The winch groaned, the chain came up streaming water, and the case rose out of the lake like a sleeping animal. It was long and gray with brass latches, the kind of case made for a very precious thing. Two men from the dock company set it down on the planks in front of me. The boss, whose name was Walt Haney, asked if I wanted to be alone. I said no. I knelt on that crooked dock with my bad knees and opened the latches one by one, and a soft puff of dry air came out. Inside, wrapped in a faded blue blanket, was a violin.
Beneath it lay an envelope addressed to me in the careful handwriting of Leon. I read it right there with the wind in my hair. Donna, this was my grandfather violin. Josef Marek carried it from Telc in Czechoslovakia on a steamship in 1921, and he played at every wedding in south St. Louis for forty years. When the great flood of July 1993 filled our basement, I carried it out through the water on my shoulders. I swore it would never be in danger again. That is why I built the dock that fall, and why I sank it here.
The letter explained the swimming. A violin in a sealed case on the lake bed keeps steady cold, away from fire, burglars and flood. But gaskets wear and little packets of silica must be changed, so every morning of every summer, Leon swam down to check. I had thought it was exercise. I had waved from the porch with my coffee while the man I loved dove thirty feet to look after his grandfather. I laughed until I had to wipe my eyes. Walt Haney laughed too, and then looked away, a little embarrassed for both of us.
Donna learned her husband spent thirty summers guarding his grandfather violin underwater so their granddaughter could play it someday.
Why hide it from me? He answered that on the second page. Donna, you would have worried about my heart and my age, and you would have made me stop. And I wanted to give it to the right Marek at the right time. Then came the line that took my breath. Our granddaughter Ellie is the one. She has his hands. If you are reading this, please let her play it on this dock when it is strong again. I pressed the page to my chest and sat there on the planks while the lake slapped softly at the pilings below.
I did not trust myself to carry it, so I called the one person who would know what to do, my son Greg in Jefferson City. He and Ellie drove down that very afternoon. Ellie is twelve and plays second chair in her school orchestra. When she saw the violin, she put both hands over her mouth. We did not let her touch it yet. Instead, Greg drove the case to a violin maker in Columbia named Pete Hollis, who is known for his honest work. I wanted a professional to say whether Leon had saved it or ruined it. Ellie rode the whole way with her forehead against the window, not saying a word.
Pete called me three days later. The wood was perfect, he said, not one crack. The label inside read Josef Marek, Telc, 1908, and he valued it at roughly 40 thousand dollars, though he said that number was the least interesting thing about it. I told him the violin was not for sale, not now, not ever. It belonged first to Leon, then to me as his widow, and by his letter it belonged to Ellie. I would keep it safe in the house until she was old enough to take it. Pete cleaned it, fitted new strings, and refused to charge me a cent.
The new dock was finished the second week of August. The company used the old pilings that were still solid and, at my request, left the third one exactly where it had always been. Walt Haney himself carved a small brass plate and screwed it to the rail that reads, Leon Marek built the first dock in 1993. He kept something precious here. I did not know a plain piece of metal could make a grown woman cry, but I stood on the new boards in the evening light and wept without shame.
On a warm Saturday, the whole family came. Greg grilled burgers and my sister drove up from Springfield. Ellie stood at the end of the dock with the old violin under her chin, and the cove went quiet, even the frogs. She played a slow Czech folk song that Greg had found in the letter of Leon, the one his grandfather used to play at weddings. The notes floated over the water like something freed from a long sleep. When she finished the first verse, my sister whispered that she could hear a hundred years in it. A neighbor in a fishing boat cut his engine and just listened. I closed my eyes and I could almost feel Leon beside me.
After the last note, Ellie lowered the violin and looked at me. Her cheeks were wet. “Grandma, I think he was down there listening the whole time,” she said. I told her that I believed it too. Thirty summers of morning swims were really thirty summers of a man making sure something beautiful would be waiting for a child he had not yet met. She hugged me so tight that my glasses slid sideways, and Greg took a picture that sits on the mantel now, the two of us laughing on the dock. Behind us the lake shines like a piece of glass, and the third piling stands straight and proud.
Now when I sit on the porch with my morning coffee, I can hear Ellie practicing through the screen door on the weekends she visits. I no longer wave at an empty lake. I lift my cup to the third piling, to the man who swam down into the cold every day, to the long journey of a violin from Telc to the Ozarks. Leon never could play a single note, but he made sure this family would hear the music for a hundred more years, and I think that was his whole heart. He gave it away one dive at a time, and I am only now collecting it.