Back at the stove, I cut one of the bicycle tube pulls off the slingshot and geared up a capo on the guitar and slid it up and down the neck, working chords for a while. Before the fire died and the kitchen got cold, I went and got the catalogue and turned to the page where the Harmony guitar stood in stateliness and mystery beside its case.
I really didn’t have to go to the catalogue to see the guitar; it had been fixed in my mind for well over a month. When I trudged through my potato-picking stint for John Cobly; when I approached the brook in the early morning darkness listening for splashes around the trap area; when I skinned a muskrat by lantern light in the shop with the sour burnt kerosene smell mingling with that of the musky, raw carcass; when I rolled a pelt inside out onto a pointed board, nailed it on and scraped off the lumps of fat; when I mailed the silky-haired, stiff hides wrapped in heavy, brown paper tied with binder twine, that guitar hung in the back of my mind like a vision.
It all came together a few weeks later, when The Old Man picked Wally and me up after school with the wood sleigh and pointed to a hump in the buffalo at the bottom of the sleigh. “There’s a dangerous machine in there I got at the post office. Better wait ’til you get home to find out what it is. The frost won’t do it any good.”
Then there was that awe and excitement of opening the triangular box in the kitchen, smelling the fresh newness of the guitar and holding it. Wally’s bow, strings and rosin were strategically placed inside the box. He grabbed them like a starving cat and disappeared.
But he was back that evening. I was too wrapped up in my new guitar to go over. He had his fiddle, with the new strings on, new bow, rosin and all, in a potato sack.
“Going to try some potato music, are youse,” The Old Man said. He was laying on the couch smoking his pipe and peering over his glasses with a wry look.
“Let’s see what youse can do. How about ‘Saint Ann’s Reel’?”
“I’m a little cold right now,” Wally said.
“Good way to thaw out your fingers.”
We got set up and Wally got off after a few false scrapes with me flailing away best I could with the lice comb I was using as a pick. The pick Alban Gallant gave me broke and it hadn’t dawned on me that I could have gotten a bunch for ten cents when I ordered the guitar. When we stopped we sat looking at The Boss like two hounds hoping for a bone. We couldn’t tell much by his expression; he had his hand over his mouth. When he finally took his hand away, he had a bemused smirk.
“Not bad,” he said. “Youse could pretty well tell what youse were trying to play.”
“As if he’d know,” Nanny said, her knitting needles clicking, “the old goat. Youse sounded lovely. Youse should get in on the school concert. They’d love to have you.”
“Think so?” Wally said.
“Sure.”
“Think we could have a tune in your parlour, just this once, Mrs. Jackson?”
“Sure. The Queen Heater is lit. It’ll be nice and warm.”
“Go into the little room at the side; leave the door ajar,” The Boss said.
We hadn’t really considered the Christmas concert before that. But by the time Wally went home we were sold on it. With our new equipment, we thought ourselves quite the professionals and we went at it pretty well every night right up to when they started practising for the concert.
It was customary for the teacher to begin giving the concert assignments—the skits, songs and whatever—amidst the daily lessons at school. We worked so much each day until the last two weeks, when we took everything to the hall full-time right up to the big day.
Our teacher had that up-beat exuberance all teachers seem to have when we approached her. “Bring your instruments,” she said. Next day, she set us up front by the blackboard with everyone else watching stiff, still and big-eyed. Of course, Wally was set on ‘The Barley Corn Reel,’ or the gist of it, which was no doubt somewhat less than we imagined. Wally’s bow arm locked right off, making the bow veer at angles. His jaw and tongue were working kind of out of sync, too. But we worked away, finally locking into some semblance of music.
Most of the class, including the teacher, had their hands over their mouths, and some were bucking at the shoulders. They managed to hold back, though, except Gail Macdonald. Johnny Hately caught her arm and jerked her hand away from her mouth and she let out a yelp.
“Give them a hand,” the teacher said when we finished. She had to choke out the words. She didn’t take long getting us into our lessons.
Every so often, pretty well right up until recess, the odd person would be seized with shoulder bucks, taking sneak peeks at us with a hand over his or her mouth. At recess, with strained composure, the teacher told us to just practise at home until we moved to the hall.
On our way outside I said, “Wally, I’ve been meaning to tell you something. You know, your tongue lolls out and your jaw works sometimes when you play.”
“They do?”
“Yeah.” Wally gave me a dour look. In the yard, on two opposite snowbanks, divided by a large dip, most everybody else was forming up in two opposing lines for a snowball fight. “That’s got nothing to do with the music.”
“But it looks funny.”
“Ah, go on,” Wally snarled.
He went and stood by himself by the side of the school and waited until I picked a side and took the other.
“Let’s get Jackson!” Wally yelled and I was hit with a hail right off the top.
The battle was on then, and it raged, with the smacked crossing to the opposite side until one side gained the upper hand through attrition. Finally, Urban Gallant stood alone, jumping, dodging, slipping and kicking up his feet, with an all-out volley zeroing in until he suddenly turned into a leopard. Then we had an all-out, pelt-in-your-face, throw-down-your-neck tangle. And there was Wally at close quarters, lining me up, with his mouth open—and I half crammed, half threw in a loose gob of dirty slush. We went home in different sleighs that afternoon.
I didn’t know whether I should go to the Masons’ that night or not, but I wound up going. Wally was sitting on the stove tank whittling on a stick, scowling with his jaw jutting out. He didn’t speak, didn’t even look at me.
I talked awhile with Joe about the weather. Mabel was sewing a patch to the seat of a pair of overalls, her long fingers working the needle and thread, her thin shoulders slightly hunched, a set of square glasses perched on the end of her long, pointed nose. Jenny, who I found pretty in a skinny sort of way, with her pert nose, long, red hair and blue eyes, did her homework at the table as if I didn’t exist and never would.
I kept eyeing Wally, sizing him up before I spoke. I finally took a chance. “Well, Wally, going to have a tune?” I said.
He didn’t answer; just went on whittling. I waited. Finally, he climbed off the tank and shuffled toward the door to the attic stairs. “You coming?” he grumped, halfway to the door.
We were barely getting started when Wally stopped and said, “You’re out of tune.”
“You’re still sore about what I said, ain’t you?”
“Ain’t sore about nothing. Get in tune.” We went through the tuning for a while, the plunks of the fiddle and the up and down wings of the guitar strings augmenting the gloom of the shadows on the wall, the feeble candlelight hitting the side of Wally’s face, making his scowl grotesque. After he hitched around a bit, we finally started off.
There are times in learning activity, music or whatever, when things just hit home. Maybe it was because Wally was miffed and forgot himself; maybe it was incentive brought on by the upcoming concert; maybe it was just timing. Whatever the case, for two star-gazers in Joe Mason’s attic that night, their lips blue and their fingers stiffening with the cold, things hit home and “The Barley Corn Reel,” though not in the full sail of a schooner, at least in the steady chop of a row boat, took off. I’d say the continuati
on record for “The Barley Corn Reel,” with Wally sawing away, his jaw set firm, a devious, victorious glint in his eye, and me dinging my best, was eternally broken.
When we finally stopped, Wally blew on his fingers and said, “We ain’t doing nothing but ‘The Barley Corn Reel’ right up to the concert.”
I held my fingers over the candle. “Wouldn’t it be safer to go with ‘Saint Anne’s Reel’?” I said.
“Nope, not fancy enough.”
“We better go another round and get out of here before we freeze up solid.”
“Okay,” Wally said, with the fiddle under his chin again. “Here we go. Old Tyme Fiddle Champ, Fiddling Wally Mason with Picking Jake Jackson: ‘The Barley Corn Reel.’”
The first day at the hall, we were an entity unto ourselves, as far as we were concerned: sitting by the pot-bellied stove, glowing red around its ring, and listening to the older girls harmonizing “Noël” on the short steps leading to the stage, Bob Scovie’s random plunks at the keys of the piano standing kitty-corner to the stairs, and now and then the rattle of hard coal scuttling into the stove and the door shutting to the clang of the coal scoop—all echoing in the high-ceilinged room smelling of old varnish, burning coal dust and must.
Jackie Wall just about got things going right off. He was flapping his arms and crowing like a rooster at centre stage and a poke from behind the curtain knocked him off. He hit the floor with a ka-thump and came barrelling at us. He just missed the chair Wally had laid his fiddle on in a potato sack. It took me and the teacher and a couple of others a while to keep Wally from going at him with the coal scoop.
Except for our rehearsal as two dumb shepherds, we sat by the stove, with Wally burning his initials into a scrap of board with a hot poker. He had a sober, determined look on his face, sitting there with a twist of smoke curling past his ear.
When our time came, the teacher got us set up on stage with the air of someone who would just as soon do something else. The rest of the class sat up close in the chairs as if this was something not to be missed. But Wally kicked in big time, with a glaring stare, getting a fair junk of the tune and the rhythm— no tongue loll, his jaw set.
Everyone, including the teacher, stared with his or her mouth open. I had to kick Wally’s chair and knock him off key to get him to stop; he must have went ten turns. The teacher had her hand flat on her face. “My,” she said, after a dead silence. “My, my, my. Well, I guess we’ll try the tea skit. I guess you boys can just keep practising until the concert, at home on your own.”
Wally peered sidewise at me when we got back to the stove. “We showed them owl hoots a thing or two,” he said.
For the rest of the time, we went through the rerun lines of skits and solos, in that halting try-again manner, with the teacher’s patient prompting, spaced by the bumps and scrapes of the old sofa, table, chairs and back wall arrangements. Outside of our shepherd stints, Wally sat beside me at the stove in supreme smugness. I guess you could say we both sat that way.
The big day finally came. The trustees hauled in the tree, with its fresh, septic smell, and we dragged the big cardboard box of decorations down from the attic, decorated the tree and nailed up wreaths and bows.
Wally and I didn’t bother to go home for supper; we came in the morning wearing our good clothes, with a few extra sandwiches in our lunch cans so we could rehearse with the place to ourselves.
The place looked magical and cozy now, with tiny, coloured lights peeping among the wreaths frilling the cut-out “Merry Christmas” at the jaw of the stage, and the decorations on the tree: the raining icicles, silver sprig lines, coloured balls and crepe ropes.
I can’t remember the like ever happening, but if a thief had plied his trade in the district on concert night, he would have done well.
Only the sick, infirm and the odd person with some kind of grump didn’t attend. They came singular and in groups, in overcoats and buckle overshoes, with that quiet, wondering expression reserved mostly for church and funerals. And they squatted to the chairs, glancing around and murmuring barely above a whisper, sometimes moving to a better viewing site.
Except for when we trooped on stage for the opening chorus to the piano plunks of “Marching to Georgia,” and our shepherd stint at the nativity scene, when my beard came unstuck and I had to hold it to with my hand, we sat and watched the others as they wobbled their way through, taking nervous glances at the audience sitting in semi-darkness, intent on catching every word, be it choked, flubbed or stammered.
Our time came after the intermission and the hard fudge sale, when the usual lump or two rattled off the walls and the odd bald head while Jim Mackie and Alban Gallant played a few reels and the Gallant children stepped her off.
We made our way to the two chairs set up for us at centre stage. Wally’s movements were quick and deliberate, his eyes like burning coals. He cut in before the teacher finished her introduction. We were pretty well into the tune before they got the curtain up.
I guess you could say the inevitable happened then. Although I don’t think it would have if they’d given us more time to rehearse. It was kind of like getting hit with a bucket of cold water when you’re not expecting it. That dry, deserted feeling grabbed me and froze me up, knocking me off stride; it grabbed Wally at about the same time and everything flopped into squawks and offbeat guitar dings.
Wally kept at it though, kept working away with his bow arm locked. Then I saw his jaw start to work. Then his tongue lolled out and he bit down on it with it still a ways out and still trying to work. When I looked at the crowd, the few faces I could see had an awestruck look. Then it was like something simmering into blowing up until we were hit by a gale of laughter that came in a belch. I glanced to the off-stage corner and saw the teacher standing with her shoulders bucking, her face beet red and her lips pursed shut. But Wally limped away, with me getting a ding in now and then. I was worried he might bite off his tongue. The roar of laughter carried on for some time after they dropped the curtain on us, with Wally still working away like he was trying to catch up.
In the end he stomped backstage, stiff-necked and with his peculiar belligerence. “I ain’t playing no more,” he said. “Laugh at a fellow like that.”
Over in a corner, behind one of the movable back walls, Linda Robbins and Janet Fuller were waiting for their skit. Janet was finding it hard to keep a straight face, but Linda came over with something akin to sympathy in her blue eyes and on her plump face, framed by blonde curls. “That’s okay, Wally,” she said. “You gave it your best and you did a good job.”
That wasn’t much help, since even he knew he didn’t.
Wally went and hid in the basement right up until the closing chorus and he wasn’t too fussy about coming out then, but the teacher coaxed him to it. Trouble was, when everyone saw him again, there was another belch of laughter. He stood singing with a shoulder hitched up and his head canted like a dog in the rain. Then he realized he was the centre of attraction, and his face lost its stiff twist. He squared off to the audience with his head back, and the roar got louder.
I guess if Santa hadn’t come about then, they’d have laughed until they got home. But he came, ho, hoing his way in from the cold. He went through his usual greeting, then handed out the gifts—prearranged by the hat raffle—amidst that bluster and excitement brought on by presents, the giving and receiving.
They kind of lost it again when Santa dealt Wally his. “Ho, ho, ho, to fiddling Wally Mason from someone who cares. Now I wonder who that could be?”
When everything was all over and we were getting on our overcoats and overshoes in the buzz and muddle, big Stewart Lucas, with his paunch bulging from his open overcoat, his open overshoes flapping, his piano key teeth going from ear to ear in his big, round face, came and said, “Wally, I never thought you had it in you. To put on a show like that must have taken some doing. And Jake, that
get up you had on your guitar made it all the funnier.”
The Old Man and Nanny went home just after we played. One of the milk cows had bloated that afternoon and John Cobly had to come over and tap her. They wanted to get home and keep an eye on her. I went home with the Masons.
It was a cold, dark night. There was a slight wind, but you could still hear the squeak and crunch of sleigh runners amidst the bumps at the pitches, coming in ragged cadence along the string of rigs, with the surprised yelps and laughter. Wally and I weren’t laughing, though. We rode in glum silence.
The Boss was sitting by the radio listening to Inspector Faraday wedge out a grudging “Merry Christmas” to Boston Blackie.
He eyed me sideways with a smirk on his face before breaking into a full smile. I put my guitar away, then sat with my feet on the oven door and drank a cup of the hot chocolate Nanny had left simmering on the back of the stove when she went to bed. When the program finished, The Old Man told me to take a look at the sick cow before I went to bed and turned in himself.
I usually stayed up late on Christmas Eve, but I felt like going to bed early. My musical dreams had taken a licking, to say the least. Buying my new guitar didn’t seem like such a good idea now. I put my clothes on and got the flashlight. When I got to the heavily iced doorstep, I paused and looked up. A few stars had broken through. There was a quiet stillness disturbed mildly by the raucous bark of a fox and a crump from cracking ice in a distant field. I could see the glow of lights from the city off to the north and, as if by some cue, the northern lights began to flare and dance from beyond.
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