Inside that box, wrapped in a quilt and wedged between the rafters, was a fiddle case. Old black leather, cracked at the corners. I carried it down the ladder like it was full of eggs.
The couple, Megan and Luke, opened it on the kitchen table. Inside was a fiddle, dark honey colored, with a little carved scroll at the top shaped like the head of a horse. And a note, folded in the bow compartment, dated October 1979.
The note said the bank was taking the house on Monday, and everything in it was going to auction. It said the fiddle was made by hand by his own grandfather in 1921, and it belonged to his son Jesse, who was eight years old. It said nobody was taking it. Signed, Harold Pruett.
I looked inside through the f hole with a flashlight. There was a paper label. Made by A. Pruett, St. Marys, 1921.
A man who lost everything he had in 1979 made sure the one thing that mattered was the one thing nobody could take.
Megan called the historical society in St. Marys. The lady there knew the name right away. The Pruetts had lived in that house since before the first war. The grandfather was a furniture maker who built three fiddles in his life, all by hand, and played them at every church supper on the river. Harold lost the house during the bad years at the end of the seventies. He moved his family to Ohio and died there in 1995.
And Jesse?
Jesse Pruett was fifty five, and he was a bluegrass player. A good one. He played every weekend in bars and festivals up and down the Ohio River, and he taught fiddle out of his living room in Marietta, just across the bridge.
Megan messaged him that night. He did not answer until the next afternoon, because he said he had to read it about twenty times.
He said his father told him when he was a boy that the old fiddle was sold at the auction. Jesse spent his whole life looking at old fiddles in pawn shops, hoping to see one with a horse head on the scroll.
His father never told him. Maybe he thought he would get the house back someday. Maybe he just could not stand to talk about it.
Jesse drove over that weekend. He sat at the kitchen table in the house he was born in and opened that case. He did not say anything. He tuned it very slowly. Then he played a song his father used to play, an old river waltz.
Megan cried. Luke cried. I stood in the doorway with my snips still in my back pocket and did not know where to look.
When he was done, he said it had not been played in forty seven years, and it still sounded like his grandfather.
Jesse plays it every weekend now. He brought it back in the summer and played on the porch for the whole street. Megan and Luke set out chairs.
Nineteen years I have been on ladders. I never found music up there before.