Most Anything You Please

by Trudy Morgan-Cole

  seven

  I PRAY YOU LEND AN EAR

  1985–1989

  RACHEL

  “And what is it she’s doing at university again?”

  “Forklore. Some old foolishness. I don’t see how she’s going to get a job at that.”

  “It’s folklore, Nan!” Rachel had corrected Audrey a dozen times and now figured she had to be doing it on purpose.

  “You must be some proud of her, though. Goin’ to university,” said Mrs. Penney.

  “I don’t know what she’s at that for. Woulda been better off going to trade school, she coulda done a secretarial course or something useful.” The women’s voices continued to drift up the stairs behind her as Rachel headed upstairs.

  “Valerie’s young one did that secretarial course and she’ve been two year now looking for a job in it. She’s still workin’ part-time at the K-Mart.”

  “Well, see? If a girl with a secretarial course can’t find a job, what chance do she have with a degree in Forklore?”

  Finally, the door closed behind her and cut off their voices. Sometimes Rachel felt like a character in a story in which Audrey was the narrator. Audrey had been commenting on and explaining Rachel’s life to everyone who walked into the store for as long as Rachel could remember. Maybe she was an omniscient narrator: she might know more than Rachel did herself.

  Audrey knew, for example, that Folklore was a useless choice of a major, nothing that would ever get Rachel a job. Based on the people Rachel knew, the whole idea of having a “job” at some point seemed as remote as riding a unicorn anyway. Everyone she went to high school with was either drifting through university like she was, or unemployed, or gone away to the mainland. University, whatever the degree, at least postponed the future for four years.

  Saturday afternoons, and a couple of evenings a week in the shop: that was Rachel’s version of having a job, and she knew she was lucky to have it. Her shift started in half an hour; she had come in late last night, slept till nearly noon, and then gone down to the shop to get a loaf of bread. A slice of toast, a cup of coffee, and she’d be ready to face an afternoon behind the counter. She could have picked up a package of bacon—they still kept a small selection of meat products in the cooler—but Rachel didn’t want a big breakfast.

  Audrey glanced at her watch as Rachel came back downstairs after her coffee. She always did that, even if Rachel was early for her shift. “Don’t keep me waiting now, I got to stop into the Giant Mart before I goes out to visit Mom, and then I got to go all the way out to Treese’s. She got some soup made she wants me to bring out to Mom, though I don’t know why she couldn’t have brought it out herself. She takes advantage of me having the car, is what it is.”

  Rachel propped a library book up on the cash register and leafed through it; she had a paper due Monday and hadn’t started yet, although she had a few rough notes on index cards. She should have brought those down. She could still run up and get them; it wasn’t like the store was going to be that busy this time of day. Even the neighbourhood kids wouldn’t be in looking for candy till the afternoon; they were most likely still sprawled out in front of their Saturday morning cartoons. Rachel thought fondly for a moment of Huckleberry Hound, Heckle and Jeckle, Scooby-Doo. What were the youngsters watching now, she wondered? Someday you’d be able to get a Folklore paper out of this, Saturday morning television.

  She turned the idea over in her mind as she turned pages of her book, and tried it out on Larry Kennedy when he came in at half-past two to buy a pack of Export A. After paying for the smokes he offered her one and they leaned on the counter together, smoke drifting in wreaths over their heads.

  “It’s not folk art, though, is it?” Larry said. “I mean, not really—it’s mass-produced by the broadcasting networks, it’s just there to sell advertising, like everything else on TV.”

  “Maybe. But I mean, somebody’s still writing the stories, it’s still storytelling—I’m not sure it’s any less valid than, like, this fairy lore stuff I’m researching.”

  Larry was already grinding out his first smoke and reaching for a second; he was a fast, fierce smoker, especially when he was hungover. “But the fairy lore is real folk culture—oral tradition, stuff people pass down. A woman’s story at a winter’s fire, authorized by her granddam. That’s from Macbeth,” he added. He was the biggest show-off and also definitely the smartest person Rachel knew, and certainly the only person who would have this conversation with her, half hungover, on Saturday afternoon in the store. “Folk culture is about passing on legends, not selling candy bars.”

  “Don’t knock selling candy bars, that’s how my family built our vast commercial empire.” Rachel waved a hand around at the shelves. “Anyway, I’m not sure we can say it’s not folk culture if somebody’s making money off it. Haven’t people always made money off culture? Didn’t the Brothers Grimm have to make a living?”

  “Sure, but the people they got the stories from, the real old storytellers, you know, they were legitimate, they were genuine. There’s a purity to it, you’re not going to get that from Scooby-Doo and Shaggy.”

  Rachel shrugged. “Yeah, I guess. I’d still like to write a paper about cartoons though. Where were you at last night? I thought you were coming by Brenda’s place?”

  “I was going to, but I went downtown. This Irish guy was playing the bodhran at Erin’s Pub. You should have been there. It was amazing. A bunch of us ended up going out with him after. It’s true what they say about the Irish, how they can drink, you know. He even showed up the Newfoundlanders. You should’ve been there.”

  “What, to try to drink some Irish guy under the table?” She wished she had been there; it wasn’t until she was here actually with Larry that Rachel could admit to herself that she had spent the whole time at Brenda’s last night half-watching the door, waiting for him to come in.

  “No, for the music. There’s great stuff happening over there in Ireland, and some of it’s happening here too. Screw studying fairy stories: the music’s the real thing. That’s where our culture— whatever bit of it is left—that’s where it is. In the music.”

  “You keep thinking I care about music more than I do.”

  “You keep thinking you care about music less than you do.”

  This was their oldest argument. It began the day Larry had dropped by the house with Rachel to get something and saw her guitar. She rarely played it these days. Picking up the guitar stirred too many memories. Henry teaching her those first few chords. Playing pop songs after school with Vicky singing along. Everyone Rachel had ever played or sung with had disappeared, and if she sat down to play with Larry, as he kept nagging at her to do, he might vanish too, wispy as one of the smoke trails above their heads.

  And yet. She did play, alone in her room. Not Top 40 songs anymore. She bought a lot of albums, listened to all kinds of things, and then she dug through Nan’s country records and listened to some Hank Williams. One night she sang “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” and when she looked up, Nan was standing in the doorway. “I heard him sing that live,” Audrey said.

  “My father was a musician when I was a kid,” Rachel told Larry. “As much as he was anything useful. There’s nothing pure or authentic about Newfoundland music. I mean look at people a lot more successful than my father was—people like Joan Morrissey or Dick Nolan or whoever. What were they singing except tunes and rhythms ripped off of American country music and dressed up with Newfoundland words? This place has nothing of its own anymore. I’m sure it did one day, but those days are gone.”

  “No they’re not, that’s where you’re wrong! Look, you’ve heard Figgy Duff—”

  “They’re an oddity, swimming upstream against the tide. And don’t say Ryan’s Fancy either because they’re not Newfoundlanders, they’re Irish, so how is that any different?”

  “It’s different because—look, there’s no
point in me explaining. Come with me to Twillingate next week. I’m going on the weekend, you won’t even need to skip class.”

  The door pinged and a swarm of little snotty-nosed Husseys and Cadwells moved in to the store. The Husseys all looked exactly like Loretta and Claude, who were both in Rachel’s class at various times. Surely the Husseys she went to school with couldn’t be having kids of their own already, but could Lorraine’s mother still be producing kids? It seemed there was a never-ending supply of Husseys, though no corresponding demand.

  “Missus! Give us a bag a jawbreakers!” shouted one of them. Nan would have had these little buggers whipped into shape the minute they were through the door and they’d be asking for stuff properly, probably even saying please, but it was all Rachel could do to keep an eye on them and make sure they weren’t stealing stuff.

  “Just think about it,” Larry said over the swarm of tangled heads. “Twillingate. Next Saturday. Bring your guitar.”

  RACHEL

  There was tea in the cups, smoldering butts in the ashtray, and Purity Jam-Jams and Lemon Creams on a plate in the middle of the table. Effie Mifflin gave them tea and biscuits and apologized that she had nothing homemade; she had made a fruitcake but her grandsons had just polished it off yesterday before they went up in the woods. The chit chat and pleasantries went on for an hour before, almost hesitantly, Larry pushed the red Record button on his portable cassette player. “Now Mrs. Mifflin, you promised you’d sing for me, remember?”

  “Oh, you don’t want to hear me sing.”

  “No I do, I really do.” Never mind that he and Rachel had driven four hours from town and booked a room for the night in the Albatross motel in Gander, just to spend Saturday afternoon listening to this seventy-eight-year-old woman sing folk songs.

  “I can’t carry a tune like I used to. Now my sister, Rose, she got a lovely voice. Just like a nightingale, Rose is. And she got some memory for songs. I gets halfway through and I forgets the words, like. But Rose, she knows these old songs, twenty and thirty verses to ’em, and she can go on for hours.”

  Larry glanced at Rachel. How far away did Rose live, she could see him wondering, and was a trip possible? “And where is Rose now?” Rachel asked.

  Mrs. Mifflin touched a hand to her chest. “Oh, Rose have been gone this twelve year now. A cancer of the breast, it was. Poor Rose. I likes to imagine I can hear her singing, sometimes, when I’m going around the house, doing my work. What a lovely voice.”

  The cassette spun, recording all the old lady’s protestations, her arguments that it would have been far better if they could have recorded her dead sister singing. Finally, Larry coaxed a song out of her. “Now this is an old one, my grandmother taught it to me and Rose. Rose could have made a better job of it….”

  Twas in the merry month of June

  When the rosebuds all were swellin’

  Young Jamie on his deathbed lay

  For love of Mary Ellen…

  Her voice was lovely, if a bit worn by age and cigarettes. It had a clear, sweet quality, and as she sang Rachel understood a little bit of why Larry loved to do this, why he wanted to go to tiny coves and bays and record old people singing songs before they died. There really was something pure about it—not that this woman didn’t have a TV or radio, but the song reached back to something older and more isolated than that, to a time when songs and stories were handed down, grandmother to granddaughter, father to son. If this woman’s grandsons only stopped by to get a piece of fruitcake before heading into the woods, something would be lost.

  The song—which had many, many verses, and the singer didn’t stumble over a word once—was clearly a version of “Barb’ry Allen.” A song sung in England at least three hundred years ago, and collected in different versions all over the world since.

  “It’s got to be pure oral tradition—where else would she have learned it, or her grandmother?” Larry said as they drove away from Mrs. Mifflin’s house, cassette tapes full of songs, bellies full of the fishcakes she insisted on giving them for supper. “That means that song probably came over from England with the first people who settled this cove, and people have been singing it, learning it, changing or mis- remembering the words ever since. I’ll check in the archives when I get back—I know other people have recorded versions of it here in Newfoundland, but I don’t think anyone has got this exact version.”

  “Which is good, right? It means it’s more—authentic, or whatever.”

  “Yeah.” Larry’s fingers tapped and drummed on the steering wheel; he was full of energy, in constant motion. Recording songs was like doing a line of coke or something for Larry. Not that he actually did coke, as far as Rachel knew—in fact she didn’t know anyone who did, all her university friends were into copious amounts of beer and weed and nothing stronger—but she couldn’t imagine any drug would get him much more charged up than three hours of listening to an old woman sing folk songs.

  “Those other ones, the local ones—those are important too though, right?” Mrs. Mifflin had sung a song about her great-grandfather who was lost out on the ice at the seal hunt. “Rose used to sing this, it was lovely,” she had said before launching into it.

  “Hell yes. Those are even more important. She’s probably the only person alive who knows them. Before we had this, before people could go around and record songs, these things would just be lost. Gone forever, if none of the younger generation wanted to learn them. And they didn’t, mostly, because our generation is crap, and all we care about is the Top 40 and MTV and whatever other crap comes up out of the US on cable. By the time we have kids it’ll all be gone. Everything, a whole culture, washed away.” The jittering hadn’t stopped, but he had gone from excited to agitated in the time it took to turn back onto the main road.

  “Right. And that’s why you do this.”

  Larry shook his head. “No, it’s not enough. I mean it’s important, it’s got to be done, but what good is it, if recordings of old songs sit in the archives at the university? Sure, someone can dig them up in a hundred years—if they can still play cassette tapes—and hear Mrs. Mifflin singing a song her grandmother taught her, but it’s just—it’ll be like, I don’t know, reading some Greek or Latin shit. Caesar’s Gallic Wars or something. It’ll be dead, on tape or on a page. If people aren’t singing it, it’s not alive.”

  Rachel saw that this genuinely upset Larry, and later, in the hotel room, she understood why he had asked her to bring her guitar, why he brought his own. He wasn’t interested in this just as an archivist; this was more than Forklore to him. He didn’t want old songs pressed like dead roses between the pages of dusty books. He wanted to sing them. And he wanted Rachel to sing them too.

  Larry played the tape, guitar cradled in his arms, trying to pick out the tune as Effie Mifflin sang about her great-grandfather dying on the ice. “It’s got a lovely little thing going on there, that minor-key thing,” he said. “But she’s all over the place with the timing. Hard to tell how it was meant to go. In some parts it’s almost like a three-four time.”

  “Rose would have done it better,” said Rachel.

  She took her own guitar out of the case, because Larry wasn’t badgering her to play. He didn’t even seem to notice as she tuned, until they were playing together and Rachel said, “What if the whole thing was like that? Like in the three-four time, but faster? Way faster, and with percussion.”

  “A bodhran, maybe.”

  “You’re obsessed with the bodhran.”

  “It’d be a totally different song if we did it fast.”

  “But isn’t that the—you know. The whole point of it?” Rachel suggested. “Like it’s this really sad thing, and she sings it like that so it’s what you expect. But speed it up, put in a drum, like it’s some kind of dance tune you’d sing at an Irish wake when everyone’s half-cut, and then—bam. You know. He’s dead there on the ice, and
his eyelids are frozen together, and it just hits you. The contrast. Or whatever.”

  Adding “or whatever” to pull back her words, make them less definite, was a trick she had learned arguing with guys in class. But she didn’t need it with Larry; he was nodding, his fingers speeding up on the strings as he played. “Right, right, right…how does the next verse go? Dammit, play the tape again.”

  An hour later they had it, the verses—the four best ones, leaving out the other seventeen—ingrained in both their memories, the haunting tune with its new, faster tempo. Rachel played lead guitar and Larry strummed along, thumping his guitar with the heel of his hand to simulate the beat of the bodhran. They sang it together, alternating lead vocals as they alternated the verses about the sealer dying on the ice and the wife waiting at home for him, seeing his token come to stand by her kitchen stove at the same moment he closed his eyes and let them freeze shut.

  “It needs a chorus,” Larry said. “None of these old songs ever have a chorus.”

  “She’s got lines she repeats over and over, though. Like the way it says, he never will come back no more. Or when it’s one of his verses, it’s I never will come back no more. You could build a chorus out of that.” And that was enough to set Larry off, fingers flying over the strings, blending the words into the melody they already had.

  That morning, on the highway out, Larry had said, “I, um, I booked a room in the motel out here. I would’ve booked two but I couldn’t afford it. But it’s got two beds. I asked for that. Just so you—you know, I didn’t want you to think. You know.”

  “Oh right. Of course. Of course not. Uh, thanks.”

  It was the most awkward conversation they had ever had. But what else could you say? Come on this trip with me, we’ve never even kissed or gone on a date but should we sleep together? You had to say something out loud, to get it off the table.