What October Brings

Hell Among the Yearlings Chet Williamson

It wasn’t scary at all. Michael was playing it well enough, that wasn’t the problem. Michael Wilkins always played great. It was just that everyone had heard the tune too many times. “Jerusalem Ridge” was one of those rare minor-key tunes that were in most fiddlers’ repertoires. It was bouncy and moved along nicely, and made a nice variation, since the vast majority of fiddle tunes were written in upbeat major keys. But scary? No. Elmer would show them scary.

He glanced around to see the effect the tune was having on the crowd. Daisy Kreider, who was accompanying on her guitar, was smiling and watching Michael intently, the way she always did when she backed up another musician. That was one more thing he loved about Daisy, as though her looks and personality weren’t enough.

Michael played on, having left the melody for the improvisation at which he excelled. With the crowd’s attention fixed on Michael, Elmer used the moment to hold his own fiddle to his left ear and quietly check to see if the alternate tuning had held. It had, and he put the fiddle back on his lap on top of the dry, aged sheets of music he’d been studying, and listened to Michael finish his tune. Let him have his moment of glory. Elmer was going to cook him and serve him on cornbread. Elmer’s music was going to be scary as hell.

He found it in the attic, in a battered cardboard box full of music that his mother had gotten from an old violinist just before his death. He’d remembered the box when he was thinking about where he might find a new tune with eerie qualities for the contest. To his disappointment, the box was filled with formal violin exercises, classical sonatas, and dozens of Victorian era solos with piano accompaniment.

Still, he dug to the bottom, hoping to find a collection of folk tunes or Appalachian ballads, something previously unheard by the other kids and the judges. All the way at the bottom of the box, underneath a small pile of chipped and brittle Bach sonatas and partitas, was an even more time-ravaged piece of music. The paper, if paper it was, was cracked and yellow, torn in many places, and he saw immediately that the music was written by hand in black ink, as were the somewhat uneven staff lines. There was no title, nor was there a name of any composer, but what he found of immediate interest was that at the top left of the first of the two pages were four capital letters separated by vertical lines, reading “F|E|A|R.”

When Michael Wilkins played the final bars of “Jerusalem Ridge,” he put everything he had into it, ending with an improvised cadenza that made his bow a blur and caused the strings to howl. The audience, in turn, howled their approval, clapping and cheering as Michael took a small bow and nodded to Daisy in recognition. From the way she smiled back at him, he knew she’d been mightily impressed with his performance.

More so than Elmer Zook, that was for sure. That big old farm boy was clapping hard enough, but the smile on his face said to Michael, I’m gonna get you now, town boy.

There it was, wasn’t it? Farm Boy and Town Boy. When it came to bluegrass music, street cred didn’t matter. What mattered was cowshit cred. It mattered to Ken Groff anyway. A former tractor jockey himself, Ken always seemed to favor the hicks, the ones who had old-time music, not only in their blood, but also symbolized in brown on the bottoms of their boots. And as head of the Smoketown Bluegrass School, Ken had his favorites, of which Elmer Zook was number one.

Michael had to admit that Elmer was a helluva natural musician. The kid had chops. His sight reading was impeccable, and he could spend a minute reading a new tune on paper, and then play it from memory. On top of that, his technique was impressive and his ear was sharp, and he could recreate old Kenny Baker solos note for note.

His sole failing was creativity. Michael left him in the shade as an improviser, but Ken Groff wasn’t bothered by it. Ken’s instruments were banjo and guitar, so he was easy to impress when it came to fiddle.

Now Ken stood up, still applauding, and faced the small audience of about two dozen people – students, parents, and a few friends. “All right, let’s hear it for Michael and ‘Jerusalem Ridge!’ Really good! But the question is, was it scary? Remember, this is the night of the Halloween jam, and we’re lookin’ for the scariest fiddle tune ever heard! So far we’ve heard ‘The Devil Went Down To Georgia,’ ‘Little Sadie,’ and now ‘Jerusalem Ridge.’ Those raise a few goosebumps?”

Most in the audience chuckled, and there were a few shouted out yeahs and nos. Michael had put his fiddle back in its case, and now sat next to Daisy in the second row. “You playing for Elmer?” he whispered.

She shook her head. “He’s playing alone,” she whispered back.

Michael looked at her closely, trying to figure out whether she was pleased or displeased about not playing with Elmer. Their rivalry over Daisy was an established fact at the bluegrass school, though neither had yet gotten up enough nerve to ask her out. Ken alluded to it now and then, sometimes subtly, sometimes less so. One of his more blatant comments, offered when Michael and Elmer collided trying to open a door for Daisy, was that the two boys should do a duet on “Hell Among the Yearlings.” Both Ken and Frank Withers, the fiddle and mandolin teacher, laughed hard at that one.

When Michael looked up the title on Google, he found that, besides being the name of a Gillian Welch album, it was a fiddle tune he hadn’t been aware of, and that the title referred to young, rambunctious cattle. He wasn’t flattered.

“All right now!” Ken said. “Our next fiddler is our old buddy, Elmer Zook! What are you going to play for us, Elmer?”

“It doesn’t have a title,” Elmer said softly, as he stood up, tucked some sheets of music into his case, and closed it.

“Well, you gotta call it something,” said Ken.

“I, uh… I guess just ‘Halloween Tune,’ maybe?”

“Okay then, ‘Halloween Tune’ it is. Is it scary?”

It was awful. He had taken the music down to his room, closed the door behind him, and tried to play the handwritten notes, but they made no sense. He figured that a piece of music entitled “FEAR” would sound weird, but he didn’t think it would be altogether crazy, like this was. If a tune ever sounded like pure cacophony, this was it.

He sat down on his bed and looked closely at the brittle old sheets of music. There were no other notes, no name of any composer, just the four letters, separated by lines, at the top of the page:

Then it occurred to him that the lines themselves might have some significance. Instead of the letters indicating the title, maybe the lines meant the letters were something more than just letters in a name.

A tuning.

Guitarists used alternate tunings all the time, tuning their strings up or down to create an entirely different tonal sound. He’d never heard of anyone doing it on a fiddle, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t possible.

He picked up his fiddle and looked at the letters, “FEAR,” again. Then he tuned his G string down a full tone to F, his D string up a tone to E, and left his A string as it was. But what, he wondered, was the R? Notes on the scale went from A through G – there was no note R.

But as he looked closer at the handwritten R, he saw that the looped upper part was larger than the straight lines that made up the bottom half, and he realized that if he ignored those lines he had a letter D. So was the composer making a wise-ass joke of some kind? Giving the piece a title while slightly hiding the proper tuning?

He tuned the highest string, the E, down a full step to D, then picked up his bow and drew it over the four strings. The D-E-F, three notes side-by-side, made for a strange dissonance, but one that brought a twisted smile to his face. Then he stood up, put the music back on the stand, and played the first few notes, fingering on the altered strings exactly as he would have on the standard tuning.

It took only a few notes for him to know that this one was scary.

“Is it?” Ken asked again.

Elmer Zook gave a little shrug. “Yeah. I think so anyway.”

“Well, we’ll be the judge of that,” Ken said with a laugh as he went to sit down. “Take it away, Elmer!”

Elmer raised his fiddle to his chin, then flexed his bowing arm twice. He took a deep breath, and let the bow rest on the retuned strings. In his mind he saw the black, handwritten notes on the brittle old paper, and he began to play.

When the first notes tore into the fabric of the air, a change came over the attitudes of the listeners. The slouchers began to straighten up, and the heads of those already sitting straight began to lift like hounds on scent. Their gazes, initially fixed on Elmer, slowly rose until they were focused on something just above his head, something that wavered in the suddenly thick air of the room, shimmered in strands of red and gold and silver and black, and, as one phrase led to the next, the black began to predominate, subsuming the other, brighter colors, and finally taking even the deep, dark red into it, like blood turning black in starlight.

The boy continued to play in the privacy of his bedroom, in the solitude of the empty house. This will work, he thought. This will be perfect. Damn, but it was weird. It was beyond just minor key, though it had that quality to it. There were scoops and leaps and jagged staccato passages that were enormously challenging, yet he was somehow able to negotiate the demanding maze of notes. His sudden ability surprised him. He knew he was good, but he hadn’t realized he was this good.

But as the torrent of tones surged out of his violin, he saw on the page a flashing, shimmering light, and he thought, oh no, not again. He’d been troubled with ocular migraines since eighth grade, painless but bothersome neurological illusions in both eyes at once, visions of a jagged-edged oval, as though something in his brain had shattered a glass sheet spread across his vision and shards glimmered across the landscape of his sight. It was annoying, but always went away within a half hour.

However, he soon realized that this ocular migraine was different from the dozens he’d had before. The area around the torn edges, showing the real world he had always continued to see during even the worst of these events, was changing, was becoming filled with bizarre colors merging with a lack of color, and the jagged oval at the center of his vision was different too. Never before had anything begun to come through it.

Elmer played on, as if unable to stop. His eyes seemed to have rolled up so that the pupils were hidden behind his eyelids, showing only the whites, but his right arm continued to saw at the strings, and his left held the fiddle under his chin, while his fingers raced and spasmed on the black fingerboard.

Except for the shrieking fiddle, the only sounds heard in the room were soft moans, whimpers, and deep, ragged sighs. Nearly everyone was looking into the space in the air above Elmer’s head. Nearly everyone was seeing the same thing there, but each saw something different as well, something meaningful to him or her alone, something terrifying, something heartbreaking, something fearsome.

Midge Butler saw her father looming over her late at night.

Perry Crawford saw his mother on the bathroom floor, her head half gone, her pink .45 caliber handgun still clenched in her fist.

Eight-year-old Tim Keebler held his cat Pluff in his arms, panicked as to why she wasn’t moving, why her hind legs just hung there as if there were no bones in them.

Abe Peters shivered over an open grave deep in his cornfield, a shovel in his hands, the body of his wife Esther at his feet, her neck twisted so that she was looking over her right shoulder, up at the stars.

And Esther Peters saw her best meat knife sliding in and out of her husband’s stomach, just below his breastbone, over and over, her hand with her late mother’s signet ring, the only piece of jewelry she owned, holding it with white knuckles. And she heard him grunt with every shove, and heard her own terrified breaths whistling in and out of her tight throat.

Everyone who heard saw something, events real, events imagined, things that still might be and things that never would. They saw these terrors in the space in the air over Elmer Zook’s head, that space to which the music rose and then spread out over them all like a dark blanket of sound. They sobbed and trembled and wailed at what they heard and what they saw, and the boy continued to play. It was not music. It was not a tune. It was a surge of sound that gave them all a glimpse of a world they had not imagined, a world where fear and terror ruled, where there was no light nor joy nor love, only loss and pain and savagery, and they could do nothing to make it stop.

Ken Groff tried. He was the closest to Elmer, and he pushed himself to his feet, where he wavered for a moment before a flood of repeated, falling triplets drove him to his knees, and he grabbed his head in his hands and wept. And Elmer played on.

The boy played on, all alone, in his bedroom. He wanted to stop, but he couldn’t. Even as more and more of those unformed, shapeless creatures undulated through the gap that had been torn in his vision, he knew he had to stop. He was beginning to have thoughts, bad ones, far worse than even the darkest fantasies he’d ever imagined in the blackness of midnight.

He began to cry, and thought he could feel his bladder start to empty itself in panic, wet heat like blood trickling down his thigh. He was gasping, barely able to breathe, thinking that soon, soon, he must surely pass out, fall unconscious while those creatures continued to pour into his sight, his room, his mind, and then—

Something took the bow from his hand, wrenched it away, and his right arm dropped, and the sound ceased all at once, the roar subsiding, his vision clearing, and standing there in front of him was his younger brother, looking at him in confusion and disgust, the plastic buds in his ears blaring hip-hop so loudly that the boy could hear it.

“What the hell are you doing?” his brother asked him, gesturing with the bow he was holding toward the growing dark, wet spot on the front of the boy’s jeans.

“An accident,” the boy said huskily. “Don’t say anything to Mom and Dad about this,” he added, with as threatening a look as he could muster under the circumstances. “Or I’ll tell them you’re listening to that hardcore crap.” The threat, along with the fact that he was a head taller than his brother, seemed to be sufficient, as the younger boy nodded, handed back the bow, and left the room.

The boy changed his jeans and underwear, and washed the soiled ones, hoping they would dry before his parents got home. Then he sat on his bed and looked at the music that had affected him so strongly and unpredictably. If the music had had such an effect on him when he played it, what might it do to those who listened? Even if he managed to stay sane, the listeners to such musical blasphemy might never forgive him…

He thought some more. He thought about what he might do with the tune. Despite its power, and because of it, there was no way he could play it in the Halloween contest.

But it might be just right for someone else.

It had gone on long enough. The effect the tune had produced was far more than he had intended. The music had to stop now.

Michael stood up and ran to where Elmer stood, his bow still slashing at the strings. As Michael tried to grab his fiddle, Elmer twisted away, right arm lashing out so that the bow ripped across Michael’s face, making him stagger backwards, then fell upon the strings once more. Enraged and desperate, Michael tackled the other boy, and he and Elmer fell together, their combined weight upon the fragile instrument, which shattered with a crisp, treble cracking of maple and spruce.

Though his violin was now nothing more than a splintered box of wood held loosely together by twisted strings, Elmer tried to keep playing. He still held the bow, now broken in half, and moved the wood, devoid of horsehair, across the ruin of an instrument. When no sound resulted, he increased his efforts, and thrashed about on the floor, grunting with the effort, his eyes wild.

Michael tried to restrain him so that he wouldn’t hurt himself or others, but it was difficult. Elmer seemed imbued with maniacal energy, and it wasn’t until Ken and Frank Withers came to Michael’s aid that they were finally able to hold the boy still.

Michael was surprised and relieved at the assistance, for it meant that Ken and Frank, at least, had regained their own emotional stability. As he looked around the room, he saw that the others were also coming out of whatever spell the music had placed upon them. Some were trembling, some were crying, but all seemed rational, more rational than Elmer Zook, at any rate.

When Ken and Frank’s attention shifted from Elmer to his concerned and sobbing parents, and while the others in the room were assuring and comforting each other, Michael surreptitiously slipped the wax earplugs out of his ears and into his pocket.

When Michael came into the old firehouse that the Smoketown Bluegrass School rented for their lessons and gatherings, everyone was in the banquet room and kitchen in the back eating Halloween snacks and drinking punch and soda. Here in the big room where the fire trucks had been parked, the chairs were set up for the competition and jam session afterwards. Everyone had put their instruments along the side wall, which is what he had been counting on.

He carried his violin case over and put it near Elmer’s. Then, glancing up to make sure no one else was in the room, he took from his case the brittle, folded music sheets and a small note, opened Elmer’s case, slipped them inside, and closed it again. Then he joined the others in the back.

Elmer was talking to Daisy, of course, but she smiled when she saw Michael, and he joined them. None of them mentioned the contest. When Ken finally announced that the competition would start in ten minutes, Elmer went into the main room right away, while Daisy remained and chatted with Michael.

When, five minutes later, they went into the big room, Michael saw that Elmer was crouching in a far corner, turning his tuning pegs to try and get them to hold in an unaccustomed position. The old music sheets were on the floor, and Elmer was looking at them, playing very softly so no one could hear.

He’d taken the bait all right. Michael had written the note in what he thought of as a feminine hand, with loops and spirals and little hearts to dot the i’s. It had read:

“Tune to F-E-A-R and kick Michael’s bee-hind! A Friend”

Michael thought the “bee-hind” was a cute touch. And there was a bigger heart over the “i” in “Friend.”

From the corner of his eye, Michael watched Elmer hold the music close and examine it carefully. He was sight reading sure enough, and memorizing as he went. Gullible hick or not, the kid really had a gift. He was going to ride this tune bareback.

As Michael tuned, Elmer, still holding the music, went over to Daisy. He couldn’t hear them, but he figured Elmer was telling her that he wouldn’t need her to accompany him after all.

Michael smiled. If that tune screwed up Elmer’s head just half the way it had done to his, it was going to be a real spectacle. He nearly laughed aloud at the prospect of watching Elmer pee himself in front of Daisy.

It might even screw up the heads of some of the listeners, and that sure wasn’t going to endear Elmer to folks either. Nope, Elmer Zook’s name was going to be a dirty word from tonight on. Yep, I’m gonna get you now, farm boy.

Michael patted the pair of earplugs in his right pocket, and did a quick, soft run-through of “Jerusalem Ridge” once again. Winning the contest mattered, but what mattered most was that he played the best that he could. After all, it was getting to the point where, even as young as he was, music was his life.

Michael looked through the windows into the large, empty room. A lot could change in six months, and it had. He’d finally gotten his driver’s license, and could drive on his own now. Sometimes he’d drive over to the old fire station, now empty and for rent once again, and look through the windows and think about making music.

Nobody did anymore. Nobody who was there that night could even listen to music, let alone play it. Shopping malls, doctor’s offices, stores that played background and elevator music were all off-limits to the students, parents, and friends of the Smoketown Bluegrass School who had come to the party that Halloween night.

And nobody knew why. In the ruckus and confusion afterwards, Michael had taken the music and note out of Elmer’s case, balled them up, stuck them in his pocket, and burned them when he got home. So nobody knew why Elmer had played what he played, and nobody knew where in the world he got that tune in the first place. There were all sorts of theories, more about the reaction to the tune than the provenance of the music itself. They examined all the leftover treats and punch for food poisoning, and even inspected the building top to bottom for mold, but didn’t find anything.

Ken and Frank stopped giving lessons right away, and Ken officially closed the school a couple weeks later. Though Michael hadn’t actually heard Elmer’s performance, he didn’t play anymore, because there wasn’t anyone around to play with. Daisy went to another high school, so he didn’t see her either. And Elmer? Well, nobody saw Elmer. Michael heard that he’d been put in a “special” school, but was afraid to ask what “special” meant.

Michael looked through the windows one last time, then turned and walked down the street to his folks’ car. He got in and figured he’d give it another try. He pushed the “AUX” switch on the dashboard, brought up Spotify on his phone, and from his playlist he chose Dirk Powell’s version of “Lonesome John,” a fiddle tune he’d always liked.

As he pulled out onto the street, the fiddle began playing in double-stops, and after a few bars the banjo joined in. He felt no sense of torment, but the music sounded ugly to him. He found no pleasure in it, and he turned it off and drove in silence.