The Alto Wore Tweed (The Liturgical Mysteries)

by Mark Schweizer

  Mother Ryan, as she liked to be called, ignored my comments and was quite adamant. “Everyone will love it.”

  “I will hate it. And besides, I don’t seem to have the music.”

  She was not to be put off. “I’ll get the music. You teach it to the choir and we’ll do it on Sunday.”

  “We generally rehearse our anthems weeks in advance, Loraine.”/font>

  “Call me Mother Ryan.”

  “Hmmm,” I said. “This Sunday the choir is doing Duruflé’s Ubi Caritas along with the Veni Creator Variations. I generally don’t do the French literature, but the anthem is beautiful. It fits the lectionary and the variations can be done with the choir during communion. Also, if you check your list, you’ll find we’re scheduled to do the Mathias service music. Taking the service as a whole, I’m not sure that Kum-Baya will fit in well with all that.”

  She looked at me as if I was speaking to her in Swahili and had lobsters coming out of my ears. Then she smiled a cold smile.

  “The Bishop and I like to have a “blended” service—some old, some new. Just go with me on this.”

  This was news to me. I knew Bishop Douglas pretty well. He was a traditionalist and he always gave plenty of notice in regards to his infrequent visits. But maybe he wanted to see how his new appointment was working out.

  “The Bishop will be here on Sunday? Will he be celebrating?”

  “Well, you never know,” she said in what she perceived was a cutesy little-girl voice but came off rather like one of the munchkins from the Lolly-Pop Guild.

  She was lying like Ted Koppel’s hairpiece and I couldn’t figure out just who she was trying to impress. She certainly wasn’t impressing me and the other two members of the worship committee. Denise Franks, the lay reader for Sunday, and Beverly Greene from the Altar Guild, were old-school pillars of the church. They had grown up in the congregation, married here, had their children baptized and they, in turn, had married here also. They and their families were part of the fabric of St. Barnabas. Now they were sitting very still, not saying a word, the blood draining from their faces.

  “I’ll tell you what,” I said, looking around in my most Grouchovian conspiratorial fashion. “I’ll give you a chord and you start the song. Then I’ll pick up my banjo and the choir and I will join in on the chorus. We’ll just follow you.” I was mugging about so much that with a cigar in my mouth and a comb under my nose, this performance would be worthy of A Night At The Opera.

  I thought surely she would see I was being wholly sarcastic. Certainly the other two committee members knew it. She just smiled smugly and ticked the task off her to-do list. No. 3—Emasculate the choirmaster. Check.

  “That will be great,” she said, grinning at me like the possum that just ate the nightingale. “Everyone will love it.”

  “Yes, you keep saying that,” I added as the committee’s collective eyeball size went from ping-pong ball to saucer.

  What I forgot to tell her was that I don’t play the banjo. At least not in church.

  What she forgot to tell me was that she was not a singer by any stretch of the definition.

  And the Bishop missed the whole thing.

  • • •

  The exact word I used to describe Herself’s unaccompanied Sunday morning solo to my good friend Tony over coffee on Monday was “interesting.” The exact word most of the choir had used was “hilarious.”

  Father Tony Brown had retired after sixteen years at St. Barnabas. He had come to St. Germaine just a year before I did and had hired me as the organist and music director when I moved to town. There was a bit of finagling to do, such as convincing the seventy-five-year-old organist who had been there for fifty-two years that it was time to retire. But Father Tony handled everything with such aplomb that there weren’t any ruffled feathers.

  “She needs some time to define her own ministry,” he said, sipping his coffee. “She’s just defining it more abruptly than a priest with a little more experience might.”

  “Can we talk frankly?” I asked, getting a little irked. I had hoped for a little more sympathy.

  “Nope,” he said. “I have to be on her side. Perhaps she doesn’t yet appreciate your skewed sense of humor.”

  “No, she might not,” I said, an evil smile crossing my lips.

  I had assumed she would stop singing after the first chorus when she realized she was going on alone, but she charged ahead, glaring up at me in the balcony and singing all four stanzas—the last two in a quivering voice of rage. “Someone’s praying Lord, Kum-baya.” She had sounded vaguely like Ted Kennedy doing an impression of Willie Nelson on a bad day. Altogether, it might not have been the effect she was hoping for. The congregation, for some strange reason, didn’t join in, but sat there, mute, as if suddenly struck dumb by the Holy Spirit.

  “Sorry,” I had said after the service, “I thought you were just kidding about Kum-Baya. But you did a great job.”

  She had just glowered at me, words trying to form on her lips but not making their way past her twitching jaw muscles.

  “Everyone loved it,” I had added.

  • • •

  Meg cornered me after choir practice on the next Wednesday.

  “We have guidelines, Meg. Musical and liturgical guidelines,” I said, mentally preparing my defense. “And we don’t sing Kum-Baya during the worship service. The words don’t even mean anything.”

  “That may be, but there’s a larger issue at stake. You have to allow her some leeway in how she perceives and presents her ministry. And besides, you’re the one who makes up the guidelines.”

  “You’ve been talking to Tony. And anyway, I don’t make them all up. Some are actual guidelines agreed upon by the worship committee.” I was in over my head and I knew it.

  Meg leaned into me like a fighter going for the knockout. “What about the Jesus-Squeezus Rule?”

  “OK. I admit I made that one up. But it’s a good rule.”

  The Jesus-Squeezus Rule declares that the choir of St. Barnabas will never willingly sing any anthem that rhymes any word with “Jesus.” The text of the offending anthem that precipitated the injunction included, “Here’s to Jesus, the one who free us, just come and squeeze us.” The J-Squeezus Rule was adopted unanimously by the choir and only broken once a year.

  “And the exception?” She knew she had me, but I thought it was a low blow and totally irrelevant to the discussion at hand.

  The exception to the J-Squeezus rule came about five Christmases ago when I, having had one too many eggnogs at the choir Christmas party, composed an anthem in which I rhymed “Holy Jesus” with “moldy cheeses.” I admit that it was a bit of a forced rhyme. However, in my own defense, it was a shepherdic madrigal and moldy cheese was integral to the libretto. The choir laughed so hard in rehearsal that it was decided to grant the lovely anthem an exemption and we performed it to great acclaim at the 11:00 service on Christmas Eve and every Christmas Eve since.

  I nodded, my shoulders slumping in mock defeat. “Yes, there’s always an exception.”

  “So you can bend the rules a little...”

  “You don’t know her,” I argued. “I’ve looked into her cold, serpent-like eyes. She has no soul.”

  “Let’s just give her a chance,” Meg said firmly.

  During the second Sunday of her régime, Mother Ryan offered a “prayer for a womyn in her season,” womyn apparently being the singular form of the new collective noun wimmyn, including a mention, among other things, of “the flowing menses of our ancient rhythms.” There was a lot of squirming and sniggering going on in the bass section, and it was the general consensus that it was going to be a long winter.

  “Let’s just get rid of her,” Meg said firmly.

  • • •

  The phone’s unexpected ring jolted me out of my reminiscences. Meg had turned the volume up on the ringer again. I tended to leave it on “mute,” explaining to Meg that I much preferred to pick up the vibrations of the ph
one ringing as I passed in close proximity to it—something that had never actually happened yet. And besides, if someone wanted me, I had a pager.

  “The phone’s for you,” she hollered over the Lyle Lovett CD I had put on the Wave.

  “It wouldn’t be if you hadn’t answered it.”

  “It’s Dave,” she yelled from the kitchen. “And you’d better get it. He says it’s important.”

  I looked at my pager. I had turned it off. I clicked it on and it lit up like a mobile home on Christmas Eve. The police station. I decided I’d best answer the phone.

  As I said before, St. Barnabas Episcopal Church is my part-time employment, but my profession in the real world is that of chief of detectives—lieutenant grade. It’s an official title but, in actuality, I’m the only detective in St. Germaine. After discovering that “Would you like fries with that?” was the operative professional question from a guy with a masters degree in music composition, I went back to school in law enforcement and eventually got a second master’s degree in public administration.

  The other two cops on the force are Nancy Parsky and Dave Vance, a part-timer.

  “Hayden. We’ve been trying to reach you.”

  “Just a second. Let me turn the music down. Better? Why didn’t you just page me?”

  “I did. I don’t think you have your pager turned on.”

  “Hmmm,” I answered, pretending to try to discover what was wrong with the offending electronics. “Ah, there it goes. Whoa. Quite a lot of messages from you guys.”

  “Yeah. Right, boss.”

  I sighed. I wasn’t fooling anyone today.

  “You’d better get on down here,” Dave said. “Nancy’s already on her way.” Dave, generally a slow talker, seemed more animated than usual.

  “Whoa. A three-alarmer. What’s up?” It wasn’t often we had this kind of action in St. Germaine. “Did Connie Ray’s cows get loose downtown again?” I was joking, of course. Connie Ray’s cows were only a two-alarmer. “Should I bring my gun?”

  “It probably wouldn’t hurt.” Dave was somber and not at all his usual jovial self.

  “Jeez.” I said, rolling my sleeves back down. “I’ll swing by the church and get it. I left it in the organ bench.”

  “Organ bench?”

  “I figure it might come in handy.”

  Dave could never figure out when I was kidding him and when I wasn’t. I actually only had one of my guns in the organ bench. I kept one under the seat of my truck and the rest of them in a safe at my cabin.

  “We might as well meet you there then,” he said. “I’ll ride with Nancy.”

  “Meet at the church?”

  “At St. Barnabas. There’s a body in the choir loft.”

  • • •

  Dave and Nancy are both homegrown and both wanted to be on the force since they were in high school together. Dave went to the community college for a couple years, Nancy to Appalachian State where she majored in Criminal Justice. I admit that Nancy was an Affirmative Action hire, but she’s worked out fine and is a top-drawer cop. She never married and so is “on call” all the time. Admittedly, there’s not a whole lot of “on-calling” but she does get paid a little extra. We have one car and one cell for prisoners in the station house, but then, there isn’t a lot of crime in St. Germaine. Nancy broke our big case last year—several home burglaries. Someone was breaking into houses and stealing wine. It turned out to be the McCollough boy and the story was that he was trying to get money to buy video games, which his mother wouldn’t let him play anyway because they have no television set, much less a Nintendo. But the Nintendo Defense was the official version as told to Judge Adams, thus completing the plea agreement and garnering a suspended sentence. I stayed out of the whole thing since I knew the family. The wine wasn’t that expensive—twenty to thirty dollars—and he rarely took more than a couple of bottles from any one house. Nancy found it all under his bed. As the kid’s sister put it, “He jest ain’t right and we all knows it.”

  Part-time Dave watches the office and takes the phone calls between nine and three. We pay him minimum wage, but he makes ends meet thanks to a small trust fund set up for him by his grandparents. All 911 calls go down to Boone and they call them back up to us.

  My job is to keep everything running smoothly, which it does most of the time. When I’m feeling particularly bored or envenomed, I get my ticket book out from underneath the stacks of papers on my desk and start giving out speeding tickets around town. Unfortunately, word travels fast and traffic around town slows to a crawl until my nasty mood passes. I usually only get to give four or five tickets before all of the St. Germainites get the word. Afterwards, I tend to feel guilty and tear the tickets up. The odd person that does send in his money gets a gift certificate for breakfast downtown at The Slab courtesy of the St. Germaine Police Department. The good thing is that St. Germaine property taxes are so high that our budget doesn’t depend on us producing revenue through ticketing speeders like some towns around these parts. The bad news is that our taxes are so high. I, however, don’t live “in town” and thereby escape the unkind tariffs that are the lot of the rest of the unlucky serfs. Plus, I get to use the gift certificates for breakfast now and again. It’s just one of my many perks.

  • • •

  “I gotta run,” I said as I headed through the kitchen toward the back door, grabbing my sweatshirt off the nail behind the door. October tended to get chilly once the sun went down.

  “What’s up?” Meg looked concerned. The spinach pie and steak kabobs she’d been fixing for dinner were almost on the table. The food tempted me to leave the dead body to wait just a little longer. However, I could tell I wasn’t going to get any supper without an explanation. An explanation which, if I knew Meg, would only lead to more questions—questions to which I presently had no answers.

  I grabbed a kabob to-go.

  “Well, little dahlin’, it’s time for yo’ man to do some work for a change. Get your coat and a kabob and come on. I’ll fill you in on the way.”

  Chapter 2

  I slid the Rachmaninoff Vespers Service into the CD player as we pulled out of the drive. My blue ’62 Chevy pickup, although showing its age, was outfitted with a new state-of-the-art Jansen so system. I didn’t need the big speakers because they were situated right behind my head, but I got them anyway. I flipped over to the Nunc Dimittis. I loved to hear those Russian basses sing that low B-flat.

  “Hayden, when are you going to get a new truck?”

  It was the first thing out of Megan’s lips whenever she had to ride with me. She drove a three-year-old Lexus, courtesy of her ex.

  “I like my truck. It suits me.”

  “You could get anything you want. An Expedition maybe. Or a Range Rover. For God’s sake, you have over two million dollars in your accounts.”

  “Yeah, but this time last year I had about four. I can’t afford a new truck losing two million a year.”

  She laughed at that. “You’re not the only one who took a financial hit, you know. All the stocks took a dive. You know that when we invest...”

  “We’re in it for the long haul,” we both sang together, chanting the mantra of the investment counselor.

  The old truck was on its third transmission that I was actually aware of, and I suspected that this one was on the way out also. But I’d had the truck since ’83 and I wasn’t about to give it up. The odometer said 54,000, but I had put a notch in the hard plastic steering wheel every time the odometer had turned over. Added to that, it had obviously already turned over at least once when I bought it at a police auction with 24,000 showing—so I added one for good measure. Four notches so far. I hoped for at least a couple more.

  “Where are we going in such a hurry that we left the spinach pie for the rats?” Meg asked between bites of her kabob.

  “St. Barnabas. We’re going to St. Barnabas. And I haven’t seen a rat for days.”

  Meg had been concerned with rats in the
house since I shot one that was hiding under the bed in the loft. I shifted into fourth and turned onto the main road.

  “We’re going to the church? What for?” she asked, munching away. “I thought we weren’t going to the church supper. I just fixed a pretty nice meal.”

  “Well,” I said, trying to break the news gently. “It seems that someone was found dead in the choir loft.”

  I admit that I have never been good at delivering bad news with a great deal of delicacy, so it was really no surprise that I had to pull over briefly.

  “Who?” she whispered, as we cleaned pieces of the chewed onions and green peppers off the inside of the windshield. “Who was it?”

  “I don’t know,” I replied, pulling back onto the road. “Dave didn’t know either. He and Nancy are meeting us at the church.”

  • • •

  We really do have a lovely, quiet little town up in these North Carolina mountains. It’s sort of touristy for those tourists who know about it, but most of them head for Blowing Rock Boone or even Banner Elk. In the winter months we have plenty of snow, but no ski slopes, so our tourist season happens in the autumn when the colors are at their peak. In October, Mother Nature favors St. Germaine with more adornment than any one town deserves, most of it due to a town ordinance that was ramrodded through a closed council session by the mayor on October 15, 1961 forbidding the cutting of any healthy tree in the downtown area. At the time, the ordinance was viewed as antibusiness and anti-growth, but the $1000 per-tree fine kept most of the old vegetation intact, and since new construction was generally predicated on clearing unused land, most business owners chose to remain in their old buildings and refurbish them—all this at a time when it was much more fashionable to tear everything down and start from scratch. The upshot was that while most small towns were embracing the architectural style of the fifties and sixties, now known as “bad,” and eventually losing their downtown areas, St. Germaine remained pretty much as it had for the last hundred years. I might add that there is now a statue of Harrison Sterling, the old mayor, gracing the downtown park. As the plaque says—a man of foresight and wisdom.