Making a new cello: Pt. 27, finished.

The time has come, the walrus said, to speak of many things: of ships, and sails, and sealing wax, and cabbages and kings. The time has come to finish this cello. The first step, once the varnish is dry, is to finish the fingerboard. I plane the surface, scrape it, sand it and then polish it to a high sheen. Then I break the edge, using a plane:

And then finish it with files. Next I fit the topnut:

And then the saddle at the lower end, where the tailgut rides:

Then it’s time to ream the holes and fit the pegs:

Now that all the work is done on the cello I polish out the varnish. And then it's time for the last step, to fit the soundpost and then the bridge:

And when the bridge is carved, I put it on, tune the strings up to pitch, and there you have it: a finished cello.

And this is where it would be nice to have a photo of the finished cello, but it went out the door before I had a chance to photograph it. And while that might seem anticlimactic, in a way it fits. When a cello’s done in the white, I start another as I’m varnishing it. By the time it’s ready be polished out and set up, I’m already deeply immersed in the next, and have to tear myself away. Don’t get me wrong: it’s great to see it all done, and even more to hear it. But then I usually can’t wait to get back to the next one. And then before I know it it’s back for the six month tune up; and the edges are worn, and it’s got a few dings, and it now belongs to the world.

My brother Charlie loved to build walls. If my interest in using tools and working with wood went back far, his interest in building walls went back even further:

Visiting Charlie at his office one day for lunch, a framed photograph caught my eye: a stone wall. Chest high, and curved, it was a dry wall, the rocks joined as tightly as the planks of a wooden hulled sailing ship. Odd, though, to see a photo not of a familiar landmark, or without family members posed in front. “Where is it?” I asked. But I don’t remember where he said; it was no place that I knew. “Then why do you have it?” I asked.

He looked at me like I’d lost my mind. “Because it’s a beautiful wall,” he replied; as though of all people I – the cello maker – should have known without asking.

We would set out on summer days, kids in tow, from the farmhouse up in Pennsylvania, to look for stones. It’s shale country, perfect for the kind of flat rocks you want for a solid wall, and you find them everywhere: creek beds, roadsides. Across the field up behind the house, back in the woods, we would find old walls, now tumbled down, split apart by trees and frost heaves. We’d maneuver the van as close as we could, door open, and he would select the best stones with as much care as I would the tops and backs for my cellos, and we would scrabble up the steep sides of a creekbed, carrying the stones and laying them one by one in the van.

The choicest of them all left its mark on Charlie. Always on the lookout for good stones, he had spotted a trophy driving back up to the house one day, and after dinner he got the kids and headed off to retrieve it. A perfect stone: flat and smoothed by countless years in the creek, even, rectangular, and huge: at least four feet by three. But it was getting dark, and it slipped free as he was lifting it; as it fell, it caught the little finger on his right hand, almost severing it completely. They managed to reattach it, but it remained permanently curled; so that when you shook his hand, it would graze against your palm – a momentary reminder of a singular passion.

He went back for that stone, and now it lies, embedded in the lawn by the side of the house, pots of basil on it in the summer sun.

There are stone walls he built down by the lake, where you can sit on the warm flat stones and watch the sun sparkling across the water, with the white clouds above the trees on the other shore sailing against the blue, the deep blue of the sky.