The Note in the Wood

By B.A. Brittingham

B.A. Brittingham is this month’s winner of $570.00 for a story about observations and assumptions.

Bio: Born and raised in the grittiness of New York City, Brittingham spent a large segment of her adult years in the blue skies and humidity of South Florida. Today she resides along the magnificent (and sometimes tumultuous) shores of Lake Michigan.

Without further ado, “The Note in the Wood” by B.A. Brittingham.

Aberdeen, Indiana is small, even by Midwestern standards. The streets, some of which are still cobbled in century old stones, wend through town like petrographic brooks.

Citified visitors stopping here on their way through insist that Aberdeen is a properly and intelligently laid-out little burg. “Designed for livability” is the current pop phrase.

The truth is — though we long ago learned it is best to leave people with their illusions — this town was once an inland port on a feeder river. Its tree-bordered byways were simply paved atop old Indian trade paths leading to the waterfront. Where something stood in the way, a boulder, a marshy spot, a dense grove, the local Miami Indians merely ran around it, innocently preordaining yet another curve in the eventual asphalt.

I live on the second story of a defunct grist mill. The main floor, and all of Wellman Street for that matter, is full of trendy little boutiques catering to the tourist trade. They stock locally made crafts: brooms, candles, dolls, quilts, that kind of thing. This upper level was quartered off for storage or apartments but sat empty for nearly a decade before I faxed the Chicago-based owner to inquire whether he would be interested in renting it as studios to myself and two others. He was delighted to shed the headache of all that undeveloped, vacant space. So happy that he willingly reimbursed us for upgrades needed on the rather rudimen­tary plumbing.

Who am I? That isn’t relative to what I’m about to tell. You might say I’m an observer. All three of us in the upper mill are observers of one type or another.

Lyle Tilford is the photographer in Studio #3. His specialties are nature shots —forests, fields, feral creatures — and the chronicling of nearby Mennonite life where such communities are not averse to having themselves captured and compressed onto silver halide. So demanding is he in what he commits to film, that he even maintains his own darkroom where he can control its development, something not often done in this era of digital depend­ence.

Molly McDonell inhabits Studio #1 at the north end. She is an eccentric, sixtyish seamstress-milliner who refers to her section as a salon — Maison du Chapeau — and is never seen without some sort of bizarre headgear. Lyle and I often engage in silly specula­tions as to how she manages to maintain herself in this almost extinct occupation.

“A wealthy widow who escaped the city and doesn’t care if she sells anything or not, so long as there’s enough to keep her and the pet parrot in sunflower seeds,” is Lyle’s theory.

“Molly and Polly,” I giggle. “You know those hats she models are often just dis­guised parrot perches.”

All of which is way off the point. Observers are like that, we meander mentally the way our streets do physically.

I chose Studio #4 at the south end because its windows face three different directions. The glass didn’t exist in the original building since, of course, the weight and vibrations of the grindstones would have rendered them dangerous and weakened the overall structural integrity of what are otherwise very solid walls. But when the mill was renovated, large Thermopane windows were added to both floors. Unlike Lyle, who wants as little illumination as possible in his studio, I regard natural light as a commodity worth reaping three times a day.

Why the need for true light as opposed to the florescent variety hanging from the high ceiling? Pingo, ergo sum. I paint, therefore I am.

Late afternoon, when the shadows are deeply divergent and the sunlight matures into amber, is when I work on the street side of the studio, laying down broad, rapid strokes in oil or tempera to capture the goings on below.

From this vantage point, quite unintentionally, I began observing Schlingmann’s shop.

They are tall and graceful, the row of nineteenth century, brick buildings on the opposite side of Wellman Street. I sense a mildly supercilious attitude in the way they gaze across at us from their patrician blind ‘eyes’ made of antique wavy glass. The mill is, after all, a cruder version of what they were intended to be; and it sits like an unlovely granite bullfrog, hunkering over the edge of a fast-moving tributary just above its convergence with the great Wabash.

The shops on both sides of the street are forced by competition into oftentimes garish displays of self-indulgence: flags and whirly-gigs, tables laden with 50% off items, automatic bubble-makers spewing airy, soap globes into the breeze. The toy store has a clown on its payroll for weekends when the throngs are thickest. For a while the fast-food place up the way assaulted us with tinny melodies from an old calliope.

So Schlingmann’s unassuming sign is nearly lost in the gaggle of commercialism. It is a black metal cello suspended four feet out from the building by a metal rod. Only on the plate glass window is an explanation forthcoming in gilded letters: Violins, Violas, Cellos Custom-Crafted. Repairs and Restoration Services.

It is as unexpected as a working potter’s wheel in the housewares aisle at K-Mart.

I’d made my way in and out of the shops meeting proprietors, chatting amiably and passing out flyers concerning the joint artistic effort being undertaken at the mill, when I got to Schlingmann.

He was then in his late forties with the first flecks of silver sparking fawn colored hair. On our initial encounter, he was bent over a workbench in one well-illuminated section

of an otherwise dark interior. As I entered, a juncture of sounds nullified one another; he said, “May I help you?” at precisely the same second I launched into my spiel. We were accompanied by a long sad, moan playing itself out from above.

I halted mid-sentence, mid-word. A tool set down, the scrape of a chair, the creak of old floorboards, all vaguely registered within the dwindling of the chord. When it was done, I realized I was still standing head back, mouth open, looking altogether unattractive as I gaped into the overhead dimness.

“The other shops, they all have bells or buzzers,” he remarked, syllables marching in a Germanic cadence.

“How did you do this?” I asked, though the apparatus was becoming more visible as my eyes grew accustomed to the indoors.

“Ah, well…” it sounded abashed, humble, not what I expected from a man whose iron eyes and ivory skin might have made him a Luftwaffe poster boy sixty years earlier.

“…um, you see the stick pointing up from the back of the door? The bow is mounted to it. And over there, you see, are the strings. So, the door moves…”

Like its metal counterpart outside, there was another cello within, this one a true instrument which he had suspended so that the bow ran across its strings whenever the door opened.

“That’s really clever,” I said reaching for the doorknob to resurrect the chord. He winced when I did it two more times.

And finally, “Please, if you want real music this is not its best expression. It serves a purpose, but an instrument is at its finest when held by human hands, not a steel strap.”

I had a sense that he might, reluctantly, take from its place on the wall, one of the other members of his visiting quintet. That he would do it as a demonstration, to buy back the purity blasphemed by the untuned sound of the ‘bell’ above. But I also knew how precious an artist’s time is and was sorry for having broken into his.

“Thank you, but I want to get to everyone on the street before closing. Would you mind if I left some fliers here? This is what we’re doing…”

He came forward to lean against an ancient, non-electric cash register fronted by a rack full of yellowing sheet music. Folding his hands, he surveyed me — mostly my face, for he was a mannerly person — but this was interspersed with occasional furtive glances at the rest of me.

I gave an abbreviated version of my interrupted pitch. Faint amusement danced about his evenly carved features. A moment of silence, the extended gaze of mutual interest, a subtle, charged sexuality in the air.

Then, quite suddenly, as though a switch had been reset behind the gray eyes, his face went solemn. He retreated elsewhere, perhaps behind the ocular garage doors I imagined roll­ing down over a humanity momentarily liberated.

“Of course, you may leave them. I wish you and the others well.”

Politely dismissive, he was already bending over a flat piece of wood as I left. Crossing the street, I wondered if theories on the workings of another mind can be committed to canvas.

At the end of that particularly arid summer when, without movable irrigation machin­ery, the corn and soybeans would have gone to dust by August, I saw a young girl outside the shop. She was peering into the window, right hand cupped against it. Strange little thing, I thought, in her long, green flowered dress, white Amish prayer covering and sturdy Oxford shoes. A man in black clothes and a woman attired in a larger version of the girl’s frock came along escorting three older children, all boys. They moved steadily up the way, only stopping when the child at the window failed to join them. The mother went back several paces, gently took her hand.

The Amish, along with the Mennonites and the Hutterites, are sometimes called the Plain People. They come to town only for the most pragmatic purposes i.e., flour, fabric, hardware. Basic essentials they cannot make for themselves. Ambling along a street devoted to gewgaws and gaudy consumerism was roughly equivalent to seeing a habited nun strolling Amsterdam’s infamous red-light district.

They disappeared around the street’s curve and from my awareness. Until I saw them several weeks later. This time it was only the woman and the girl, attired now in matched dresses of blue gingham. The child was tugging on the mother, obviously trying to cajole her into entering Schlingmann’s. I smiled, thinking it oddly delightful that her attention should be seized by a dingy little music store rather than the bright toys nearby.

Finally, the mother relented. The pair went inside. I picked up a tube of acrylic, squeezed a minuscule snake of cadmium blue onto the palette and began mixing.

Where does inspiration come from? Perhaps it is always there, surrounding us like dust motes or the subatomic particles of cosmic creation. We are given the responsibility of developing antennae to alert us to its presence, to the subtext that exists if only we can find fitting connections between seemingly disparate items. It is an energy that drives both artist and scientist.

Almost an hour passed before they came out. By then they existed permanently in that part of the Wellman Street mural I was painting one section at a time.

She cut an interesting figure throughout the winter. The wind, with or without snow, charged down from Canada, surging unobstructed across the flat farmlands, bending in a brash, brittle susurrance the remaining cornstalks. It coiled along Wellman Street, tearing at the cloak she wore. I watched, thinking how she resembled a character from a Nathaniel Hawthorne novel, a pint-sized Hester Prynne, or maybe Pearl in The Scarlet Letter.

And I wondered about it all. Particularly when the mother stopped coming and the small, dark-hooded figure ran into the shop for a couple of hours every other week.

One afternoon, when the light was a listless gray and it seemed winter was stretching into an endless corridor, I decided to pay Schlingmann another visit. I wrapped up several slices of walnut bread I’d made the previous evening — one does need a pretext to call on a barely made acquaintance — and marched across the street.

I was looking up anticipating the cello announcement as I entered.

“Hello! Nice to see you again Madame Van Gogh,” he called out.

Good, he remembered me and what I did.

There was a crisp, almost sweet smell inside, the scent of long ago outdoors. I’d missed it on the first visit. Possibly it hadn’t been as strong then. Now, in the midst of a closed up, exclusionary season, the aroma magnified itself, morphing from pale summery cologne to the rich redolence of winter perfume. The ancient memory of firewood and the warmth it surrenders makes its bouquet a comforting one.

The cello’s vibrations faded.

“Sounds different,” I remarked pointing upwards.

“Ah, well, every so often my apprentice climbs up and tightens a few things. For a while it all sounds better. Then the humidity changes or gravity intervenes…”

He came forward, friendlier and more relaxed than when I’d left him two seasons ago.

He was an attractive man, minus any tendency towards the prettiness some women so admire. He possessed a tall spareness, an efficiency of figure but one which did not rule out the muscle required to actually go out, select and fell a tree he deemed necessary to an envisioned project.

I leaned on the counter as he approached. Seeing the aluminum foil in my hand, he remarked,

“So? This time it is not about fliers?”

“No,” I said from the center of a long sigh. “This time it’s just … cabin fever.”

Momentary puzzlement skipped across his features. Then, “Oh, yes. When one must get out in spite of the weather even when there is work for inside.”

“I should apologize. For barging in. Again.”

“No,” he answered quickly. “This is good. Sometimes I forget to stop. Until I am too sleepy to go on. Yah, I am glad for a visit.”

Eyes twinkling, he added, “And not so often are the visits from handsome women.”

It was the perfect opportunity to inquire about the girl, but my flattered vanity decided to pass on it.

“So, what have you this time?” he asked.

When I told him, I was granted immediate entry to the inner sanctum while he went back to brew coffee.

We chatted amiably. Camaraderie must have loosened up the artist in him, for he launched into an explanation of what he was doing.

“This is called ‘book-matching,’” he said showing me the split of a piece of sycamore.

Maple or sycamore were the preferred woods. Air dried only, with an eight- to ten- year seasoning necessary to produce ideal tone.

“The grain becomes a mirror image of itself. It will be glued together to form the back of the violin. Done correctly, you cannot tell there is a seam.”

“Which means, I guess, no Elmer’s Glue.”

“Mein Gott, no!” he answered with a flat, pained smile. “One must use good hide glue. If later there is damage, it can be removed easily and without ruining adjacent parts.”

“And hide glue, is it what I think?”
“Yah, from the long boiling of animal parts. Collagen.”

He grew pensive as his attention wandered. When he spoke again, there was an undercurrent of melancholy that mimicked the lonely cello.

“Always we must destroy to create. What we use to make something splendid comes from the death of something else.”

He turned to regard me, piercingly, in a way I could not evade. “This is most unfair, I believe.”

Yes, I thought, while images of the ginning of cotton for canvas, the pressing of seed for oil, even the rude extraction from the earth of non-animated substances like minerals used in paint pigment, all galloped through my head.

Aloud I said, “Isn’t that the burden of the artist, scrambling the elements to make something new? All in the name of beauty.”

Which is, of course, the book-matched graining of Truth.

We exchanged another long look, though this time it possessed no obvious sensual overtones. It was rather a convergence at some level far from, yet still remotely akin to, the flesh.

I didn’t notice the third party’s arrival.

It would have been convenient had it been the Amish mystery child. But it wasn’t.

In his stronger, more disciplined voice Schlingmann said, “This is Jakob, my appren­tice. What we were looking at, is his first design. He moved here from Wisconsin to become a violinmaker.”

“Nice to meet you, Jakob. I’m surprised young people are interested in such an archaic method of production.”

“You thought all instruments were made on an assembly line.”

I nodded.

“Not those that are to be concert quality. There are some … ‘effects’ that can’t be put into them by any machine.”

He stepped away, began moving tools about on another workbench. Schlingmann glanced at me, then the student, obviously torn between the moment past and the necessity to move along.

“Never impede education,” I said lightly, hand on the coatrack. “It was a pleasure. We’ll have to do this again.”

“I certainly hope so,” he replied with sincerity.

“You’re kidding,” said Lyle. “Hang on. I’ll be out as soon as I finish with this stabilizer.”

The words came from a red glow seeping around the slightly cracked door to his darkroom. I was sitting on a large cushion about fifteen feet away, sipping a glass of cabernet. In the perpetual twilight of his studio, one couldn’t tell what time of day or night it was.

“Anyone ever tell you your place looks like a vampire bar?”

“Yes. You. Only last time you called it a bat cave.” He came out holding two clips of still-wet film strips. “You seem to have forgotten — lots of interesting things can happen in the dark.”

I pretended not to notice his wink. “Sounds like photog propaganda to me.”

“Getting brazen in your old age? Just inviting yourself across the street? I’m thinking of being jealous.”

“Yeah. Right.”

“So, you’ve sacrificed a half loaf of walnut bread in the name of curiosity. And what do you know now that you didn’t before?”

Slow sip of wine. “Well, I know that he seems perfectly harmless. He’s sensitive…”