Eli brought home a tune with forty-seven notes before the first pause. His sister brought him a hammer.
“Roof,” Ruth said.
“I’ve come to play.”
“Then you’ll want somewhere dry to stand.”
The old dance hall had lost three boards above the stage. Afternoon light lay across the floor in thin bars. Beside the wall stood their father’s chair, the one with a burn mark on its left arm.
Eli set his fiddle case on the chair.
“I paid for a ticket all the way from Bell Junction.”
Ruth handed him the hammer anyway. “The ladder’s free.”
He hadn’t seen her in four years. There was gray in her hair now, and a crooked white scar over one knuckle. She saw him notice it.
“Plane slipped,” she said. “Don’t put that in a song.”
Onstage, a girl tightened the bow of a fiddle too large for her shoulder.
“That’s June,” Ruth said. “She opens tonight.”
“The notice says I open.”
“The notice was printed before you answered my letter. When you didn’t confirm, I gave June your place.”
June stopped tuning. “I can go later.”
Eli gave her the friendly smile he used with nervous pupils.
“Let’s hear what you’ve got first.”
She played eight plain bars, eight short lines of music. The bow caught on the third. She tried again. Above them, Ruth’s helpers struck their hammers in an uneven pattern: two quick taps, a pause, then one heavy blow.
June played along with it.
The melody lifted at the pause and landed with the heavy blow. Eli heard a place for it in his new piece. A rough little bridge between the long opening and the difficult middle.
“That last bit,” he said. “Again.”
She played it.
He took out his fiddle and added a run above her notes. The hall filled with the sound he’d been imagining on the train. June lowered her bow.
“You like it?” she asked.
“It fits beautifully.”
She stood waiting.
He wanted to get it down before he forgot. He pulled paper from his case and wrote the notes while Ruth carried another board up the ladder.
At rehearsal, the dancers came early. Eli took the stage and began his new piece.
They listened through the forty-seven notes. Then they tried to step.
One couple turned left while another stood still. Old Mr. Bell moved on the beat Eli had meant them to hear, but the next run drove him to stop and count on his fingers.
The fiddler from the next town would have loved this piece. Eli had pictured him listening from the back, unable to find a single fault.
The dancers found several.
“Where does a fellow put his foot?” Mr. Bell asked.
Eli played June’s eight bars. The couples moved at once. A skirt swung. A heel clicked. Then he went back to his own tune and they slowed to a puzzled walk.
“I’ll need another hour,” he said.
June was putting her fiddle in its case.
“Stay,” he told her. “I want you to play that middle part.”
“You said I was opening.”
“You still can. Later.”
“Later isn’t opening.”
Ruth was at the bottom of the ladder. He wished she would go away before he heard what she thought.
June pointed at his paper.
“You wrote my tune there.”
“Eight bars. I made something around them.”
“I made something around the hammers. You didn’t ask.”
The dancers began finding jobs elsewhere in the hall. A man who’d never swept a floor took up the broom.
Eli looked at the eight bars. They seemed smaller on paper than they had sounded under June’s bow.
“I thought you’d be pleased,” he said.
“I was. When you played with me.”
She closed the case.
Ruth moved his fiddle from their father’s chair to a dry part of the table. She put an empty bucket on the chair’s seat.
“Rain by dark,” she said. “Help us with the last boards or find another stage.”
“You’d cancel the dance?”
“I’d cancel you.”
He stared at her. She was not joking. She had paid for the hall, the supper, and the nails. He had come home with a tune and expected it to buy him everything.
He climbed the ladder.
For the first ten minutes, he held a board badly and got shouted at. For the next twenty, he learned where Ruth wanted his hands. He worked his fingers around the hammer and struck two quick taps to set a nail. Then he drove it home.
From below, June’s tune came back to him.
He didn’t play it. He had a board to hold.
They finished all but the corner over the stage. One supporting timber was rotten. Ruth wouldn’t fasten a good board to it.
“Bucket for tonight,” she said. “New timber tomorrow.”
Eli climbed down with a red mark across his palm. June was helping lay the supper table.
He set his page beside her.
“These are yours.”
“I know.”
“Would you let me play behind you tonight? I’ll follow.”
She read the difficult runs he’d added.
“Not all that.”
“No.”
She drew a line through one run. He winced. She noticed, and drew another.
“And I open,” she said.
“You open.”
He wrote her name above the eight bars. She added two more bars while he watched. This time he asked before he wrote them down.
By supper the first rain was falling. It sounded soft on the new boards. In the unpatched corner, it dripped steadily into the bucket on their father’s chair.
Eli remembered his father sitting there after a dance, listening to the last tune and pretending not to be tired. He’d meant to take the chair onstage tonight. It would have looked fine beside a famous returning son.
Ruth wiped a drop from its arm.
“He’d have liked seeing that roof fixed.”
Eli looked up at the fresh boards.
He had carried Ruth’s last letter in his fiddle case for a month. He’d answered with the date of his visit and the name of his new piece.
June lifted her bow. Eli stood a step behind her, where she could hear him but didn’t have to watch him.
Her first note was thin. His answering note was quieter. She found the hammer rhythm and let it run.
Mr. Bell put his foot down exactly where he wanted it.
The floor answered.
Afterward, a woman asked Eli who’d written the tune.
He pointed to June, who was eating the last piece of pie with both hands.
“You can ask her when she’s finished.”
His train left the next morning. In his case, beneath June’s page, lay the ticket that would take him away before the timber arrived.
Ruth carried the bucket outside. He followed her.
“How late does the next train run?” he asked.
“Next day.”
“I’ll miss my appointment.”
“You might.”
He folded the ticket into a smaller square and put it back. In the morning, when the timber arrived, his fiddle stayed in its case.
Ruth put their father’s chair against the wall, out of the way of the ladder. Eli steadied its short leg with a wood shaving.
Then he climbed up to take his end of the board.
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