Mountain Solo Read online

  I trace the faces through the glass and wonder if I'll ever see them again.

  There's one of Kiah, Eleni, and both Amys in their leotards and ballet slippers. And there's me with my violin, standing next to Kendall, whom I'd just as soon not see again.

  I find the group shot that's my favorite. Ben, my best friend in all the world, is in the middle of it, one hand supporting his cello and an expression on his face like he'd rather be playing it than posing.

  Ben doesn't even know I've left New York. Besides cello, he plays a pretty good string bass, and when I got back from Germany he was already off on his summer job, touring New England with a jazz group. He called four or five times, but I let him talk to the answering machine.

  Out of habit I glance at my watch and calculate the practice time left in the day. Then I remember I don't have to do that anymore. The whole afternoon and evening lie wide open, with no new music for me to learn and nothing old to polish. I can leave my violin case closed the way it has been for the past two weeks.

  The sheer freedom makes me feel a little giddy.

  Or maybe I'm just hungry, I think. Should I have breakfast or lunch?

  In the kitchen I drink orange juice while looking at another photo. This one, which is on the refrigerator door, is of me when I was three and a half; or almost. I'm wearing a bathrobe and cradling my new violin the way I might a doll. Mom's neatly printed label has almost faded away, but I can still make it out. I was Tessie back then. Occasionally still am.

  Then I spot a note from Dad propped against a cereal bowl. "I'll pick you up at lunchtime—noon sharp—so we can buy you some camping gear."

  I start to hurry down the hall and then have to backtrack to answer the phone.

  "Tess," Mom says, "why didn't you call and tell me you'd arrived safely? Anyway, I want you to know that I've spent the entire morning straightening out the mess you left behind."

  "I didn't leave a mess."

  "Most importantly, I've gotten your violin teacher to understand that you're on a needed mental health break—"

  Mental health break! "But that's not true! Why would you tell Mr. Stubner that?"

  "So he'll keep a place in his schedule. I'm keeping doors open for you."

  "You had no right."

  "But they won't stay open forever so don't dawdle too long in coming to your senses. And don't let up on your practicing You don't want to get further behind than you can help."

  My gaze swings to the microwave display that says 11:48. I think, Dad will be here in twelve minutes. Again I calculate the hours I have left in the day. It's a habit hard to break, and I feel guilty for even trying to. Or maybe the unsettled feeling inside me is dismay at how easy it would be to give in to Mom.

  I know that if I stay on the phone with her she'll soon be telling me what music to work on. And then, before I know how she's made it happen, I'll be on another airplane, on my way back to New York and a life I don't want anymore.

  Making my voice steady, I say, "I can't practice for several days at least because we're going on a camping trip. I'll call when we get back."

  And then I hang up.

  I take a fast shower throw on some clothes, and am in the driveway pulling my hair into a ponytail when Dad drives up.

  Shopping with him is a fast affair It takes us ten minutes at one store to get a sleeping bag to replace the one I outgrew years ago—Amy will use that—and fifteen minutes at another to pick out an internal-frame pack that looks as if it will hold a lot more than I want to carry. I'm kind of stunned at the size of the checks he has to write, but he says they're part early happy birthday—my birthday's three weeks away—and part welcome-home gift.

  Lunch is milkshakes and onion rings, which used to be our secret treat. Then Dad has to get back to his veterinary clinic. He tells me, "If you wouldn't mind getting a ride home with Meg, it will save me some driving."

  "Isn't she working?" I ask.

  "She has an appointment at a nursing home out this way and then is taking off early to get things ready for tomorrow."

  "What's she doing at a nursing home?"

  "She didn't say. Just called to suggest I drop you off there."

  "I'M SUPPOSED TO meet Meg Thaler," I tell a man at the front desk.

  "Dt Thaler?" he asks, and I almost say no before I remember she is one, a Ph.D. doctor "She got here just ahead of you," he says, gesturing down a long hall.

  Spotting Meg toward the far end, I hurry and catch up with her as she pauses in a doorway. She gives me a smile while speaking to someone I can't see. "Miss Bottner?" she says.

  "I wanted to let you know I'm here," I whisper "I'll wait in the lobby."

  "Please stay," she tells me. "Miss Bottner?" she says again, stepping inside. "Katharina?"

  Meg motions me into the room, where a woman sits at a window. Even though her back is toward us, she gives the impression of being very old. And when she reaches for the controls to make her wheelchair circle around, I see scars, darkened and puckered with age, stretching across fingers that strain to work the buttons.

  Once she's facing our way, she urges, "Sit down, sit down. And tell me who you are. Someone said, but I do forget..."

  "I'm Meg Thaler" Meg says, "and this is my stepdaughter Tess."

  "Well, tell her to sit, too," the woman says.

  There's only one visitor's chair so I take up a place on the floor where I can lean back against a bureau.

  Meg says, "I work for the Forest Service, and one of my projects is locating the place where you grew up. It's probably the last undocumented homestead site in the Rattlesnake, and..."

  Katharina Bottner listens attentively to the explanation, but when Meg says, "I was hoping you could tell me some landmarks to look out for" Katharina replies with, "Are you the girl come to give me my bath?"

  Meg's cheeks turn a feint pink. "No," she says, and starts over with a simpler explanation.

  Katharina interrupts to ask me, "And who are you again?"

  "Tess Thaler" I say.

  "And you?" she asks Meg.

  "I'm Meg Thaler from the Forest Service." Meg touches Katharina's hand, and again I notice the scars. "Katharina, it would really help me to know about where you grew up. Do you remember if your parents farmed the land?"

  Sudden humor sparkles in Katharina's eyes. "They certainly didn't run a store on it. Wouldn't have had any customers but wild animals."

  Meg chuckles but pushes on. "Do you remember what buildings you had? Besides a house? A barn, perhaps?"

  "Certainly we had a barn," Katharina says. "If I could, I'd ask Papa to show you." She halts, appearing puzzled, as though she's trying to pull together some thought. Then she shakes her head. "But I haven't seen him in a long time."

  Meg waits a few moments, and then she says, "Your father was a violin player wasn't he?"

  "I haven't seen him in a long time," Katharina repeats. She looks down at her hands. "He would have taught me to play, you know, only of course there was the dynamite. My own fault for wandering off. I'd been told."

  "Dynamite?" Meg asks as I shudder at the image of a little kid being hurt by explosives. But Katharina is done talking about it. And when Meg tries to direct the conversation back to the homestead, Katharina starts talking about the young robins outside her window.

  We thank her for seeing us and are saying good-bye when the puzzled expression returns to her face. Then it dissolves as she apparently finds the thought she was after "I do have something of Papa's you can look at."

  She rolls her wheelchair to a closet, slides open the door and nods toward a shelf crammed with bags and boxes. "It's up there," she says, looking at me. "You'll have to move some things."

  Meg motions for me to go ahead, and I'm about to ask what I should be looking for when I see the unmistakable shape of a violin case. I pull it down and set it on the bed. "Your father's?" I ask.

  "That's what I said," Katharina answers.

  "May I open it?"

  "Yo
u won't see it unless you do."

  As I ease back the worn, stiff latches, Meg says, "Tess is a violinist herself."

  Katharina says, "Papa called it a fiddle."

  The hinges squeak when I lift the lid, and the mingled scents of rosin, old wood, and decaying fabric rush out. The violin that rests on the case's crushed-velvet lining has one peg that looks different from the others, and two of its strings are missing.

  "Will you play a piece?" Katharina asks.

  I draw a finger over the instrument's curved, finely crackled surface, sad to have to tell her, "I'd like to, but this isn't in any shape to play."

  "Oh." The single word is soft with disappointment.

  "I'm sorry," I tell her "What kind of music did your father play?"

  "Every kind you can name. Square-dance music and hymns and old-timey things like 'Go Tell Aunt Rhody.' One year when every one of our lambs lived right to market, Mama even bought him a book of music so he could learn some different pieces. That's when he learned 'Danny Boy.'" Katharina's eyes focus on a point in midair "What I liked best, though, were his woods sounds."

  "What were those?" I ask.

  "Oh, just one thing and another we'd heat Birds singing, owls, like that." Frowning, she looks at the instrument and makes a small humphing noise in her throat. "Well, put it away." She reaches for the buttons of her wheelchair "You'd better go now. I'm tired."

  We're in the hall when Katharina calls us bade. "Girl," she says to me, "what's your name again?"

  "Tess."

  "Did you come here by train?"

  "Come to...?" I hesitate, wondering if she means to the nursing home and not sure it's polite to call it that.

  "To Montana, of course," she says. "Papa came by train, carrying that fiddle all the way from South Dakota."

  "You were with him?"

  "Why, he was just a boy. I wasn't even born!" She chuckles. "The idea!"

  Did you know she had that violin?" I ask Meg as we get in her small pickup truck.

  She shakes her head. "I knew her father—Frederik Bottner—played one because it was mentioned in a newspaper clipping about a dance in the old Rattlesnake schoolhouse. That's why I wanted you to meet Katharina. I thought she might have some interesting stories to tell you. But that she'd still have his violin ... That was certainly unexpected."

  "Her father's playing must have meant a lot for her to have kept his fiddle when she couldn't play it herself. Do you think she meant that a dynamite explosion was what ruined her hands? How would a kid have gotten hold of that?"

  "In homestead days?" Meg says. "You name it. People used dynamite for blowing up tree stumps, blasting irrigation ditches, opening up mine tunnels. There were so many ways for kids to get hurt or killed back then: open fires, boiling kettles of laundry, livestock that couldn't always be trusted, wild animals."

  "You make those times sound awful," I say.

  "Not awful. Just hard and full of risk." She pauses. "I think an accident with dynamite would have been more likely to kill Katharina than just hurt her hands. But maybe some smaller explosive, something she associates with dynamite..."

  We stop by Meg's office in the Forest Service building at old Fort Missoula, and I wait in the car while she makes a quick trip inside. She comes out carrying a folder that she gives me. "Photocopies from our Rattlesnake files," she says. "And maps. You can see on the first one where I think the Bottner home probably was."

  I unfold a topographic map labeled "Rattlesnake National Recreation and Wilderness Area." A tiny black dot indicates our house just outside the boundary, and a penciled X marks the mouth of a gulch several miles in.

  "That location's just an educated guess," Meg tells me, slowing for traffic backed up by road construction. "I found a 1909 land claim filed by Frederik Bottner but most of the legal description was too water damaged to read." She breaks off to ask, "What do you think would be the fastest way to go? Reserve Street to Broadway?"

  Shaking my head, I say, "Missoula's grown so much you probably know it better than I do."

  I study the map. The X-marked gulch, which is narrow to start with, tapers in to become just the blue thread of a stream cutting down the contour lines of a mountainside.

  Meg mutters under her breath as she slows for an asphalt truck. "I swear every road in Missoula is being worked on at the same time." She makes a sharp left. "Let's see if this is better."

  As I put away the topo map, I notice a picture of a rusted-out kettle and ask what's special about it.

  "That's what started this search," Meg answers. "A hiker came across it a good bit farther up the 'Snake than any of the documented homesites, which raised the question of whether there was a site we didn't know about. Then I found that land claim, and Bottner is an unusual enough name that I was able to track down Katharina."

  Frowning at yet another traffic snarl, Meg detours from her detour "Actually," she continues, "there were two Bottners who seemed to have owned land in the Rattlesnake. The other was a Johann who moved there some years before it was all officially surveyed. A relative, I assume."

  Meg's revised route takes us to a brick-paved street that runs along the railroad tracks at the north end of downtown Missoula, and we stop at a crosswalk to wait for a couple of adults and a dozen little kids in day-camp T-shirts.

  "Must be a field trip to engine thirteen-fifity-six," Meg says, gesturing toward a steam locomotive that's ending its days inside a fence near the old Northern Pacific depot.

  Remembering what Katharina said, I suggest, "Maybe Katharina's father came in right here."

  "He well could have," Meg answers. "People like to think of homesteaders arriving by covered wagon, but the truth is most of the ones who took up land out here arrived after the covered-wagon days were over."

  I picture a boy in old-fashioned overalls, a farm kid from a prairie state—South Dakota, Katharina said—struggling to get his bearings at a bustling train station in an unfamiliar mountain city. "It's too bad Katharina couldn't tell us more about him," I say.

  "That's one of the frustrating things about studying the past," Meg says. "You have to accept that you'll never learn all there is to know about the people who lived in it. Though of course you keep wondering."

  I see what she means, because I'm wondering myself what that boy thought about as his train pulled into Missoula. Did he look out a window to see what awaited, or was he remembering what he'd left behind?

  As the last stragglers reach the sidewalk, Meg shifts into first and drives forward. Out on the tracks, a brakeman waves to the engineer of an incoming freight train, and slowing boxcars rumble and boom.

  Meg asks, "Home, or do you want to go grocery shopping with me?"

  "Home, if you wouldn't mind," I answer "I'd like to get unpacked."

  The job doesn't take long, though, and once again I find myself wandering the house. In the living room, I see that someone's put my violin on the piano. I ought to take it to my room, I think, without moving toward it. I bring a cola from the kitchen, page through a magazine, and then abruptly put it down.

  I go over to my violin, open the case, and run my hand over the instrument inside—the way I felt the wood of Katharina's father's violin. Plucking a couple of strings, I wince at how they've slipped out of tune.

  Bringing them back up to pitch, I play a few chords, and it feels so good that I think maybe I'll keep going, just for a little while. I sound a few more chords, considering I know so many pieces, but I think that what I should play is my solo. When you make a mistake, you don't go on until you fix it. At least I never have.

  Only, when I try that first note, the one I last heard tear out raw and wrong into a concert hall full of people, I bow it almost too softly to be heard. I'm scared of it, I think. One little note, and I'm scared of it.

  I take a deep breath, prepare to try again, and am glad when Amy's bursting through the front door gives me an excuse not to. She holds out a chalk picture of two tents in a mountain meadow. "It wa
s arts day at the park," she says. "I made this for you."

  "Thank you," I say. I start to comment on the wild, bright colors she used, but she's looking at my violin. "Can I hold it?"

  "If you're careful."

  I put it in both her hands, but she says, "No. Like you hold it."

  So, with my hands around hers, I put it into position. "Rest your chin on that black oval piece." I help her bow some open strings, but she wants real music.

  "You've got to know fingering to play a melody," I tell her "That takes lessons and practice."

  "Then you play," she says.

  I hesitate, but then I think, She's not expecting Vivaldi. "What would you like to hear?"

  "I don't know."

  "'Danny Boy,'" Meg says, pausing in the hall, sacks of groceries in her arms. "It's been going around in my head ever since Katharina mentioned it."

  "Don't you want help putting those away?" I ask.

  "No, thanks. Not this time," she answers.

  So, accompanied by the quiet click of kitchen cabinets being opened and shut, I play my violin for the first time since the concert. Amy watches, her arms wrapped across her middle. She's a rapt, uncritical audience, and "Danny Boy" is so lovely and simple it almost plays itsel£ Only, when I'm halfway through it, I can't go on.

  I stop in the middle of a phrase. "I'm sorry, Amy," I say. "I'll have to play for you another time."

  "Why?" she asks.

  "I'm sorry," I repeat as I put my violin in its case.

  There aren't any sounds from the kitchen for a few moments, and then Meg calls, "Amy, will you please come set the table?"

  WE EAT DINNER in the kitchen. Supper really, since it's just soup and sandwiches. Amy is telling a drawn-out story about her friend's little brother being a major plague when she suddenly breaks off to tell Dad, "Tess played her violin for me today. She's wonderful."