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It hadn’t been the way it was supposed to be. War was to be impersonal, anonymous. You weren’t supposed to be squatting in an empty wood with a man whose life you’d just stolen - one with one blue and one green eye - waiting for him to die. Like it was intimate, like you knew him and his ma from up the road a few farms.
The winter of 1867 in the hill country of North Carolina was the winter of ice. Most of the farms around High Spire paid a heavy toll for its passage, and, by the time the baby arrived in April with the warm sun, the Barkers had lost a young bull and three of the sow’s litter.
Winston’s apprenticeship to his father, which lasted seven years, ended abruptly when he sold his first violin. He didn’t get much for it and it was far from a perfect specimen. He was twenty-nine and ecstatic. Perhaps only one other time in his life would he capture such elation: years later when he thought he heard angels in a freezing Manhattan park.
“Patience, I’ve got to get the hell out of this goddamn place. I’m doin’ it, and soon.” In the background a steam radiator hissed as if to mock Lola’s bold words. The black girl was staring at a schizophrenic web of cracks in the dingy institutional ceiling twelve feet above their heads. “Holy Mother hear you talk like that, chile, she drop you ‘round, some.”
“I don’t care. A lousy cigarette, a goddamn cigarette! We’re almost seventeen years old, Patience, it’s not fair!”
“Lots things ain’t fair, Lola, but you got a bed all right.”
The auto jolted to a stop among Stonehenge-like gravestones enormous in the pale light offered by a partly occluded moon. The front passenger turned to face the two girls with a toothless leer and a long-bladed knife.
“Giddy-up, girls,” he said, nostrils flaring, his eyes stallion-wide with anticipation.
“The weather has turned bad,” came the not unpleasant voice from deep shadows overlapping a massive desk. “It will be best if you stay here tonight.” A shadow in the shadows moved just slightly.
She couldn’t place the voice; the accent was not Midwest. “Who are you? I need to get out of here, I’m needed home.”
“Nothing would suit me more, Miss. But it is impossible. You’ll stay the night. You will be safe here, I promise. This is my home. I am Al Capone.”
Scarface? God a’mighty! She gulped. Vito, what the hell have you done?
“A girl could get pneumonia waiting for you, Winston.” Madge finished off the brandy. Then she smiled observing him with a bemused expression. “I think I understand, though. You’re a virgin.” Her voice held surprise without malice. “Damn, you sure are. Not a young one, but a virgin.”
The younger Barker could not have known what touched Axel Travis so, how the feel and smell of resin and wood could evoke so bittersweet a memory for the old man. This was the kind of instrument he had played in another lifetime, long before the war. Suddenly he remembered the sweetly flowing bow strokes of the adagio and a viper’s quickness of his hands unerringly flashing across some misplaced concerto. He had not thought of it for such a long time. Idly he wondered if his fingers suddenly found and reattached would obey his brain as they once had.
Hooking the bent wire frames of his ancient spectacles over the tip of his nose he began to slowly rotate the violin on his thigh, a polishing cloth protecting its molded neck from his touch. The joints were seamless; the maple flitches shaped into rib plates as matched as mirror images.
“You have built a wonderful instrument, here, Winston. I thought some of your pappy’s fiddles was pretty good, and they was, but this ain’t the same as they. Would ya’ play her a little? I’d truly love to hear her.” His one tattered sleeve dabbed at his nose.
There were only two Kodak prints, now sepia-toned, creased and faded, the first showing a man awkwardly holding a baby. He was tall and gaunt, clad in an ill-fitting suit. Partially hooded eyes glared. He wore a longshoreman’s cap angled low. A crooked, self-conscious smile played at the corners of his lips.
The infant he held was a featureless bundle. A white knit cap was pulled snugly around the moon face. I turned the picture over to read the inscription. “Winston and baby Elliot - Christmas 1928 - Findlay, Ohio.” I had found my father and my grandfather!
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