Then I lifted the rag. And I stood behind my own counter, the register still not even cashed in for the day, and I looked at it a long while before I could make myself move, and then I walked over and locked my front door in the middle of a Tuesday with the Open sign still turned to the wall, because that man had pawned a fiddle. And not just any fiddle. I knew this fiddle.
Half the county knew this fiddle. It belonged to old Merle Tackett, who played it at every wedding and every funeral and every fish fry in this part of Missouri for fifty years, the way his own daddy had before him. That was his daddy fiddle, a hundred years old, and Merle Tackett would no more pawn that fiddle than he would pawn his own right arm. And here it was, in a hard case in the back of my shop, hocked for eighty dollars and left behind.
Something had to be terrible wrong. So I closed up and I went looking, because a man does not pawn the thing he loves most in this world for eighty dollars unless the bottom has fallen clean out of his life. And I found him, and thank the Lord, he was alright, alive, at his daughter place three counties over.
Here is what had happened. Merle daughter, who he had been on the outs with for years, one of those long family silences nobody even remembers the start of, got real sick this spring. Fast and bad. And Merle got the call, and he did not have gas money or the money for the road, not a dime, an old fiddler never does. So he did the only thing he could. He pawned his daddy fiddle, the most precious thing he owned in this world, for eighty dollars, and he drove through the night to get to his girl, and he made it in time. He was there. They made their peace, all those wasted years mended in a hospital room, before she pulled through, which thank God she did.
I figured I lost the fiddle for good, the man told me, standing in his daughter kitchen with tears standing in his eyes. And I would do it again ten times over. A fiddle is a fiddle. That is my baby girl. There is no eighty dollars and no hundred-year-old fiddle in this whole world worth more to me than getting to hold my daughter hand and tell her I was sorry before it was too late.
I gave him the fiddle back. Did not take a cent for it. How could I? That fiddle bought a father and a daughter back from years of silence, right at the very edge of losing each other for good. That is the best eighty dollars anybody ever spent in the history of the world, and I was not about to be the man who kept a fiddle for it.
Merle Tackett played at my own girl wedding last month, that same hundred-year-old fiddle, and he would not charge me either. Said we were square. Said better than square. And when he played, I do not mind telling you, I stood there and cried like a baby, thinking about everything that fiddle almost cost, and everything it bought instead.