The Wood Remembers

Chapter One — The Bench

My hands have begun to lie to me. In the morning they are strangers, two cold tools someone left out in the rain, and I sit with them wrapped around the coffee until they remember whose they are. Then they work. Not as they did. There was a time these fingers could feel the thickness of a spruce plate through the back of a gouge, could read three millimetres and bring it down to two without once lifting the wood to the light. Now I measure twice and trust neither number. Old age is a workshop where some careless apprentice has filed the marks off all your gauges.

The shop is the same shop it has been for fifty years. Two windows facing the courtyard, south light all morning, the long bench under them worn into a shallow bowl the exact shape of my leaning. A man wears a hollow into oak the way a river wears a stone, by doing one small thing ten thousand times and never thinking of it as the thing that will outlast him. There is a cast-iron stove that smokes when the wind comes off the river. There are pegboards of gouges and finger planes, their handles brown with the oil of two pairs of hands, mine and a dead man's. There is a smell I have lived inside so long I only notice it when I have been away, and then it greets me at the door like a dog: linseed and larch resin and the clean cold scent of fresh-cut spruce, which is the smell of snow if snow had a heart of sugar.

On the bench tonight is a violin in the white. Finished in the wood, every curve cut and scraped and waiting, but bare, the colour of cream, no varnish yet. It is the last one. I have not said this out loud to anyone, because to say it is to invite the cleverer kind of pity, but I know it the way you know the last warm day of a year even while the sun is still on your neck. My eyes go at evening now. The arching I can still feel; the f-holes I can still cut, slowly, the way you'd cross a stream on stones you weren't sure of. But the fine work at the scroll, the last turn into the eye where the chisel has to find a line a hair wide — that work is leaving me, and a violin is not honest if the scroll is a lie. So. The last one.

People ask me, the few who still come up the stairs, how many I have made. They want a number. They want to write it down and tell someone at dinner. I never give them one because I stopped counting somewhere in the middle of my life, around the time I understood that the count was a kind of vanity and a kind of fear, both, and I had enough of each already. But if they press, I tell them the truth, which disappoints them.

I made one good one. The rest were practice.

The one good one is not in this room. It is not in this country. I gave it away forty years before it could have made me famous, and I have never been sorry, and I have never told anyone the real reason, and I am seventy-nine years old, and a man who is making the last of anything ought to stop lying at least to himself. So I am going to set it all down. Not for the customers and not for the books that write about us makers as though we were a guild of saints with secret recipes. For my granddaughter, who is coming Thursday, and who has begun, God help her, to love an instrument the way I loved one, which is to say more than is safe.

Her name is Lena. She is sixteen and she plays the viola, badly and with her whole soul, which is the only correct way to play badly. She brings me biscuits her mother bakes and she sits on the stool that was my master's stool and she asks me questions I have spent a lifetime not answering. Last week she asked me why I never made myself rich. The week before she asked me whether I believed wood was alive. I told her to pass the smaller scraper. A man can hide behind a tool his whole life if he is diligent.

But Thursday I think I will tell her about the tree.

Chapter Two — The Tin of Shavings

I was twelve when my father gave me to Otto Brandt, and I use the word gave on purpose, because there was no asking, mine or his. We were poor in the particular way of people who had once been less poor and could remember it, which is the worst way. My father mended clocks. There is no living in a town like Solva for two men who mend clocks, and I was the second man whether I liked it or not, so when Brandt let it be known he wanted a boy with quiet hands, my father walked me up the hill before I could finish my bread.

Brandt's workshop sat above the river Levna where it bends below the old bridge, two flights up a stone stair worn slick by rain and by him. He was not a large man but he filled a doorway by standing very still in it. He had a face like a chisel that has been ground too many times, all the soft gone off it, and eyes the grey of weathered spruce. He looked at me the way I would later look at a billet someone was trying to sell me — for the flaw, for the hidden knot, for the place where the grain ran out and would betray you under load.

"He's small," Brandt said to my father.

"He'll grow."

"They always say that." He did not look at my father when he said it. He looked at my hands. Then he took my right hand in his — his were enormous, scarred white across the knuckles, warm and dry as old paper — and he turned it over and pressed his thumb into my palm, hard, watching my face. I did not pull away. I think now that was the whole of the interview. I did not pull away, and so I had a life.

He did not teach me to make violins. For two years he did not let me touch a violin, except to carry it. He taught me to sweep. He taught me to keep the glue pot at blood heat and never let it boil, because hide glue that has boiled has had its strength cooked out of it and will let go in a year, in a damp room, at the worst possible moment, in another country, when you have nothing else of your old life intact — but I am getting ahead, that lesson took on its full meaning later. He taught me to sharpen. Three months of nothing but sharpening, the gouges and the knives and the little finger planes, on stones with water and then on a strop, until I could shave the hair off the back of my arm and the patches grew back in stripes and the other boys in the town laughed at me. He would test an edge by paring a curl from a scrap of pine end-grain, which is the cruelest test there is, end-grain, and if the curl came off whole and translucent he would grunt. If it tore he would hand the tool back without a word and the silence was worse than any beating my father ever gave me, because my father's anger passed and Brandt's disappointment had the patience of weather.

He never praised me. I want that understood before I tell the rest, because the rest will make him sound kind, and he was not kind, he was something rarer and harder to live with, which I did not have a word for then.

I will tell you when I first suspected it.

I had ruined a joint. We were gluing the two halves of a spruce top — you split the billet and open it like a book so the grain mirrors itself, bookmatched, and then you plane the centre joint until the two faces meet with no light between them, no light at all, you hold it to the window and there must be not one thread of day showing through, and then you glue it, rubbed joint, no clamps, just hot glue and the heel of your hand and the right amount of trembling. I had planed mine proud in the middle. A beginner's error, a belly in the joint, invisible until you sight along it. Brandt would see it in the morning when he checked the closed seam, and he would split it again in front of me and make me start over, and I had wasted half a day and a length of glue and I was twelve and I cried about it that night on my cot in the corner, quietly, the way you learn to cry in another man's house.

In the morning the joint was perfect.

I sighted along it before he woke and it was true, dead true, no belly, the two halves married as though they had grown that way. I never said anything. He never said anything. But I had heard him in the night, the small sounds, the scrape of the jointer plane, the tick of the glue brush against the rim of the pot, a man past fifty doing in the dark the work his apprentice had botched so the boy would not have to face him over it. He let me think I had done it. He let me carry that small false pride out into the day so that it would teach me what real pride felt like and make me want it honestly.

That was the kind of tenderness he had. It came out only at night and it never had his name on it.

There was a tin on the high shelf, a flat tin that had held tea once, and I was forbidden it, which of course meant that I opened it the first afternoon he left me alone in the shop. I expected money, or the secret of the varnish, which the whole town said he kept written on a paper hidden somewhere. Inside was a single shaving of spruce. One. Curled tight as a watch-spring, gone the colour of weak honey with age, and so thin that when I lifted it to the window the light came through it and showed the grain like the lines in an old man's hand. I did not understand it. I put it back exactly as it had lain.

Years later, when I was clearing the shop after he died, I understood. It was his son's. His son had taken one shaving off one plate, the boy's first true cut, the curl unbroken — and then there had been an earlier war than mine, the one nobody in our family spoke of either, and the son had gone into it and not come out, and all that was left of a boy who would have been a maker was one curl of spruce in a tea tin on a high shelf where a man could look at it without anyone watching him look.

He took me on the year after he lost the boy. I never knew that while he was alive. I only knew he was hard with me, and that he stayed up in the night to spare me shame, and that he could not say a single warm word to my face. I have forgiven him everything, including the warmth he could not give, because I came at last to understand it was not withheld. It was spent. He had had a fixed amount and he had given it all to a boy who was already gone, and what he gave me instead was the trade, which is a colder thing and a longer one, and which I am still living off, here at the end, the way you live in winter off a summer's wood.