The Christmas Cantata (The Liturgical Mysteries) (5 page)

"Maybe I will," I said. "And those anthems aren't gloomy. They're contemplative."

"Oh, I see," said Meg. "Contemplative, eh? Pensive, perhaps? Meant to remind us of our mortality as we repent and prepare for the Glory of Christmas?"

"Exactly," I said. "Advent classics."

"Nonsense. They're gloomy. Gloomy and forlorn."

I could see her point. "Well," I agreed, "perhaps my choices in choir anthems have been a bit...wintry."

"Wintry, indeed," said Meg. "Whatever you decide to do, you'd better hustle. We only have three more rehearsals before Christmas Eve."

* * *

The cold
spell hadn't broken, but by ten o'clock on Wednesday, the temperature had climbed to a balmy twelve degrees. The sun was bright, almost too bright, and there still hadn't been any snow despite the frigid air mass that had settled over our end of the state. Ten o'clock on a December morning usually found the Slab Café packed. This morning, not. The only customers in the restaurant were Nancy, Dave, Meg, and myself. That is, if you didn't count Cynthia, who might be counted since she wasn't actually "on" this morning, but had just come in for a cup of coffee.

"Cynthia doesn't count," said Pete, gloomily. "She won't be paying for her coffee. So, including you four, that makes five customers this morning."

"We're not paying, either," said Nancy. "We get comped, remember?" She pointed at her badge. "To protect and serve?"

It had been Pete's practice to comp the PD's breakfast tabs at the Slab since he'd first been elected mayor some twenty years ago. In actuality, he'd managed to route some city expenditure money into his café coffers under the guise of mayoral/police departmental breakfast meetings. Unfortunately, once he'd been dethroned, we law enforcement officials still expected the courtesy of a complimentary breakfast. If Pete had needed the money, I might have felt sorry for him.

Pete sighed heavily. "Well, then, if I count Meg, who is
not
a mooching member of our city's finest..."

"I'm not," Meg assured him.

"That brings the grand total to two. Subtract the three free breakfasts I have to rustle up and I'm one in the hole. Usually by this time on a Wednesday in December, I've done $800 worth of business. I haven't done $800 in the last week."

"Things will pick up," Meg said, in as cheerful a tone as she could muster. "Why, even Hayden is in a better mood."

I nodded and sipped my coffee. "It's true. I am. And the weather is supposed to warm up a bit tomorrow."

"Clear up into the mid-twenties," Dave added. "It'll be like a heat wave."

Pauli Girl McCollough came out of the kitchen carrying a platter of country ham biscuits. "Here y'all are," she said, setting our meal in the center of the table. "This is some first-rate country ham. The biscuits just came out of the oven."

Pauli Girl was in her first semester of nursing school and home for her Christmas break. She was Ardine McCollough's middle child and the only girl. Her older brother, Bud, was known throughout the county for his wine expertise and was attending college at Davidson. I hadn't seen him since Thanksgiving, but I suspected he was close to finishing his fall semester. Pauli Girl's younger brother, Moose-head (Moosey for short), was still in elementary school and his school's Christmas break was still a couple of weeks away.

All three of the McCollough kids had been named by their father, PeeDee McCollough, who was, by all accounts, not a nice person. Not only did he name all three of his children for beer, he was not hesitant in disciplining them, or their mother either, using whatever was handy, be it a belt, a walking stick, or a car antenna. It was when he brought home a piece of airline cable he'd found at the dump that Ardine decided that she and the children might be better off without him.

These kind of "homemade divorces" occasionally happened in the hollers and when PeeDee McCollough disappeared, no one looked very hard. No one except for a certain Miss Charity Porkington, the leader of the unmarried women's Sunday School class at the Baptist church where PeeDee had been a regular attendee and deacon. After several weeks of futile calling, Miss Porkington drove up to Ardine's single-wide trailer and asked her, pointblank, what had happened to PeeDee, then fell weeping on the front stoop until Ardine went back into the trailer and came out with her shotgun. It was then that Miss Porkington saw the wisdom of relocating to another county.

"How about some scrambled eggs with this?" asked Dave, taking two ham biscuits and reaching for the strawberry preserves.

"No eggs," snarled Pete. "You'll get what you get." His voice dropped to a mumble. "...Bunch of fat-cat, freeloading city employees..."

"Why the change in your yearly holiday curmudgeonry?" Cynthia asked me. "Pete's been acting like this for a week now."

"Oh, I'm still embracing my inner Scrooge," I said, "but it sort of has to do with that music you gave me."

"Really?" said Cynthia. "So it's good?"

"It is good," I said, at the same time watching Meg catch Nancy's eye and soundlessly move her lips to form the words, "No, it's not."

"Quite frankly," I continued, "I'm intrigued. If it was performed on Christmas Eve at St. Barnabas in 1942, someone must remember it."

"So it's the mystery that woos you," said Nancy. It was a statement rather than a question.

"Perhaps," I said, "but it's a attractive and interesting work by a pretty good composer. If the choir can learn it, we can go ahead and perform it on Christmas Eve."

"No, we can't," mouthed Meg.

Chapter 4

Moving to Henry's hometown in the mountains was not something that she wanted to do. At least not yet. But he'd asked her to do it, to be his link to his parents to whom he was not particularly close. He felt guilty about that, and she agreed to move into his small house in St. Germaine. She did not know his parents well, but they were pleasant enough to her, seeing as she was the "right" sort of person and her family was well connected to the Vanderbilts.

She wrote to Henry everyday—sometimes twice—then sealed her missives inside a special armed forces envelope, addressed it carefully, walked the three blocks to the post office, and mailed it. She didn't know if he got them in a timely fashion, but suspected that he didn't. She didn't receive a letter every day, but then, didn't expect one. His letters to her came in packets. Maybe five, maybe twenty. There was no rhyme nor reason. She might receive a packet of letters on a Tuesday, then nothing for two weeks, then another packet on a Friday, then yet another the following Monday, and Monday's letters were actually written before the letters in the two earlier packets.

She tore through them as quickly as she received them, devouring Henry's words as soon as they landed in her hands, then spent hours putting them in sequence and rereading them, trying to get a sense of chronology, but not only that. She wanted to, needed to, discern his mood, his level of anxiety, his sentiments about the war; but he only wrote about the weather, about army buddies, about North Africa and the cities he'd seen. He never mentioned the battles he fought, the horrific death she knew he must be witnessing, the inhumanity that was part of his everyday life. She understood that he didn't want to worry her, but this did not assuage her fretfulness.

What she loved the most, and so read over and over, was when he wrote about their coming life together. He had plans, big plans. After he got back to the States, he'd work for the family for a few years to save money, then move into banking when the time was right. Henry Greenaway was going to open a bank. He had the connections from his Yale days and he already had investors. And he wanted her to follow her music career wherever her talent might take her. Children? Sure, but there was no rush. This was his dream...their dream...and he wrote about it often.

* * *

"Just what is this?" asked Marjorie suspiciously, thumbing through her copy of
La Chanson d'Adoration.
"Who is this Elle de Fournier? Some friend of yours?"

Marjorie Plimpton was generally the first person to show up for choir rehearsal. She had been a soprano in her youth, but by middle age, cigar smoking and gin consumption had taken her voice down to alto, and now, as she approached her eighties, deep into the tenor section. She swore that if she lived long enough, she'd become a bass even though she didn't much care for reading the bass clef. "I can do it," she said. "It just takes me a little while to count all those lecher lines."

"I don't know anything about Elle de Fournier," I said, "but we'll do some checking."

"Looks hard," said Marjorie, flipping the pages. "And it's all handwritten. This isn't one of them modern sounding thingys, is it? That stuff makes my back hurt."

"Maybe just a little," I admitted.

"Well then, lemme fill up," said Marjorie, getting up from her chair. She retrieved a small silver flask, a flask that had found a permanent home in the hymnal rack of her choir chair, and disappeared behind one of the organ pipe cases.

The choir loft in St. Barnabas Episcopal Church is located in the back balcony. When the terrible Thanksgiving fire destroyed our church building, we chose to model our new structure on the 1904 church, or as close to the original as we could. The choir, therefore, as well as the pipe organ, were relegated to the back balcony. Our architect and contractors added upgrades, as might be expected in a new structure—wireless internet, state-of-the-art sound and recording system, hidden sprinklers—but, on the whole, the similarity between the new church and the one that burned was amazing. If a person had visited the church five years ago, and not been back again until last Sunday, he or she might not have noticed any difference. I held out a hope, though, that whoever it was would notice the new pipe organ. It was a beauty.

The new organ had been designed and constructed by the Baum-Boltoph Organ Company right here in North Carolina. It consisted of forty-three ranks of pipes, thirty-four stops, and was perfect for the space: a long nave, two transepts (side alcoves that formed the "arms" of the traditional cross-shaped building), and enough pews to accommodate our two hundred fifty regular worshippers with room to squeeze in a hundred more for special services. The choir loft could seat thirty singers comfortably and the organ console sat next to the balcony rail, stage left and facing center, from which I played, directed, and kept a watchful eye on both the choir and the people down in the chancel where the altar was located.

The eight-foot-tall stained glass window at the back of the loft depicts a larger-than-life St. Barnabas as a mature apostle. His head is bald on top, and what hair remains above his ears is white. His beard is long and curly and he has a rolled scroll in one hand and a quill, clasped to his bosom, in the other. He wears his scarlet bishop's robes with a white and gold cope (since he was, after all, the first bishop of Milan), but eschews the mitre, and looks very much like a Roman senator, sandals and all. This is a nineteenth century depiction that has very little to do with what Barnabas might have looked like, but it is an accurate copy of the old stained glass window that had been destroyed in the fire. The inscription reads "St. Barnabas, Son of Encouragement, Acts 4:36." Barnabas is also known as the "Son of Consolation," but we choose to dwell on the more "uplifting" aspect of our name saint. Occasionally, one of the children will sneak up into the choir loft and color St. Barnabas' toenails red using a crayon that has been thoughtfully provided for them in their worship bag. This drives Marjorie crazy and when it happens, she spends most of the sermon scrubbing St. Barnabas' toes with her gin-soaked handkerchief trying to make the aggrieved saint presentable.