Satisfied, Anson flicked the cigar into the muddy yard and was about to return inside the house when he heard a faint, curious tinkling sound coming from the direction of the river. It was an eerily familiar sound, and at first he doubted that he’d really heard it. He strained to shut out the wind. Yes, there it came again, a glassy shivering. Anson closed his hands to keep them from shaking. All the calm he’d gathered from the cigar was evaporating with each repetition of the sound. He looked dully into the moonlit dark, expecting… what? He knew that glassy shivering, but it took him a moment to see the wagon in his mind’s eye and the burly photographer with the heavy brogue and pointed questions. It had been some time since Anson had recollected that image. Ah, but it was too much, fanciful—the product, he knew, of futile brooding. A man could find the past everywhere if he wasn’t vigilant against it.
Self-knowledge. Anson had never considered himself a fool, and he wasn’t about to change. And yet, there was a reason for the patterns the mind assumed, just as there were reasons for the rhythms in nature. If he’d come to the delta of the Fraser River to find again the battlefield of Antietam, so be it. And why should that even be a surprise? In twenty years Dare had never asked for him to come anywhere, had only sent telegrams and brief letters regarding business matters after their last meeting, when Dare had stayed at Anson’s home. So, out of loyalty and genuine faith in the man, Anson had come to this Canadian river. There was misery and tension all around him, his old longing for opium had returned, and a former enemy bearing the physical evidence of defeat had opened the painful wounds of his country’s severance. Why should all this not be photographed like a battlefield? It would make a fine study of the dissolution of the years. Anson could see the grinning Scotsman making a square of his fingers before his eyes.
But the image faded. Anson knew he was not prone to fancies. So he left the veranda and walked around the house. The glassy sound increased as he crossed the field toward the wharf, and, walking up the gangway, he recognized the sound as piano music. He could not have been more amazed if there had been a tripod set up on the planks with a grinning figure poised to vanish under a black cloth. In different circumstances, Anson would have clapped his hands with joy at the unexpectedness of life, he would have gladly succumbed to humility before the mysterious workings of a greater power. As it was, the sight he came upon only deepened his dread, for it struck him as grotesquely out of place, like seeing children emerge from a woodlot at Antietam. His mouth filled with the smoke of long-dead ashes, Anson approached the unlikely congruence in the moonlight. But with each step, one amazement gave way to another. For as he reached the source of the sound, he felt easier in his spirit, liberated from the poisonous miasma of his own musings.
The girl stood in the middle of the wharf, her thin figure in the moonlight slightly hunched, her elbows extended to either side. Bareheaded, her long, black hair gleaming, she faced the river. But he knew she could not see it, for her view was blocked by the large wooden crate that had been unloaded from the paddlewheeler some days before and that Anson had assumed contained cannery equipment. Off to her right, stepping rapidly forward and back, poised as if to run, stood the girl’s older brother, Edward, a reserved, handsome boy of twelve years. Near his feet lay the front side of the crate. Only when Anson had reached the end of the gangway and stepped onto the wharf did he notice that the boy held a hammer in one hand and a crowbar in the other. Even in the bright moonlight, his face looked ashen.
But Louisa did not lift her hands from the piano, which, as far as Anson could see, was a handsome instrument, the front of its high back ornately carved and almost gleaming, as if made of rosewood or some other special variety. The high notes swirled into the damp air, notes as delicate and pretty as the child who gave them life. Anson felt the tears come to his eyes. In such a remote and forlorn place, where beauty seemed mostly to exist in the surroundings, such music was a rare beneficence. Even the sucking of the tide at the pilings and the drone of the mosquitoes seemed quieted by Louisa’s playing.
The boy, only a few feet away, suddenly dropped the hammer and crowbar and hurried to his sister. He grabbed both her elbows from behind. She gasped and the music stopped.
“That’s enough, Lou,” he said and then added in a whisper, “You’re upsetting the doctor.”
Anson, however, was smiling broadly and letting the tears press against his lenses until he finally had to remove his glasses.
The brother and sister, blurred now, waited. The lost music had drifted away with the current, which gurgled and sucked at the pilings. Anson tried to hold on to the notes. In a quavering voice, he said, “That’s very pretty. Chopin, I believe?”
“I… I don’t know,” the girl said. She hardly even seemed a part of her surroundings, her face shone so vividly. Anson noticed that her fingers still played the air at her sides.
“You don’t know? Well, I suppose the composer doesn’t matter as much as the composition. But you play beautifully, Louisa. And at such a young age. How long have you been taking lessons?”
“She’s never even had one,” her brother said, and it was as if he’d turned all the moonlight onto the girl.
She lowered her eyes and said quietly, “Ed, you’re forgetting Mrs. Parmiter. She gave me a lesson.”
“That hardly counts. Two or three minutes was all it lasted before Mother came in and made you…”
The boy stopped and glanced over Anson’s shoulder in the direction of the house. He frowned and all the sudden enthusiasm over his sister’s talent drained out of his body as if he’d been punctured. Anson, still amazed by what he’d come upon, hurried to address the girl.
“Do you mean that you’ve never been taught to play? How is it that you can play Chopin?”
Her brother’s enthusiasm flooded back. His broad, handsome face beamed.
“She has a gift. Mrs. Parmiter said so. She said Lou was a… a… what was that word, Lou?”
The girl did not look up. Her fingers twitched a little, as if the last of the music was dying out in sparks.
“Prodigy, I suspect,” Anson said.
The boy nodded excitedly.
“And I suppose this is why there’s a piano on the wharf?”
Neither child responded. Very gently, the boy had taken hold of one of his sister’s hands. The tenderness of the gesture moved Anson deeply. These children had lost an older sister the summer before, their mother, still grieving, was clearly not well. Edward and Louisa, he saw at once, were close in a way that Anson, without siblings, had never known.
He smiled. “Your parents have recognized your talent and are encouraging it?”
“Oh, no, sir,” Edward said. “I don’t believe so. Mother doesn’t like her to play and Father thinks it will be good for her to play hymns in the house. Mrs. Parmiter wants to give her lessons, but I don’t think Lou will be allowed.”
Anson nodded slowly. He could almost feel the sadness seep back into his face. To combat it, he put as much cheer as possible into his voice.
“Well, now, something will have to be done about that. Louisa, surely you wish to take lessons?”
“Oh, yes! More than anything!” The girl pulled her hand free, then clapped both hands together. The sound sent all the notes she’d played whirling starward again.