The Songs She Never Gave Him

In the Appalachian highlands, the year a daughter is born, her mama brews seven jars of cider.

When the girl comes of marrying age, she opens one jar a year, waiting for the man she loves.

If all seven are emptied and she still isn't wed, the jars get smashed, and she waits no more in this life.

The first six, I drank alone.

Because every year, Luke Weiss said: not this year.

He was a musician who'd come to our town to collect the old heritage folk songs, and he stayed three years.

I taught him to sing the old mountain harmonies. He taught me to record sound on a phone.

He said once the album was finished, he'd come back to marry me.

The day I broke the seal on the first jar, he went to the next county.

Said a folk singer named Mavis Pruitt had ruined her voice, and he had to take her to the state capital to see a doctor.

The second jar, Mavis was cutting a record.

The third jar, Mavis was touring.

The fourth, fifth, sixth, I can't remember the reasons anymore.

I only remember that every time I called, I could hear her laughing in the background.

The seventh year, I carried the last jar up from the cellar.

Twenty-three years it had aged, the mouth sealed by Mama with a twist of straw rope, my handprint still pressed into the clay from the day I was born.

That evening I dialed his number.

He said he was at the airport, that he had to fly with Mavis to New York to sign a deal.

"Wait for me. Soon as it's signed, I'll come back."

"I mean it. This is the last time."

The last time.

He said the last time every year.

But I only had this one jar left.

I broke the clay seal and bent to the mouth of the jar, breathing in.

Twenty-three-year cider, so rich it had gone bitter.

When Mama brewed it, she surely never imagined her daughter would drink it down alone in the end.

I lifted the jar and poured it into me, mouthful by mouthful.

Cider no one comes to share, you don't keep.

When it was gone, I set the empty jar in the yard.

Moonlight dropped inside it and trembled.

It held nothing.

Before light, I carried the other six empty jars out of the kitchen.

I lined them up beside the seventh I'd finished the night before, all in a row across the yard.

The oldest one had a chip out of its rim, moss crawling up the side.

I scratched at it with a fingernail. It wouldn't come off.

The phone buzzed once in my pocket.

Luke Weiss, 2:47 a.m.: "Aria, it's signed. First flight out. Wait for me."

A second line under it: "I mean it. Trust me."

I pressed the screen dark and put it away.

I went inside, took two changes of clothes, locked the door, and started down the flagstone path toward Mama's.

Fog lay heavy over the town. Passing the bell-tower hall, I could see only its peak.

Mama was at the stove, simmering porridge.

When she saw me come in with clothes in my arms, her spoon didn't stop.

She glanced at me once.

She asked nothing.

A second bowl appeared on the counter.

I set the clothes in the back room and came out to tend the fire.

The wood snapped in the firebox.

Mama's spoon tapped the rim of the pot. "Aria."

I stirred the coals.

"Your uncle just came by. Said there's a man standing in your yard."

"Dragging a suitcase."

The tongs paused in my hand.

Mama said no more.

She turned and ladled out the porridge.

I ate two bowls.

She sat on the threshold stitching a shoe sole, then looked up at me. "All seven jars, gone?"

"Yeah."

The needle stopped against the sole.

She said quietly, "Then it's over."

Mama couldn't read, but no one knew the town's customs better than she did.

After the porridge I remembered my ID was still in the cabinet at home.

And a few heavy coats I needed to bring over.

I went back down the flagstone path. The sun had just climbed over the ridge.

I pushed open the gate.

Luke Weiss was crouched in front of the seventh jar.

His suitcase tipped over by the door, not yet pulled inside, his coat thrown over the back of a chair in the front room.

A wrinkled white shirt, sleeves pushed up to the forearms, mud on the cuffs of his pants.

He heard the door and stood, turning around.

His lips were dry and cracked, like he'd come a long, hard way.

When he saw me, his voice came out a little rough. "Aria."

I didn't answer.

I went around him into the house and started digging through the cabinet.

My ID was in the second drawer, wrapped in a cloth pouch.

He followed me in and stopped in the doorway. "I bought the ticket the second she signed. Red-eye into Nashville, then a bus, then a bike the rest of the way."

"I didn't stop anywhere."

I bundled the ID together with my heavy clothes.

His voice came from behind me. "The jars in the yard. I saw them."

"Aria, listen to me. I'm not leaving."

"This time it's real."

I shut the cabinet.

He blocked the doorway, one hand braced on the frame.

I stood up and looked at him.

Close.

Close enough to smell the leather of an airplane seat on him and the diesel off the bus.

I said, "Move."

He didn't.

"The thing with Mavis signing the deal, it's not what you think."

"Let me explain."

His phone went off inside the jacket slung over the chair back.

The ringtone was a few bars of folk guitar.

I knew that tune.

A mountain ballad, the melody I'd taught him, the one he'd later rearranged for guitar.

It rang twice.

He turned to reach for the jacket, too quick, and knocked something out of the pocket.

A folded piece of paper dropped to the floor.

He swiped the call away first.

The name that flashed on the screen was Mavis.

"See? I didn't pick up." He turned back to me.

I wasn't looking at him.

I was looking at the paper on the floor.

Print showed through the fold.

"Letters in Folk Song Track List"

First line at the top: "01 Song of the Cicada, words and music: Mavis Pruitt"

Song of the Cicada.

"Song of the Cicada," one of the old mountain harmonies.

I'd taught it to him line by line.

The credit said Mavis Pruitt.

I bent down, picked up the paper, and put it in his hand.

"Yours."

I slipped past under his arm and walked out into the yard.

Seven empty jars, lined up neat and straight.

The sun caught the mouths of them but couldn't reach the bottoms.

I carried my clothes toward the gate.

He called after me. "Aria, I can explain that song."

I didn't look back.

A figure flickered at the mouth of the lane, a bundle of timber on his back, walking steady.

Mama wouldn't let Luke Weiss in the door.

He stood outside the yard for two hours.

From the back room I could hear him, every word squeezing in through the cracks in the wooden door.

"Ma'am, I just want to say two things to Aria."

"Let her come out. Five minutes, that's all."

Mama sat in the main room stitching a shoe sole, her hands never stopping. "Go on home."

"She doesn't want to see you."

His footsteps went back and forth outside the door.

In the end he left.

The sound of him faded off down the flagstone path and folded into the crowing of roosters somewhere far off.

Once the footsteps were gone, I dug out my phone.

I searched three words: Letters in Folk Song.

Mavis's new album, not released yet, but the pre-order page was already up.

The cover was a bell-tower hall.

Wooden flared eaves, gray tile pitched to a point, terraced fields stacked behind it.

I knew that bell-tower hall.

Three autumns ago, Luke Weiss sat below it and took a whole stack of photos.

I scrolled to a promo interview and tapped it open.

In the video Mavis wore a long linen dress, sitting in a recording studio, her voice soft.

"The inspiration for this album comes from the Appalachian highlands. Luke took me through so many mountain towns, and we collected so many folk songs."

She gave a little smile. "He was my guide."

She said, "took me through so many mountain towns."

The three years he spent in the village, I was the one who took him around.

I led him down the mountain trails, across the rope bridges, through the rice paddies, all the way out to Pine Ridge and Hollow Creek, to hear the old song-masters sing.

Under the video there was a preview link.

I tapped the first track.

The intro was insects chirping and water running.

My finger stopped.

That chirring was the summer cicadas from the hill behind our village.

Luke Weiss had stood under the old oak with his phone, recording a whole evening of it, and I'd sat beside him afraid to move.

In that recording you could even hear me holding back a laugh, the catch of my breath.

Then Mavis's voice came in over it.

The tune was the melody of "Song of the Cicada," with a new arrangement, the words rewritten in plain English.

She sang it beautifully.

But when the chorus came in, a harmony was laid underneath.

Faint, buried in the backing track, almost impossible to make out.

A woman's voice, humming the original ballad in the old dialect.

That voice was mine.

I set the phone face-down on the bed.

I lay there a while, staring at the dried peppers hanging from the rafters.

Mama pushed the door open. "Hungry?"

I shook my head.

She didn't leave. She stood there a moment. "That Weiss guy is back. Sitting on the stone bench at the mouth of the lane."

I didn't move.

Mama sighed. "He's got a notebook in his hands. Says it's the songbook. Says he wants to give it back to you."

It was that songbook.

The one I'd copied out by hand, every harmony the village knew written down in it, over a hundred songs, three months of copying.

Back then he'd said he was taking it to use as a reference for the arrangements, and he'd return it when he was done.

Seven years.

And he brings it back today.

I rolled over to face the wall. "Tell him to leave it by the door."

"He doesn't need to come in."

Mama made a small sound and went out, pulling the door shut behind her.

After a while, Luke's voice came from outside. "Ma'am, I'll set the songbook here."

"There's a USB stick too. The demos for the album. I wanted Aria to hear them."

He paused. "Some of the recordings on it are her voice. When I recorded them, I never told her they'd end up on the album."

"That's on me. I'll deal with it."

It went quiet outside for a stretch.

Then he said, "Aria. If you're in there, you can hear me."

I could hear him.

He said he never told me.

He said he'd deal with it.

He'd lived in this village three years. He'd recorded my voice, recorded the songs I taught him, recorded the cicadas here and the running water.

And then he'd carried all of it away and put it inside another woman's throat.

He never even asked me.

Outside the window, the sun had crept up the wall.

The phone screen was still lit.

That harmony seeped out of the speaker, thin as water slipping through your fingers.

It was the voice I'd sung at seventeen.

Luke didn't leave.

He took a room at the old inn in the village, the timber lodge at Martin Lambert's place down by the creek mouth.

Mama went out to buy rice and came back saying he was helping Martin split firewood.

The next day, that he was nailing down loose boards on the bridge at the village edge.

The third day, Mama said nothing at all.

At dusk I went down to the creek to wash clothes, and from far off I saw lights on over by the bell-tower hall.

In the old days the hall was only lit for the song gatherings.

There was no gathering this season.

I carried my wooden basin closer and heard someone inside, singing.

Singing rough, the pitch not quite true.

But I knew it.

It was "The Old Song."

One of the old mountain harmonies, six verses in all, and the last two only the elder song-masters still remembered in full.

I'd taught it to him.

He stalled on the fourth verse.

Stopped a moment, then started again from the top.

I stood behind a pillar of the bell-tower hall, the basin set down by my feet.

He was sitting alone by the fire pit, that songbook open across his knees.

The page he'd turned to was in my handwriting.

He stared at it for a moment, then picked the song back up.

Fourth verse. He stalled again.

Back then, whenever he stalled, I would come in under him.

Two voices, one high and one low, folding together beneath the roof of the bell-tower hall.

Today there was only his.

Hollow and thin, with no second voice to lift it or set it down.

I bent for the wooden basin and turned to go.

His phone rang by the fire pit.

He glanced down at it.

Hesitated.

Then answered.

I couldn't make out his words.

But on the other end, a woman was crying.

His voice dropped into that practiced, gentle tone I knew so well.

"Don't cry. Just tell me what's wrong."

"Let me see what I can do."

"Hey, don't panic."

I carried the basin away.

The creek was cold. I wrung out the clothes and hung them over the bamboo pole.

The water clung to the backs of my hands in a thin film.

The half-sung song was still circling in my ears.

That pause in the fourth verse, like a nail left half-driven.

Back at Mama's, she was already asleep.

I sat on the bench in the main room and opened the songbook I'd brought home that day.

A hundred-some songs, copied out one by one.

The last page was blank.

I turned it over. On the back, a line in pencil, in his hand.

"When the album's done, I'll come back and sing it for Aria."

The date beneath it was the day he left the town.

Written seven years ago.

I closed the songbook and put it in Mama's old wood chest.

The brass latch had rusted, and it stuck a little as it shut.

The next morning, the old woman from the west end of town came to visit.

She and Mama talked for a while, and on her way out she glanced at me.

Mama walked her to the door, came back, and sat down. "The Cross family has sent word to ask twice now."

"Alvin Cross's worked wood his whole life. Good hands, honest man."

Mama didn't press me for an answer.

I folded the quilt and thought it over.

"Let him come and sit a while."

Mama looked at me.

I said it again. "Let him come sit."

That night, lying in bed, no more singing came from the direction of the bell-tower hall.

Moonlight came through the window and fell on the closed wood chest.

The brass latch was dull and gray.

Not a sound anywhere.

The day Alvin came, he brought a comb he'd carved himself.

Highland cedar, fine-grained, the kind that won't snag.

He set the comb on the table and sat on the bench in the main room drinking tea.

He didn't say anything.

Mama came in to refill the water, looked at the comb, then looked at him.

He raised the bowl and took a sip. "Ma'am, I'm clumsy with words."

"This comb won't pull your hair when you brush it."

Mama gave a soft hum and went to cook.

That left only the two of us in the main room.

His hands were large, the knuckles thick, the calluses worn in by years of wood shavings.

I picked up the comb and turned it over in my palm.

Smooth. Steady.

No pretty words, no big promises.

Just a comb that wouldn't pull a single hair.

I closed my hand around it. "Alvin."

He looked up.

"You know I waited seven years?"

He said, "I know."

"And you don't mind?"

He thought about it. "You were waiting on someone else."

"I'm waiting on you."

Then he lowered his head and drank his tea, as if he'd said the most ordinary thing in the world.

Outside, the sun was warm.

I said, "Then I'll have Mama give the answer."

On his way out, Alvin met Luke Weiss at the courtyard gate.

Luke froze for a beat, looked at him, then looked toward my house.

Alvin didn't break stride. He turned sideways to let him pass, and walked on.

Luke didn't come back to himself until the man was far down the path.

He crossed the yard in a few quick steps, just as Mama came out carrying a bowl.

"Auntie, who was that just now?"

Mama didn't answer the question. "Mr. Weiss, you should go home."

"Aria's business is no longer yours to worry about."

She called him Mr. Weiss.

She used to call him Luke.

He stood in the yard, and the color drained slowly from his face.

"Auntie, can I say a couple of words to Aria? Just two."

Mama planted herself in front of him. "Whatever you want to say, she doesn't want to hear it anymore."

"Mr. Weiss."

"Alvin's family comes tomorrow to seal the betrothal."

"Go."

For a long while there was nothing but quiet outside.

Then came the sound of his footsteps moving toward the gate.

Slow. Every step like wading through water.

Later Mrs. Lambert came by to visit and said a few low words to Mama.

Said Luke's phone had rung over and over at the inn, always the same girl calling.

Martin had caught the voice on the other end by accident: "If you don't come back, I'll wreck the signing."

"There's been nothing wrong with my voice for ages, and you know it."

"What are you still doing in that rundown little town?"

Mrs. Lambert dropped her voice. "That Pruitt woman, her voice was never ruined. Not once."

Mama glanced at me.

I kept folding the laundry. My hands didn't stop.

Her voice was never ruined.

So the first year, when he said he'd take her to the state capital to see a doctor. The second year, when he said she couldn't get through a recording without him. The third year, when he said her tour needed him.

All of it lies.

And he believed it for seven years.

No.

He didn't believe it.

He was willing to go.

Mavis needed him, called for him, came crying to find him.

I only said, I'll wait for you.

He said all right.

The one who waits doesn't call, doesn't make a scene. So the one who waits is the easiest to put off.

I folded the clothes and put them in the chest.

The next morning, Mama went to Alvin's family and gave them my answer for me.

By the old custom, once the woman's family has spoken, the match is sealed.

There's no taking it back.

When the news spread through the town, I was down at the creek washing vegetables.

From far off I heard a dull sound from the direction of the yard.

Like clay breaking on stone.

Later Martin told Mama that Luke had crouched in our yard the whole morning.

He picked up the seven empty jars one by one and looked at them.

When he got to the last one, the one with the broken seal and my handprint on it, his hand shook as he lifted it.

The jar fell to the flagstones and broke into pieces.

He crouched down to gather the shards, and one of them cut his hand. Blood dripped onto the muddy handprint.

He just stayed like that, crouched, holding the broken pieces.

When Alvin came through the alley with the betrothal gifts on his shoulder pole, he didn't look at him.

The pole creaked under the weight. Among the gifts were two sets of bedding and a pair of wooden chests he'd made with his own hands.

He walked steady.

Luke crouched in the shards and didn't lift his head.

When Mama told me all this, I was rubbing tung oil into the wooden comb.

The oil soaked into the grain, and the color went a shade deeper.

I wrapped the comb in cloth and put it under my pillow.

Moonlight came through the window.

There were no empty jars in the yard anymore.

There was nothing left to wait for.