8. Chapter Eight
Chapter Eight
Honey
The inherited dulcimer goes home on a Wednesday. The client drives out from Springfield, parks in the gravel drive, and stands at my workbench turning it in her hands the way people turn things when they’re afraid to find what they’re looking for. She finds the repair. Looks up at me.
“You can see it,” she says. Not a complaint, a question.
“Up close, if you know where to look. From across the room, from the mantel—it’s gone.”
She holds it at arm’s length. Takes it in. The tension in her jaw releases. “That’s exactly right,” she says. “That’s what I wanted.”
After she leaves, I stand in the workshop for a while, the bench clear for the first time in weeks, and then I pull Kragen’s file.
The wood he picked is still the one I would have chosen.
I start with the templates.
His neck width requires new calculations.
If I scale only the neck without adjusting the body proportions, the instrument will look and resonate wrong.
I work through the ratios on paper first, just as my teacher in North Carolina taught me: understand what you’re building before you touch the wood.
An hour of calculations, then another hour checking everything.
“Measure twice, cut once,” my mentor said.
I build the new neck template from scratch, check it three times, and set it aside.
Then I select the back and side wood from my walnut stock—the piece with texture in the grain, the kind that looks almost plain until the light catches it and then looks like water moving.
The building is clean and absorbing, the way structural work always is.
I cut the sides and bend them over the bending iron, the walnut going soft and cooperative in the heat, taking the curves of the waist without complaint.
The kerfed linings fit into place. I tap the spruce top and listen to it, trying to find out what it already knows about itself.
Two weeks in, I text him when the structural work is done.
Me: Started your commission last week. Neck templates took longer than expected—new territory for me at this scale. Body is complete. Ready for finishing work.
Kragen: New territory meaning you’ve never built for someone my size before.
Me: Correct. I’ve built for large hands before, but not that large. The fret spacing was a genuine puzzle.
Kragen: I’ve been told my hands are a lot to deal with.
Kragen: In the context of guitar playing. That’s what I meant.
Me: I assumed.
Kragen: I’m not going to touch that.
Me: Estimated completion date is three weeks from today. I’ll be in touch when it’s ready.
Kragen: Can I see it?
Me: No.
Kragen: I meant a photo. Just to see how it’s coming along.
Me: I don’t send progress photos—I want you to see the finished instrument, not a series of stages that don’t mean anything yet. You’ll see it when it’s done.
Kragen: Fair enough.
Kragen: What does it look like right now?
Me: Like a dulcimer.
Kragen: Helpful, thank you.
I set the phone down. The soundboard is right there.
The spruce is clean and pale, the grain running straight and true from end to end. It’s a good surface. It would be a perfectly good plain instrument—exactly what he ordered, exactly what I quoted him.
I think about the napkin sketch in the shallow drawer under the bench.
Five flowers. A loose cluster on a forked stem, the petals slightly irregular the way real flowers are.
I burned them on a scrap piece weeks ago and they looked right.
Not right like his drawing, right like the thing the drawing was pointing toward.
I haven’t touched the scrap piece since.
It’s still on the shelf above the walnut stock, face down.
A small design wouldn’t take long. One corner of the soundboard, near the peghead—discreet, tasteful, the kind of decorative touch that says I noticed something about you without saying anything louder than that. I tell myself the wood is calling for it.
He went still when he described them. I don’t think about home much. But some things.
I turn on the burning pen, test the temp on a piece of scrap wood, take a breath, and press the pen to the wood.
The first flower takes shape the way the ones on the scrap piece did, the line finding itself, the petal edges going dark and clean, and the slight irregularity that makes it look alive rather than mechanical.
The smell of burning spruce fills the workshop, that acrid char smell that lives in my clothes and my hair and probably my DNA at this point.
I do the second flower and the third, adjusting the cluster, finding the angle that makes the petals catch light.
I sit back.
Five flowers in the upper corner. Tasteful. Appropriate. The exact right amount.
I do three more.
Kragen: Question about the fret spacing. Did you end up going with what we discussed in the workshop, or did the calculations change it?
Me: Changed it slightly. Your middle finger reach was the variable I underestimated. I added two millimeters to the spacing between frets four and five.
Kragen: You measured my fingers?
Me: You were looking at the walnut stock. I was doing my job.
Kragen: I don’t know whether to be impressed or unsettled.
Me: Both is fine.
Kragen: Question. Do you name your instruments while you’re building them?
Me: No.
Kragen: Not even in your head?
Me: Especially not in my head.
Kragen: I name everything. My guitar has had three names. Currently Gerald.
Me: You named your guitar Gerald.
Kragen: He went through a phase.
Me: I’m not going to ask.
Kragen: Probably wise.
Kragen: My clan would say Gerald proves I was always the wrong kind of orc. StillWater orcs don’t name things. They sit with them.
Me: StillWater?
Kragen: My clan. Muted, deliberate, internal. Not exactly known for running a bar and playing guitar solo on Friday night gigs.
Me: And yet here you are.
Kragen: And yet here I am.
The next time I pick up the burning pen, I can’t deny that I’m past the upper corner.
I’ve moved down the left side of the soundboard, the cluster expanding into a spray, stems forking and forking again just as he described them on the hillside—you’d come over a ridge and the whole slope would be pink.
Not the whole soundboard. I have standards.
Just the left side, flowing down from the corner in a considered asymmetrical design. Tasteful. Still tasteful.
I work until the light from the west window goes orange, and then I turn on the lamp and keep working.
The thing about pyrography is that it requires a particular type of attention—not the broad focus of planning or the narrow focus of precision measurement, but something in between, a state where your eyes and your hands are in conversation and your brain is mostly out of it.
It’s the same state I used to find in gymnastics, in the middle of a floor routine, when the music and the movement and the apparatus all lined up and I stopped performing and started just being in it.
I haven’t thought about gymnastics in years without the weight of loss attached.
It occurs to me now, somewhere in the third hour of burning velara flowers onto a dulcimer I was paid to leave plain, that I’m not thinking about it with that weight right now.
I don’t examine this.
I keep burning.
Me: How does a StillWater orc end up running a bar? I’ve been wondering.
Kragen: StillWater orcs sit with things. They don’t perform.
Kragen: I’ve spent the last eight years performing.
Kragen: I wanted stages. I wanted noise and rooms full of people and music that moved. My clan saw me as a problem to be solved.
Me: Were you?
Kragen: Probably. I was very loud about wanting different things. Which is very un-StillWater of me. Loudly wanting things you’re not supposed to want is its own irony.
Me: So the Emergence was…
Kragen: The Emergence was the first time in my life I exhaled.
I got here and there was music I’d never heard and instruments I didn’t know existed and humans had no opinions about what a StillWater orc was supposed to be.
I walked into Walt’s bar shortly after I arrived because I could hear someone playing guitar through the door.
Walt was hiring. I worked the bar, then started playing on the small stage. I’ve basically never left.
Me: And yet.
Kragen: And yet what?
Me: You described those flowers like someone who remembers exactly what a hillside smells like.
He pauses longer than usual. No floating dots.
Kragen: Yeah. Some things follow you whether you invite them or not.
Kragen: How’s the instrument.
Me: Coming along.
The right side of the soundboard.
I’m doing the right side now. Not the whole thing—the right side, flowing up from the tail, mirroring the movement on the left without being symmetrical.
Asymmetrical is more alive. The flowers on his world’s hillsides wouldn’t have been symmetrical.
They would have spread across the slope organically, following the terrain instead of any deliberate pattern.
I’ve been working on this soundboard for four days.
I sit back and take in what I’ve done and what’s left, and I understand with complete clarity that I am going to cover the entire soundboard.
Not because I planned to. Not because it’s what he ordered or what I quoted, or what any reasonable professional would do to a plain commission.
Because the flowers belong there, all of them, covering the piece of wood the way they covered those hillsides.
Anything less than that would be a lie about what this instrument is.
I’ve known this for two days. Only now do I let myself admit it.
I pick up the pen.
Kragen: Two weeks since your last update. Should I be worried?
Me: No. It’s taking longer than I estimated.
Kragen: Longer how?
Me: I made some decisions about the finishing work that extended the timeline. Nothing that affects the structure or playability. The instrument is fine.
Kragen: Honey.
Me: It’s fine. I’ll be in touch when I have a new completion date.
Kragen: I’m not worried about the timeline. I’m wondering if you’re okay.
Me: I’m okay. I’m working.
Kragen: Okay.
Kragen: I played something at the bar last night that I’ve been sitting with for a while. Finished it, finally. Or it finished itself—not sure which.
Me: Which is it usually?
Kragen: Honestly? It finishes itself. I just show up.
Me: That sounds about right.
Kragen: How do you know when something you’re making is done?
Me: When anything I add would be a lie.
He doesn’t respond for a few minutes.
Kragen: Yeah. That’s exactly it.
The painting takes three more days.
I work within the burned lines the way I always work: the pigment going inside the channels the pen made, the flowers settling into the wood like they’d always been there.
Pale pink, the color I mixed from the description he gave me, darker toward the center of each bloom and lighter at the edges, the variation that he said made them look like each flower was individual rather than stamped from a pattern.
I work from the peghead down and around, following the design I burned, the flowers filling the soundboard, finding every space, settling into the grain.
When the painting is done and fully dried, I glue the soundboard to the body. The instrument closes around it and is then ready for its finish coat. I set it flat on the bench in the light from the west window and reach for the finishing cloth.
What’s coming is familiar. I’ve done this hundreds of times. And still…
I shake a small amount of finish onto the rag and wipe it across the soundboard in one slow pass.
The wood wakes up.
That’s the only way I’ve ever been able to describe it, the moment the oil hits, and the grain comes alive underneath, the pale spruce going warm and amber, the burned lines going from gray-brown char to something deep and rich and permanent.
The velara go from sketch to statement in the time it takes the oil to soak in.
The grain of the wood runs underneath them like water, and the flowers sit on top of it and inside it at the same time, and the whole thing looks like it grew there because in some sense it did—out of a napkin sketch and a hillside description and thirty seconds of a male going still in my workshop when he wasn’t planning to.
I stand here for a long time with the oiled rag in my hand.
It’s the most complete thing I’ve made. Not technically—I’ve built instruments with more demanding joinery, more complex structural requirements. Complete the way a thing is complete when it was made for a specific person and couldn’t have been made for anyone else.
Well, I think.
I text him.
Me: It’s done. Come Monday.
Kragen: I’ll be there.