Alida's Song Page 4

  He was half dozing when he noticed a white rock sticking out of the ground. It was perhaps a foot across, nearly round—so smooth a shape that it caught his eye and kept him watching as they rode past. When they came to the other side of the rock he saw that it was a face, a woman's face carved in stone in the middle of the pasture.

  “Gunnar,” he said. “What's that?”

  “What?”

  “That rock. It looks just like a girl's head.”

  “That's Wilhelmina.”

  “Who is Wilhelmina?”

  “A girl I used to know when I was young. Very young. As young as you.”

  “Who carved the rock?”

  “I did.”

  The boy jumped off the wagon and stopped to look more closely at the carving. It was, he thought, elegant. He never used the word but it came to his mind now. He'd heard it in a movie once used to describe a beautiful woman and he thought the carving was that way—elegant. She had a fine straight nose and eyes that tilted up at the corners and a soft line of hair down the side, all carved and smoothed and polished so that the girl seemed almost alive, as if her head were pushing out of the ground and the rest of her were in the earth.

  He squatted and looked more closely but could see no bad cuts, no flaws, just smooth white stone with a line here and there to suggest hair. A pretty girl, he thought. She was a very pretty girl and he was there, looking at her, when his eye saw another stone off a bit, thirty or forty yards, this one round and gray, almost too round, and he moved to it and saw it was the carved head of another girl. This one seemed very familiar in some way and he called to Gunnar again, “Who is this? It seems like I know her.”

  “You do. That is your grandmother Alida.” Gunnar looked away. “When she was young.”

  And the boy could see it now, when he knew, could see her eyes and the shape of her head. Then he saw more. Standing there, he could see four, five … seven of them scattered around, all heads with faces looking across the grass.

  “We have fence to do,” Gunnar called, the words singing with his speech defect. Weeavefuuuncctodo. “Come now.”

  The boy trotted back to the wagon. “They were pretty.” The word seemed wrong, too little. “Beautiful. They were beautiful.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Were they all girls you knew—like girlfriends?”

  “Girls I saw, yes. Not all friends. Some of them never saw me. Did not look at me. Did not know me because of my … because.”

  “How many—how many carvings are there?”

  “I do not know. Some of them I have forgotten and some of them are covered now. Each fall when harvest is done and before winter sets in I do a carving. Most of them are in stone, some are in wood back in the trees at the other end of the pasture.”

  They worked fence all day and when the chores were done that night the boy went out alone before dark and walked through the woods at the end of the pasture and saw them. Standing trees, faces carved and sometimes bodies, not whole bodies but an arm, a hand, the curve of a leg, always a face and the neck carved, in a pine tree or a poplar. He did not count them but there were many, over a dozen in the trees, and he did not know how many rocks and he walked through the ones in the trees and it was like being with people. He closed his eyes and could almost hear them talking, giggling, making girl sounds, the ones that made him so shy, and he felt bad at first for Gunnar, bad that he had never had a girlfriend, and then not so bad. Gunnar had many of them, all right here, all beautiful and graceful. Whenever he wanted to be with them he could walk out here and they would always be young and always be pretty.

  There came a day when the boy was working in the yard, not going out in the fields. He always kept one eye on the geese. They had accepted him in their fashion—that is, they wouldn't attack him if they knew he was watching them. He had seen a story once in a National Geographic magazine about tigers in India that killed and ate people. The people thought the tigers wouldn't attack if they knew they were being watched so the people wore masks on the backs of their heads when they went into the forest to make the tigers believe they were being watched. The boy thought of doing the same thing with the geese but they seemed to have quieted—perhaps hitting the gander with the bucket had made a mark—and he was going into the barn to scrape out the gutters when he heard a strange whining sound coming from the milk room.

  He stopped and listened and realized it was somebody humming and he opened the door to find Olaf standing by the separator. He had a Red Chief notebook and he was making marks on paper while he hummed.

  “Hello,” he said when the boy walked in. “I hope the sound did not bother you.”

  “No … not at all. What are you doing?”

  “I'm writing some music. For your grandmother. See?” He held the notebook so the boy could see the page.

  At the top in all capitals were the words:

  And down the page were squiggles and dots inside lines. The boy had seen musical notes in books in school but these were different. It was Olaf's private way and only he knew how to read it.

  “How does it sound?” the boy asked.

  “It's not done yet. I'll play it the first Saturday.”

  There it was again. This time the boy remembered his grandmother saying it when he went to bed at the end of the first day. “What does that mean, the first Saturday?”

  Olaf smiled. “The first Saturday of every month we go to town. There is a dance. We play the music for the dance. It is this next Saturday. That is why I am working on the song. Next Saturday is a special day for your grandmother.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It is her anniversary. If her husband, Clarence, your grandfather, were still alive they would have been married forty-five years.”

  “I never knew him.”

  “He was a good man. A very good man. They had a good marriage until the cancer took him. He died before you were born, when your mother was still a girl.”

  “Will there be many people there?”

  Olaf laughed. “All the people will be there.”

  Chapter Eight

  Saturday came fast, too fast for the boy, but not so fast that he did not have time to think of the problems he faced.

  He had never been to a party.

  He did not know any of the people who would be there.

  He had never been to a dance.

  He could not speak to girls.

  He could not be with crowds of strangers. He could not, he finally decided, go.

  The boy started in early in the day on Saturday. As they did morning chores he mentioned that he was not feeling well. His grandmother felt his head and Olaf and Gunnar both looked at him strangely.

  “You did not seem sick at breakfast,” Olaf said. “You ate good.”

  “He ate more than me,” Gunnar said. “More than both of us.”

  “I just feel kind of sick,” the boy said, knowing it was a lost cause. “It only came over me now.”

  “Well,” his grandmother said, “I'll just have to stay home tonight and make sure you are all right.”

  The looks Olaf and Gunnar sent him were withering and he knew it was over. “I think it will be all right. I think I just drank too much milk. I'm still not used to whole milk.”

  Preparations began right after evening chores. They milked a half hour early—though Olaf said it was not good for the cows and it was difficult to get them to come into the barn early—and then went to the house and ate a light supper (just two kinds of meat, potatoes, canned peas and corn, rhubarb pie and milk and coffee) and then began the cleaning-up process.

  Olaf and Gunnar took off their shirts, rehooked their bibs—still with their long underwear on—and scrubbed their heads and hands at the kitchen sink until they looked raw. Then they went into their rooms and put on clean bib overalls and clean work shirts, buttoned up tight to the collar.

  The boy wore clean jeans and tennis shoes and a clean work shirt his grandmother had bought for him befor
e he came. He tucked the shirt into his jeans but felt decidedly misdressed. In those days in the city it was thought cool to wear engineer boots with a strap and buckle, and jeans down low with the belt loops cut out of them, and a leather jacket or a T-shirt with a cigarette pack rolled up in the sleeve and to have a ducktail haircut or at least a flattop. It was not cool to have scraggly hair that needed cutting but was not long enough for a proper ducktail, and to wear tennis shoes and jeans with a belt and a blue work shirt tucked in, and he once again wished he were not going but knew there was no way around it.

  His grandmother had a room upstairs and she came down in a new dress with light red flowers all over it, with her hair in a bun and a new kind of hairpin holding it back and up that looked like a pearl comb.

  “You look like spring,” Olaf said, smiling. “Like early summer is coming.”

  Gunnar smiled. “If you keep this up I will have to do another carving.”

  She blushed and waved them away. “You talk silly now,” she said. “It's just a dress.”

  “With a new pattern and a new hairpin, I think …” Olaf laughed.

  But his grandmother walked through the kitchen and out before he could say more. The men followed her out and Gunnar started the truck. His grandmother climbed into the middle and Gunnar drove and Olaf rode on the right. The boy sat in back and they moved through the evening dusk, seven miles at thirty miles an hour, until they came to Grant.

  It was not a proper town. There was a small hut for a post office, a beer hall, a store that was closed and a frame building painted white that served as a community center, voting place, dance hall and sometimes church.

  There was electricity in Grant, but just. There were no streetlights or outside lights except for a bulb over the door of the store and another over the entry to the dance hall. These were bare bulbs, not over a hundred watts, and yet they still brought in what looked like every bug in the county. The bulb over the dance-hall door was so surrounded by moths that the light seemed to be a dim glow four or five feet across.

  There were eight or ten old trucks parked in the front of the dance hall on the dirt road and— this was a surprise—four wagons pulled by horses. The horses were unhooked and tied around back to a rope between two trees, standing patiently in the dark, swatting mosquitoes with their tails.

  To avoid the bugs, adults did not tarry at the door but went right in. There were some younger children playing outside—six- and seven-year-olds—and they slowed and stopped and watched the boy as he went inside with his grandmother and Olaf and Gunnar, the children whispering because the boy was new and strange. Later he discovered that he was related to most of them in one way or another but he had never lived nearby so knew none of them.

  Inside the dance hall there was a kind of orderly disorder. At one end of a large, open room with exposed rafters was a galvanized stock tank full of cold water and brown bottles of beer and clear bottles of homemade root beer. There were also two large galvanized Thermos containers— five gallons each—of sugared concentrated grape juice mixed with water. Along one wall was a table made of slab wood from a sawmill and on the table were bowls and plates of food: potato salad, cake, cookies, cold sausage, loaves of bread, rolls, sweets, trays of venison and fish, jugs of maple syrup, jars of honey, dozens of jars of jelly and jam … It seemed endless and his grandmother stopped just inside the door.

  “I forgot to bring food.”

  “Not for us,” Olaf said, pushing her gently on. “Tonight is for you and Clarence, and the guest of honor doesn't bring food. Besides, we brought the music.”

  Overhead hung another bare bulb, this one perhaps 150 watts—or it might have been brighter because there were not so many moths around it—and the boy could see in more detail than he'd seen outside. Near the tank at the far end of the building there was a slightly elevated platform—not over a foot high—and on the plat form a man stood with an accordion hanging from a strap on his neck.

  He waved at Olaf and Gunnar as they came in, and held up a bottle of beer. There was no furniture and the bare pine floor had been polished smooth by years of dancing. Around the room stood men and women, and boys and girls about the same age as the boy. There must have been forty or so altogether. The men and women stood in couples but the boys stood apart from the girls, who all seemed to be blond with blue eyes and who all suddenly seemed to be staring at the new boy.

  He was immediately aware that he had the wrong clothes to be cool, though he was dressed much the same as everybody there, and that he didn't know anybody. He felt immediately and viciously shy. In an instant he was alone. Gunnar and Olaf moved up to the raised bandstand and his grandmother slid off to the side to say hello to a group of women.

  He stood for a second, then saw a place in the corner by the bandstand where nobody was standing and walked over there—sure all eyes were on him—and stood at last with his back to the wall. His mouth felt dry and he stared at the rafters in the ceiling and he thought how good a root beer or grape drink would taste but to get one he would have to leave his corner, walk out in front of the bandstand where everybody could see him and around to the stock tank and back— an impossible journey. He desperately needed something to happen, and as if in answer to a prayer Gunnar took rib bones from his pocket and rattled them to get the room's attention. Olaf took his fiddle out of the case and tuned it to the accordion and without further ado they broke into a wild schottische that filled the room. Within moments there was a line of men and women dancing around the room in a circle— one, two, three steps forward, one step back, one, two, three steps forward, one step back, all in time to the heavy beat, with the men slamming their feet hard on the steps and the women moving lightly, swinging on the arms of the men as they wheeled around the room.

  Gunnar turned and motioned for the boy to get out on the floor but he would not, could not, and shook his head. Gunnar signaled to Olaf, who was fiddling with quick sweeps of the bow and did not have time to reply.

  The schottische was a warm-up dance—not just for the dancers but for the three musicians—and the room soon smelled of sweat and beer and sounded with laughter. The dance lasted a full fifteen minutes, growing in volume and increasing in tempo until only the strong could keep up, and at last there were just two couples stomping and wheeling around the floor as Olaf and the violin and the accordion passed the music back and forth until, finally, Olaf broke a string and the song ended.

  “I will need to put in a new string,” Olaf said. “Everybody should take a short rest.”

  Olaf and Gunnar took root beers and Gunnar handed the boy one while Olaf attached a new piece of catgut and stretched it and turned it in small squawks.

  “You did not dance,” Gunnar said. “This is a dance. You are supposed to dance. Are there not enough girls for you? Find a girl and dance.”

  Olaf put a hand on Gunnar's arm. “It does not matter if he dances. Besides, it is time now for Alida's song. She will pick who is to dance.”

  Olaf stood and talked to the accordion player, who nodded and found a different chord on the keyboard.

  “Everybody to the sides,” Olaf said. “This next dance is called “Alida's Song” and it is for Alida and Clarence. Everybody knows this would be their anniversary except that Clarence is gone and so Alida can pick anybody she chooses to dance with her.”

  While he spoke Olaf resined his bow and when he started only the violin spoke. And it was a violin now, not a fiddle, and it spoke in low, soft music for a full half minute before the accordion came in, not as an accordion but as an or gan, soft as well, the notes curving out across the floor to where Alida was standing to the side.

  Olaf did not look at her but had his eyes closed and the violin spoke and the accordion followed until the boy could almost see what Clarence and Alida had been when they first met, the love they had, and then his grandmother moved, came walking down the side of the room and stood in front of him and held out her hand.

  “I don't … I me
an I can't …”

  “Yes,” she said, nodding. “You can. I taught you. Come dance with me now.”

  And he took her hand and she put his other hand on her waist and her hand on his shoulder and they started to dance around the floor. At first he was all feet, and so embarrassed he could hardly think, but then he started moving with the music, moving her with it and then, without thinking, he was doing it, dancing with her.

  She laughed and her eyes looked young and for a second, almost two seconds, she looked like Gunnar's carving, and like a picture he had seen that his mother had, of his grandmother when she was young, standing next to Clarence, tall and straight, the old photo tinted to show red cheeks and blond hair, Clarence serious but she with a small twinkle in her eye as if she knew some great and wonderful secret.

  “You have a lot of Clarence in the way you look,” she told him, “and the way you dance and laugh, and the way you hit the geese and swear.”

  “I didn't think you heard.”

  “You must learn all things,” she said, “how to dance and laugh and see things and even swear. You must learn them all, but now just listen to Olaf's song for Clarence and me and let me close my eyes and dance.”

  And he did not think any longer but swirled her around and around and danced with her until her face shone with perspiration and she smiled and said, “It is enough, enough,” and he moved her to the side and brought her a glass of grape juice and then turned to see a girl named Helen with blond hair and blue eyes and she was smiling and he took her hand as easily as if he'd been doing it all his life.

  And after Helen a Betty and then a Margaret and he danced with them all, some of them two and three times, until some of the boys were mad but he didn't care. He danced until his legs ached, danced until he had laughed himself hoarse, danced until Gunnar had had one too many beers and had to crawl into the back of the truck to sleep, and he was at last riding home, Olaf driving with his grandmother between them, and he turned to her and said: