2. Chapter Two
Chapter Two
Honey
The gouge is about three inches long and runs with the grain. At some point in the last hundred years, a doorframe, a fall, or someone moving furniture without thinking had left a mark. The wood beneath is sound. The instrument is fine. It just looks like what it is, which is old.
I run my thumb along it while my new customer, Carol, tells me about her grandmother.
She's been talking for ten minutes. I stopped needing new information after the first two.
Grandmother played. Grandmother is gone.
The mountain dulcimer, or lap dulcimer, as some people call it, has been in a closet for eleven years.
Now she'd like to hang it above the fireplace, and she'd like it to look nice.
What she means is she'd like the damage to disappear. I understand. I can do that.
My thumb brushes along the scar again without me meaning it to.
The spruce top has gone amber with age, rich where the light catches it. Whoever built this a century ago built it right. I can feel that before I test a single string. Carol is still explaining where it usually sits on the mantel, but my hands have already decided.
I tune the first string by ear, find the second, adjust the third. "Sorry," I say. "Do you mind?"
She stops. "Oh… no, go ahead."
After I tune the fourth string, I sit and move it to the familiar spot in my lap.
Then I play the opening bars of "Shady Grove," because it's the first thing my grandmother ever taught me and it comes out of my hands before I think about it.
The sound that fills the workshop is warm and dark.
It's the mellow resonance old wood acquires after decades of Sunday mornings in someone's living room.
I stop.
"It plays beautifully," I say. "Whoever made this really knew what they were doing."
"My grandmother played it every Sunday," she says. Her voice has lost its abstract tone and carries emotion for the first time since she entered my workshop.
I set it down carefully. "I can fill it and color-match it. From across the room, you won't see anything. Up close, if you know where to look, you'll see where it was."
She nods. "That's fine. That's all I need."
I write up the estimate, and she signs it. Then I walk her to the workshop door and watch her pick her way across the yard toward the gravel drive.
The property is bright in the mid-morning, the oaks throwing short shadows toward the house, and somewhere up the hill a crow is making its feelings known, loudly and repeatedly.
Back at the bench, I pull the commission toward me and get back to work.
It's a high-end, decorated dulcimer, the kind I like.
The client wants an old quilt pattern worked along the fretboard, all repeating diamonds and careful angles.
I've worked out the shape of it in my head, and now the iron is heated, the wood waiting under my hand.
The first line is always the hardest part.
I pick up the pyrography iron and press it to the test scrap.
Too hot. I dial it back, wait, and try again.
The iron finds the first line, I follow it, and everything else falls away when the work is going right.
This is what I didn't expect when I was seventeen and broken open and lying in my grandmother's house learning to exist in a body that had just betrayed me: that I would find something I was better at than gymnastics.
Not better by the measure of trophies and rankings.
Better by the measure of rightness. The feeling of being exactly where your hands belong.
From the time I was eight years old, every hour that wasn't school was gymnastics — practice, conditioning, travel, competition.
Nine years of that. Then a hip injury at seventeen ended it, and I lay in my grandmother's guest room for three months with no training schedule, no meet on the calendar, no idea what I was for.
Grandmother taught me to play. That was the first gift, the dulcimer coming down from the wall during the worst of the recovery, her carrying it upstairs and sitting beside me on the bed to show me where to put my fingers, not making it a project or a prescription, just playing because playing was what she did and now I was there to learn.
I wasn't graceful about it. I wasn't graceful about anything that year. But my hands were good, and she told me so, and I believed her because she didn't say things she didn't mean.
The making came later. I ordered a kit mostly to have something to do with my hands and discovered, halfway through building it, that my hands had known where they belonged before the rest of me did. I finished it and immediately started looking into how people actually learned to do this properly.
There was a builder in western North Carolina, traditional Appalachian instruments, seventy years old and still the best in the region.
I wrote him a letter—paper, envelope, stamp—and told him what I wanted to learn and why.
He wrote back. I spent a year in his shop.
Then I came home, cleaned out my grandfather's old woodshop in the side yard, and started building.
That was nine years ago. The property is mine now.
It's the only place I've ever lived. It's been in the family since my great-grandmother's time, though I never knew her, so in my head it's always been my grandmother's house.
Three generations of women before me made it what it is, and then it came to me.
The quilt pattern takes shape on the fretboard.
Outside the single west window, the light shifts from gold to gray, cloud cover coming in off the ridge.
My hip registers it before I do, a low, dull awareness in the joint, nothing that needs attention, just my body noting the weather as it has since I was seventeen.
I shift my weight off my left side without thinking about it.
The adjustment is so old it doesn't feel like an adjustment anymore. It just feels like standing.
Nine years later, my body still keeps weather like a calendar.
I work until the workshop lamp is the brightest thing left, and then I keep working, because I've always liked it being the last lit thing on the property at the end of a day.
Only later did I learn my grandfather did the same thing.
My grandmother mentioned it once, offhand, years after he was gone.
Apparently, I inherited it without knowing, because I caught myself doing it the first winter I was running things alone.
The diamonds grow across the fretboard. The inherited dulcimer sits at the edge of the bench, waiting for me to make its gouge disappear. Outside, rain taps softly against the roof.
I keep working.
Kragen confirmed for ten o'clock today. He also mentioned being an orc in his first email, which I appreciated — it meant he understood it was information I should have before an orc stranger drove out here alone to my workshop.
I've been thinking about doorframe height and workbench clearance and whether the entry-level dulcimer will look absurd in his hands. Practical considerations. Nothing else.
The front bench is cleaner than it needs to be.
A car slows on the county road before turning into the drive.
I hear the crunch of tires on gravel with enough time to set down the burning pen and pull off my work apron. I wasn't listening for him. Not exactly.
I open the workshop door before he reaches it.