Sunday evening for picking parties at their home.
One Sunday, Addie and I passed Freddie and Marge’s on our walk back to the farm from dinner at Momma’s. The early spring air was warm enough that they had left the door open. Music tumbled out onto the street—banjo, guitar, fiddle, and mandolin. Addie stopped dead in the street, her head cocked to one side. She followed the music into their house. Just opened the screen door and strode in. I was right behind her.
Freddie sat on a tall stool in the kitchen. One of the Wilkes girls and a few of the old fellows who used to play with my uncle Lester crowded the room, not skipping a beat of their waltz as Addie barged in.
I couldn’t see Addie’s face, but I saw Marge’s when she turned from cleaning up at the sink and realized we were in her kitchen. There was the little flash of surprise that crossed people’s faces when they met Addie. I waved so Marge would know which one of us was me.
Addie stood motionless, transfixed by the music, then cackled with delight as the tune ended. Amid the noise of everyone shifting around to pull in some more chairs, I introduced her. No one blinked or asked a question as we settled in our seats.
“I’ve heard about you,” Marge said. “Glad to meet you, Addie.”
The musicians picked up their instruments again and started playing “Haste to the Wedding.” Marge pulled me to my feet. We turned in the middle of the kitchen and danced out to the porch and back. Addie stood up with her hands held out expectantly. Marge took her for a spin, the two of them laughing. Addie followed surprisingly well.
When they danced back into the kitchen and Marge released her, Addie sat and stared at the musicians, enthralled. During their next break, Freddie leaned across the kitchen and said to Addie, “Here, you look like you want this in your hands. Try it.”
Addie took the banjo and ran her hands over its strings, “ahhing” like a child, and everyone laughed at what they took to be comic exaggeration. She bent over it in precise imitation of Freddie’s shoulder-hunched way of playing and grinned up at me as she plucked.
After Addie returned the banjo, the musicians resumed playing. She closed her eyes as she listened, tilting her head as if zeroing in on one instrument then another. We stayed until milking time.
Days later, she found Uncle Lester’s old fiddle at the bottom of the wardrobe. It made an awful squawk when she first touched bow to string. She winced and echoed with her own surprised cry. Holding the fiddle out away from her shoulder, she glared at it.
I’d been around enough fiddle players to show her some basics—the tuning pegs, the bow, the rosin. The next time we went into town, we bought strings. She worked on her fiddle-playing every spare moment, her face screwed up in concentration. She paced the house, the yard, and the barn, fiddle to her chin. Soon she had notes and had taught herself a simple song. In the next few days, she pulled me from my chores and asked me to sing for her. I’d sing a song and then she’d work at it and work at it until she got it right.
Once, after I sang “The Old Rugged Cross” for her, she spent every spare moment of her day working on it. She showed up at the barn while I finished the evening milking, fiddle and bow in hand, her brow furrowed. “Once again? I almost have it,” she said. I sang it again, leaning my head on old Lilac’s warm side. She listened intently, staring up into the rafters of the barn, the way I’d seen Daddy stare as he listened to the radio. Then she played it again, swaying in the lantern light, her eyes closed.
Not long afterward, she carried the fiddle down to Momma’s for Sunday supper and we stopped by Freddie and Marge’s. They recognized Lester’s fiddle in her hands and playfully asked her what she planned on doing with it. Without a word, she stepped into the center of them, put it under her chin, and started on a slow version of “The Old Rugged Cross,” a little rough but all there. Rusty, an old man well known in the area for his fiddling, picked up on the chorus with her. When they were done, he put his old, mottled hand