Chapter One
Sneak Peek: The Orc’s Gift
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, 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 it in the graduation of the top, thicker at the center and thinning toward the edges, the kind of instinct that comes from years of knowing wood rather than measuring it.
I set it flat on the bench and turn one of the tuning pegs.
The woman is explaining where it usually sits on the mantel. 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, 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 and I walk her to the door of the workshop and watch her pick her way across the yard toward the gravel drive.
The property is going gold in the late afternoon, the big oaks throwing long shadows toward the house, and somewhere up the hill a crow is making its feelings known, loudly and repeatedly.
Back at the bench I briefly inspect the old dulcimer: the honest gouge, the amber spruce, a hundred years of Sunday mornings in the wood, and then I pull the commission I’ve been working on toward me and get back to work.
The commission is a high-end piece, the kind I like.
The client wants a flowering vine running the full length of the fretboard, detailed enough that you can identify the blooms, with smaller complementary work on the pegbox.
I’ve been planning the design for two weeks and I’m finally ready to burn.
I pick up the pyrography iron and press it to the test scrap.
Too hot. I dial it back, wait, try again.
The iron finds the first line and 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.
Grandmother taught me to play. That was the first gift, the dulcimer coming down from the wall during the worst of the recovery, her sitting across from me in the living room and showing 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 kit came later, when I could get around better.
I ordered it online on a Tuesday night mostly to have something to do with my hands at the kitchen table, and I spent three weeks putting it together, and somewhere in the middle of it I understood that this was the thing. Not the playing. The making.
I finished the kit dulcimer and immediately started researching how people actually learned to do this.
There was a man in western North Carolina who had been building traditional Appalachian instruments for forty years, and he took two apprentices at a time.
I wrote him a letter, an actual letter on paper, and he wrote back.
After I studied with him for a year, I came home and cleaned out my grandfather’s old woodshop in the side yard, where decades of inherited tools and one very good lathe had been gathering dust. Then I 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.
Four generations of women before me made it what it is, and then it came to me.
The flowering vine 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.
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.
I didn’t know my grandfather did the same thing until my grandmother mentioned it once, offhand, years after he was gone.
I didn’t know I’d inherited it until I caught myself doing it the first winter I was running things alone.
The vine grows across the fretboard. The inherited dulcimer sits at the edge of the bench, waiting for me to make its gouge disappear.
The rain finds the roof, soft and even.
I keep working.