Aunt Ena turns off the water and leans against the sink, settling her eyes on mine. There is pain and anger and a kind of tenderness in her face, a combination I see there whenever the fiddle comes up. “That fiddle’s at the bottom of the lake or broke up and carried off somewhere. Either way, it’s gone, just like your daddy.”
But what if it’s not gone? A thought that’s been tempting me for a while surfaces. What if I could find it and use it? I could raise his ghost; I could talk to him again. And with Daddy’s fiddle, I could make music worth hearing. I could be everything he meant me to be. Everything I want to be.
“If I could play Daddy’s fiddle, it’d be like having him back,” I say, but I keep my other ideas to myself.
Aunt Ena guesses my unspoken thoughts, as usual. “Maybe so, but the dead always stay dead,” she says gently. “We live with their ghosts, but that’s all. Wallowing in your grief will only draw evil. You need to focus on all the good things in your life, not the things you’ve lost.”
“I guess.” I rest my chin in my hands and stare at the cracked and faded linoleum floor. Maybe that’s what I’ve been doing these last few weeks, out in the woods playing my fiddle. Wallowing. Maybe that’s why the shadow man is back. But if I’m wallowing, Aunt Ena’s just as bad—living here alone, the last survivor of her family home, with only ghosts for company.
I leave after a few more awkward minutes, claiming homework. But when I reach the car, I turn and look back, lifting my eyes to the upstairs windows. I don’t know what I hope to see there—the dirty windows are empty, except for a few wasps climbing across the glass. Behind the house, the pine forest looms, deep and dark and waiting, always waiting.
The clouds grow heavier and darker as I drive home, and the sky dims like it’s twilight instead of early afternoon. When I pull into the driveway, Jim’s truck is gone, which I hope means he and Mama and Honey have gone off somewhere.
I climb out of the car and start toward the trailer, but then I hear the fiddle tune again, faint and faded as an old photograph. I stand still in the yard and listen. Only the wind in the trees.
But then a sharp, mournful wail slices through the air, familiar and dreadful at once. I move closer to the woods and listen again. Shadows settle over the golden pine needles, turning the woods dark. The atmosphere feels taut as a bowstring, the storm starting to roll in from across the fields.
And then the fiddle begins to play in earnest, the volume going up and down, swirling through the trees like it’s carried on the wind. It’s carrying my heart with it.
I walk to the boundary of our five acres and then go deeper into the woods, until the trees grow so close together I have to stop and squeeze through them. My hair catches in hanging vines, and thorns scrape against my skin, snagging my clothes.
The fiddle plays on and on, low and slightly mad, growing into a frenzy wilder than the wind that’s whipping through the trees. Rain drops out of the sky without preamble—fat, hard, stinging drops that would soak me to the skin if the trees weren’t so thick.
I think of the lyrics from “The Twa Sisters” again.
Only tune that the fiddle would play was
Oh, the dreadful wind and rain
And then the rest of my memory from Aunt Ena’s place comes back—what happened after Daddy’s fiddle brought the old man’s ghost to my room. It was the first time I ever saw a ghost with my own eyes, instead of just knowing it was there or feeling it brushing by. I was so little, but I wasn’t scared. I pushed the covers away and got out of bed, my feet cold on the bare floorboards. “Come on,” I said, holding out my hand to the man.
His hand felt like a winter chill but was solid enough to hold mine. Goose bumps trickled up my arm from where my skin met his, but I didn’t let go. I led him out of my bedroom and down the stairs, into the parlor where Daddy liked to play.
When we appeared in the doorway, a child of six in a pink nightgown and an old man with a lost expression, Daddy looked up, his eyes widening even as his left hand continued to hold down the fiddle strings and his right arm continued to draw the bow across them.
Once his mind took in what his eyes were seeing, he dropped the fiddle and leaped across the room, grabbing my empty hand to pull me away from the man, who cowered away, his solid form already beginning to wane.
“Why’d you come here? I didn’t call you here,” Daddy said to the ghost, angrier than I’d ever heard him. He glanced back at me as though to assure himself I was all in one piece.
The old man said, “I can’t . . . I can’t remember.” He was hardly a man now, more like a whirl of human-shaped wind.
“Go on home,” Daddy said, his voice low and shaking. “Go back to your rest.”
And then the man was nothing more than the kind of ghost I was used to—a breath, a memory.
Daddy turned back to me and swept me off my feet and clutched me to his chest like he’d just pulled me out of the ocean half drowned. He sat on a sofa and held me close, his breath in my hair. I pulled my head back to see his face and put one hand on his cheek, which was rough as sandpaper. A tear slipped down from one eye, wetting my hand. I wiped the next one away. “Why are you sad, Daddy?”
He turned his head to kiss the palm of my hand. He stared deep into my eyes, and it was like looking into a mirror, the same soft brown and long eyelashes. “Shady Grove,” he said, “I think it’s time I laid this here fiddle to sleep.”
Of course, that fiddle couldn’t be laid down. He took it up again less than a year later. He always took it back up. Maybe he’s still playing it, even though he’s dead. Maybe that’s what I’m hearing now.
The thought speeds my feet, but I run into a patch of trees so clotted with vines I can’t find a way through. I have to backtrack, looking for an opening, but the woods are so dim now it’s hard to see far ahead.
I find an opening and run, full out, until my chest heaves and I’m clutching a stitch in my side. But the fiddle music’s all around me now, swirling on the wind, whistling through the tops of the trees. If there’s a source, I’ll never find it.
Finally, breathless, I drop to my knees on the pine needles, my hair soaked and dripping, my skin marked with scratches. Lightning forks overhead, spreading shadows through the trees. They all look like hulking men.
Oh, the dreadful wind and rain
I lie back on the damp, earthy-smelling forest floor and let the rain pummel me. The thunder has ripped through the fiddle tune, leaving nothing more than half-formed notes fluttering in the treetops, the torn remnants of Daddy’s song.
It was Daddy. I don’t know how, but somehow, somehow it was him.
“Where are you?” I whisper.
The only response is a low, spine-tingling rattle. I turn my head toward the sound and open my eyes, every hair on my body standing up. The lightning flashes again, illuminating a pair of glittering black eyes and a coiled, sinuous body. Icy fear spreads through me.
A rattlesnake is curled at the base of a tree, its eyes trained on me. Even in the gloom, I can tell it’s a diamondback rattler, maybe five feet long. I haven’t seen one this big in years. My thoughts turn frantic. If it struck me, sending its poison racing toward my heart, where would my ghost end up? Would Daddy be there to meet me?