A pretty youth, Jack McCormick was a virtuoso with a violin. After his father’s death while Jack was still a small boy, his mother struggled to earn enough for her son to study music under a great maestro. His talent blossomed, but the teen-aged Jack wanted more than the beauty of his strings to stir his imagination.
Studying the classical styles of all the greats before him left him empty. He wanted more. At fourteen, he began sneaking out at night, entering the honky-tonks and back alley bars to entertain with his magical fiddle. When his dear and beloved mother found out, his life as a honky-tonk man was over.
So Jack ran away. He wanted the world, but what he got was World War II.
On the verge of budding manhood, he stepped into the hell of war. When most boys were chasing skirts, working at the family business or finishing school, he was fighting for his life.
In his haste to escape his home, Jack had to leave behind everything including his violin. Homesickness became his worst enemy. It dogged his every step through Europe.
On a particularly rainy day, thousands of miles from home, Jack was assigned to guard some captured German soldiers. They were encamped in the open, no shelter to be found. It was cold; the men were injured and hungry. Sickness was making the rounds.
A run-off stream of rainwater had formed, wending its way through the prisoners, carrying with it the broken debris created by war. Among the items floating in the water was a violin case. A German officer grabbed it, found its strings intact. After tuning it, he began to play.
Jack watched from a short distance, his keen eyes looking on with longing. Still just a kid, his desire to touch it over-came his orders to patrol the area. Having learned a smattering of German in his travels, he managed to ask the prisoner if he could have a look at it.
The German, hoping to curry favor with the young boy, handed it to him with great care. Jack caressed the gentle curves of the beautiful instrument, plucking the strings, sighing brokenly. A picture of his mother in the dank little kitchen back home, a smile tugging at the corners of her mouth, formed in his mind. He felt the touch of home in the wood and strings of the violin.
Handing his gun off to a buddy, he gently cradled the instrument under his chin and drew the bow across its strings. His eyes closed as he lost himself in Mozart’s Violin Concerto in D. The glorious notes floated over the French countryside causing more than one hardened soldier to stop and draw breath. As the story goes, even the rain stopped, the clouds parting to allow the sun to bask in the splendor of the music.
When Jack finished and opened his eyes again, the German officer was silently weeping. Jack tried to hand the instrument back to the prisoner, but, in perfect English, the man told him to keep it. “It is meant for you,” he said.
Jack carried that old fiddle with him through every trench and battlefield until his tour ended. He took it home with him. It was the only instrument he would use, even when he was playing for Benny Goodman and his orchestra. Every day he wondered what had happened to the German officer who was so affected by his music. He never saw the man again.
Thirty years later, he was still carrying that old fiddle when he met and married my Aunt Alice. She was a beauty with the voice of an angel. It was love at first sight. They’d both been married before; both had grown children and grandchildren. They’d both suffered much in their lives, and saw in one another something akin to salvation.
I remember how he played. I loved to listen to them both. Alice would bring the house down with her powerful voice and Jack would lift it up again with the passion of his violin. When we lost Alice a few years back, we thought Jack would never recover. He did his best to carry on, finally moving away to be close to his children.
I got a call today. Jack is gone. He lost the passion for his music when the voice of his angel was silenced. He lost his life when cancer took its terrible hold. They both will live forever in my memory, and between them, he carries that old fiddle.
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