The Piano Maker (2 page)

Afterward she walked back to the hotel and asked to see a room that was quiet. The landlady handed her the number 308 key and smiled at her. “Top floor, out back. Just evergreens and the ocean. My name is Mildred. If there’s anything you need, just ask.”

“Thank you. Madame Cabayé in Montreal mentioned you to me. And this hotel.”

“Our Sidonie? You know her!”

“Yes, I do. I stayed at the
pension
a few times.”

“They got married here, but then they moved away.”

“She told me. Her husband works at the bank, the Sherbrooke branch. He’s the assistant manager and she looks after the
pension
.” She raised the key. “We can talk later.”

Up in the room she patted the bed and looked around at the armoire and the nightstand painted in a grey-blue with clouds and sunflowers in the French country style; the bathroom through the open door; the view out the window. The silence.

“It’s wonderful,” she said to Mildred back downstairs. “Thank you. I’ll take it. My name is Hélène Giroux. If someone could help me get my luggage from the car? There’s a trunk in the backseat that I’ll need a hand with.”

“Oh, surely,” said Mildred. “Let’s go and get it.”

At seven o’clock that evening she was at the piano again, for the funeral mass for three fishermen.

Mildred had said that every last person in town had known the men and that the church would be full. It was. If she turned to her right she could see the crowded pews and aisles, and everywhere people were staring at her and then whispering to each other and looking at her again, clearly wondering who she was. Mildred had predicted that as well. Now Mildred was sitting in the third pew in the middle, next to her four hotel employees.

Up in the pulpit Father William spoke about the dead men and the loss to their families and to the community.
She sat on the piano bench, waiting, rubbing her hands and keeping them warm in her lap.

Then Father William came down the winding stairs and he looked her way and nodded, and she straightened up and began to play.

THAT NIGHT SHE HAD
one of the dreams. She heard Nathan calling her name, but she could not see him. The place he was calling from was all darkness and blood in the snow, and when she called back her breath froze in the air and her words fell to the ground and broke into pieces. It was one of the three or four dreams since the accident that kept repeating: that cave of horror, shadowy movements and smells and pleas that still wrung her heart with each renewed dreaming even though she knew the outcome well by now, and no matter how much she tried in her dreams to change it, she could not. It came on without mercy like blows to a terrified child, and only rarely did she wake before it happened. But that night she did. She woke with a cry and lay staring at the ceiling with her heart hammering, and she sat up and looked around at yet another room in yet another town.

A pale silver light, furniture she did not know.

She threw off the covers and climbed out of bed and stumbled to the window, barefoot on the wood floor. She pushed
up the sash and breathed the cold air. The palest of light out there. A storybook sky full of stars diffused by a high mist. After a while her heart calmed and then she could hear the ocean and the wind in the trees, and the dream let go of her.

She sat down on the chair and reached for her boots and pulled them on. The right boot always the reminder, always that. She tied the laces, and then in her hat and with her street coat over her nightgown she stepped out onto the landing and took the stairs down. In the thin white light from the sky and the yellow from the streetlamps she crossed the square to the church and at the side entrance used the key the priest had given her. She stepped inside. So quiet and dark at this hour. Only the eternal flame by the altar and the street-side windows gave some light.

She found her way to a front pew and sat there with her hands in her coat pockets. She looked at the piano, at the fine shape of it, the classic footed legs and the delicate prop stick, and in her mind she could see each part of it, the cabinet pieces still raw from the milling floor, the keyboard and its nerve endings, the fine soundboard with the bridge applied. The harp so heavy it took two men to raise it and four to set it into its lockpoints.

She stood up and walked to the place on the stone crossing where she thought the piano should be, and she looked up and clapped her hands and listened. She moved six paces to her left, closer to the wall, and clapped again.

On the way back to the hotel she looked in on her car. All was well. Frozen mist on the windows. She patted it
on the fender and moved on. Up in the room she took off the coat and boots and hat and crawled back into bed.

A few hours later she sat in the dining room eating breakfast. Mildred came with a coffee mug from the kitchen and stood by her table.

“Mind if I join you?”

“Not at all. Please do.”

“That was so very good last night. Honest. I sing in the choir, and so I know a bit about it. We’re all familiar with the Navy Hymn, of course, but never like that. Not played like a straightforward melody but like a long ballad to draw you in and move you, and in a good way, like from someone really understanding you. I mean that. That’s how it felt. So fine. Did you just improvise that?”

“Yes, I did.”

“And the other piece, what was that?”

“That was something from the Brahms requiem. Father William let me choose it.”

“It was good too. But what you did with the Navy Hymn … I feel like thanking you. I really do.
Thank you
.”

Mildred looked suddenly embarrassed, and she raised her coffee mug to cover the moment and took a sip and swallowed.

There was a pause and then Mildred said, “I almost forgot. Morris, that’s the sexton, he was here before you came down. He said to tell you that Father William has
invited you to walk in the funeral. You can come with me if you like, and I’ll tell you a bit about this place.”

The funeral was at ten. Crossing the square to the church she noticed Mildred’s shoes, the good stitching and supple leather. She said so, and Mildred told her they’d been made by a man in town. Then they stood in the weak sunlight and more and more people came, dressed in black, all of them: men, women, and children. The boys had their hair combed with water, and their ears stuck out red in the cold. The girls had fresh ringlet curls, and some of them had little wreaths on their heads, small white paper blossoms that according to Mildred they’d later throw from the government dock to float out and bring comfort to the souls of the two men who had not been found. A few days earlier the Coast Guard had abandoned the search and had officially declared them lost and perished at sea.

“Very old words those are along here,” said Mildred. “ ‘Lost and perished at sea.’ Old and much too common. I should know.”

The coffin of shaved pine sat on trestles in the sun, and after the priest had blessed it, five fishermen and a Royal Canadian Mounted Policeman in his dress uniform shouldered it and carried it up the hill to the graveyard. Wives and mothers walked behind the ministrant, who carried the cross while Father William in a white surplice
kept waving the censer. Wisps of smoke hung in the air, and the people behind them walked through it and some of them wept. The grass was bent and frozen where it was in the shade. Hoarfrost clung to the wire fence and sat on old crosses of carved stone. Madame Cabayé had talked about the historic cemetery. Acadians, mostly, she’d said. People who’d been deported or driven out, and many had moved south to Louisiana when it was still French and years later had come back from all over. They’d signed the British oath and settled here and then died in this place. And today three more crosses: two temporary ones out of barnwood at the memorial site, and one at an open grave.

When the coffin was at rest on the two boards across the hole, the priest handed the censer chains to the ministrant, and he folded his hands and raised his face to the sky. They stood for a moment while all was silent, and then in a voice so strong it made everyone look away from the coffin and up at this young priest of theirs, he called out:

Most Holy Spirit, who didst brood upon

the chaos dark and rude

And bid its angry tumult cease, and give

for wild confusion, peace
,

O hear us when we cry to thee

for those in peril on the sea
.

Later he saw her walking past the open vestry door and he called to her: “Mrs. Giroux! A quick word if I may.”

He stood up and waited for her before he sat down again. “You played very well last night. Thank you. A number of people have spoken to me about it. Some that used to sing in the choir.”

“The acoustics in the church are good, Father. All that stone with just enough wood to soften the sound. I’d suggest moving the piano a bit. Closer to that curved wooden wall. It’ll sound even better there.”

“If you say so. Morris can do that. It’s on casters and there’s certainly enough room. I don’t know when the organ will be fixed. It’s an old McAllister. The parts have to be custom-made and then shipped from Boston, or maybe even from Edinburgh. That’s expensive, and this church is poor like all of the French Shore and all of Nova Scotia. Things turned bad here in ’27 and ’28, not as bad as in Ontario, mind you, because they relied on industry. And then the stock market crash, of course. But our people here never had much money to invest, and now we still have the fishing and the agriculture. Most of our food is homegrown or it comes from the Annapolis Valley. Good soil and water there. We are fortunate in that.”

“Yes. About the organ, now, Father. The old McAllisters have wonderful bronze pipes, but some of the workings are delicate. I happen to know that because we made linkages for them. In your organ, some parts will have been replaced more than once already.”

“Yes, they have, according to the log. But it’s getting ever more expensive. David Chandler thinks he might try and make them in his pattern shop. He says we could use heavy sailcloth for the bellows. David’s a fine craftsman. Have you met him?”

“No. Not yet. But I’ve heard of him. He does leatherwork too, I’m told.”

“Yes, he does.”

Father William wore a black soutane with the Roman collar undone and the sleeves pushed up to his elbows. He had reddish hair cut short, red bristling eyebrows, and clear grey eyes filled with a young man’s hope and trust. He might not be thirty yet, young enough to be her son. He sat studying her, taking his time with his hands folded on the table. Eventually he said, “Did Sidonie or Mildred tell you anything about us here?”

“A bit, yes.”

“Saint Homais used to be all French, of course, just like the other stretches of the Shore, all the way around the turn past Yarmouth to places like Port L’Hebert and Port Joli, and even past that. Now the French are down to perhaps sixty per cent, but many of those are originals, like the Chouinards and the Cabayés and the Bissonnettes. Their names are on some of the oldest stones on the hill, and there’s pride in that. But there are also many non-French that are from here, like Mildred, and many come-from-aways such as myself and David Chandler, who is an American. It’s a close community, not unlike a large and
sometimes quarrelsome family. My point is that, since the funeral, people have been asking me who you are and what brings you here and if you’ll be staying.”

“Well, I hope to be staying. But when you speak of the community, there is something I should tell you. I want to make it quite clear that my family was not exactly the churchgoing kind. Especially not after the Colonial Office blamed the missionaries for my father’s death. I don’t think my mother ever set foot in a church again.”

“Your father was a missionary?”

“No. He was an engineer. In French West Africa, mostly.”

“I see. But you are able to play the sacred repertoire? From the seventeen and eighteen hundreds?”

“Yes, of course. It’s some of the most profound music we have. You heard me play the Brahms.”

“Yes, I did. It was good. Now, when it comes to being
churchgoing
, as you put it, let me assure you that you won’t be the only one in the community or even in the congregation that’s uncommitted.”

“Uncommitted?”

“Yes. Your faith. I understand, and I don’t mind. Well, I do and I don’t, because there’s always hope. I
do
mind when they call themselves freethinkers, because thinking has nothing to do with it. The real freethinkers actually had the discipline to think in straight lines. Kierkegaard, Nietzsche. Martin Buber, who’s still alive and still a sharp thorn in the side of the church. We studied them at the seminary.”

He paused and looked down at his hands on the table. He looked up again. “This church used to be a cathedral,” he said. “Do you know what that is?”

She felt herself blush. “A cathedral. Well, yes. I do know
that
much, Father. It’s the main church in a diocese. Or the bishop’s seat. Is there a bishop here?”

“Not any more. But this church is still the heart of our community, and it has a long history. It was consecrated a cathedral two hundred years ago, before the diocesan boundaries were redrawn. It will always be a cathedral in spirit, if not in practice. It was a community effort at the time, with all the locals pitching in and one master builder, a French architect, to guide them. Two men fell to their deaths building it. They are buried on the hill.”