5. Chapter Five
Chapter Five
Honey
Saturday morning is a good one: clear light through the workshop window, my hip quiet, Carol’s dulcimer waiting at the center of the bench. The workshop smells like char, coffee, and old spruce.
Gouge repair is the kind of work my hands can do while the rest of me thinks about something else.
The napkin is at the edge of the bench where I left it after Kragen left, propped against the base of the tool rack. I’ve moved it twice already this morning, once when I needed the space and once for no reason I could name. Both times I put it back in approximately the same place.
There’s no reason to keep a napkin sketch from a customer I’ve met once. I pick it up to throw it away, then stand there with it in my hand for several seconds, apparently waiting for myself to become a more reasonable person.
I don’t.
I open the shallow drawer under the bench, the one where I keep things I haven’t decided about yet, and put it inside.
For a while, I do what I came out here to do.
The filler is ready to blend. I work the edges carefully, matching the grain direction, taking my time with the color.
This is the part that means nothing while you’re doing it, and then suddenly looks like something.
The gouge is disappearing. By the time I finish and apply the final coat of varnish, you’ll only see it up close if you know where to look. From across the room, it will be gone.
That should be satisfying enough to keep my attention. It usually would be.
What I keep coming back to isn’t the drawing. It’s his face when he talked about them.
Kragen does not seem like a male who loses track of himself easily. He came into my workshop with that easy smile and that voice, filling the space without claiming it. Then he looked at the phlox photograph, and something in him stopped.
His voice changed when he described the velara, and his eyes went somewhere that wasn’t my workshop. For thirty seconds, he was somewhere else entirely.
I have seen people talk around what they miss. I’ve seen customers bring in instruments that belonged to dead parents, dead spouses, dead grandparents, and make practical requests because practical requests are easier than saying what the object actually is.
That wasn’t what this was. Not exactly.
He didn’t make the flowers sad. He didn’t make them precious. He just described them like they still existed somewhere in him, whole and intact, waiting behind a door he didn’t open very often.
I should file it under interesting customer detail and move on.
I do not.
I clean my brushes. The inherited dulcimer sits there with a hundred years of Sunday mornings in it and a granddaughter who wants to make it look like that never happened. Then I stop thinking about that because it isn’t my business what people do with their grief.
The workshop settles after the repair is finished. No pen hiss, no brush against wood, no small decisions waiting for my hands. The next commission sits on the bench, but I don’t reach for it yet.
I put the repaired dulcimer aside to cure, then pull a scrap piece of spruce to the center of the bench. Not for anything. Just to have wood under my hands while I think.
It’s a good scrap. Too small for a soundboard, too clean to throw away, pale and straight-grained and already sanded smooth because apparently at some point I had plans for it and then forgot them. That happens. Wood waits better than people do.
I turn it once under my hand.
Except I’ve already picked up the burning pen.
I tell myself I’m just testing a temperature setting I’ve been meaning to check; the pen has been running slightly cool, and the quilt-pattern commission needs clean, even lines. A test on scrap wood is practical. It’s what you’re supposed to do.
I press the pen to the wood and draw a petal.
The line goes down clean and dark, the wood giving off that faint, dry whisper it makes when the pen is at the right temperature.
That sharp smell of controlled burning rises, char and heat and spruce, so familiar to me it barely registers anymore.
I draw a second petal. A third. The flower that emerges from the grain is small and five-petaled with a slightly irregular shape, just as real flowers are slightly irregular, the center marked with a few fine lines suggesting depth.
It looks like his drawing.
I do another one, for calibration. Then another. By the fourth, the lie has worn thin, and by the fifth I’ve stopped pretending I’m testing the pen at all.
Five velara. A loose cluster, forked stems, five uneven petals.
They look right. Not like his drawing. Like what his drawing remembered.
I sit back on the stool and look at them.
There is no reason for this to feel like anything. They are practice marks on scrap wood. I make practice marks all the time: vines, diamonds, leaves, borders, small test blooms for other commissions when I don’t trust my hand yet. This is not different in any practical sense.
Except it is.
These are not my flowers. I’ve never seen them.
I don’t know the hillsides they came from or the spring light he described or the exact shade of pink that wasn’t flat, darker toward the center and lighter at the edges.
I don’t know what it means to come over a ridge and have a whole slope of them appear.
But my hands believed him.
I reach for the tung oil without thinking. It’s on the shelf above the bench where it always is, the rag folded over the neck of the can, and I shake a small amount onto the rag and wipe it across the scrap piece in one smooth pass.
The spruce warms under the oil. The burned lines deepen. The flowers settle into the grain as if they were always waiting there.
The oil is always the dangerous moment. Before that, a design can still be marks.
Good marks, bad marks, careful marks, but marks.
Then the finish hits, and the wood decides what it is willing to become.
Sometimes it reveals what you’ve done. Sometimes it tolerates it.
Sometimes the whole piece comes awake under your hand and looks back at you like it knew before you did.
This one wakes.
I came out here this morning to fill a gouge and test a pen. Now there are five pale velara on oiled spruce, and I’m thinking about hillsides.
Not the phlox hillside in North Carolina, though that’s the only reference I have. Not the photograph by the window. Not any place I’ve actually stood.
His hillside.
The scrap piece sits on the bench with its five flowers, and for one impossible second, I can almost smell them.
Sweet, not heavy. Present. Exactly as he said.
I stand here longer than necessary, the rag still in my hand, the scent of tung oil and char in the workshop, the morning light catching on the oiled spruce.
Then I put the rag aside, cap the oil, and tell myself this is nothing.
I leave the workshop lamp on when I go in for lunch.