Free Dry Bones in the Valley: A Novel by Tom Bouman

sawing back and forth with the bow, it was patterns, you know, down-up-up-down-up-down-up-up-down-up and so on. You fit the tune to the bowing pattern. Because I was nine and it took me a while to build the patience for this, at John’s insistence we’d often spend even ten minutes at a stretch just down-up-up-down-upping in a particular key, until John could recognize that neither of us was thinking about it anymore but just doing it and all of a sudden he’d call, “Red Haired Boy!” or “Edward in the Treetop!” and we’d be off.
    Another thing I learned from John Allen, when I got halfway better at the fiddle, was the virtue of slowness. There were times when, justifiably proud at having practiced that week, I wanted to whip through a tune, to show off. If I did get out of hand, John would set his fiddle on his knee and smile and say, “Too fast for me! Can’t keep up.” Which you knew wasn’t true, just a nice way of saying slow down and let the tune work through you, not vice versa.
    Down-up-up-down-up-down-up-up. You get the pattern and the rhythm right and then wait for the tune. I needed something I could rip into. “Bonaparte’s Retreat” found me. Most versions you hear give you whiplash, even the older ones. It’s best slow. I’d heard that it’s not as triumphant a tune as you’d expect, but originated with Irish soldiers hired by Napoleon, heading home in defeat. In the case of that tune, slowing it down is the only way something so familiar can still live and breathe. It was always a good one with Polly on the bodhran, she always had steady rhythm but indifferent pitch.
    By the time I got to the modified part B Copland had made so famous, I had to stop and breathe. I thought of George Ellis. Got a piece of paper and curled it into a funnel, poured the rest of my whiskey back into the bottle, and went to bed, but never to sleep.

I T ’ S NOT hard to get up if you never go down. Dawn brought a hint that the weather might get clearer. With enough pain pills, my head would too. The eastern sky was bright as a wild rose as I walked stiff-backed from my woodpile with an armload for the stove. The snow had melted, and my boots left prints on a field that, newly bared, crackled underfoot and shimmered silver; it was a beauty that would not last another ten minutes, so I dropped the firewood and stood and watched the night’s frost dissolve into morning mist. Somewhere in the tree line, a bluebird burbled a tune, but I couldn’t pick him out. It was the first songbird I’d heard that spring, other than the wisecracking redwing blackbirds, and the chickadees who never leave. Before long the wheezy timing belt in Ed Brennan’s pickup joined the choir. The truck jounced along my driveway and backed up next to the tumbledown shed referred to as the “Big Garage.” There is no Little Garage, far as I know.
    My place belonged to Ed Brennan’s Aunt Medbh, who died. The farmhouse stood snug against a gentle slope of a hill, with a view down a wooded valley patched with yellow fields. It was once a small dairy farm, as the slumping post-and-beam barns and a milk house attest. Barbed wire, vanishing into the earth in spots, marked the border of the thirty-acre plot. Ed had bought it from his cousins following Aunt Medbh’s death of old age. When natural gas arrived to the area, his cousins kindly offered to buy the place back, but Ed had plans to improve the farm and preserve it all in one swoop. He doesn’t love the idea of hydrofracking, Ed, and will sign no leases. I live there rent-free with the understanding that I’ll help improve the place to his specifications, and will also have right of first refusal when I can get the money together, provided I agree never to allow drilling once I own it. Until that day, Ed pretends the house already belongs to me. I’m of two minds, surrounded as I am by landowners who have already signed. My misgivings won’t keep gas away any more than Ed’s will.
    I