Cadillac Cathedral (19 page)

“They’ve only got two rooms left,” he said, after coming out of the office. “You think that’s enough? One for the men, one for the women?”

Lucy glared at Peterson, but Peterson said he didn’t feel like driving all over town in search of another motel. “We’d probably just get lost.”

“Are you sure of this?” Arvo said, as soon as the women had gone inside to sign for the rooms. “Lucy and Cynthia in the same room? Neither one is likely to thank you for it.”

Peterson’s grin was wide. “If they can’t get along, one of them could bunk in with us or curl up in the Henry J, take their pick.”

Because their rooms were off the second-floor veranda, Arvo claimed the one closest to the wooden staircase for himself and Peterson.
Then he drove the hearse up close to the staircase and brought out a short cable from his tool kit. He wrapped the cable around the front axle, then brought both ends around a four-by-four wooden post and snapped the combination lock closed. It might have been better to have the hearse out of sight from the road, but here at least he would be able to check on it now and then without going outside in his underwear.

Though he had often checked the phone books to see whether a Myrtle Birdsong still lived in this city, he thumbed again through the several pages of Bs. And there was indeed an M. Birdsong still listed at the familiar address.

He had no trouble recalling his boyish terror while climbing the front stairs the first time — a practice session for a school concert — expecting to find dead bodies in every room of the house, laid out on tables or stacked against the walls. Of course she had laughed when she noticed his anxious peering about, and had explained that her father’s business was kept to a separate building facing the street behind. Though he’d let her ride in the hearse, she said, she’d never been inside where he works. “Though, if I decide one day to follow in his footsteps …”

Of course she had laughed, and immediately denied any real interest in the business, though she’d sworn she’d never leave her father for a career in any other city. In fact, he’d later discovered, she had for a brief while owned her own small florist shop in town before marrying the man her father had taken on as his assistant. A man, it turned out, who believed that a woman should not be the owner of a business — even a business that sold boutonnieres, corsages, and bouquets of cut flowers.

While Arvo phoned out to have pizzas delivered — Hawaiian for himself, pepperoni for the others — Lucy brought up a case of beer
and a carton of ginger ale from Peterson’s trunk and placed them on the little table in the men’s room. While they waited for their dinner to arrive, Lucy conducted an informal and un-asked-for seminar on the art of raising chickens. Maybe she thought some lesson could be found in it. “The first thing you gotta know is that chickens are stupid,” she said. “You can’t expect to get any sense out of them. And you can’t expect them to understand or obey an order.”

Peterson said he’d known a few people like that. He might even have married one or two of them. “At least with chickens you can put them in a pen and know they’ll stay there. They don’t go on expensive shopping sprees.”

“They’re pretty easy to behead if you catch them with an axe in your hand,” Lucy said while glaring at Peterson. “But they still go squawking headless all over the pen with blood flying everywhere.”

“I’m not sure we needed to know that,” Cynthia said. She opened a box of chocolate brownies and set it on top of the television set. “For after the pizza. Baked last night, iced this morning. In case you got impatient and ate the banana loaf somewhere along the way.”

Petersen got to his feet. “Shoot! It’s still in the car. I’ll get it!”

“Teacher brought us treats,” Lucy said, not unkindly. “The second thing you need to know about chickens is that if they’re given a chance they’ll peck one another to death. Watch what happens if one of them gets a little scratch. They won’t leave her alone until they’ve pecked at that spot of blood long enough to kill her.”

“Too many people in one motel room could be much the same,” Arvo suggested, convinced she had her reasons for bringing this up.

“For all I know they may think they’re helping her out by pecking the blood away,” Lucy said, “but the fact is, unless you rescue the injured chook, they won’t stop until she’s dead.”

“Sounds like people in stories I’ve read,” Cynthia said. “Shakespeare,
the Bible, Faulkner. If I’d known all this about chickens I might have had less trouble getting the students to read.”

“Sounds like politics too,” Arvo said. When silence followed this, he added: “Poor ol’ Martin.”

Once they’d eaten most of the pizzas and Cynthia’s baking, and had drunk a cup of coffee made in a plastic contraption that only she knew how to use, Arvo suggested that the rest of them could do whatever they wanted with their evening but he wasn’t going to hang around a motel room when he could see Carmichael’s family performing in a concert.

He could have knocked on Myrtle Birdsong’s door this evening as easily as tomorrow morning but he wasn’t ready yet. All along he’d assumed he would be making the call as they were about to leave for home, when there was no chance of looking as though he’d come for a meal or a long evening of conversation. If he stopped by tonight she’d feel she had to invite him in, and he’d never be sure if she was being polite even while resenting his intrusion.

“What sort of concert is it?” Lucy said. “Remind me.”

“Old time music,” Arvo said. “Fiddles and banjos and singing. I have four tickets if we need them.”

Lucy’s hand dismissed the tickets, the fiddlers, the singing, and those who indulged in such activities. “What I’m going to do is shop.”

“Fine,” Arvo said, “but Carmichael would be hurt if he found out we were in town and none of us turned up.”

Lucy laughed — a little contemptuously, Arvo thought. “You really think he’ll notice if you’re not there?” When Arvo didn’t respond to this, she added, “So go! Once I’m back from shopping I’ll keep an eye out the window so your precious hearse isn’t stole — though I can’t imagine why anyone would want it.”

After Arvo had asked the young man behind the front desk to
look up from his book now and then to check that no one was monkeying with the hearse, they drove off in Cynthia’s Honda, first letting Lucy off at the city’s largest shopping mall and then heading down the street that would lead them farther in amongst the increasingly taller buildings and glass-fronted stores at the city centre. Here the church was easily found at the intersection of two commercial streets, where a line-up of people several abreast reached from the front doors down the several steps to the sidewalk, around the corner of the building, and halfway down the block.

“You didn’t tell us we’d have to fight our way in,” Cynthia said.

Fortunately, by the time they’d left Cynthia’s car in a basement parking garage the line had at least begun to move.

The church they were about to enter was built of pale smooth blocks of stone, with a tower that soared up past the leafy branches of chestnut trees. Peterson shivered. “I never been inside one of these, except for one long boring funeral long ago. You think we’re safe from being hog-tied and forced to kowtow to some priest?”

Cynthia elbowed him hard. “You think people are deaf?”

Arvo noticed in this early evening light that she had put on a little more makeup. She must have hoped from the beginning that this journey would include more than just a drive. Would Peterson agree to stop somewhere for a drink afterwards, before going back to the motel?

Once they’d got inside, the long pews were already crowded except for a space here and there only wide enough for a person on his own. It appeared they would have to split up. But Cynthia spotted what appeared to be space in the balcony — enough for three people to cram themselves into a back row if they got there fast.

“I bet the place don’t see this many people here on Sundays,” Peterson said.

“
Doesn’t see
,” Cynthia muttered, as though to herself. Then put a
hand over her mouth. “Sorry. A habit.” Once they’d found and claimed the vacant portion of bench, she said, “Hard seats like this is one reason I use Sundays to do all the things I didn’t have time to do in the week.”

“Sundays I try to sleep in,” Peterson said, “but Herbie gets up early and can’t stand waiting long. It’s his sighing and pacing outside my door that wakes me.”

Cynthia hummed as she studied the program she’d been handed at the door. “Is Carmichael’s granddaughter a Carmichael too?”

“She is,” Arvo said. “His oldest son’s oldest girl, I think. But she may not have kept her name.” It wasn’t easy to keep from elbowing the large woman to his left. This space hadn’t been as wide as it had looked from below.

“Here they are,” Cynthia said. “Just before the intermission. That could be good. If we’ve had enough we can leave right after and nobody’s feelings get hurt.”

They hadn’t long to wait before a happy gentleman in a black bowler hat came out onto the stage and played a rip-snorting tune on a banjo. One of those old-time dance pieces that seemed familiar though you couldn’t think of the title. After bowing to the applause, he welcomed everyone to the concert and introduced the first act. With arms thrown out wide he shouted: “Prepare to meet the future!”

The future turned out to be a long line of youngsters traipsing out through a back wall door to take their places across the front of the stage. Not quite teenagers, most of them, Arvo guessed — all holding a fiddle in one hand, a bow in the other, all wearing white shirts and black bow-ties. A lad who couldn’t be more than ten, wearing a black porkpie hat similar to the emcee’s, took the seat at the piano. He watched the fiddlers get settled. They watched him. His suspenders formed a large red X against the back of his white shirt.

Once silence had fallen over the room and everyone seemed to be
settled in place, the boy at the piano nodded once, and up came the bows atop the raised fiddles. Three more nods and as sudden as a slammed door they all flew at once into a whirlwind of fiddling. The boy pianist hunched over the keys, his black hat nodding in time to the chords, his left foot thumping the floor. He might have been an eighty-year-old man from the hills of Tennessee, swaying and nodding and stomping his foot. Bent over the keyboard, he watched his own hands then turned to watch the fiddlers, back and forth, back and forth. The young fiddlers grinned with the pleasure of this joyful race, kept their eyes straight ahead, frowned briefly through a bar or two — perhaps a difficult part — then went on grinning as though this pleasure had come as something of a surprise. For a while a palehaired boy at the centre played a melody that rose above the others, becoming a sort of game that briefly made him a soloist. When he came down out of his own line of melody and rejoined the others the audience applauded even while the music continued.

The applause, once they’d come eventually to a sudden stop, was a great thundering roar. Could a crowd this large be made up solely of relatives? Faces on every side grinned with pleasure, and several people muttered excitedly to neighbours. No doubt they thought a standing ovation would be called for if the evening had not just begun. What would they have left to do if things got better than this? If he’d stood up alone to applaud they would think:
That man should get out more
.

And probably they would be right. He went to no more than two or three movies a year. He saw concerts advertised in the paper that were twenty minutes from home, and sometimes they were concerts he would like to attend — but he didn’t bother going when the time came. He was sure he’d feel out of place if he went alone, but who did he know who would want to go with him? Most had their families to
go with. And neither Peterson nor Cynthia would have attended even this concert if it hadn’t been a spontaneous part of an excursion — a break from home, a novelty, a sort of tourist attraction. And complimentary tickets of course. Also, the possibility of seeing Carmichael here — someone they knew from up-home — or Carmichael’s family at least, performing in front of a room full of city-dwelling strangers.

Once the young fiddlers had played three lively pieces, a string of adults holding fiddles and bows filed out from wherever they’d been hiding and formed two more standing rows behind the young ones. This tune was much more complicated than the earlier ones, and included a couple of instruments Arvo had never seen before. The boy pianist was now blowing into a tube attached to a small keyboard he held in one hand while playing it with the other. Apparently someone had invented a hand-held piano to be operated by lungpower!

Around the curve of the balcony he noticed a group of women of perhaps his own age sitting together in a row. No men, no children. Hair was white or coloured a pale blonde. Chatting, laughing. Well-dressed city women having a good time.

When the fiddlers had disappeared behind doors again, the emcee walked out onto centre stage and took hold of a standing microphone. “Now brace yourselves for a real treat, folks. Tonight’s special out-of-town guests have come all the way from … well, from several klicks up the highway. If I told you they’d just flown in from Tennessee you’d be inclined to believe me once you’d heard them. These are true Country folk! True musicians in the Grand Ole Opry tradition, but from much closer to home. Please welcome the Iris Carmichael Band!”

He supposed he’d never before seen people he knew performing
on stage. Especially people he’d talked to earlier that same day. Iris had dressed herself up in a long dress of some striped material. She must have had her hair tied up somehow this afternoon, since he could not recall noticing it this long. Her bearded husband and the other fellow looked much the same as they had on Carmichael’s front veranda.

As the program promised, their first song was “There’s a Meetin’ Here Tonight.” Iris began it alone: “
Some come to dance, some come to play, Some merely come to pass time away …
” When she came to a sort of end to this, the two men joined in: “
Cause. There’s. A. Meetin’ here tonight. There’s a meetin’ here tonight. I know you by your friendly face. There’s a meetin’ here tonight.
”