The Dulcimer Boy

  The Dulcimer Boy

  Tor Seidler

  Illustrations by Brian Selznick

  For Karen Russo

  —T.S.

  For Tamar Brazis

  —B.S.

  Contents

  Chapter One

  THERE WAS A STRANGER at the front door with a…

  Chapter Two

  THE TWO LITTLE BOYS were installed in the bedroom next…

  Chapter Three

  A FINE LINDEN TREE stood in the yard of the…

  Chapter Four

  WILLIAM MADE REMARKABLE progress on the dulcimer. He found he…

  Chapter Five

  A DROP OF COLD WATER landed on his cheek, and…

  Chapter Six

  HE WOKE IN A hammock. It was strung up in…

  Chapter Seven

  THE NEXT MORNING, William awoke from a wonderful dream in…

  Chapter Eight

  THE GLASS RAISED a bump like a quail’s egg on…

  Chapter Nine

  UNTIL ALMOST ONE in the morning Drake listened to the…

  Chapter Ten

  THE SEAMAN HEARD the same noise overhead but paid it…

  Chapter Eleven

  WILLIAM OPENED HIS EYES and realized he was having his…

  Chapter Twelve

  IT WAS A LARGE one-room shack with an oilcloth window…

  Chapter Thirteen

  THE CANDLE FLAME began to dance. The draft grew stronger,…

  Chapter Fourteen

  A FEW MINUTES LATER the old gentleman led William and…

  About the Author and the Illustrator

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  William has the brown hair and Jules the gold

  But without another word the stranger took himself off

  CHAPTER ONE

  THERE WAS A STRANGER at the front door with a wicker chest under his arm.

  “Tradespeople use the back,” said the massive, bald-headed gentleman who answered.

  Instead of turning away, the stranger handed him a card.

  “This be you?” he asked.

  The bald gentleman took the card. It read:

  EUSTACE CARBUNCLE, ESQ.

  THE CARBUNCLE ESTATE

  THE HILL ABOVE RIGGLEMORE

  NEW ENGLAND

  Mr. Carbuncle nodded curtly but did not ask the stranger in. The stranger’s curly brown hair was full of dust, and his navy-blue clothes were scruffy. He also stammered in an undignified manner: the words jerked out of his mouth as if they would have preferred staying inside him.

  “This here’s…for you then. Used to belong to your wife’s sister, but your wife’s sister…she died. A weakly creature she was, and she’s…gone away.”

  “Ah,” Mr. Carbuncle said, removing his hands from the pockets of his smoking jacket to accept the wicker chest. “And she remembered us in her will? Something of value, perhaps?”

  But without another word the stranger took himself off, hurrying through the gate in the picket fence and down the hill.

  In Mr. Carbuncle’s mouth was a thick black cigar, which rescued his large pink face from suggesting a certain harmlessness. The cigar twitched at the fellow’s behavior. But in a moment he turned and took the wicker chest into the house.

  “Amelia, my dear,” he called out. “Something from your sister.”

  Mrs. Carbuncle entered the hall with a weary sigh and a faint odor of disinfectant. She was a narrow, black-stockinged woman with her hair caught up in a black scarf; her narrowness and hardness of feature were in strong contrast to her husband. She leaned her broom against the banister and came over to the hall table, where he had deposited the chest.

  “My sister?” she said. “But I haven’t seen her these years. Why would she send us something now, out of the clear blue sky?”

  “She died,” Mr. Carbuncle replied. “You never know—it might be something of value.”

  “Oh, well then,” said Mrs. Carbuncle.

  They opened the lid to the wicker chest. Inside were a tiny boy with golden curls, an equally tiny boy with hair all different shades of brown like a bowl of nuts, and a strange musical instrument. The boys were both sound asleep, and a note was wound in the instrument’s silver strings. It said:

  William has the brown hair and Jules the gold.

  They are ten months old.

  This dulcimer is all their father has to give them.

  Mrs. Carbuncle crossly tore the note into little pieces. She was careful, however, to stuff the pieces into her apron pocket, letting none of them drop on the floor, for she had already done the hall that morning.

  “Who even knew Molly was married?” she cried. “A wonderful wedding announcement!”

  She then went to the hall closet and began to pull on a pair of galoshes. When Mr. Carbuncle asked her why, she explained, “You know how it is down there around the orphanage—all that river muck.”

  Mr. Carbuncle looked from his wife to the strange merchandise in the wicker chest. Beside the chest stood a pewter bowl full of unpaid bills.

  “Let’s not be rash, Amelia, my dear,” he said, puffing thoughtfully on his cigar.

  “Mr. Carbuncle?”

  “It occurs to me that we’ve been handed a golden opportunity.”

  “Golden opportunity?”

  “Mmm.”

  Mrs. Carbuncle stared aghast at the gentleman of leisure she had married.

  “But, Mr. Carbuncle! You can’t be thinking of taking them in! Think of the expense, sir! Think of the wear and tear on your furniture, your rugs. And we can’t even afford to reshingle the roof!”

  “Exactly,” said Mr. Carbuncle, lifting his eyes in that direction. “Don’t think the neighbors haven’t noticed.”

  He could not see through to the roof that was in disrepair, but he could see the ceiling moldings, around which his cigar smoke was curling. They were very grand, but they were dingy in spite of all his wife’s efforts. “Besides,” he added, “these two won’t eat much.”

  Mrs. Carbuncle’s face grew very pinched, but she did not drop her tone of servility.

  “I don’t understand, Mr. Carbuncle,” she said.

  “Two objects of charity, Amelia. Don’t you see? Two objects of charity under our roof. That’s better than painting and shingling!”

  All Mrs. Carbuncle could do was sigh.

  “Oh, well then,” she said.

  CHAPTER TWO

  THE TWO LITTLE BOYS were installed in the bedroom next to that of the Carbuncles’ son, Morris. On Sunday the family went for a stroll down into Rigglemore, pushing the two boys ahead of them in a pram. It quickly became known that they had taken two objects of charity under their roof.

  That evening, as every evening, Morris excused himself from dinner the instant he had finished his second dessert and took himself off to bed. He believed he grew faster lying down, fooling the pull of gravity. Although he was not yet as tall or as meaty as his father, it was his great ambition to outstrip him.

  Mrs. Carbuncle served her husband his usual coffee and brandy and struck the match for his after-dinner cigar. But he neither sipped nor puffed with his usual relish.

  “People seemed impressed, didn’t you think?” she said, puzzled.

  Mr. Carbuncle frowned, turning to William and Jules, who were squeezed into a high chair on his left.

  “How old was Morris when he started to talk?” he asked.

  “Why, he said ‘potato’ at fourteen months,” she replied.

  “But they’re only ten months. And that one already babbles like a brook.”

  He pointed his cigar at William, the one with the nut-brown hair, who in fact had looked from side to side throughout the afternoon strol
l, saying, “Dog.” “Yellow.” “Old man.”

  “Well,” said Mrs. Carbuncle, “some children are slower than others. It doesn’t mean—”

  “For Heaven’s sake! Morris isn’t ‘some child.’ He’s a Carbuncle!”

  Turning his great, dinner-flushed face on Jules, the one with golden hair, who was nearer him in the high chair, Mr. Carbuncle said, “You don’t talk yet, do you?”

  Jules, who had not spoken that day, opened his mouth, closed it, then opened it again. A small, rather unintelligible sound came out. Mr. Carbuncle, having just taken a puff on his cigar, exhaled. As the thick smoke enveloped Jules’s little face, his mouth closed, his blue eyes blinked in surprise.

  “Black,” William commented, pointing to the cloud of smoke.

  The ceremony of asking Jules if he could talk and then blowing cigar smoke in his face became as regular as Mr. Carbuncle’s after-dinner brandy. Eventually Jules stopped opening his mouth. And as he grew older, he never made a sound, at the dinner table or away from it.

  William, on the other hand, became glibber and glibber. After a few months he began to imitate Morris.

  “May I have the end piece, please?” William would say. “And gravy on everything?”

  Once, however, he imitated Morris too closely.

  “May I have more hollandaise, Pa?” he said, handing back his plate.

  On this occasion Mr. Carbuncle’s face, hovering over the steaming dish of asparagus, darkened dangerously. Horrified, Mrs. Carbuncle corrected William’s presumption.

  Since Jules never answered when asked what he cared for, he was given slender, often meatless servings. As time went by, William found himself with less and less appetite for the meat his brother went without, and eventually he began to refuse meat himself.

  They hardly grew at all. Mr. Carbuncle, being a gentleman of leisure, spent most of his time at home, and as the years passed, the sight of two such puny things became positively offensive to him. Finally Mrs. Carbuncle moved them from their bedroom up to the attic, where they would be more out of sight.

  At the dinner table Mr. Carbuncle would shake his head sadly, noting the number of cushions they required on their chairs in order to reach the table.

  “And one of them dumb as a post to boot,” he would sigh. “What did we do to deserve it, Amelia?”

  But she had far too much respect for her husband ever to remind him that he had once referred to them as a golden opportunity.

  One day, when the boys were six, Mr. Carbuncle remarked, “I suppose the runts could start school.”

  On Monday morning he led them down the hill to the school on Elm Street where Morris went. But when it came to adding the boys’ names to the roll in the principal’s office, Mr. Carbuncle balked. The name of their father, the man his wife’s sister had married, was a mystery to him.

  The idea of enrolling boys without surnames made the principal cluck his tongue. He suggested “Carbuncle.” Mr. Carbuncle handed him back his pen indignantly, nib first, and led his two charges away.

  So William and Jules continued to stay home all day and learned to read and write only by looking into Morris’s books while Morris was resting up. The boys were deeply distressing to Mrs. Carbuncle. She had a great fervor for cleaning: her attitude toward the floors and furniture, especially the Carbuncle antiques, was religious. Unlike Morris, the two boys would sometimes move around the house, going from one room to another. Often they left fingerprints on the arms of chairs or on banisters or doorknobs.

  Sometimes they would even chance to leave a print on one of the Carbuncle antiques, making Mrs. Carbuncle quite wild. Although she never raised her voice to her husband, she could hit piercing notes, and she got into the habit of chasing the boys upstairs with a broom, screaming that she wished they were both stuffed and hung up on a wall.

  This was hard on Jules. Although he could not speak, his ears were extremely sensitive. To escape the piercing notes, he would scramble up the stairs and up the ladder into the attic, where he would huddle in a corner under the slant of the roof, his hands clapped over his ears.

  On one of the top shelves was a musical instrument

  William, on the other hand, rarely bothered to go farther than to hide by the antique mahogany secretary that stood on the landing at the top of the stairs. Mrs. Carbuncle’s moods were well known to him by this time; in a minute she might turn around and send him on an errand to the grocer’s. But even when her voice had died down, like a crow flying off into the distance, William would remain by the antique secretary, coming out and staring up at it. The pediment resembled two waves about to break, and on one of the top shelves was a musical instrument, strange and lovely behind the glass doors, like something underwater.

  CHAPTER THREE

  A FINE LINDEN TREE stood in the yard of the Carbuncle estate, its roots rivering over the lawn. The attic window—a little round window in the gable—gave directly onto this tree, and on sunny mornings the boys were awakened in their bed by the nervous sunlight that jiggled in through the leaves. They would lie there and listen to the swallows that nested under the eaves.

  Winters in the attic were less idyllic. It was unheated, and year by year the old cedar shingles were rotting off the roof, letting in more of the cold. Mr. Carbuncle, who had begun to speculate in gold, had long promised to reshingle. But the promise remained unfulfilled, and to keep their blood circulating, the boys paced the attic in a huge astrakhan coat that Morris had discarded when astrakhan went out of fashion.

  One winter Jules began to mope. William reminded him that the swallows would be coming back, but to no effect. Finally William convinced their aunt to let them move back down into one of the bedrooms. But Jules refused.

  Spring came, and to William’s dismay Jules failed to perk up. The songs of the birds, which Jules had always particularly loved, held no charms for him now. One perfectly nice morning he did not even get up for breakfast, and after the meal William went up to find him huddled in the corner under the slant of the roof.

  “Feeling mopey?” William asked.

  Jules shrugged.

  Jules failed to appear at lunch as well. None of the three Carbuncles so much as noticed his absence. After lunch William went up and found Jules still huddled in the same corner.

  “Feeling fluish?” he asked.

  Jules shrugged. William stared at him. Usually Jules’s eyes were like two small blue pools, but now they looked empty, as if the plugs had been pulled.

  When Jules was not at the dinner table that evening, William could not touch his food and excused himself before dessert, bent on discovering once and for all the cause of his brother’s listlessness. He searched the upstairs for a pencil and paper for Jules to write with. But when he opened the top drawer of the mahogany secretary, the brass pulls rattled on the lower drawers. He had hardly found the box of paper when he got a whiff of disinfectant.

  Mrs. Carbuncle came around the head of the staircase. “So now you’re putting fingermarks on our finest piece of furniture. I thought as much when you skipped pudding. And what do you think you’re doing with Mr. Carbuncle’s stationery?”

  “I want Jules to write down what’s wrong with him.”

  “Really?” she said. “I didn’t notice anything particularly the matter with Jules today.”

  “But, Aunt Amelia! He hasn’t been down all day long!”

  “Hasn’t he? Well, I’m sure I wouldn’t know about that—there isn’t a peep out of him whether he’s there or not. But I do know paper doesn’t grow on trees. Stationery like that costs…Look at me when I’m speaking to you!”

  She saw what he was staring at, and then she sighed, pulling a key from a pocket of her apron.

  “I’ve seen you ogling that before,” she said. “Will you keep your fingermarks to that if I give it to you?”

  William nodded, speechless. She unlocked one of the high glass doors and handed the strange musical instrument down to him.

  “Mine?”
he whispered.

  “Well, it came with you.”

  William ran his fingers gently over the instrument. The wood was time-polished, and the strings were silver.

  Mrs. Carbuncle turned to go down to her dinner dishes.

  “Is it…a dulcimer, Aunt Amelia?” he asked.

  She turned around, her eyebrows raised.

  “How’d you know that?” she asked.

  Soon he was alone. He sat down on the top stair with the dulcimer in his lap and ran his fingers over the sides of the instrument, which were inlaid with seagulls in mother-of-pearl.

  There were two little cork-headed hammers tied by a slender thong to one of the dulcimer’s pegs. Using one of these, he struck the silver strings. Morris, passing by on his way to lie down for the evening, made a sour face.

  He sat down on the top stair with the dulcimer in his lap

  William stared down at the dulcimer in surprise, winding a finger in his nut-brown hair. He tried again, making sure the hammers struck the strings squarely. It sounded just as bad.

  He began to fiddle with the pegs, changing the tuning of the strings. He tuned and tested, tested and tuned, losing all track of time.

  At last he ran a finger over the strings like a harp and produced a sound that did not grate on his ears. Then, however, he found himself at a loss. The Carbuncles were not a musical family. He did not know a single song.

  As he let the cork hammers wander over the strings, he had to smile at his luck. Almost immediately a tune began to emerge out of the random notes. It was simple but quite pleasing. He practiced it over and over and over.

  Suddenly he heard the tinkle of ice. It was the ice in Mr. Carbuncle’s nightcap; his aunt and uncle were coming up to bed. It was ten o’clock, and since coming up after dinner, he had not once heard the grandmother clock at the end of the hall strike the hour.