her trailer and the garden and the tattered figure of the scarecrow watching over it all. Where was she supposed to find a music still true to all of this, but different enough to break the pattern of four summers immersed in its quiet joys and mysteries?
“I don’t know if I can do it,” she said.
“You can try,” Robert told her.
“I suppose. But what if I call something worse over?”
“You didn’t call anything over. Those spirits were sent.”
Staley shook her head. “This fiddle of Grandma’s plays a calling-on music—I can hear it whenever I play.”
“I don’t deny that,” Robert said. “But you’ve got to put some intent into that call, and from what you’ve been telling me, you didn’t intend to bring anything over last night.”
“So when those blackbirds gather to her fiddling,” William said, “it’s because she’s invited them?”
Robert shrugged. “Crows and ravens are a whole different circumstance. They live on the outside of where we are and they learned a long time ago how to take advantage of the things we do, making their own hoodoo with the bits and pieces we leave behind.”
That made sense to Staley. She’d never deliberately called up the blackbirds, but they came all the same. Only not here. That was why she’d always thought it was safe to play whatever she wanted around the trailer. She’d see them from time to time, mostly going after her garden, or sneaking off with a bit of this or that for their nests, but they didn’t gather here. The closest roost was out by the highway.
She glanced at Robert to find his gaze on her, steady but mild. She wanted to say, How do I know the devil’s not being so subtle that he’s persuading me through you? But they’d been talking long enough. And whatever else Robert was, she doubted he was the devil.
Kneeling on the grass, she cracked open her fiddlecase. Took out her bow, tightened the frog, rosined the hairs. Finally she picked up the blue spirit fiddle her grandmother had given her and stood up again. She ran a finger across the strings. The E was a touch flat. She gave its fine tuner a twist, and tried again. This time all four strings rang true.
“Here goes nothing,” she said, bringing the fiddle up under her chin.
“Not like that,” Robert told her. “Dig a little with your heart before you start in on playing. You can’t jump the groove until you know where it’s at.”
True, she thought.
William gave her an encouraging nod, then walked over to the trailer and sat down on the steps. After a moment Robert joined him, one hand closed around the neck of his guitar, damping the strings.
Staley took a breath and let it out, slow. She held the fiddle in the crook of her arm, bow dangling from her index finger, and closed her eyes, trying to get a feel of where the meadow was today, how she fit into it. She swayed slightly where she stood. Toe on heel, she removed one shoe, then the other, digging through the blades of grass with her bare toes until she was in direct contact with the earth.
What do I hear? she thought. What do I feel?
Woodpecker hammering a dead tree limb, deeper in the woods. The smell of grass rising up from by her feet. Herbs from the garden, mint, basil, thyme. The flutter and sweet chirps of chickadees and finches. A faint breeze on her cheek. The soft helicopter approach of a hummingbird, feeding on the purple bergamot that grew along the edge of the vegetable and herb beds. The sudden chatter of a red squirrel out by the woodpile. Something crawling across her foot. An ant, maybe. Or a small beetle. The hoarse croak of a crow, off in the fields somewhere. The sun, warm on her face and arms. The fat buzz of a bee.
She knew instinctively how she could make a music of it all, catch it with notes drawn from her fiddle and send it spiralling off into the late afternoon air. That was the groove Robert kept talking about. So where did she go to jump it?
The first thing she heard was what Robert would do, bottleneck slides and bass lines, complicated chord patterns that were both melody and rhythm and sounded far simpler than they were to play. But while she could relate to what his take would be—could certainly appreciate it and even harmonize with it—that music wasn’t hers.