The Songs She Never Gave Him

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.