The Dulcimer Boy Read online

  He sprang up the ladder, the dulcimer under his arm. Only as he lowered the trapdoor behind him did he remember his brother.

  Jules was sitting in the corner of the dim attic, his arms around his knees, his head hanging down, asleep. William set the dulcimer aside and carried his brother to bed. He hardly seemed to weigh a thing.

  As he set him down, Jules woke up.

  “Is your appetite back?” William asked, pushing back Jules’s disheveled golden hair and feeling his brother’s brow.

  Jules did not seem to be running a temperature, but his eyes were still empty. William began to search for something to write with. But except for their bed, and a box of clothes, and the astrakhan coat hanging from a nail in the roof beam, the attic was bare.

  Then he remembered what his aunt had said about paper not growing on trees. He opened the little round window, thrust his hand out into the night, and pulled in a bunch of new linden leaves. He took down the astrakhan coat and worked the nail out of the roof beam.

  Sitting on the edge of the bed, he handed his brother the writing materials and asked what was the matter. Jules sat up. He took four leaves and scratched a word on each with the nail.

  William stared at the message for some time. He had spent every day of his life with Jules, but this was the first time Jules had spoken to him.

  William looked from the leaves to the golden head, the hollow cheeks, the empty eyes. A solemn feeling came over him. His heart felt quivery. It was strange, sudden, as if wings were beating inside him. It was as if his heart were leaving him entirely.

  The dimly lit attic was becoming unsettled. Things were running together like watercolors…he and Jules.

  Wiping his eyes, William went over to get the dulcimer. He sat down on the bed again and struck the cork-headed hammers lightly on the silver strings. He began to sing.

  “The one I love was like the tide

  That runs under the quay,

  Smoothing the wrinkles on the shore

  Only to fall away.

  “For the sea is dark and never still.

  It never will obey

  Hearts that are in the likes of me.

  My love is gone away.”

  He sang the song to the tune he had practiced, singing in a clear, quiet voice as if he had known the words since the day he was born. When the song was finished, Jules’s eyes were shining.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  WILLIAM MADE REMARKABLE progress on the dulcimer. He found he had a knack for making up songs. Before long Jules had several favorites. And when another winter came, the dulcimer could make them forget the cold.

  One morning they were awakened by the first party of swallows arriving under the eaves.

  But this spring turned out to be different. While the rest of Rigglemore grew brighter, the Carbuncle household only grew gloomier. The latest brands of tonic for baldness and the boxes of crisp cigars stopped arriving for Mr. Carbuncle from New York. Morris, feeling victimized at having his clothes allowance cut off, began to stay in bed on school days, asking to be brought elegantly bound books from the family library. One night, after drinking a lot of brandy, Mr. Carbuncle used his gold mining shares to light a fire. The next morning he hinted darkly that the family antiques, perhaps even the estate itself, might have to go under the hammer. Mrs. Carbuncle continued to clean.

  One evening at dinner Morris unveiled a phrase he had gotten out of one of the elegantly bound books.

  “Fiddling while Rome burns,” he said, staring at William and Jules.

  After this, when William and Jules came down to meals, Mrs. Carbuncle was wont to say, “Don’t think we don’t hear you playing that miserable music.”

  William hung his head over his plate. Up in the attic after the meal, however, Jules would write him a message in leaves to the effect that his playing was not miserable at all.

  One afternoon not long after Easter the town auctioneer paid the Carbuncles a visit. A dry, leathery old man, the auctioneer made a tour of the house, rapping pieces of furniture with his knuckles, fastening yellow tags onto brass handles, peering at the signatures on paintings, and speaking of the worth of everything in a voice so rapid that the words sounded like cards being shuffled. William and Jules, however, were not allowed to witness these curious proceedings for long. In the course of his appraisals the auctioneer naturally left many fingermarks, and needing to take her distress out on someone, Mrs. Carbuncle soon screamed at the boys to keep out from underfoot. So they went to sit under the linden tree, where William played suitably mournful songs on the dulcimer.

  The sun had fallen below the roof of the house when the auctioneer appeared on the front porch with the three sullen Carbuncles.

  “Well, that’s the lot then,” he said as they started for the gate in the picket fence. “The truck’ll be here tomorrow for the things. Sunup, so none of your neighbors’ll be the wiser.”

  He stopped under the linden tree.

  “What have we got here?”

  “Our two objects of charity,” Mr. Carbuncle replied.

  “Not the youngsters. I mean that.”

  William stood up. “This is my dulcimer, sir.”

  “A dulcimer, is it? Why, it looks like a dandy. Let’s have a gander.”

  William proudly handed over the instrument. The auctioneer ran his leathery hands over the time-polished wood and the silver strings.

  “Don’t see one of these every day,” he murmured to the Carbuncles. “Looky here, mother-of-pearl down the sides as pretty as you please. Yes, siree, all dressed up and nowhere to go.”

  “You don’t say,” Mr. Carbuncle said, brightening a little. “It’s not worth anything, is it?”

  “Not more’n four or five hundred—if a body knew how to talk it up.”

  “Really! Did you hear that, Amelia? Perhaps these tykes can earn part of their keep, after all. They’ve been something of a burden to us over the years, you know.”

  “Oh, I know,” sighed the auctioneer. “All Rigglemore speaks of your charity.”

  Mr. Carbuncle, now almost cheerful, watched complacently as the auctioneer fastened a yellow tag around one of the instrument’s pegs. William looked on in stunned silence.

  “But it’s mine!” he finally cried, finding his tongue.

  Mr. Carbuncle, taking the dulcimer, had little trouble holding it out of William’s reach. Mrs. Carbuncle sighed.

  “Think of it—raising his voice like that to his benefactor.”

  “A sad business,” said the auctioneer, wagging his head.

  Morris chose this moment to unveil another phrase from one of the elegant volumes.

  “Ungrateful children are sharper than serpents’ teeth,” he announced.

  “Yes,” Mr. Carbuncle agreed. “A most ungrateful, ungentlemanly business.”

  Mrs. Carbuncle whisked the dulcimer off into the house. Mr. Carbuncle magnanimously walked the auctioneer all the way to the gate.

  “Until dawn then,” he said.

  When he turned back to the house, he paid no attention to William tugging on the tails of his smoking jacket. Nor did he pay any attention to the desperate pleas that dogged him around the house. But when they sat down to a New England boiled dinner and William had still not let up, Mr. Carbuncle lost his equanimity.

  “I’m in no mood for this,” he said. “My furniture is covered with tags. My house looks like some kind of shop. But I ask one small sacrifice of you, and what do I get? Sniveling.”

  “There now!” said Mrs. Carbuncle, as if just what she had expected had happened. “You’ve ruined Mr. Carbuncle’s digestion with your selfishness. Go up to your room this minute.”

  William excused himself, having not even touched his dinner.

  When he was halfway up the ladder to the attic, he felt a tug on the cuff of his pants. He looked down and saw a golden blur.

  Jules had followed him from the table. He seemed to be pointing at something.

  William climbed back down and wiped h
is eyes. Jules was pointing at the high glass doors of the mahogany secretary, behind which lay the dulcimer. It looked stranger and lovelier than ever before.

  William reached up and tried the latch. The glass doors rattled, locked.

  They both stepped back, smelling disinfectant. Their aunt was standing at the top of the stairs, her arms crossed over her apron top.

  “The one thing Mr. Carbuncle didn’t have it in his heart to part with and you have to smudge it,” she said. “Didn’t I tell you to get up there?”

  She pointed to the ladder. But William was now entranced by the dulcimer, shimmering behind the watery glass.

  “William, didn’t I tell you to get up there?”

  He still failed to acknowledge her. She took him by the shoulders. He turned and looked at her blankly.

  “Why, you’d think I was talking for my health!” she said as she pushed him toward the ladder. “Now get up, and don’t let me lay eyes on you before breakfast.”

  Soon he was lying at his brother’s side in the dim attic, staring up at the slant of the roof. On the floor below, the grandmother clock struck the hours. At ten he heard their aunt and uncle trudge up to bed. Then the silence of the house was disturbed only by the loose, rotten shingles, flapping on the roof in the wind.

  After midnight a cold blade of moonlight came in the little round window. William slipped out of bed. Jules, rolling over quietly, watched his brother disappear through the trapdoor.

  William stood before the mahogany secretary. Slowly he lifted his hands to the glass doors that glimmered in the moonlight from the window on the landing.

  He recognized the muffled sounds of his aunt’s and uncle’s snores: one a high, thin sound, the other a deep, grunting wheeze. Bending down, he eased out the bottom drawer of the secretary. It creaked. He withdrew a brass candlestick from the drawer and then used the drawer as a step, standing on it.

  He hardly had to touch the glass with the candlestick for it to shatter. As the pieces showered down onto the floor, a little triangle of the broken glass fell into his shirt pocket. He grabbed the dulcimer.

  A doorknob turned, and then he smelled disinfectant. As he leaped down off the drawer, his aunt uttered a piercing cry. Then something huge and dark floated down from above, settling over his shoulders like a cape.

  His aunt ran at him, screaming like a crow. He fled down the stairs and out the front door into the moonlit yard. His aunt was at his heels. Suddenly she shrieked. He looked over his shoulder and saw her lying facedown on the ground. She had tripped on one of the linden roots that rivered up on the lawn.

  The tails of the huge astrakhan coat flapping out behind him like wings

  It was all he needed. He raced through the gate in the picket fence and down the hill, the dulcimer under his arm, the tails of the huge astrakhan coat flapping out behind him like wings.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  A DROP OF COLD WATER landed on his cheek, and he thought, The roof’s leaking again.

  Yet the bed felt curiously hard, and the air was not fusty, as it was in the attic, but cool and wild.

  William rubbed the sleep from his eyes. Instead of roof beams there were the lordly boughs of pine trees high above him, higher than the ribs on the ceiling of a church. It was before dawn. The pieces of sky that showed through the trees were the color of his aunt’s pewter dishes.

  A shiver of memory went through him. He had broken the most treasured Carbuncle antique, stolen the dulcimer, and run off like a thief in the night, he knew not where.

  He sat up and looked around. He had slept between two bulged-up roots, the astrakhan coat pulled over him. The forest was deep. The only sounds were the creaking of the high boughs in the breeze and the faint patter of dewdrops on the pine needles.

  He was trembling. To calm himself he pulled the dulcimer from under the coat and began to pluck it. Its peaceful notes wandered out among the pines.

  Suddenly the whole forest came alive with sound. His fingers froze; he lifted his eyes to the boughs above. All the birds in the forest seemed to have awakened at once: they were warbling, chirping, whistling, and singing. In a moment, however, the symphony of sound died away, leaving only the creaking of the pines.

  William resumed his playing. The birds started up again. He stopped, experimentally. They stopped. He started again, and the forest resounded.

  Soon the sun rose in the sky, spangling the pine needles with gold. William’s trembling was quite gone now. In fact, it was nice to be somewhere new, serenaded by birds. After a while he stopped playing and began to wind a finger in his hair, his thoughts widening like ripples on a pond.

  He stood up and shook the pine needles from his coat. A sheaf of leaves fell out of its pocket and began to scatter over the brown-needled floor of the forest. He dropped the coat and ran after them.

  They were linden leaves, each with a word scratched into it. He laid them out between the two bulged-up roots.

  He began to rearrange the scrambled leaves. He found a number of messages, but they made grammatical sense only. Finally, however, he found the message, and his eyes shifted to one of the golden spangles. He saw an image of his brother, a golden figure crouched over the open trapdoor, while he, William, pressed his hands against the high glass doors of the mahogany secretary.

  Slowly his eyes returned to the message.

  A solemn feeling had stolen over him. He had the sensation of wings beating inside him, and as he saw another image of his brother—this time huddled in the slanted corner of the attic, silent and empty-eyed and forgotten—the colors of the forest began to melt together before his eyes.

  William stuffed the leaves back into the coat pocket and tucked the dulcimer under his arm. As he ran, his feet padded quickly and softly on the needled ground. He wove his way through the high-waisted trees.

  But he had skipped dinner the night before, and long before he found his way out of the forest, the tails of the coat began to drag heavily behind him in the needles.

  At last he emerged onto a meadowy downslope. Hooding his eyes against the noon sun, he looked out over a quilted countryside of apple orchards in blossom and meadows spotted with gray boulders and black-and-white cows. There was not a sign of Rigglemore or the hill above it.

  He wandered despondently down the slope and across a number of bouldery fields, having to climb several stone fences. He heard faint music. He hurried over a knoll, then fell to his knees and touched his lips to a brook.

  His thirst quenched, he noticed fish shadows darting across the water. He broke off a willow wand, undid a string from the dulcimer, and fastened it onto the end of the wand. With the silver string, it took only a moment to lure one of the fish to the bank. He dashed his hand into the water. Nothing.

  He squinted up at the sky and sighed, seeing that what he had thought were fish were only the shadows of a flock of dark forest birds circling overhead.

  But at least he was not lost. A stagnant river went through Rigglemore, through the mucky section of town. Assuming this was the beginning of it, he put the silver string back into his instrument and started downstream for home.

  Little by little the music of the brook grew deeper. It became a stream. The stream widened into a river, and a road began to wind along the riverbank. William followed it, wrapping the dulcimer in the coat to protect it from the dust of the road.

  He passed a number of people on the road, mostly farmers. One, the driver of a hay wagon, gave him a ride for a couple of miles and offered him a puff on his corncob pipe. William choked on the smoke, however, thinking of Jules. The rest of the farmers were a pithy bunch. None would commit himself on how much farther it was to Rigglemore; none had any food to give him; all eyed with suspicion the dark birds circling over his head.

  It was painful to look at the cows in the meadows, chewing their cuds so contentedly. He fixed his eyes on the distance. Nothing looked familiar. But he noticed a strange, flat blue cloud forming on the far rim of the horizon.

>   By late afternoon he was weak from hunger. He tugged rather desperately on the coattails of fellow wayfarers, asking if this was indeed the way to Rigglemore. Many of them shook him off. A few replied, “Mebbe,” or “Not as I know of.” Most discouraging of all was the woodsman who laughed and said, “But you’re not wriggling now, lad—why do you want to know the way to wriggle more?”

  Finally, as dusk stole over the countryside, William became conscious of a roaring in his ears. This was a bleak sign. After a few more steps he collapsed on the roadside.

  He lay on his back, staring up at the twilit sky. It came as little surprise to him that he should be seeing things: white things, circling among the dark forest birds overhead. Yet blinking only brought the hallucinations into sharper focus.

  Suddenly he sat up and unwrapped the dulcimer. He stared from the mother-of-pearl seagulls inlaid along the sides to the white things in the sky. They were identical.

  Somewhat revived, William got to his feet and continued along the road beside the river. The roaring in his ears grew louder, and in less than a quarter of a mile he found himself standing on the edge of a promontory. The river plunged over it—a roaring waterfall.

  There was a broad plain below, and to William’s surprise there were a number of rivers winding their ways across it; he had not imagined there were more than one. Beyond the plain lay the flat blue cloud that had captured his attention earlier. It went on forever in the evening light, its dark surface shimmering with movement.

  “Dark and never still,” he murmured.

  Beyond the plain lay the flat blue cloud

  The rivers on the plain below all finally merged and entered the dark expanse of a great harbor, around which was built a city that looked a hundred times the size of Rigglemore. William set off down the steep road, his eyes on a beacon that swept the sky from a lighthouse at the harbor’s mouth.