Spruce

A seed falls on scree, finds soil, germinates. A deer walks past or, this being higher up the slope, near the timber line – a mountain goat climbs past, grazing on spruce seedlings. It misses this one. Profiting from chances such as this, the tree grows straight up for three hundred years.

When the snows fall, a rock outcropping shelters the tree somewhat, which is to its benefit especially as a sapling because the snows were heavy in those early years – as they are most winters on this mountainside- and bent many seedlings, broke some of them off completely.

A long march away, in the warmer South, a court celebrated the discovery of a continent by evicting Jews from the country. Here on this mountainside, this steep end of a broad mountain meadow, the grass and snow can go decades at a time without seeing a human footprint in these days.

People have passed through here for millennia. Hunters, and refugees, and soldiers. Game has been hunted with sharpened flint in these mountains. Men in furs have trudged through carrying spears; men in helmets and little else have carried pikes. This tree stands in a lucky place, a little too far up the hill when soldiers march through on their way to Italy, or from Italy, Swedes killing Austrians or French chasing Italians or Irish fighting one side for the other; a little too far up the hill when they pass through the valley below and need wood for their fires.

In the Thirty-Years war, a Schwedenhöhle is a manmade cave with a camouflaged entrance. When foreign soldiers approach, Swedes for example, an entire village will hide everything of value in such a cave and hide the entrance. Everything is packed in – livestock, women, gold. There, in the thickening air and darkness, they wait for the soldiers to leave, to finish ransacking the village and grow bored and continue on. The villagers hold their breath, shush the livestock, slaughter what won’t be quiet. Geese, for example, it’s unlikely geese would be taken into a Schwedenhöhle.

The spruce would be a large tree by this time, more than two hundred years old. It would be the big spruce, a valuable piece of timber, just too far up the slope to bother with.

A violin-maker needs wood such as this. Straight-grained, healthy wood. He can’t harvest it himself. First of all, he has violins to make. He is too busy in Vienna, say, or Cremona making his instruments and selling them; even more importantly, the wood must season for more than a generation before he can use it. So even if he did have the inclination to cut the wood himself, or have it cut, it would be for his son or grandson, not for himself.
The wood dealer cuts the wood. Rarely does a violin-maker or a luthier go into the hills himself to cut down a spruce, or to select the ebony imported from where they import ebony from. The dealer of wood for instruments does this. He selects the tree. After talking to the locals, he will hike up and down hillsides evaluating trees, studying the trunk for knots and straightness, knocking against the wood with mallets and listening to the sound.
His workers wait down the hillside with their axes and saws and sledges, smoking a pipe or resting, while he looks at the tree; then he signals them and they take up their heavy iron tools with a groan, and join him up the hill.
“This one,” he says. They will cut several spruce trees on their outing this week, drag them down hill, cut them and split them into manageable sizes, ship them back to the city. He shows them how he wants the tree to fall. The gentleman explains to the local loggers how to do a job they have been doing all their lives, since they were large enough to carry an axe, but they say nothing. Only one of them, who went to school for a time as a boy, over in another village, even speaks his language.
The gentleman wants the tree to fall gently, but with enough force to ring, as he calls it. He wants to listen to the sound the tree makes when it strikes the ground. This is another way in which he evaluates the wood. Two men take up a crosscut saw and remove a wedge from the side of the trunk so it will fall as the visitor wants it to. Before they can saw, though, some stones and rubble has to be moved out of the way and they direct their helpers to do this.
When the wedge is cut the men saw the tree most of the way through from the other side. Then they back off and one of their helpers chops through the last few inches with a large, heavy axe. The tree begins to creak and he dashes away, stumbling and falling on his ass. The tree remains standing, the other men laugh at him. He stands, dusts himself off, and chops some more. This time the tree falls. The gentleman listens to it ring as it strikes the ground. “This one is good,” he says.
The workers quickly chop off the limbs and saw it into two-meter lengths. The lengths are rolled onto sledges and pulled downhill by mules.
Cut into manageable sizes, the wood is transported to the wood-handler’s warehouse, cut further into large blocks and aged for a generation on shelves in the warehouse. The largest blocks are big enough for a cello, or even a contrabass. The wood dealer counts the rings in the old tree. Over three hundred years old. The wood is untouched for a generation, shifted on the shelves, moved when the roof springs a leak but otherwise untouched. After thirty years or forty, an instrument maker might pay a visit to the wood dealer’s son, who has taken over the business. They would talk about the history of the wood, where the tree grew, who cut it, how long it has aged. How it was stored. If he decides to use the wood, the dealer would cut the required amount – in wedges, not even slices – and he would ship it back to his workshop, where the long process of making an instrument would begin – gluing two wedges together, cutting them into the outline of the instrument, carving it out, shaving it thin.
This would be in the middle of the nineteenth century at the earliest. Paganini is already dead. After another generation, the violin, say, or the cello or contrabass or viola, the instrument would be broken in. It would have a mature sound. The violin would then burn in the musician’s home in World War I, or in an air raid on Vienna in World War II, or like the spruce it would survive against all odds and be played by various musicians, handed down from teacher to student or auctioned off in auction houses all through the twentieth and into the twenty-first centuries.
And all this time, the rest of the spruce would age in the warehouse, handed down from father to son to grandson to great-grandson. Maybe one of them loses the business in a card game – this happened more than you might guess, fates changing hands over cards in a tavern, wealthy families reduced to sharecropping or servitude by drunken chance. Or, losing everything in a bad investment, the dealer would have to sell. Or his sons would not want the business, or he would have no children and he would sell to a Jew. Or the dealer would be Jewish and would liquidate his business, selling it to an Aryan at a bargain and flee the country at the right time, if he were so lucky.
There were many ways for wood to change hands. Weiss had heard of all of them. He traveled throughout Europe buying up old wood in that way, mostly spruce or fir, but other woods, ebony; he had some ivory, centuries old.
The spruce was the oldest he had.
“I haven’t cut down a single tree,” he said to Pendelton. “Most of my wood was logged before I was even born, none of it after you were.”