I brushed the snow off that stiff oilcloth and unwrapped it right there in the wreckage, and I stood dead still in the snow and the splinters, because cradled inside, perfect and dry after sixty years under that roof, was a fiddle.
Not a cheap one. An old country fiddle, a Hardanger fiddle, the kind the Norwegian folks brought over to this North country generations back, carved and inlaid with mother-of-pearl and a little dragon head at the scroll, beautiful even under decades of dust. Somebody had wrapped it with great care and hidden it in the loft of that garage, up in the dark under the peak, and left it there.
It took me a while to learn the story, from the old-timers who remembered. The man who built this garage had come over from Norway as a young man, and he had been a fiddler, a real one, the kind who played at every wedding and dance in the Norwegian community up here. And then he lost his wife, young, and the folks who remembered said he never played another note after that. The music had been theirs, the two of them, and when she was gone he could not bear it.
He could not sell the fiddle. He could not destroy it. And he could not stand to see it or hear it. So he wrapped it up and hid it in the loft of his garage, high in the dark, and he closed the door on that whole part of himself, and he lived out his quiet grieving life a few feet below the music he could not play anymore.
He put his whole broken heart up in that loft, an old fiddler told me, and he never once climbed up after it, because to hold it again would have been to hold her, and he could not survive that twice.
I could have kept it. It is worth real money. But a fiddle is not meant to lie silent in an oilcloth, and this one had been silent for sixty years, and I could not stand to let that go on one day longer.
There is a girl in town, thirteen, who plays the fiddle like she was born with a bow in her hand, whose family came from that same Norwegian stock. I had the old Hardanger cleaned and restrung and set right by a man who knows such instruments, and I put it in that girl hands.
She played it at the Sons of Norway hall this spring. The old tunes, the wedding tunes, the ones that immigrant built this town on and then went silent over. There was not a dry eye in the place. An old man grief, sealed in a loft for sixty years, came back down into the light as a young girl joy, and the music that died with a Norwegian bride is being played again by a child who never knew her.
The snow took my garage. It gave me back a hundred years of somebody song. I would make that trade a thousand times.