Fiddle:. Vivian Wagner
she said. “I think he’s in his workshop. Just a minute.”
In his workshop. Just the thought of his fiddle workshop excited me.
A few moments later a grizzled man’s voice came on the line. “Yes?” he said gruffly.
“Mr. Conner,” I said. “I’m Vivian Wagner, and I’m working on a story about you for Bluegrass Unlimited magazine. I was wondering if I could set up a time to come by and visit with you for a few hours.”
He was silent for a moment. “Bluegrass Unlimited?” he asked finally.
“Yes, sir,” I said, not sure why I was resorting to “sir.”
“Well then, I reckon you’ll have to come on out,” he said, his voice lilting. “I’ll be happy to show you what I do.”
I arranged for a family vacation down to Asheville, North Carolina, to visit some cousins of mine. On the way, I made plans for us to stop in Christiansburg, Virginia, for one night so I could drive into the mountains and meet with Conner. The Bluegrass Unlimited angle was good: at least I had a nominally work-related reason to be driving around the Blue Ridge Mountains meeting strangers.
We arrived late one afternoon at the Christiansburg Hampton Inn, in a part of town dominated by fast-food restaurants and gas stations. We checked in and took the elevator to our room.
“Who’s up for going to meet a fiddle maker with me?” knowing what the response would be.
“Not me,” said William.
“I’d rather go in the pool,” said Rose, looking at me tentatively to see if I was going to push the point. She didn’t have much of an opinion about fiddle makers, but she loved hotel pools.
“That’s okay,” I said. “You can just stay here and swim in the pool with Daddy, if you want.”
“Yeah!” they both shouted in unison. Really, they both loved hotel pools. They could go to any hotel, anywhere, even a mile from our home, and be happy just to swim in its pool.
I looked at my husband, feeling kind of awkward and apologetic, knowing this was my thing. This was my journey, my obsession. I had arranged this trip; I had dragged them all down here; they had to just put up with it.
“Do you mind staying here with them while I drive up there?” I asked. “I’ll be back in the early evening.”
“I guess,” he said. “Do what you have to do.”
I looked at him, trying to discern his mood, his perspective. But he was inscrutable. As if he had shut part of himself down.
“Thanks,” I said. “Really. Okay?”
He nodded. I got the kids into their bathing suits, and we all went down to the pool, which was surrounded by large bushes and a black cast-iron fence.
“I promise, I’ll be back by early evening,” I said. My husband waved slightly and then turned away from me to watch as the kids jumped in the pool. I waved at them, and they waved back, smiling wet smiles.
“See you kids soon!” I called. “Love you.”
As I drove past the McDonald’s, pizza places, and chain hotels, the late afternoon light spread green, gold, and copper on the hills. The road I drove up into the Blue Ridge Mountains would, according to MapQuest, change names several times: first Route 460, then South Franklin, then Pilot Road, High Rock Hill Road, Daniel’s Run Road, Hummingbird Lane, and finally Conner Road.
I tried to note each name change as I passed the occasional crooked road sign, all the time climbing higher and higher, past old log cabins and farmhouses with towers of tomatoes, past trailers set into hills cut away to reveal millennia of yellow and rustcolored rock layers, past trucks with shotgun racks and stars-and-bars bumper stickers. At last, I arrived at Conner Road, a road named after the first settlers in these parts, ancestors, I presumed, of Conner himself.
As I drove up, Conner stood in the doorway of his modest ranch house backed up against the Virginia woods, waving. He was a wizened old man, his face like a precise, wrinkled carving from the same red maple he used to make his violins. He wore a blue plaid shirt, black suspenders, khaki pants, and a tan and green cap with a fiddle embroidered on it. He had a gray beard and mustache, reddish skin, and a broad, toothy grin.
“You made it,” he called as I stepped out of the van.
“Yeah,” I said. “I just kept driving.”
“Well, that’s the way you do it,” he said, laughing a deep, scratchy, woodsy laugh.
I walked through the grass toward the house. Several large butterfly bushes heavy with purple blooms and covered with black, blue, and purple swallowtails lined the front of his house. When I approached, they flocked into the air, hovered for a moment, and then landed on nearby branches.
He led me into his home, and as my eyes gradually adjusted to the inside light, I saw wood everywhere: knotty wood paneling, a carved wooden owl gazing across the small room from his perch on a wooden mantel, and a large reddish string bass and a cello resting on a wood floor.
“This is Ilene, my wife,” he said, nodding at the kind-looking woman who stood quietly at the edge of the room. She had short gray hair, a kindly face, and sharp, sprightly blue eyes.
“Nice to meet you,” I said, shaking her hand.
She smiled. “The same,” she said. I’d find out later that she’d known Conner her entire life, growing up just down the road from him, but they’d only married recently after both of their first spouses had died.
I felt both of them looking at me, sizing me up, a feeling I’d get used to on this journey.
“Care for something to drink?” Ilene said.
“No, that’s fine,” I said, getting ready to ask Conner some questions about his fiddle making, waiting for him to sit down. But he didn’t. He stood there, watching me.
“Mind if I ask you a few questions before we begin?” he asked.
I was surprised. I’d worked as a journalist for years, but I wasn’t used to being on the other side of an interview.
“Sure,” I said.
“Well, to be honest, I could spend days talking to you about fiddles,” he said. “Guess I’m just wonderin’ what you want to know. What you already know.”
I paused. “Well,” I said. “I play violin. So I know a little already. But I’m still learning about fiddles and fiddling. I guess I want to find out everything I can about fiddles and fiddle making in a few hours.”
He studied me carefully. “Play the violin, do you?” he asked.
I nodded.
“Well, maybe later I’ll give you a little fiddle lesson,” he said.
“That would be great,” I said.
He still didn’t sit down, but he pointed at a large leather-bound book on the coffee table in front of me, with The Secrets of Stradivari printed on the front in gold.
“That’s how it all began,” he said. “Most of what I know, I learned from that book.”
He opened it and showed me diagrams of violins, with measurements for width, length, thickness of wood, and page after page of fine-print instructions.
“See?” he asked proudly, and slightly conspiratorially, as if he were letting me in on a secret. “See there? It’s all in this book.”
Conner’s workshop was in an old, white-painted and peeling schoolhouse that he bought, disassembled, and rebuilt behind his house. As the door creaked open, it took my eyes a moment to adjust to the dim light coming in from the side windows. Straight ahead, I could see a large, black cast-iron wood stove. To the right, the walls were painted