When the painting is done and fully dried, I glue the soundboard to the body. The instrument closes around it and is then ready for its finish coat. I set it flat on the bench in the light from the west window and reach for the finishing cloth.
What’s coming is familiar. I’ve done this hundreds of times. And still…
I shake a small amount of finish onto the rag and wipe it across the soundboard in one slow pass.
The wood wakes up.
That’s the only way I’ve ever been able to describe it, the moment the oil hits, and the grain comes alive underneath, the pale spruce going warm and amber, the burned lines going from gray-brown char to something deep and rich and permanent. Thevelarago from sketch to statement in the time it takes the oil to soak in. The grain of the wood runs underneath them like water, and the flowers sit on top of it and inside it at the same time, and the whole thing looks like it grew there because in some sense it did—out of a napkin sketch and a hillside description and thirty seconds of a male going still in my workshop when he wasn’t planning to.
I stand here for a long time with the oiled rag in my hand.
It’s the most complete thing I’ve made. Not technically—I’ve built instruments with more demanding joinery, more complex structural requirements. Complete the way a thing is complete when it was made for a specific person and couldn’t have been made for anyone else.
Well,I think.
I text him.
Me:It’s done. Come Monday.
Kragen:I’ll be there.
Chapter Nine
Kragen
By eleven, I’m working my way down the bar in the same order I always do: glasses first, then the taps, then the floor.Thursday close is quieter than on a weekend. Half the crowd, half the noise, Walt leaving earlier because he knows I’ve got it.
The bell over the door jingles right at eleven-fifteen.
Grulk.
Which means he’s been waiting for the last customer to leave. Which means he’s been thinking about the dulcimer again.
I shouldn’t have told Grulk about the dulcimer. I mentioned it three weeks ago in a moment of weak judgment when he asked why I’d driven out to the county on a Tuesday afternoon, and Igave him the short version: a custom instrument being built with a wider neck, but no names, no details, nothing he could work with. Evidently, that wasn’t enough.
He drops onto his stool, and I pour him a Grim Dark without being asked.
“Don’t,” I say.
“I haven’t said anything.”
“You’re about to.”
He picks up the glass with great dignity. “I was simply going to ask how you are.”
“I’m fine.”
“You don’t look fine.”
“I look like I always look.”
Grulk tilts his head and studies me the way mechanics study an engine making a sound they don’t trust. I wipe down the section of the bar nearest him and wait.
“You look,” he says finally, “like a male who is thinking about something he’s not thinking about.”
“That doesn’t make sense.”
“It makes perfect sense. What is it?”
