far

Fiction

The Cellist

Erin Arata
issue five

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The cellist arrived with the autumn. 

She came every year as the days began to shorten, passing the last stalks of summer-stubborn sunflowers and the first carloads of apple-pickers on her way to Dubley Falls. By then, we’d been expecting her. Painted pumpkins had gone on sale at Gardner’s, and Al Dubley had oiled his tractor for hayride season. As the maples dyed themselves lively, dogged as any New Englander against the evergreen’s reign, we started craning our necks, checking for the black car on Maple Street, beside the elementary school, in front of the Pruitts’ house. We couldn’t stop ourselves looking, though we knew she would come on the tenth of October. She’d arrive in time to call up the sun and wake us with the first notes of Après un rêve or Verklärte Nach, names we’d forgotten in the last dozen months, remembered suddenly in our want to impress her.

When, finally, she came, and we heard them, we shattered the frost on our windows, forcing them open, turning thermostats as we did. The cellist’s song brightened the drone of our coffeemakers, the cereal-bowl sounds of our children. It made melody to the snarl of starting motorbikes and the wail of the train into Boston. It replaced our church bells, which our priest, Father Kilcoin, did not ring, though he hummed her hymns through morning mass. We gathered as the gray grew brighter, warming the air with our breath and our bodies, ringed around the folding chair beneath the bust of Willard Dubley.

She was always quiet, the cellist, and we never knew as much about her as we wanted. Still, as the years passed, she stopped eyeing us as a cat in a tree eyes a man with a ladder and allowed us brief moments, gave us answers we cherished as much as her songs. We learned eventually, from television programs and album covers, that she had gone to a great conservatory in a great city, and played in many great cities since, for cheering crowds that could fill our common a dozen times. She told us, as she gathered pages of sheet music—A new song? You spoil us!—that her first home was far from New Hampshire and that she had begun playing cello when she was eight.  

Throughout the day, we brought her coffee, platters of food, blankets when it was cold, umbrellas when it rained, music books, and trinkets. Children were allowed to leave class to deliver drawings they’d done of a figure with lines for limbs and crayon-red hair, clumsy musical notes about her head, a squat little shape in her arms. She thanked us for the food and umbrellas with a nod; it was our children she put her effort into, once they’d streamed from the school’s doors to gather before her, knocking knees, palming smiles, never quite meeting her eyes. When they arrived, the cellist would finish a song with a flourish—the kind that makes children squeal—then take each drawing, examine it carefully, and place it in her case. She had amassed many over the years; we didn’t know where she put them, but we believed her promise to keep them close. Perhaps she liked the way our children drew her, always with a crescent-moon smile. Perhaps she liked that they saw her that way, even though when she played beneath Willard Dubley’s bust, she mostly kept her mouth straight and shut, hiding her teeth.

It was only in her first days with us that we hadn’t understood. Her frown, her posture; her rigid silence, while her strange instrument sobbed. We had questioned her and, unsatisfied with her answers, walked our children to school; whispered worry behind our hands; watched with suspicious eyes as she plucked with her fingers, carved with her bow. Her melodies had no place on a morning in Dubley Falls. We were ashamed to admit it, but she’d frightened us then. Perhaps it was her, but it may have been the music. She hadn’t played Bach then, nor Boccherini. For the first four autumns, she’d played only lullabies. 

We had not known her, had not asked for her, so we asked Al Dubley’s son, the chief of our police department, to send her away.

We pretended at other concerns in our doorways while he straightened his mustache, approaching the woman, who only looked up once he was beside her. The chief’s great-great-grandfather looked passively down on them both.

“Ma’am,” Chief Dubley said, apologetically. “You can’t play here.”

The cellist did not stop in her lullaby. Rockabye, baby, the strings sang. 

Chief Dubley removed his hat and began to twist it in his hands. “I’ve had complaints,” he told her. “The noise. Music, I mean.”

The cellist’s eyes moved from her bow to his face. When the wind blows, the cradle will rock, her strings said as she asked if the place where she sat was a public space, a common. 

“I suppose so,” the chief said. “But it’s early, people are going about their mornings. People are trying to sleep. You’ve got to understand…That house right there…” He pointed. “The Pruitts. They’ve got a new baby, just a year old.”

The cellist followed Chief Dubley’s finger. Cradle and all, her cello sang, as if in answer. The chief nodded to the song’s conclusion, as if he’d suddenly recognized the tune. He half-smiled, stomped one foot, and looked away. “Be that as it may,” he said, “we’ve got quiet hours. Two hours after dusk to two hours after dawn.”

The cellist told him she would keep that in mind.

This gave the chief pause again, and we watched him straighten his hat with troubled eyes. “What brought you to Dubley Falls?” he asked her.

She said, “I’m looking for something,” so, he sent her the priest.

We watched our next-newest arrival, Father Kilcoin, emerge from the church at the edge of the common, its door freshly painted, its windows newly washed. We shook our heads, sure he would fail to free us of the stranger sharing our sunrise, for he was a stranger too. He had not yet seen our leaves fall nor our river run over. He had not been woken by sirens the night Gardner’s fell to flame. Had not prayed beside Angela Pruitt as another of her babies returned to dust before it could breathe. Had not even heard our church bells, though we’d seen him climb the belfry, caulk cracks and measure for replacements. We held still as he approached her, the cellist ceasing in her song. We watched these strangers speak, saw the cellist glance past us to her parked, black car, with the school and the Pruitts’ beside it. A moment, and Father Kilcoin nodded. Our bodies relaxed as she began to play again. Another lullaby. 

The priest crossed the street to us and said, “Blessed are the merciful for they shall obtain mercy.” We did not know what he meant, but we began to feel cold in our warm doorways. We agreed to let the cellist stay—as long as she respected quiet hours. One hour and fifty-eight minutes after sunset, she slid her instrument into its case, climbed into her car, and left. The next year, when she returned and resumed her music two hours after dawn, we did not know why, but we were merciful. 

We began to wonder. The next year, we began to ask.

We asked her many questions as her visits accumulated, even once we’d learned where she came from and where she went when she left. Her words sat in our hands, precious as falling snowflakes, and we began to crave more as we held them, if only so they wouldn’t melt as fast. We wanted to know what she thought about as she played. We wanted to know what she thought of Dubley Falls. We wanted to know what she was looking for and whether she returned each year because she’d found it or because she was still searching. We wanted to know who she made her music for, if not for us.

The little girls with their wide eyes asked, “Were you ever in love?” 

The cellist said, “I was once.”

The young mothers with their babies fussing in baskets asked, “And now?”

The cellist said, “I have my music, and I love many things.”

The old women with their sharp ears asked, “Isn’t that lonely, dear?”

And the cellist said, “It was my choice.”

She played a great number of songs for us, more than we could fathom a mind learning. Sonatas and concertos, baroque and romantic, Haydn and Stravinsky. Still, though her performances varied, they always ended with the same song. Over the years, it became our favorite: sweetest because she had given it to us, saddest because it meant another ending, another year before she returned. She explained once that it was the first song she’d learned, and she played it as she breathed: Happy Birthday to you. Happy Birthday to you. On her third year in Dubley Falls, we began to sing along.

We grew to expect our finale, and we expected, too, that, on the morning of the tenth, Maya Pruitt would race to her window in the house across the street, oblivious to her shivering until a parent appeared beside her, worrying at the skin she’d left bare. Soon, she was old enough to cross to the common, alone. At the cellist’s request, she always wore a coat.

Maya Pruitt adored the cellist. Whether this was because she arrived each year on Maya’s birthday or because the cellist had red hair too—both of Maya’s parents were blond—it was clear to us. As she grew, she went earlier and earlier to the common, watching, listening, hugging herself, until the cellist gestured with her chin to the school, and Maya nodded before darting back across the street.

They were rarely speaking when we arrived—at least, not in the traditional sense. It was Maya who rushed breathlessly between stories, telling the cellist what she’d missed in the last year: the blinking traffic light hung on Sevenmile Road; which horses, cows, and house cats had had babies (and which babies would live with new families in new homes); the party dress Maya had seen at the store. The cellist acknowledged the child with bows of her head, nods, and small smiles. She spoke, on three occasions we could name, but her true replies were her music, dipping over and under the girl’s words as if wrapping them in winter scarves and sending them out to play.

“They have caramel apples at Gardner’s, but Daddy says I can’t have one ‘til my baby teeth fall out.” This, when Maya was five.

The cellist bowed her head.

“I can ride a bike now without training wheels. My parents are going to buy me a new one at the store. I picked one out. It’s pink.” This, when Maya was six.

The cellist nodded.

“In the summer, there was the sestercentenial, which means Dubley Falls is two hundred and fifty years old. There was a party and a parade and a clown on stilts. I don’t like clowns. Especially on stilts.” This, when Maya was seven.

The cellist smiled.

“I started playing the cello,” Maya said the day she turned eight.

At this, the cellist’s hand faltered against her strings. She finished her song but seemed to forget another usually followed. She did not answer, but this did not bother Maya. The next year, Maya returned with the announcement, “I quit the cello, I’m sorry,” and the cellist did not pause her song again. She said, “Don’t ever be sorry for that.”

There was another tradition between them, pieced together like patchwork by those of us who’d heard its parts. Each year, Maya would repeat the same five words to the cellist, as if she had been waiting to say them, like a favorite knock-knock joke. They did not always come clenched in the cold teeth of morning, nor in evening’s fist. But they always came on the tenth. “I haven’t met her yet,” Maya would say, her voice grown deeper each time.

Those of us who knew explained to those who didn’t. For two months after her birth, Maya had been elsewhere, swaddled in a stranger’s blanket until Henry and Angela Pruitt came to take her home. A closed adoption, they’d explained at the time. A stranger and a daughter, whose stories they’d never fully know—a little like our cellist, in that way, at least. So it was that at the small-voiced age of four, Maya had asked our visitor, “Have you met the mom who had you?” 

The cellist had said, slowly, “Yes.”

“I haven’t met mine,” Maya had replied, cheerful as cotton candy.

And the cellist had said, “Please let me know if you do.”

As the years passed, the cellist aging in yearly increments, Maya grew older among us. Her mornings with the cellist shortened and stopped, so we did our best to arrive earlier and tell her what she’d missed. We couldn’t answer the question they shared about Maya’s other mother, but the cellist didn’t seem to mind. Still, when the girl joined us, always in time for Happy Birthday, the cellist nodded as if to thank her for coming back. We shifted slightly around them, allowing Maya the place before the folding chair, the center of our circle, for this song. Those of us at the edges drifted toward the marble of Willard Dubley’s bust, pausing on either side of the cellist. Together, we sang smoke into the evening air.

On our seventeenth tenth, the concert drifted past sunset, lingering long after the streetlights began to shine. We were not upset to have passed quiet hours, but we worried the cellist would grow tired, asked if she would like more coffee, another slice of pie. From the edge of the crowd, where she stood with her husband, Angela Pruitt asked if she could get the cellist a blanket. If, perhaps, she’d like to make a call. The cellist shook her head. Three hours after dusk, she began her last song, and we sang Happy Birthday to ourselves as we always did. When we’d finished, she started over, and we laughed and sung again, adding new verses: How old are you now? and For she’s a jolly good fellow. Again and again, we sang, until we were breathless, only Barbara Reilly holding on to gasp, And many more! Then, finally, it was over, and the cellist regarded us, each blink seeming to brighten her eyes in the dark. It was silent for a long moment, then she said, simply, “Thank you for having me. Thank you.”

Then she stood up and went, chair folded, bow sheathed, sheet music pressed like springtime flowers.  

Some of us were still making our way home when a car stopped beside the cellist’s, and Maya Pruitt emerged from the passenger seat in a plastic crown. Staccato voices spilled over the evening as she shut the door; passed under a streetlight; then glanced at the cellist, straightening the cello case in her trunk. 

“How did it go?” Maya asked.

The cellist looked at Maya and nodded.

“I’m sorry I missed it,” Maya said. Then, slowly, more apologetically than her sorry had been: “I haven’t met her yet.”

The cellist bowed her head and closed the trunk, turning to regard the girl fully. After a moment, she gave a small, almost rueful, smile. She said, “Please let me know if you do.”

Maya smiled back. She began walking, on toward her house. Before she had quite reached the door, the cellist said, “Maya?”

Maya turned.

The cellist stared for a moment—her mouth was not in its usual line—and took the kind of breath we’d heard before violent crescendos and long, scissoring cuts of her bow. In the seconds of silence that followed, Maya’s expression became like ours: expectant and curious, beginning to wonder. We asked ourselves if the cellist was about to give us another performance, a second tenth, but she only nodded again. “Happy Birthday,” she said.

We sang her song, our favorite, as we slept that night, strings still playing in our heads. We sang for Dubley Falls and everyone in it, and for our cellist too, so she wouldn’t feel lonely on her drive through the dark. We sang for our home, which she was a part of, and for her, so she’d know it was her home too. We hoped she knew. We think she did, even if she could not stay.

Above us, the tenacious maple trees held tight to their leaves, knowing that, soon enough, they would have to let go for another year.