ALONG CAME A FIDDLER
By A.B. Goelman
s always, it’s the younger sister who approaches me. “Oh fiddler,” she says. “My sister has died.” Her eyes are red from crying. I feel sorry for her, although I really ought to know better. Her boyfriend accompanies her, lagging a few steps behind. He's tending towards stout already, waiting, hoping to be the kindly stepfather who sends his children to gather wood. Only because his new wife demands it, of course. Always the accomplice, never blamed. He stands behind her, large arms folded across his chest.
I play a song on my fiddle, look away. “Please,” she says, “Won’t you help me?”
There's a room of fiddles, I tell her. A room of time I have wasted.
“But here's her long yellow hair.” She reaches into her bag and gives me a ziplocked plastic bag of her sister’s hair. “For the bow,” she says.
She reaches into her bag again, draws out another plastic bag. “Her long finger bones,” she says, “for the tuning pegs.”
She's done her homework, I think. She knows what the finger bones are for. And I must say, the bones have been well bleached, cleaned. My fingers twitch when I look at them. It would be easy enough, I think against my will. The rest is all there too: her sister's breast bone, her skull for the sounding box.
The younger sister hands me an envelope full of cash, too. “Five thousand dollars,” she says. “Half now and half when I pick up the violin.”
I still hesitate, but with commercial rents sky rocketing in the Village, I can't really afford to say no. “Okay.” I look at my calendar. “I’ll have it ready by next Tuesday.”
“I just want to know who killed her,” she says. Her voice is harsh from crying but her gaze is steady. She looks at me, meets my eyes.
So all that weekend I stay in the shop. I drill and I glue and I weave. I cover the skull with a light leather coat just to make it resonate better, and to make the fiddle look a little less grotesque. For the bow, I attach the hair to a lovely mahogany rod I've been saving for something special. I’m waiting for the glue to dry when she returns to the shop, boyfriend in tow.
She pays me and I give her the fiddle. Then we all wait.
I listen approvingly as she tunes it. The sound is good, under the circumstances. A little tinny, maybe, but given the construction material, not bad at all. Not that anyone ever cares about the sound of the music.
After a few moments the inevitable happens. We begin to hear a voice accompanying the fiddle. A woman’s thin voice. It starts as usual—a few repetitions—the chorus of the usual song, "Oh the wind and rain". The voice builds confidence as it goes, harmonizing with itself as it gets the feel of the instrument.
The tune picks up and the words change. “Hey fiddle dee, he promised he loved me. Hey fiddle do, my sister he did woo.” The voice hums along with the fiddle for a few beats, and then returns. “Hey fiddle day, the two did kiss one day.” And then back to initial musical line, and just in case we didn't see this coming. "Hey fiddler dee, my sister murdered me."
The younger sister drops the fiddle and rushes out of the shop sobbing, followed by her boyfriend who smiles at me embarrassedly. “Women,” he mouths silently.
I watch as he follows her into the sunlit afternoon, hands thrust deep in his sweatshirt pockets. Then I pick up the fiddle and put it with the rest of them.
A.B. Goelman describes Along Came a Fiddler as "a loose, somewhat satiric retelling of a story with its roots in the old English Aire Child Ballad No. 10 - The Two Sisters," noting that, "the story has been retold in a series of American folk ballads as The Dreadful Wind and Rain".
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