A low murmur stirred the crowd as Papa Roy paused, staring down at his lap. When he clicked open the latches and dipped his hands inside the case, the quickest of high Cs crept out from beneath his fingers, a brief twang of pent-up excitement.
I had never seen a violin in real life before. The wood shone in a way I had not known wood to shine, like wet marble, and the bow hairs—who knew there were so many?—lay taut and streamlined like split sugarcane. It could have grown like a reed from a seed, that bow, and as Papa took it in his hand it seemed to me something natural to his native limbs. I wondered where he had hidden it in the house, and for how long, and why.
Papa Roy surveyed the grass on the lawn in the midst of the party for a moment, then lifted the instrument beneath his chin.
I’m not sure what I expected. A short song, maybe, something to encourage a sing-along or more dancing. But our neighbors, when I looked at them in the falling quiet, anticipated something else. They had shushed themselves, gathered the children, and waited, waited, until the snapping of the candlewicks introduced the first measure.
One swipe. And back again. The most delicate of angles carved by Papa Roy and his bowstring, dipping in and out like bare feet wading in a steam. The notes caught up, slowed down, painted pictures of freshwater streams over carved stones and sandy bottoms. It was the stillness of herons extending their necks, reaching out for the tails of minnows spied in muddy shallows. But I knew this, too: it was music from a royal court in the city of Vienna two hundred years ago, where Papa Roy had never been, had never even envisioned. But now here it was, in the backyard of his house in Bayou Bonne Chance.
“It’s Bach,” said Mama Ilene, appearing beside me. “His favorite, though he didn’t know it until I told him, back when we was in high school.”
“What do you mean he didn’t know?” I asked.
“He done played Bach all the time when he was practicing the violin as a boy—‘course we all called it a fiddle. Ain’t so rare around here. But ain’t nobody told him who the composer was.”
“Why not?”
“It was the organ player in gospel choir who done showed us all how to read music, back in the day. Papa reads it better than regular ol’ words, you can tell that. But then the organ player moved away when we was in the eighth grade, and Papa found some unlabeled sheet music in the piano bench in the church. I heard him practicing one day in the rectory—he had translated it for the violin.” Mama Ilene chuckled to herself. “I’d had my eye on your Papa Roy, of course, so one day I had my mama drive me half an hour to a record store with my friends, and we listened to just about everything in there ’til we found Papa’s song. And it was by Bach. The next day in church I went to tell him how much I just loved Bach and baroque symphonies and whatever, trying to drop a hint, you know. But he had no idea what I was talking about.”
A breeze picked up and Mama Ilene waited for it to pass, her hands folded in her lap.
“Did your Ma never play you any Bach?” she asked, eventually.
I almost laughed. The notion of my mother going near such an instrument or such a sound was absurd. “No,” I said.
“Mm,” said Mama Ilene, nodding to herself. “That’s a shame. He was her favorite, too.”