Читать книгу Stradivarius - Donald P. Ladew - Страница 12

Chapter 8

LUTHERSVILLE, WEST VIRGINIA, SUMMER 1978

Ailey Barkwood played in the dust alongside an ancient sway-backed barn. As he played, he sang “Rock of Ages” at the top of his voice. Sammy Sue, the old black woman who looked after Ailey and his Grandfather, sat on the porch and shelled peas. She gazed across the fields to the forest, occasionally glancing toward the barn where Ailey sat in the dust and sang.

Against the mountains behind the forest, massive thunderheads marched away forever. Sammy Sue smiled. Her hands, separate from her thoughts, popped fresh peas from their green sheaths. The day before, Ailey asked her how far up the biggest cloud went: did it reach the moon?

She told him it went forever.

He nodded, his serious eyes looking toward the sky. He believed her.

Sammy Sue hummed along with the boy. “You’re a caution, Ailey Barkwood. I do believe you’re tuned sweeter’n the piano at the church.”

It was true. He slid over every third word and changed those he wasn’t sure of, but each note, each tone was faithfully rendered. He could have tuned the piano by ear. Ailey Barkwood wasn’t quite four years old.

Ailey’s grandfather, Joe Barkwood, pushed open the screen door and walked onto the porch. It slammed noisily behind him. Joe Barkwood once stood six foot four in his stockin’ feet; now he was bent by age and rheumatism. Despite the wear of sixty years in the sun and a thick shock of hair gone pure white, he and the boy were quite similar: long, narrow faces, square chins, and deep-set dark eyes.

Granpa Joe sat on a bench near Sammy Sue and rubbed his legs with large, square-knuckled hands. After a while he pulled a watch and chain from a pocket in the front of his overalls and snapped it open.

“About two minutes, Sammy Sue.”

“Uh, huh, Mistuh Joe.”

They both looked toward the boy playing in the dust. Two minutes later Ailey got up and banged his hands against his shirt and jeans. A cloud of dust rose in the still air and settled back like fleas to a hound. He ran toward the porch on legs too long for the rest of his body. He went immediately to his grandfather and stood by his knee.

“Can I git it, Grandpa?”

“You ain’t gittin’ nothin’, Ailey Barkwood, till you washes your face and hands,” Sammy Sue said.

His grandfather nodded. “You do like Sammy says, boy.”

Ailey frowned at such foolishness and muttered, “What do my hands and face have to do with ‘it’.”

When Ailey came out of the house two minutes later he looked like a raccoon. The front half of his face was reasonably clean, but further back was a brown ring of dirt. He stood in front of Sammy Sue impatiently.

She laughed, warm as sunshine, and put the bowl of peas on the porch by her chair.

“What’s the matter with you boy?” He shifted from one foot to the other. “Couldn’t you find the rest of your face?” Ailey didn’t answer.

“Did you bring the cloth?” she asked.

He held it behind his back and the instant she said cloth, handed it to her. She washed his face, all of it, then his arms and hands.

“There, I knew there was a little boy ‘neath there somewhere. ”

“Granpa?”

“Okay, Ailey, bring ‘er here.”

He dashed into the house and came out a moment later with an old Philco Transoceanic portable radio. An extension cord dragged behind. It was so big Ailey could barely carry it. He bit his lip with concentration and lifted it to a low table along the front of the porch. He took the cord back inside the house and plugged it in.

Back on the porch he looked at his grandpa. “Go ahead boy, find yer music.”

Saturday afternoon: and every Saturday afternoon at two o’clock, for two whole hours, WNEW New York played the classics, featuring the New York Philharmonic Orchestra.

Neither Granpa Joe or Sammy Sue liked it much, but from the first moment Ailey heard it, he screamed and shouted when they tried to change the station. They were too old to fight such total anger.

Ailey handled the radio like a religious artifact, carefully turning the dial until he heard the familiar voice of the announcer. When he was satisfied he turned the volume up as far as it would go. By some oddity of atmospheric conditions and location, the station came in perfectly.

Ailey sat down and leaned against the wall of the house, an acolyte in the presence of the master. He had been doing this every Saturday for more than a year.

He learned the names of the instruments from a children’s concert conducted by Leonard Bernstein. Ailey’s intensity unnerved Granpa Joe and Sammy Sue. Old Joe Barkwood figured a boy ought to get worked up about a good Barlow knife or a baseball glove.

For Ailey, the rest of the world disappeared. The universe revolved around the porch of his grandpa’s house at the foot of Cole’s Mountain, West Virginia.

The opening piece was “The Moldau”, by Smetana, the most perfect evocation of a river from source to fullness ever set to music. He had listened to it three times. He knew every note. As the lilting song of the flutes marked tiny rills in the forests of Bohemia he formed the word, flutes, silently. And when the massed violins burst forth with the theme, his small body leaned forward trembling like a hunter on point.

He whispered, “violins”, as others would call the names of saints.

Two hours later, his head tilted back against the clapboard covered walls of the farmhouse, Ailey was still lost in the music. He would replay every note in his mind, over and over.

He got up, turned the radio off, and took it back in the house. Another Saturday had come and gone, the standard against which he measured the ebb and flow of life.

On his fourth birthday Grandpa Joe bought him a worn-out fiddle for five dollars from a tinker, a wandering gypsy who sold pots and pans, cloth and needles out of the back of a battered pickup.

The man was old like his grandfather, but short with curly black hair and dark, laughing eyes. He showed Ailey how to tune it and hold the bow. Ailey began to practice immediately and found himself in the barn with five milk cows, two draft horses, and twenty Rhode Island Red chickens.

Sammy Sue said the scratching made her teeth ache. His grandfather’s two Bluetick hounds sat in the doorway of the barn and howled mournfully. Ailey allowed as how they weren’t a righteous accompaniment and chased them into the woods with a dozen well-thrown rocks to make sure they understood. After that, when the hounds saw Ailey with the violin they headed for the woods without being asked.

The scratching lasted about a week, and then to his Grandfather and Sammy Sue’s surprise they heard a melody: not pure but recognizable. The old violin was all one might expect for five dollars, but somehow Ailey coaxed music from it.

Life now had other markers to define and measure the passage of time. He broke strings. These were the catastrophes that ruined the harmony of his childish existence. Then he had to wait for his grandfather to go to Elkins, the nearest town with a music store.

There were other children on the farms nearby, but he’d become so used to living with Granpa Joe and Sammy Sue he didn’t walk the mile or two to meet and play with them. If he’d had a mother and father living at home they might have seen that he had a more normal childhood. But it wasn’t to be.

His father, Little Joe Barkwood, had been killed in a sawmill accident when Ailey was one, and his mother ran off to California with a soldier when he was two. He didn’t remember his father, or his mother.

He had Sammy Sue and Granpa Joe, and he had his violin. That was enough.

PADUA, ITALY, JANUARY 1770

You weren’t my first choice, Monsieur La Houssaye, though I admire your playing as much as any violinist I’ve heard in many years. I fear the French love themselves first and their music second.” Tartini paused, “You were a good student, I’ll give you that.”

Giuseppe Tartini looked down at his gnarled hands, twisted with arthritis.

La Houssaye, elegant and vain, waited for Tartini to go on. He resented the Italian perception of Frenchmen, and that a great violinist like Tartini shared this perception, hurt doubly.

“Please do not be offended by what I say. This is, as they say, a moment of truth. Whether I am wrong or right, it will soon not matter. As you can see, time has given me the greatest punishment. I hear perfectly, yet I cannot play.”

They sat across from each other in Tartini’s drawing room. Between them on a small round table of walnut a violin case lay open. In it, the Hercules reflected the amber glow of candles spread around the room.

“Not so long ago Count Domenici Paisello gave me this instrument. He charged me to select the next man to have it with great care. He further instructed me to find not just the greatest virtuoso of my time, but a man of equal character; one who would preserve it and pass it on to another equally worthy when the time came.

“That time will come, Monsieur. It comes to us all, as these wretched claws have come to me.” He looked at his hands with profound loathing.

“I will not try to extract a promise to uphold the count’s wishes. I will hope for that, but I will not ask for the promise. It is yours and I freely give it. Let as many hear it as possible for it truly has a majestic voice.”

La Houssaye bowed solemnly to the older man.

“I am French, Tartini, that is true. I am also consumed by my music. To that I plead guilty. I do know the value you place on this beautiful thing and I shall carry out your wishes.”

“Good, that is enough.”

Tartini reached out and touched the strings gently. A look of deep sadness crossed his face. “I wish that I might hear it again, for I think God has touched this thing, and I would hear his voice before I meet him in person.”

“My dear, Tartini--” La Houssaye’s voice broke. “I am not God, but I would be delighted to play whatever you would like to hear.”

“You would do that? Ah, that is good. Play me something of yours, I have heard too much of my own.”

La Houssaye smiled. He stood, took the Hercules from the case and rapidly checked the tune.

“Let me hear an Adagio. I am too old for the pyrotechnical. Something sweet, the long bow, the cantilena...”

La Houssaye put bow to strings and Tartini closed his eyes.

Tartini’s last thought before La Houssaye gave himself to the music was a comfort. “There can be no doubt of it, he is the best I have heard, and they say he is an honorable man...”