Hang Down Your Head

by Janice Macdonald

  Hang Down Your Head

  A Randy Craig Mystery

  By

  Janice MacDonald

  Hang Down Your Head

  copyright © Janice MacDonald 2011

  Published by Ravenstone

  an imprint of Turnstone Press

  Artspace Building

  206-100 Arthur Street

  Winnipeg, MB

  R3B 1H3 Canada

  www.TurnstonePress.com

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or ­transmitted in any form or by any means—graphic, electronic or ­mechanical—without the prior ­written permission of the ­publisher. Any request to photocopy any part of this book shall be directed in writing to Access Copyright, Toronto.

  Turnstone Press gratefully acknowledges the assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Manitoba Arts Council, the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund, and the Province of Manitoba through the Book Publishing Tax Credit and the Book Publisher ­Marketing Assistance Program.

  This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events or locales, is entirely coincidental.

  Cover design: Jamis Paulson

  Interior design: Sharon Caseburg

  Printed and bound in Canada by Friesens for Turnstone Press.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  MacDonald, Janice E. (Janice Elva), 1959–

  Hang down your head / Janice MacDonald.

  ISBN 978-0-88801-386-6

  I. Title.

  PS8575.D6325H35 2011 C813’.54 C2011-905982-7

  This book is for my good friend Don Whalen.

  Without his vision and hard work to create and nourish the Edmonton Folk Music Festival from its infancy,

  I daresay we wouldn’t be Festival City.

  1

  ~

  The trouble with “landing on your feet” is that, while the phrase seems positive, it also indicates that just prior to your happy feline arrival you were plummeting some fair distance, in danger of breaking your neck. Falling, metaphorically or not, is not an action that has any sort of connotative control attached to it. You injure yourself falling down; you are out of control during a freefall; you are the butt of a practical joke when you fall for something. Even the most positive context, falling in love, leaves you dizzy and at the mercy of greeting card companies. No, the semantic adhesions to “falling” weren’t something I wanted to spend too long contemplating.

  I found myself thinking along these lines, though, every time someone mentioned my new career path, which they lately seemed to do with the same frequency as Tim Horton’s brews coffee. I appreciated the support of all my friends when they heard about the new job (although I sensed some envy there, too), however, the unspoken part of the statement was that things had indeed been very lean in recent times.

  After working as a sessional at the University of Alberta for several years, I spent some time working for Grant MacEwan College’s distance outreach section of the English department, delivering rhetoric and communication skills via e-mail and manila envelopes. Truth to tell, there was a lot more e-mail than snail-mail involved. Everyone is online these days, including my Great-Aunt Jessie. Working for Grant MacEwan hadn’t been the lean bit, though I could have used some more security and a few more courses. I spent some time working at an online chat site, too, before that was closed down. Once it shut its virtual doors, there wasn’t all that much in the way of options, so I did some incredibly creative things with lentils and book reviewing to survive the latter part of the winter.

  I didn’t mind that too much, either. Since I’d got back together with Steve Browning, he’d done his best to make sure that I ate out at least once a week, at one of our many favourite restaurants. That was another thing that turned out phenomenally well. Even though we’d broken up earlier the year before, Steve and I were now a solid couple, fully expecting to live our entire lives together, to the point of occasionally discussing the M-word, a commitment that had eluded several of my seemingly more deserving friends.

  So, I could understand why folks took the news of my appointment to the Smithsonian Folkways Collection Project at the University of Alberta with such surprise and shock. Well, the surprise I could understand. But the shock sort of ticked me off. The job description looked like it was designed with me in mind, after all. It’s not as if I don’t have the credentials and track record, along with some relatively specialized skills. I was trying to avoid friends with feedback like, “Oh my God, Randy, you landed that job?” (Michele Armstrong from Botany); “That’s a fantastic post, and the money!” (Sonia Zawarucka from U of A Radio); “They do realize you have no credentials in either Anthropology or Music?” (the ever-so-charming Mary Montgomery, who held a similar foundation-paid position to mine but with the English department’s online Orlando Project). Okay, that last one was more of an acquaintance than a friend. Anyhow, it must be the way people who lose a lot of weight feel when folks comment on it. You’re happy to acknowledge the good thing you’ve done, or that has happened to you, but you begin to wonder just what they’d been saying behind your previously substantial back.

  The University of Alberta’s Folkways Collection, the only full set of Moses Asch’s legendary recordings in existence, had been donated to the university by Asch himself, whose son Michael was a professor emeritus here. One of the great visionaries for the preservation of world music, poetry and soundscapes, Moses Asch had been so impressed with the Edmonton music scene every time he visited that he willed his personal collection to the university. It was housed in the Centre for Ethnomusicology, and every now and then a special radio presentation was aired, or a concert took place, to highlight the collection.

  At the earliest part of this century, the Smithsonian Institute, which was believed to be the central site for the collection, discovered that their collection wasn’t complete. There was much hue and cry and subsequent northern grinning when it was announced that the Smithsonian had to come to little old Edmonton to record the missing sections of the collection. Perhaps to save face, a partnership was struck, and the web presence on the Smithsonian Folkways Collection had a strong linking presence to the Centre up here. There was talk of creating a database searchable by subject of songs as well as by artists and recordings. There was talk of making the collection completely downloadable, given that the copyright on most of the songs had always been in the public domain, and most of the performers were long dead. There was also talk of creating links to research material the likes of Edith Fowke’s Folk Songs of Canada and some British scholarly works dealing with folk, roots and blues music. The big problem with all that lovely talk, of course, is that input, web design and database construction of that magnitude requires some pretty hefty outlay of both time and cash.

  And that’s almost where I came into the picture, but not quite. First, out of the blue, an enormous bequest was made to the university, specifically flagged for the Folkways Project. The donor, who wished to remain anonymous, had apparently loved acoustic music and admired Professor Michael Asch. The call went out for people skilled in online writing, with an understanding of university policy and project work and strong communication qualifications. Teaching English, writing magazine articles and monitoring chatrooms had to combine to come in handy somehow, and after a process of three rigorous interviews and the inspired admission that I played the banjo, I was offered the continuity and writing position. I didn’t even have to read the fine print: I signed the contract before they could snatch it back and snicker, “You fell for it!”

 
Summer term at the university was just beginning. Abandoned by all except grade school teachers hoping to escape the classroom by getting advanced degrees and becoming principals, the campus became a lovely place. Suddenly, there was room to breathe, and even occasionally to perch at the coffee outlet of one’s choice in HUB Mall, the housing and retail enclosed street extending the entire width of the campus on its eastern, arts-oriented edge. I swear the campus landscapers plant hundreds of new trees every year. It’s such a shame that most students leave the campus for summer work or holidays back home just as the U of A is beginning to look like everyone’s dream of collegiate life. If it weren’t so warm in the July sun, you could almost expect to see a young Jimmy Stewart and Ronald Reagan, stroll past the Dentistry–Pharmacy Building, sporting raccoon coats and striped scarves, shouting “Twenty-three, Skidoo” and singing the “The Whiffenpoof Song.”

  Speaking of “The Whiffenpoof Song,” I was surprised I hadn’t found a version of it in the collection yet, since I was finding pretty much everything else as I familiarized myself with the scope of the collection, which my boss Dr. Fuller had advised me to do before getting down to any actual work. The plan was for me to read, listen and make notes for most of the spring, and by mid-summer I’d have enough of a handle on things to write the splash pages to all the sections of the website and have promotional material organized for the tie-ins to the Edmonton Folk Music Festival’s “folkwaysAlive!” stage, where the department would be recording new material for the collection. This was one of the big things the influx of new money was able to make happen: Folkways wouldn’t be just an amazing collection of vinyl; it was going to stay a living tool. Moses Asch would have been so happy.

  It was just as well I had all this research to do, otherwise I might have found myself totally at loose ends. My best friend Denise was down east all through spring session, doing research in Stratford, Ontario, and was taking her sweet time getting home, having detoured in Toronto for some shopping and shows. Steve, of course, was busy keeping the streets safe for the rest of us mere mortals, and I hadn’t had any teaching work over the intersession months since things started to dry up for sessionals a year or two earlier. The festival tie-in was fine by me, too. The only plans Steve and I had made for the summer was to attend the Folk Festival in early August. I was thinking that, with this new job, I might be able to write off the cost of the tickets. So, all in all, I was pleased as punch to get the job.

  The project made for a very nice working environment. Everyone, including the classy Dr. Cheryl Fuller, dressed casually, and although I wasn’t sure whether it was because of the nature of the project or the time of year, I wasn’t complaining. My protective coloration is campus casual, and I often get mistaken for a student instead of a lecturer, or in this case, researcher. It’s not that I appear so amazingly youthful; in fact I am pretty sure I look every one of my forty-two years. I think it has more to do with the fact that I wear my hair in a long braid down my back, favour jeans and sweatshirts, and always carry a backpack instead of a briefcase. I look like a student from the Eighties transported by some H.G. Wells sort of magic into the future, only to find my wardrobe has been raided by children less than half my age. Every twenty years or so, my clothes come back into fashion. What on earth would be the point of throwing them out?

  I was sitting in the corner of the Centre, headphones plugged into the stereo allotted to the desk I’d claimed, legs crossed yogi-style on the institutional tweed stacking chair. I was listening to Carter Family recordings on a Folkways compilation CD, reading along in the newish biography of the first family of American roots music by Mark Zwonitzer and Charles Hirshberg, Will You Miss Me When I’m Gone, and trying to take notes on my laptop. From what was coming through my headphones, I figured Sarah sounded like a man when she was singing, a sad man. From what was on the page, I had a feeling that Maybelle would have been someone I’d have liked a heck of a lot if I’d ever met her. The book was extensively detailed in its description of the valley they came from and the times they dealt with.

  It struck me that they were living this life around the same time as folks were homesteading in the northern part of Alberta, where I’d done quite a bit of research on the background of a novelist for my master’s thesis. It was likely that many of the people I’d talked with up in Grande Prairie and Beaverlodge had been youngsters at the same time as Sarah, A.P. and Maybelle. Somehow their stories of the times seemed of a harsher life, even though we always think the Appalachian hill folks had the worst of it. Maybelle’s husband was well off by anyone’s standards, and their trip into the nearest major city seemed cosmopolitan compared to a trek from Huallan to Edmonton around that time period. I think James Dickey’s Deliverance, or at any rate the film version of it, has a lot to answer for when it comes to the way most people think about hillbilly hardship.

  I’d been thinking it would be a great idea to work a concordance database that would bring up the music being played in various parts of the world at the same time as the piece you were looking at, to put it in a global context. While I was worried about having too cluttered a screen, I made a note to ask the web designers if it would work. It might be possible to find a way to have a pop-up sidebar people could deselect if they so chose.

  So, if folks were trying to understand how “Keep on the Sunny Side” hit the world, they might be interested to know that other songs recorded in 1928 included “Honeysuckle Rose,” “Big Rock Candy Mountain” and “Makin’ Whoopie.” There might also be some room for timelines of important events in the world brought up with each song. Dr. Fuller was interested in it all being international in scope, but within the realm of keeping a unique vision. We didn’t want to be spending time and money just to replicate the Smithsonian’s existing site.

  Whoever the anonymous donor was, he or she had specified that the money was to be used to enhance the Folkways Collection. The Department of Ethnomusicology was doing its best to honour that through the web-accessible database and the MP3 files of all the older songs beyond copyright that were cleared for public domain. That part wasn’t my job. Paul Calihoo, the Centre’s one full-time employee, was working his way through the provenance of each recording.

  My job, or what it looked like at this point, was to be the creative shaper and the writer on all the copy. While my rudimentary HTML was enough to slot in the elements I wanted to play with, I was just sketching the look of things. Eventually, the material would be pulled into shape by a couple of computer science honour students who needed research projects.

  The first thing I had deemed essential was to immerse myself in the entire collection, which was enormous. Think about lining up every single person who attended a folk festival in the past twenty years end to end, and you still wouldn’t have a proper idea of the incredible span Moses Asch had established in his vision. There was everyone from Pete Seeger to Allen Ginsberg. There were recordings of mountain music, street sounds and North American frog noises. I had several terrific biographies and music histories to read through, and some of them were already bristling with sticky notes. Two boxes of CDs burned from the original collection sat at my feet, waiting to be organized in their new home after I was through with them.

  I was cueing up the next CD and starting a new file on my laptop when I noticed Paul gesturing to me with that peculiar semaphore reserved for people wearing headphones. Pushing them back off my ears so they slid into a collar around my neck, I said, “Yes?”

  “The phone is for you on line three.” He pointed to the telephone at the corner of my workstation.

  “Thanks, Paul,” I said, reaching for the phone, and flicking off the power to the CD player for the nonce. It was Steve, who wanted to know if we could swing a dinner at the Blue Chair Café to hear Ben Sures that night. I liked the melancholy quirkiness of Sures’s songs as well as his sense of the ridiculous, so I agreed immediately. There was also a platter of nachos there with my name on it.

  Moses Asch was righ
t: there was a great music scene in Edmonton—a world-class symphony orchestra; the jazz scene, pioneered by the likes of Tommy Banks and Big Miller, was still going strong; and folk music was a mainstay. Connie Kaldor had lived here, as had Dougie Maclean; and everyone had played here, from Tom Paxton to Sarah McLachlan. Ben Sures was the latest in a long line of strong singer-songwriters to call Edmonton home. The Edmonton Folk Music Festival, while younger than Winnipeg’s and not quite so eclectic as Vancouver’s, was considered the friendliest and one of the most important on the summer circuit.

  So, if you were an old folkie, Edmonton was a pretty good place to be, especially in the summer. Steve was trying to book off the time for the Folk Fest, and I stood in line for weekend passes on June 1, since they usually sold out by about three in the afternoon the first day they went on sale. I’d been to several Folk Fests, but it was especially exciting to think of sitting on the darkened hill and snuggling up with Steve this year. Even if he had to work a shift or two, we’d have some time together. All in all, this had the makings of a fantastic summer.

  I turned the music back on, and was coordinating the track number with the liner notes, when I heard the shouting. The first thing that hit me was that I had forgotten to replace my headphones, but before I could, the muffled words in the background became clearer, and way more interesting. I sat very still, which is what you should always do when eavesdropping. I remained as part of the scenery and listened intently to what turned out to be a very heated discussion between Dr. Fuller and two middle-aged people who looked enough alike to be twins. Or maybe they’d been married forever without a dog.

  “I don’t care what sort of lawyers the university has, this will is not only invalid, it’s an embarrassment to my sister and me, and to our father’s memory!” I was right the first time, they were siblings.

  “Mr. Finster, there is really nothing to be gained by threatening me. I had nothing to do with your mother’s bequest to the Centre, but I know something of how university bequests work. I assume that if it has been announced to the world, then the lawyers have ascertained that it has been fully probated and acknowledged as valid. Furthermore, there is nothing embarrassing about the Centre’s work. I cannot see how the association of our work and your mother’s name, should it be leaked, would in any way inconvenience you or your sister.”