I set the board down on the drift and stood there a long while, because when I unwound that stiff oilcloth in the snow, what was inside was a fiddle. An old one, dark with age, the wood still sound, and tucked against it a folded note in a hand I did not know, the hand of the great grandfather who raised this barn before my father was even born.
I am not a man given to standing around in the cold turning things over. But I stood over that fiddle a good while, because I never knew. Nobody in four generations had ever told me that the man who built our barn, the man whose blood I carry, was a fiddler. I only knew him as a name and a photograph, a hard old farmer who worked this land until it took everything he had. And here, sealed into the frame of the barn he built with his own hands, was the other half of him.
The man I thought was nothing but work had music in him, and he hid it in the bones of the barn rather than let it go entirely.
The note told it. He wrote that he had played the fiddle as a young man, at every barn dance and wedding in the county, that it had been the joy of his life. And then the farm came, and the hard years, and a family to feed, and there was no more time for music, and his hands went stiff with the work until he could not play anymore. He could not bear to sell the fiddle. He could not bear to look at it either, a thing that reminded him of the lighter man he used to be. So he wrapped it and sealed it into the barn, and he wrote that he hoped someday, someone of his blood would find it, and have hands still soft enough to play, and bring a little music back to this hard place.
I do not play. My hands are farmer hands, same as his. But I have a granddaughter, seven years old, who has been asking for a year now to learn an instrument, and I have been telling her we would see, the way you do. I am not going to say we will see anymore.
I took that fiddle to a man in Duluth who restores old instruments, and he cleaned it up and set it right, and he told me it was a fine old thing, made to be played. My granddaughter starts lessons this spring. On her great great grandfather fiddle. In a few years, if she keeps at it, there is going to be music in this family again, for the first time in a hundred years.
The barn is gone. I am building a new one, and it will be a good one, but it will not be his. What he left me was better than a barn. He left me the part of himself he thought he had to bury, and a little girl is going to bring it back to life. Some things a hard winter cannot kill after all.