Humble Lessons

(Semi-Autobiographical) FICTION Humble Lessons Robert Bruce Greene ON THE MORNING BEFORE HE DIED, Dad called for his fiddle. Mama made a little choked back cry and put her hand over her mouth andjust stared at him, so Grandma and Uncle Wash raised him up in the bed with a large feather bolster and three pillows, to where he was sitting mostly upright, and she laid the fiddle inhis lap. It'shard to think that I know it was three pillows, not two or four, but when somebody's about to die, it eases it to take note of small things like that. The other is just too much. The same as how I can't picture his face as he lay there, but I do remember every detail of how his hands moved so slowly and delicately over the fiddle, like the way a blind man touches things. And I knew he was reading the years of black rosin built up around the bridge, and the accumulation of grime congealed in long, shallow ridges between the strings, and the sharp grain on the end of the top where the sweat and whiskers of his chin had eroded away both the varnish and the soft part of the wood. I was too young then to understand all what he was doing, but I look back now and hope that he said goodbye to Mama as well as he did that fiddle, for it was plain how deeply he loved it, and there she sat watching from behind her hands. Then with great effort, he pushed it a little ways across the bedsheet in my direction and said, "It's up to you to do the playing now, son." Before the sun was down, he was gone. Those were his last words to me in this world. I soon came to know them not as a farewell, but a pronouncement, a spell—sometimes more like a curse—that he laid upon me. A boy the age I was at that time doesn't really know his father yet, not as he would when a grown man, and so I held on to those words with a kind of desperation, and in my mind they came to stand for everything he was. So, you might say my fate was determined from that moment. I had been doing mybest to play since I wasjust a sprat of a boy, first sawing sticks of stovewood together in the kitchen, then sneaking the fiddle out of his dresser drawer when he was off to the woods or gone to town trading, until he caught me at it one day. I thought he was going to whip me a good one, for he had admonished me thoroughly to never touch it. But instead, a queer look came over his face and he said, "All right then, let's see what you can do with it." So I scratched out a childish 41 attempt at the Sally Goodin, and my fiddling career began. But then he was gone, and me left with his dying wish for me. Well, and for him. As time went on, I did learn to play the fiddle tolerably well. But learning about music is not learning about life (although when I was older, I came to know a number of no-account fellows who would disagree with me about that). A boy on the verge of growing up is a scared and bewildered thing, and lacking a father, he is simply set adrift in the world to try to figure out for himself what he needs to know to become a man. And I did, indeed, bumble around a good deal in trying. Young people mostly don't know why they do things. They just do them because they can't do otherwise. And it has come clear to me now that while I thought I was looking for a bunch of fiddle tunes, I was also looking for a whole lot more that I was mostly unaware of—the things otherboys learned while tagging alongbehind their fathers doing chores, or around the fire at night. So I learned what I could...