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A Boy's Name and Fiddle
by Cathryn Shea A Boy's Name You could make your son a criminal just by naming him Carl, seemed like the gospel truth when I was too small to know and heard talking every day for a long time about a man on death row, my mother saying all forms of Carl are bad. When my son was born, I waited three days before calling him the name I’d looked up, having checked history and roots and Biblical references: Brian, for strong. “That’s perfect,” a nurse said, growing impatient but doing a good job hiding her eagerness to get on with it, raising her brow ever so slightly while overheard saying, “As if a name could make or break a child’s destiny.” “Why’d you name him that for?” (My mother-in-law when we tell her.) “That’s Irish. He’ll grow up to be a bum.” Fiddle The closet closed for good behind the walls of our sold house. We cradled the black case, leather handle bone dry. The violin inside, crushed against thick green nap, had traveled through deluge and drought from Mountain to Pacific time when my father moved west. After a few whiskeys, he would pull the case from behind the vacuum cleaner, play Brahms, and recount the flash flood and mud in Colorado Springs that smashed his family’s home, spared this instrument like a sign from God. He’d tell how my grandfather slapped him if he called it a fiddle, made him play Classical and nothing else, made him turn down the full music scholarship at State-- He joined the Coast Guard to escape, even though he’d never seen a coast, hated water, couldn’t swim to save himself from drowning. He found our mother near the seashore and they produced five girls who would beg him to bring out the old case and recite again how he could have played in a symphony. I ran off with a cellist and snuck the violin with me, had the sound post fixed in Salt Lake City-- thought I would learn to play by the Yamaha method. I got as far as “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” |
Cathryn Shea’s latest chapbook is “It’s Raining Lullabies” (Dancing Girl Press, 2017). Her poetry was nominated for Best of the Net 2017 and appears in Tar River Poetry, Permafrost, Tinderbox, and elsewhere. See www.cathrynshea.com and @cathy_shea on Twitter.
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