The Singing Stick, page 30
He looks again at the sky. It’s unbroken except for an invisible jet sketching a white streak across the brilliant blue. The contrail is on a collision course with the sun.
Exhaustion presses down. Foreboding. Grief.
This is like the silence after battle. After flashbacks. After nightmares. So many years since Iraq, he still sleeps in his apartment behind the farm shoppe, alone, to spare Mikey his terrors.
Olivia will survive, most likely.
As for Simon . . .
Victor falls back from the murky edge, where hope’s all mixed up with anxiety and doubt.
His attention gravitates to the fence post. The red turtle’s still there, as impervious to rotor wash as to a nor’easter.
Tears collect in the corners of his eyes. He thumbs them away.
He folds his Dinky Creek hat and shoves it into his hip pocket. He settles Simon’s grubby bush hat over his thick hair.
Now he’s got to get to the hospital.
To Fiona. To Abby, who should have arrived from Philly by now.
To the police.
To Mikey.
“Let’s go home,” he says to Lucy.
He slogs off through the pasture in the direction of the Jeep, wading in his old footprints.
Lucy lopes alongside. Here and there, she throws herself down to roll in the snow, then bounds off with a yip, as if after a rabbit. She’s moved on.
For him, it’s not so easy.
NOBODY
1156H
Victor and Lucy have gone maybe a klick when the pit drops out of his stomach.
You forgot his clarinet.
He doesn’t want to hike back to the culvert. He doesn’t want to go back inside that hole.
But that clarinet is part of Simon.
And a Marine leaves nobody behind.
CRACKED OPEN
1220H
Near where Victor had first smelled the smoke of Simon’s fire, Lucy points her nose skyward and lets rip with a howl.
“What’s the matter, girl?”
Lucy will proceed no farther. She keeps up her baying, jawing at him like he should understand, her eyes round and brown and pleading.
“Come on,” he coaxes, tugging her collar toward the culvert.
Lucy offers one last whine.
“Well, then,” he says, yielding in frustration, “stay put!”
To his surprise, Lucy clams up and sits on her haunches, as if he’d issued a command.
He gives her a tired smile. “What a pooch!” he says, tossing her his last piece of jerky.
Lucy flumps down with her treat in the snow.
Ahead looms the hole. He’ll have to go solo.
He splashes the slender beam of his flashlight around the inside of the culvert. There’s no visible source of threat, but his hair’s on end.
He screws his eyes shut to collect himself. In his mind, he nudges the stone turtle in his Jeep, sending it to and fro on its leather cord. Beneath its rhythm, he inhales from his belly.
His chest constricts. His panic is escalating. He’s tempted to run.
He jerks his gloves off. He needs his hands bare.
Eyelids still battened down, he repeats the fifth general order as if it were a frenzied foxhole prayer: “I will quit my post only when properly relieved. I will quit my post only when properly relieved. I will quit my post only when . . .”
The words bounce off the rocks. His heart’s still hammering. The stone turtle’s still swinging.
“This is it,” he says, abandoning the fifth order for a different mantra. “This is it. This is it. This is it . . .”
His breathing slows, becomes less jagged. Now he’s beginning to win.
“This is it. This is it. This is it. This is it . . .”
He senses a reassuring presence beside him. Lucy must have gotten over her stubborn streak. He groans in relief, no longer alone with his demons.
Blindly he holds out his hand, expecting a lick or a nose-nudge. He meets only air.
“Here, girl,” he says, adding a low whistle. “Where you at?”
No response.
He pries his eyes open.
No dog.
He swipes his light all around.
Not counting himself, the sole occupant of the ruined culvert is the clarinet, near where Simon and Olivia had lain, hugging each other for life.
The sight of the old man’s clarinet spotlighted on the rocks catapults Victor into the past—an afternoon back before the pandemic.
He and Mikey have just finished upgrading the shelving in Fiona’s studio. They’re sitting with her at the kitchen table, polishing off some of her raspberry cobbler.
Simon’s closeted in his den, practicing his clarinet. He never plays in front of people. Only in that room. Behind that closed door.
After a while, the chatter at the table leaves off. The three of them linger with their coffee, their forks resting on berry-stained plates. They absorb the music like bread soaking up soup.
In the reverie, Victor slips away and tiptoes down the creaky hall, toward the music. Nearing the den, he notices the door is ajar.
He hadn’t expected this. He didn’t wish to intrude, only to hear better.
But that cracked door is bait, luring him in.
He bends into a slight crouch. One squeak of the plank floor will betray him. He takes stealthy steps in his steel-toed work shoes, angling himself until Simon’s profile fills the one-inch gap between the door and its frame.
The old man has removed his wire-rimmed glasses. His long-lashed eyelids are closed; his bushy brows, arched in pleasure. He pours himself through the clarinet, swaying to the music as his fingers wag on the keys. Oblivious.
Victor freezes.
He then digs his phone from his jeans. Zeroes in. Waits.
Simon hits a loud, thrilling flurry of notes. Victor shoots a burst.
The old man never hears the snicks.
Back in the kitchen, Victor shows the sequence of photos to Fiona and Mikey—Simon so happy, yet so . . . alone.
Fiona tears up like an adoring sweetheart. Or a new widow.
Mikey wraps an arm around her shoulders and reels her into his side. She tips her head against his cheek. In that moment, they resemble mother and son—as if, at long last, Mikey has a mother who actually considers him worthy of love.
Mikey’s been more Mikey ever since.
Now, inside the culvert, Victor flips through his phone to find the one frame from that secret burst that he’d elected to keep—an image of Simon through a crack in time, turning himself into music.
Victor still can’t explain why the door of the den hadn’t been latched. Simon never would have neglected it on purpose. His music, like his peregrinations, is private.
Or who knows? Maybe that cracked-open door had been Simon’s way of letting them all in.
The only way he’d known how.
Calmer in his skin, Victor lowers himself beside the clarinet. Beside it rests a grubby pink glove, spotted with blood. By its size and color, the glove must be Olivia’s.
This stub of pink crayon must be hers too.
She’s sure into pink, he thinks, pocketing the crayon in his parka.
The beam of his flashlight glints on the clarinet’s tidy mess of silver keys and finger holes. To his untrained eye, the instrument appears to be in okay shape. Nothing that a clean rag and some polish can’t fix.
He doesn’t touch the clarinet. He ponders it like a new dad, unsure of the best way to hold his firstborn.
Timidly, he reaches with both hands to pick it up.
PRESENCE
TIME UNKNOWN
Outside the culvert, somewhere far away, Lucy howls.
Out the corner of Victor’s eye, a startling swish of luminescent pink.
He snaps his head to the side. Nothing’s there.
He shakes out the cobwebs. Maybe he’s too short on sleep. Or his blood sugar’s low.
No—there it is again! The slightest movement in the shadows.
He shoots to his feet, nerves on fire.
There! A slight rippling in the daylight at the culvert’s mouth . . . a Presence.
Just like that, it’s gone. He doesn’t see it leave so much as senses it.
He staggers out of the hole in pursuit, clenching the clarinet with both hands.
HER
TIME UNKNOWN
Victor shields his eyes against the dazzle of sunlight. When sight returns, he scans his surroundings for any shifting of shapes.
There.
He follows the Presence through the trees. It doesn’t seem to be fleeing him, but it’s so indistinct that it’s hard to track. It flows like liquid glass. Every glimpse is see-through. A lady’s pink hat, maybe. The skirt of a dress. A bare ankle.
He begins to imagine the Presence as her.
And he begins to suspect that whoever she is, or once had been, she’s somehow linked to the clarinet. Why else would she have withdrawn from the culvert right after he’d picked it up?
He trudges after her, through the snow, toward the river.
This can’t possibly be happening.
Of course it’s happening. And it will alter you forever.
He stands under a tree at the river’s edge, chest heaving from exertion, desperate for a telltale ripple of light or color.
Straight across, the cows are back at the fence.
The red amulet is gone from the post.
THE BIGNESS
TIME UNKNOWN
Where have you gone? Victor asks the Presence, surveying the landscape. But the only movement is Lucy, behind him in the trees.
Strange, this sugar maple beneath which he’s standing. Despite the nor’easter’s fury, the tree still possesses all its leaves, fiery red against the winter hues of the woods.
Dazzled by the foliage, Victor tilts back his head to stare up through the maple’s canopy. When he reaches out a hand to steady himself on the trunk, the tree sings a note, as if he’d plucked a guitar string.
The world tips on a sunbeam.
“You hear that?” he says to himself, stupefied, trying to process the evidence of his own ears.
He experiments, easing his hand higher up the maple’s trunk. The pitch of the tree’s note slides up, like when his buddy Kadeem, before he got blown up, would run a finger up a silver string on his fretboard.
A single mesmerizing note, bending toward the sky.
But no—
It’s not just one note.
Victor catches the hint of a melody, warm and melancholy. He can’t be sure, but it seems to be emanating from across the river.
Maybe from the empty fence post.
Somebody’s turning up the volume.
Somebody’s mixing in more layers of sound, until, at last, there’s only Song—pulsing, welling up from everywhere at once. From every needle on the pine trees. From every spray of light through the laden branches. From every crystal of snow. From every rock in the river. From every inch of wire in the fence. From every grommet in his boots.
Impossible music, produced from jostling and friction and dissonance.
“Do you hear it?” he exclaims again.
He’s suddenly shaky on his feet. His entire body is vibrating—or is the air trembling?
Sometimes, in combat, he’d suffered dizzy spells. Immersed in horrors too grotesque to absorb, he’d lost his bearings. A dense, sickening vertigo would spin him to the ground, and he couldn’t pull himself out of it. He always just had to get through it.
That vertigo, as he’d finally grown to understand, had been his private No.
But his loss of balance here—shin deep in fresh snow under this sugar maple, his flesh throbbing with waves of consummate sound—has nothing to do with terror or shock or his own barbarity.
He’s tripping on the molecules of a cosmic Yes.
Random images boil up on the churning music: his mom lifting the stone turtle on its cord over his head, his buddies shooting hoops on base, Mikey’s whiskered face asleep on the pillow, Meema licking a kid to its feet, Fiona sprinkling sugar over peaches, Boo Adams exclaiming “Pink!”, himself spinning to a stop on the Marble Run, Lucy baying, Simon’s arms clutching Olivia and not letting go—
Oh, the tenderness of it all!
His whole life, he’s been waiting for this glorious Song to emerge from the world’s noise. An irrefutable sign that he belongs. That he has a rightful, even necessary, place in this life. Wherever he is, as he is.
No code to crack. No privilege to earn. No worth to prove.
This is it.
The cows can hear the Song. Lucy too. Just look at them, all standing stock-still along the river, breathing in and out . . .
They’re all part of it. Nobody’s outside.
One of the cows on the fence line, anchored wide on her haunches, bellows at a billion-watt sun.
Following gravity, the Song drifts down and settles over Victor, an enchanted parachute of sound. With every inhalation through its gossamer silk, he draws more Song into himself.
Maybe every day is music, and you’re an instrument of the Giver, shivering with dread and delight, life singing through you like breath through a hollow reed. You sing—and are sung.
Some notes of the Song are givens. The rest you have to improvise, like Simon and his jazz that day through the crack in the door.
You, and everybody else, are making something more from what’s already here, getting caught up in a groove, and being carried away into a Bigness beyond all time and place . . . Or maybe into a Bigness in which all times and all places coexist, along with all souls that have ever been and are and ever shall be.
He touches the maple tree again.
Nothing.
Silence, all around.
The Song’s gotten all up inside of him.
It’s never too late to be more you than you were before.
“Thank you,” he tells the Presence, but he’s almost certain that she has moved on. Like the amulet from the fence.
SCRIBBLED IN INK
TIME UNKNOWN
Still in a daze, Victor wills himself to move. He unzips his parka. He strips down to his long-sleeve crew, one of Mikey’s old shirts. I’m just here to pet the goats, it says in bold block letters.
He peels off the crew, exposing his tattooed torso. Shivering, he swaddles the clarinet in his shirt, the polyester still holding the warmth from his body.
Like the turtle amulet, this clarinet has medicine. It’s a special carrier of the Song. The Giver has made it to talk power on the wind, to put stories in the air for the world to swallow.
The clarinet doesn’t belong to him, but the Giver has entrusted him with its keeping. By protecting it, he continues to protect the one it belongs to, until it’s no longer needed . . .
He stands the bundled clarinet on end in one corner of his daypack. It’s so long that it juts out the top. He closes the pack’s zipper against it, for stability.
He slips back into his fleece jacket and parka. He shoulders the pack. He buckles its waist strap, for good measure.
Nothing’s going to harm this clarinet.
Lucy trots up beside him and laps at his fingers.
Over in the pasture, the cows amble away through the snow, single file, like notes of music being scribbled in black ink across a fresh white page.
NEWSBREAK
3:00 P.M.
AN ELDERLY MAN SUFFERING FROM DEMENTIA HAS BEEN FOUND ABOUT EIGHTEEN HOURS AFTER HIS FAMILY FIRST REPORTED HIM MISSING FROM HIS HOME.
IN A JOINT STATEMENT WITH THE SHERIFF’S OFFICE, THE POLICE DEPARTMENT ANNOUNCED THAT EIGHTY-YEAR-OLD SIMON RICHTER HAD BEEN LOCATED NEAR THE PUHPEEG RESERVOIR IN RURAL ARONDALE COUNTY AROUND 11:00 A.M. SATURDAY. THE SITE WAS ABOUT SEVEN MILES NORTHWEST OF RICHTER’S RESIDENCE.
RICHTER HAD TAKEN SHELTER IN AN ABANDONED CULVERT. AN UNIDENTIFIED CHILD AND A DOG WERE FOUND WITH HIM.
RICHTER AND THE CHILD WERE AIRLIFTED TO MERCY HOSPITAL. THEIR CONDITIONS HAVE NOT YET BEEN RELEASED.
RICHTER’S FAMILY HAS BEEN NOTIFIED. IDENTIFICATION OF THE MINOR IS PENDING.
THE CANINE HAS BEEN PLACED IN THE TEMPORARY CARE OF ANIMAL CONTROL.
WE WILL PROVIDE UPDATES ON THIS SITUATION AS MORE INFORMATION BECOMES AVAILABLE.
A SPECIAL REQUEST
Thanks for reading The Singing Stick.
Please leave a brief review of The Singing Stick on your favorite book-loving sites. Just a sentence or two can help to raise the book’s visibility and put it in the hands of more readers.
Care to suggest The Singing Stick to another book-lover or to your book club? Don’t be shy. Good books make good friends.
Want to share your impressions of the book with the author? Email her here: phyllis@phylliscoledai.com.
BEYOND THE READING
Carry your experience of The Singing Stick beyond the reading of the book. Consider these thought-provoking questions while listening to two music playlists curated by the author.
QUESTIONS FOR REFLECTION AND DISCUSSION
How do you interpret the book’s title? In your view, what or who is the singing stick?
What role does the COVID pandemic play in the story? How would the story change if it were set in a different time?
Throughout the book, the author uses many points of view. What effect does this have? Which character’s point of view do you wish had been included and why?
