The History of Sound I was seventeen when I met David, back in 1916. Now I don’t very much care to count my age. It’s April 1984 here in Cambridge. White puff balls that must be some sort of seedpod have been floating by the window above my writing desk for days now, collecting on the sidewalk like first snow.
My doctor suggested I write this story down, due to the recent sleeplessness that started when a package from a stranger arrived at my house: a box of twenty- five wax phonograph cylinders, sent from Brunswick, Maine. A letter taped to the box read,
I saw you on television. I admire your work. These are yours. I found them when cleaning out the house we bought. Of the three books I’ve written on American folk music—with moderate success and thus the television interviews—I’ve never written about that summer with David. So, here we are.
I first saw him in the fall, after my first term at the New England Conservatory, when I was out with my friends in the pub. He was across the room, at the piano. I remember watching how his shirt stretched and slacked across his back.
“What do you think?” my friend Sam asked, tapping me on the arm.
I hadn’t heard his question.
“What are you looking at?” he said, turning.
“I know that song,” I said. It was “A Dead Winter’s Night,” a tune my father used to play on the fiddle back in Kentucky. A slow song to the tempo of “a sitting person’s breath,” as he’d say. An old English ballad from the Lake District, I’ve since researched, about a man and a woman lost in the woods, having run from their homes to elope. Thinking of it now reminds me of lying on the porch in the summer, moths flitting around the lantern, my father’s foot hitting the floor—the scratch of his boot on the wood. Katydids in the trees, stitching the night together. My brother sitting nearby.
“Excuse me,” I said to Sam.
I pushed through the crowd, to the piano. I watched David play. His eyes were closed, so at first he didn’t notice me standing there. Cigarette held between his lips. Dark hair combed back. His head jolted when the chorus arrived. I watched his hands.
“Where did you learn that?” I asked when he ended.
“Oh,” he said, looking up. “Some swamp in Kentucky.” He ashed his cigarette on the floor. A deep voice. Words spoken too fast. He played a C chord with one hand and picked up his drink from the floor with the other.
“I’m from Kentucky,” I told him. His hand paused on the keys. He looked up again.
“Yes, well. Sorry.” He held out his hand. “David.”
“Lionel,” I said.
“What department?”
Likely everyone in the pub that night was from the Conservatory.
“Voice,” I said.
“Well, fa‑la‑la. I’m composition. This”—he played the melody once—“a hobby. In the summer. To get fresh air. Song collecting.”
From across the room, my friends motioned that they were leaving. I waved them on.
“Ever been to Harrow?” I said. “That’s where I grew up.”
“Harrow. Two summers ago. Sky-blue gazebo in the center of town.”
He seemed unsurprised by the coincidence, so I, likewise, didn’t react. There weren’t many Southerners at the Conservatory then, and absolutely nobody from Harrow, a town of two thousand between the rivers Cold and Solemn. (I’d come to Boston because the school’s music teacher noticed my voice. She wrote to a friend in Lexington, who’d attended the Conservatory, who then visited Harrow and consequently organized my scholarship.) But here was David, having passed through my town on one of his collecting trips. Perhaps we’d even seen each other. I was once homesick, I remember.
“There was a reel I remember learning there,” he said. “‘Maids of Killary,’ I think?”
“I know it. Do you know ‘Seed of the Plough’?”
“Should I?” he said.
I told him that my mother used to sing it.
“Go on. Let’s hear it.”
“No,” I said, shaking my head.
“What key?” he said, playing one chord to the next, down the piano. He edged forward on the bench. “What key?” he repeated, touching out an A.
His eyebrows lifted. I noticed then a dash on his upper lip, a scar, a smudge of pale red that I’d later learn was from his father.
“Don’t think you could put a piano to it,” I said.
“The floor is yours.” He pushed away from the keys, slipped another cigarette from his pocket, picked a candle from the headboard, and cupped the flame to his face. Waited.
I was told I had perfect pitch when I named the note my mother coughed every morning. I could harmonize with a dog barking across the field. I was the tuner for my father’s violin—standing at his elbow, singing out an A while he pinched and tightened the pegs. Early on I thought that everyone could see sound. A shape and color—a wobbly circle, blackberry purple, for D. I only adjusted the shape I saw, and then locked into the correct decibels. Tastes started to accompany the notes when I was thirteen. My father would play a bad B minor and waxy bitterness filled my mouth. On the other hand, a perfect C and I tasted sugary cherries. D, milk.
I sang for David then.
I’ve always felt as if what came from my throat and lips was not mine, like I was stealing rather than producing something. This body was mine— he constriction of my diaphragm, the pressure in my throat, the lips and the softening of my tongue that shaped the sound—but what left me, ringing through the crown of my head so my skull felt more bell than corporeal, flooding my ears’ timpani, vibrating through my nose, wasn’t my own. More like the sound of wind over a bottle. Or, better, an echo of my own voice, coming from my mouth. A repetition. I can’t sing like that anymore—and I miss it. Now I have this weak warble, this drone that nobody tells me isn’t any good.
As I ended the song, the color yellow faded to the taste of wet wood.
“Where in hell did you learn that?” David asked.
I shrugged.
“I wouldn’t be puttering around school if I had a voice like that,” he said.
When he stood to get another beer, I saw he was inches taller than anybody in the room.
We stayed together until dawn. Me singing to his piano.
I might have been able to hum a D at both octaves, but I’d never met anyone with a memory like his. I’d later learn he had maybe a thousand songs in his head, and could hear a melody only once to repeat it, note for note. That night, tilting his head, plugging an ear with a finger, humming a note or two to tease out the song, he only fumbled a line when he was absolutely drunk.
“Let me buy you another beer,” I said, not moving from the piano’s side, the gray morning light filling the dusty windows of the pub.
“Yes,” he said. “You’ve kept me up all night. You owe me.”
“Anything you want,” I said, staring.
“No. I’m tired. It’s morning. I’m going to bed. I live across the street. Walk me back.”
His apartment was bare—only a bed, a piano, and a chair. Dirty plates and glasses were scattered on the floor, along with pages and pages of music. No desk. I asked him for a glass of water, because the room was spinning. He brought a water glass from the kitchen, said he only had this one clean one, took a long sip, and then spit an arc of water at me. I opened my mouth to catch the stream. He did this until the glass was empty and I was wet but had managed a few sips. He placed the glass on the floor, and then walked to me, took off my glasses, folded them and put them on the windowsill. He pulled my wet shirt up over my head and led me to his bed.
I woke when the sun was high and David was gone, with a headache and the room still moving. I’d been drunk before, but not like this. I crawled from the sheets and saw a note on the floor:
See you in a week. I gulped water from his sink, then filled the glass and walked into the living room. I sat in his one chair, drank until the glass was empty, then went back to bed, put myself under the covers. When I woke again, just before sunset, he was still gone, and so I gathered my clothes, folded his note, and put it in my pocket before leaving.
Every Tuesday night thereafter, David was at the piano and I was buying us drinks with my scholarship stipend. On nights that weren’t Tuesday, I sometimes stood across the street from his building, looking up, trying to see who it was walking around his apartment. I was only curious, I told myself. I really don’t think I’ve ever been jealous, which was a problem with every relationship I’ve had since David. Like Clarissa, whom I dated in my forties, and who left me after she admitted she was sleeping with my friend. I’d already known about her affair, and when I told her so, saying I only wished she’d admitted it to me earlier and supposed we could work through it, she got upset, as if I’d been the one doing the cheating, that I didn’t care about her anyway, so why should she stay? Most of the other men I’ve been with—Alex, William, Alistair, others—have lasted no more than a few months. Vincent was the longest. I met him in Rome, where I lived for over a year, in 1929 and 1930. An uncommonly gifted musician, originally from Milan, charming to every stranger we met, a gap between his two front teeth and a laugh that echoed all the way down the city’s narrow streets, Vincent was a cellist who practiced in the same chapel where I sang. When, eventually, I said I needed to go home, back to Boston, for career reasons, he only said, “
Americano,” like it was the worst word he could think of.
I won’t dwell on the particulars of David’s departure only half a year after we met. It was 1917. America had entered the war. Classes were disbanded. He went to Europe. I didn’t, because of my bad eyes. I wrote my Harrow address in his journal, told him to send me French chocolate.
I returned to Harrow, to the farm, to help my brother, who, not very long after I arrived, also went to Europe. Maybe that was the end of my time with David, I thought. A dozen Tuesday nights in Boston. I thought of him in the way you do when you’re young: in the mornings, lying in bed listening to the songbirds, sheets tangled around my legs; when I stood in the kitchen watching the kettle, waiting for it to boil; when I was pruning, grafting, staking, and guying the fruit trees; after work, walking to the streambed and listening to the spring peepers; sitting on our porch, listening to a thunderstorm clear its throat on the horizon in three notes, the smell of dirt released under the storm’s coming. As in, always. I sometimes woke with an impression of his face in my eyes, with my hand reaching across the bed for him. My body remembering his, even if I tried not to. Gray- blue eyes with a pale copper ring around the iris. The scar on his lip. An Adam’s apple stark as a broken bone. His hair smelled like tobacco, his neck like fermenting fruit. I didn’t experience the guilt that some men in my time would have. I just loved David, and I didn’t think much beyond that. My error was that I thought David was the first of many. That I’d had a taste of love. I was eager for my future. How could I have known that all the rest— Alex, Laura, William, Vincent, Clarissa, Sarah, and most recently George—were only rivulets after the first brief deluge?
Summer and autumn passed. Winter arrived on the farm. Snow once, but nothing like Boston. I spent months writing bad music, drinking too many cups of coffee, walking for hours. Wondering when life would resume, when the war would be over and I could go back north, back to classes, back to Boston, where, I was sure, David would return after his service.
I visited my grandfather sometimes, who lived on the outskirts of town in a house his father had built for him and his six siblings. My own father had died years earlier, in the orchard, and my mother had taken the change by going on walks that sometimes lasted into the night. So, without my brother around, the house was empty and quiet in a way I didn’t like. My grandfather would sit in his chair beside the fire, summer or winter, wrapped in blankets. We drank coffee, talked about the war in Europe and if I’d heard from my brother, and then he’d ask me to sing. He never asked me about the Conservatory. He didn’t like to talk about anywhere north of Kentucky. He’d been in the cavalry, watched his friends “de‑limbed” in Antietam. He was not a bad man—just angry. Just missed his friends and missed his wife. I’m struck now, only writing this, by how many wars have swept through my family’s lives. My brother never came back from the war.
David’s note arrived at the farm in June 1919. The return address was Bowdoin College, up in Maine. He’d written on the back of a sheet of staff paper—in the front were two bars of arcing quarter notes. A paragraph, only:
My dear silver-throated Confederate: I hope this note finds its way to you. How is life on the farm? As it stands: I just returned from a walking tour, you might say, in Northern Europe. God help me. But the day is getting brighter. I have a position up at Bowdoin, here in the evergreens. Last month a man visited the Department to show off a new phonograph prototype. The Chair thought it a Fine Idea if I was elected to record folk songs in this boreal wilderness for Dept.’s regionalist leanings. I can’t drag this talking sewing machine by myself how about a long walk in the woods this summer? The journey points north. A bed of pine needles under the stars? Birch beer? Don’t dally, just come. I turned the paper over and hummed what I could read of the two bars. A student’s jolting melody, surely. All the notes I’ve gotten from David were directives:
See you in a week, he wrote that first morning. And then:
Don’t dally, just come. He gave me instructions, and I followed.
Copyright © 2024 by Ben Shattuck. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
