(Original fiction protected under the U.S. copyright laws and may not be reproduced, copied, including electronic copies, distributed or exhibited without the prior written consent of Sarah Walko.)
Excerpt 1: Fiddlers
John Edward McHugh stood on the front porch of the house that his own hands built stomping his foot to the tune of his fiddle as he played. He was a railroad car inspector by day, faithfully serving the Grand Island Nebraska neighborhood sun up and sun down in transport. He was the eldest of nine; Irene, Rose, the twins Harold and Gerald, Kate, Vess, Jim, and Ester.
Before his hands built his house and before they fiddled, they collected things. They carried things, stole things, and buried things. They collected, carried and buried his brother Gerald who died instantly young while driving a truck that exploded due to a ruptured fuel tank. John was sent to identify the body of the boy and the whole town watched him walk home. He kicked at the rocks and dirt as he walked. He pulled his hat down over his eyes. His neighbor hollered to him.
What’d body look like John?
He stopped and stood still for a few minutes on the road, looking at a point far away that was nothing in particular but he saw it as the distance of his brother’s life line. Then he snorted and laughed, long and low.
Theren’t no body, he eventually muttered. Just a gold tooth floatin’ in a room full of ash.
His hand rubbed his pocket as he spoke. That tooth was never seen until two decades later when his own body was found, the gold tooth in that same pocket.
He built houses before he began inspecting railroad cars. When he was in his wood shop working he didn’t stop for anything and the scars on his fingers reflected it. His hands were like two-hundred-year-old oaks studded with shallow rivets from slipped saws. He wasted nothing, even slips, so they served as holding compartments for his fiddle strings at night when he played to the simple moon. He had only a third of his stomach left inside by the age of forty due to his ulcers. Worry about strong houses and smooth rails knuckled him inside and out. John McHugh never did sing. His unsung words soaked into the headboards and floorboards of the ceilings and porches of all of his houses. When the Nebraska wind blew, they all unsilently swayed.
His wife Catherine Cecelia Gebhart McHugh was also born and raised in Grand Island. Her father died when she was seven and when he did her mother bought a duplex with four units in it that she rented out to young couples. New families she called them. On the ground level she ran a beauty shop where a piano was placed in the corner and Catherine was forced to practice six hours a day. Her mother also permed her hair. All day in the beauty shop Catherine played while her mother doled out petrified curls to the whole town.
John and Catherine met one evening at a dance because neither of them were dancing. They didn’t walk home that night or any other. They marched. They built a home where they stayed, stooped, sipped and stomped for over a decade and that is where the children were born. Stone curls, unquiet floors, and proud crowds of fiddlers followed them around the house all day and every lyricless night.
Catherine’s feet often moved back and forth between three piano pedals while she slept. She would wake in the morning very tired, as if she had walked the two hundred years from Bach to Mozart or swam each note of the Platte River. One night before she slipped to sleep and her feet began to skip, she walked out and spoke to the simple moon herself. All around her on the porch were John’s empty whisky bottles. And that one night, on a night like any other night, it spoke back.
So the next morning she left.
Excerpt 2: The Talent of Winter
That first winter blew strong gusts of wind between the unstrong houses and one evening the blue Chevy broke down. They counted the exhalations of their breath aloud as they pushed it a half a block to a neighbors house and left it to walk home. The snow overtook everything and that evening when they arrived they watched it out the window. It was late December and they were unable to hear its roar. Like deafs at the symphony, they judged the talent of winter through their five eyes.
Three days later when the car was fixed Catherine returned from work and turned on the light in the living room as she was removing her coat. Genie and Rosie fell silent and looked at her. With a firm nod, she told them,
Get into the car.
Why?
We need a tree, she said it as she looked out the window, squinting through the darkness.
Catherine pulled away from the house and drove through the neighborhood. Eventually, she slowed down and pulled into a parking lot next to a grocery selling Christmas trees that Genie and Rosie were unfamiliar with. Catherine told Genie and Rosie to stay put and left the car running.
They sai in silence for a few minutes. Then Genie interrupted.
I’m cold. She said.
She’ll be right back. Rosie replied.
Genie began to hum.
Quiet Genie.
But, I’m cold. I need to do something so I don’t think of it.
Don’t hum though, you need to be quiet. Just wiggle around.
Genie giggled. Wiggle?
Wiggle.
She began to wiggle as best she could.
Where’s mom Rosie?
Don’t know. I can’t see anything from here.
Why are we parked so far away?
Don’t know Genie.
Just then, they saw Catherine, running toward them, the top of a tree in both of her hands, the thick trunk dragging behind leaving a line in the snow.
Open the door Genie, Rosie said in a a calm voice.
Genie reached across and swung the door open. The moment she did she was buried beneath falling needles and the gangly branches of the evergreen Catherine was towing. It was slung across her lap, lying horizontal on the back seat. Rosie pressed her lips together, looking back and forth between Genie in the backseat with the tree and Catherine scrambling into the driver seat. Then she began to laugh as Catherine pushed the pedal and sent them peeling onto the road toward home. Scrambling from behind the small tree, Genie tried to see if Rosie’s laughter was directed toward her. When she did she saw Rosie pointing at Catherine’s lap. Keeping her eyes steady and ahead on the road as she drove, Catherine ignored Rosie’s laughing at her pants soaked with urine.
That night they made hot apple cider and decorated the tree, singing Christmas carols the wind couldn’t hear. It stared in through their windows, curious, composed, contained. Old clothes of their father’s that Catherine had brought with the intention to cut for cleaning rags were brough out and Genie put them on. She pretended to be him, spilling her cider like a drunk and playing a fiddle with a trimmed tree branch and a closed umbrella. Laughter shook the drawer and the unstrong house. Everything stirred and tilted.
Except for the tree.
Once in bed Genie silently said she was sorry to her father. She meant it because she took off the patch from her right eye. Nothing against you or strong houses, she said. Then she held both eyes open with her fingers so she could see the exact moment that her dreams entered.