“See,” said Meg. “I don’t mind driving this truck a bit. It’s just your old rattle-trap I don’t like.” She clicked on the stereo. I had a Burl Ives Christmas CD in the player and the strains of Have a Holly Jolly Christmas sounded forth from eight very expensive speakers.
“I’ve never heard Burl sound so lifelike,” Meg said.
The drive up to Pine Valley Christmas Tree Farm was dazzling. Most of the snow we’d seen on Wednesday was still hanging on the boughs of the pine, spruce and fir trees, and the ice that glittered on the bare rock jutting from the cliffs reflected the sunlight like diamonds. We discovered, upon our arrival on this frigid morning, that we weren’t the only ones to be hunting for our tree in mid-December.
Kimberly Walnut was exiting the parking lot as we drove in, a big tree tied and strapped to the top of her black Chevy Tahoe. She waved to us on her way out. Elaine and Billy Hixon were out talking to Ardine, and I recognized Dr. Hogmanay McTavish’s old gold Cadillac and saw his familiar rotund form out on the lot sizing up some Fraser firs. Brother Hog, as he was known to his flock, was an ex-evangelist who had been lured off the tent revival circuit by the prospect of full-time ministry at New Fellowship Baptist Church. He never looked back. Bud trailed behind Brother Hog carrying a chainsaw, and following Bud was another, smaller person whom I couldn’t quite make out. Ardine waved to us as we got out of the truck and crunched across the snow to the trailer that served as command central.
“Nice wheels,” said Billy. “I almost got me one of those Tundras, but then I realized that it cost more than my house.”
“It’s a rental,” I said. “I’ll be back in Old Rattle-Trap before you know it.”
“The blue spruces are on the lower lot,” said Ardine. “Y’all go pick out the one you want, and I’ll send Bud over as soon as he’s back from helping Brother Hog. Billy can cut his own.”
“I brought my own saw,” said Billy. “I even brought Elaine so she could carry the tree back to the truck.”
“Yuk yuk,” said Elaine. “You’re a riot. We’ll see you guys at the parade?”
“We’ll be there,” said Meg. She pointed down the hill into the lower lot. “Ooo, there’s a good one.”
“Who’s with Bud?” I asked, looking in the opposite direction, shading my eyes and squinting against the sun.
“Some girl he met called Elfie or something like that,” said Ardine.
“Elphina?” asked Meg.
“That’s it. Elphina. She told me it was her vampire name.” Ardine frowned. “If you ask me, she could use a few good meals. That, and a smack.”
I chuckled. “Well, tell Bud to watch his neck. We’ll wait for him down on the lower lot. Tell him to take his time. We’ll probably be a while.”
•••
It took us most of the morning to pick out the perfect ten-foot spruce, have Bud and Elphina cut it down, tie it up, and put it in the back of the pickup with Baxter. We headed down the mountain to St. Germaine with plans to have lunch at the Ginger Cat. We drove into town, slipped into my reserved parking place, stashed Baxter in the police station and walked across Sterling Park to the restaurant. It was a quarter to two when we finished our flaming Christmas pudding (the chef’s special) and walked back across the park to the judges’ stand. Nancy was standing at the top of the courthouse steps and gave us a wave when she saw us. We climbed up and joined her.
The judges for this year’s parade were already at their table and appeared to be taking their job very seriously, going over each applicant’s entry sheet and busily making notes before the festivities commenced. The St. Germaine crowd had already gathered around the edges of the park, as well as up and down Main and Maple Streets. This year’s head judge, Mr. Christopher Lloyd, looked up, smiled, and went back to his notes. His cohorts were Roderick Bateman, owner of Blueridge Furs, and Kimmy Jo Jameson, widow of Jimmy Jameson, the race car driver.
Kimmy Jo had gotten married again after Jimmy had been killed in a wreck, just after he’d won a race, but decided to keep her first married name since she was now in great demand as a speaker at women’s church conferences. I didn’t know her current husband, but word had it that he was a “couples minister” at a big, non-denominational church in Raleigh. Her book and video Bible study, Victorious Secret—a Woman’s Spiritual Guide to Purpose Driven Intimacy, had risen to the top of the Christian bestseller list. Kimmy Jo was our celebrity judge, but was still considered to be a local gal by the folks in St. Germaine, seeing that her dear departed first husband had been buried, along with his race car, in Wormy Acres. Kimmy Jo had heard about Our State magazine covering the parade, and since she was about to come out with a line of Christian lingerie and faithwear, she was trying to get all the exposure she could. Mr. Christopher was still waiting for word on his HGTV show, so he hadn’t quite risen to celebrity status. But he’d been offered the head judge position before Kimmy Jo came on board, and he wasn’t about to give it up.
Across the park I could see the St. Barnabas Youth Group working the crowd in front of the church before the parade started, hawking hot chocolate for a dollar a cup. The Holy Grounds Coffee Shop was selling coffee and muffins right across the street, and since Biff and Kylie Moffit were both Kiwanians, the club had let them set up shop in the crèche that had been constructed for the Living Nativity. Parade vendors with balloons, horns, Santa hats, cotton candy, and who knew what else—or for that matter, where these vendors came from—were traipsing around the square doing a brisk business with kids who had badgered their parents out of a five dollar bill. The air was dry and cold, and the wind we’d endured up at the tree farm had quieted: perfect weather for a Christmas parade.
Pete and Cynthia appeared behind us while we were surveying the sight before us from the top step of the courthouse. As mayor, Cynthia supposed that she should make an appearance on the judging stand before making her way down to the Piggly Wiggly, changing into her belly-dancing outfit, and climbing onto her float.
“Merry Christmas!” said Cynthia. “Great day, huh?”
“Great,” I agreed.
“Aren’t you going to freeze?” asked Meg. “How’re you going to shimmy in this weather?”
“I’ve got a flesh-colored body suit on under my clothes. And electric socks. If I keep wiggling, I should be all right.”
“Well, that hardly seems fair,” I said. “A body suit is cheating. We were hoping for an authentic, bare-midriff, middle-eastern rendition of Jingle Bell Rock.”
“You’ll get the Eskimo version, and like it,” snapped Cynthia. “I don’t know why I agreed to this in the first place.”
“Publicity,” Pete said. “There’s no business like show business.”
We heard the strains of the first marching band playing Santa Claus Is Coming To Town coming up Maple Street toward town, although we couldn’t yet see it.
“That’ll be Green Valley High School,” said Cynthia. “They’re first.” She sighed heavily. “I’d better get going.”
“How many bands this year?” asked Nancy.
“Nine, I think,” said Cynthia. “If they all show up. I was down at the Pig earlier. We were still a couple of bands short.”
“They’ll be here,” said Meg, looking around the town square at the lingering snow, the holiday decorations, and the bustling activity. “It’s a beautiful day!”
•••
Moosey and Bernadette came scrambling up the steps of the courthouse, each of them carrying two cups of lidded hot chocolate, one in each hand.
“We thought you might like some chocolate,” said Bernadette, handing one to Meg and another to Pete.
“Thank you very much,” said Meg. She took the lid off the cup and took a sip. “It’s delicious.”
Moosey handed one of his cups to Nancy and the other to me.
“Thanks,” said Nancy.
“Indeed,” said Pete.
“Thanks, Moosey,” I added.
Moosey waited until we’d all taken a sip
, then said, “That’ll be ten dollars.”
“Ten dollars?” said Pete, almost choking.
“It’s a dollar per cup,” explained Bernadette. “Plus the delivery fee and gratuity.”
“Delivery fee?” said Pete. “Gratuity?”
“Yessir,” said Moosey. “Pauli Girl says that’s usually twenty percent. She figured it up for us. “Four dollars for the hot chocolate. Four dollars for the delivery charge. Two dollars for the gratuity.”
“Pretty steep,” said Meg. “But never mind. It’s well worth it.” She handed me her cup and opened her purse to find a bill.
“Hang on,” I said. “This is all going to the youth fund, right?”
“Well...” said Moosey. “The four dollars for the chocolate for sure. The delivery charge and the gratuity should go to the deliverers since me and Bernie thought of it.” He shrugged his shoulders and gave us his lopsided grin. “Right?”
“Wrong,” I said. “You two give all that money you’ve been collecting to Mrs. Sterling, you hear? And I’ll find out if you don’t.”
Bernadette took Meg’s ten dollar bill and huffed in disgust. “All that work for nothing,” she said. Then she and Moosey turned and took the steps down to the street two at a time, then dashed across the pavement into the park well in front of the first band.
•••
Big Mel was a champion.
At the age of five, Melanie Louise Gedunken came off the cattle ranch her family owned in Texas and won her first beauty pageant by blowing away the competition in the talent department. She wasn’t a beautiful child, not by any stretch of the imagination, but, in a certain muted light, wearing a wig and a lot of her mother’s makeup (and before her permanent teeth came in,) she might have been taken as “cute.” Still, she was head and shoulders above her competition. Literally. Hence her nickname, Big Mel. Melanie’s talent—the one that cinched that early title of “Grand Supreme” in the American Royalty Tiny Tot Pageant—was tap-dancing. She took it very seriously, practicing until her mother begged her to stop breaking all the tiles in the kitchen.
At the age of seven, then five feet six inches tall and strong enough to throw and castrate a calf in three minutes flat, she took up the baton, and twirling became her passion. Throughout her formative years she won prize after prize in her age group at the National Baton Twirling Championships in the categories of Solo, Strut, Two-Baton, and Three-Baton. Big Mel graduated from high school (having reached her final height of six feet four) as the top-rated twirler in the nation, and her tap routines in the Dance-Twirl division garnered her a full scholarship to the University of South Carolina where she majored in Physical Education with a specialty in kinetics.
Big Mel married after graduation and moved to Boone (her husband Eric’s home town) to open her own studio featuring tap, twirling, gymnastics, and her championship philosophy. Eric had long since left the union, but Big Mel wasn’t interested in re-marrying. She poured her passion into inspiring children to walk (and tap) in her size fourteen shoes.
The trick, thought Big Mel, to making The Mud Creek Tapping Academy and Training Center a viable contender for the Grand Marshall’s Prize in the St. Germaine Christmas Parade was to give the crowd what it wanted. The foundation of her float was a flatbed trailer, thirty feet long and eight and a half feet wide. She would have used her forty-eight foot trailer, but it was too long to make the turns downtown and thus against the rules. The beds of both special competition trailers were floored with planks of unfinished white oak to give the greatest percussive resonance and resilience to the tappers. Giant public address speakers, positioned in the back of the pickup truck pulling the float, could be heard as far away as Blowing Rock when Big Mel cranked up the volume.
She planned carefully. Her thirty foot trailer had two-hundred forty square feet of tapping area. If all the tappers stayed within their two square foot radius, Big Mel could put every one of her fifty tappers on the float, twelve of her best twirlers, a stable, a manger, several wooden sheep, and still have room for the grand finale she had planned for the judges. Big Mel had taken her exhibition to competition after competition and had a wall of trophies to show for it. Today would be no different.
•••
The temperature was hovering around thirty-five degrees when the Green Valley High School Marching Pioneers and dance team passed the reviewing stand. If the wind didn’t kick up, I thought Cynthia would be just fine in her body suit. Meg had her hands pushed deep into her pockets now that she’d finished her hot chocolate.
The band marched to a halt, turned and faced the judges and played their now signature Santa Claus Is Coming To Town with the dance team acting out “You better watch out, you better not cry,” like the highly skilled thespians they obviously were. The band finished to applause, spun sharply a quarter turn to the left and marched on to a lively drum cadence. They’d play again once they exited the square. I looked around to try and pick out the reviewer for Our State, but then realized that I wouldn’t know him even if I did spot him.
Following the first marching band were a couple of classic 1930s cars decorated to the nines with flashing Christmas lights and wreaths, then a stagecoach being drawn by four horses from the Jumpin’ Jehosaphat Gem Mine in Newland. The Pipes and Drums from Grandfather Mountain turned the corner and let loose with a sound that was meant to strike terror in the hearts of the Highlanders’ enemies. Instead, the ten pipers piping and the twelve drummers drumming were met by another round of applause from the crowd.
On and on came the floats: the Junior League of St. Germaine; the Praise Team from New Fellowship Baptist Church; the 4-H Club; the waitresses and mascot from the Bear and Brew; Ian Burch and Flori Cabbage and the other members of the Appalachian Rauschpfeife Consort, all dressed up in their snoods, jerkins and breeches. These floats were interspersed with smaller entries: the Shriners in their little cars, Mr. Terwilliger’s Marching Pigs, the Horn in the West cast tossing out peppermints, and the Bullwinkle Moose giant balloon. Bullwinkle, unfortunately, had to make his way around the outside of the town square due to the overhead power lines, but we could see his colossal head poking around the steeple of St. Barnabas as he floated by on the next street. Every fifteen minutes or so another band would come marching through.
One sentimental favorite was the marching handbell choir from Lord’s Chapel. They played a very nice rendition of—what else?—Silver Bells, arrayed in white robes, angel wings, and halos glowing with the power of LEDs. As the handbell choir finished their arrangement in front of the judges, complete with gentle choreography, we could just see Cynthia’s float coming into view at the corner of the park. Behind her was Santa, the traditional culmination of any Christmas parade, high atop his sleigh and being pulled by a John Deere tractor. In front of Cynthia was the last band of the afternoon, a high school from Lenoir, and ahead of the band, taking the last corner before pulling up to the courthouse, was Big Mel.
The Mud Creek Tapping Academy and Training Center’s float managed to tastefully combine the sacred and secular by placing the stable of Bethlehem squarely at the North Pole—not the literal North Pole, but the one that served as home to elves, directionally impaired penguins, Santa and Mrs. Claus, and the candy-cane forest. Wooden, cut-out sheep peeped out shyly from behind the red and white striped foliage.
Along the parade route Big Mel had her little tappers rap-tap-a-tapping to Sleigh Ride, while the twirlers free-styled through their three-minute routine. The fifty tap dancers, none of them taller than four feet and all dressed in little shepherd outfits, grasped the crooks in front of them in a two-handed Fred Astaire grip, and rowed with the rhythm of the shoes. Cute? This defined cute! There was a good-sized crowd actually walking on the sidewalk beside the float to watch the presentation again and again.
As the float turned the corner, the tappers were taking a breather, but Big Mel horse-whistled them to tapping position in short order. Big Mel was on the float, of course, dressed as the Virgi
n Mary and sitting in the stable beside the manger. Flanking her on either side were two wise men, their black tap-shoes sticking out from beneath their bejeweled robes. There was an angel praying on his knees in the hay-loft—a boy named Brian who had been studying at the Academy for several years. I recognized him from Bible School at St. Barnabas last summer—quite a little tumbler.
The float pulled up to the judges’ stand. Big Mel smiled from beneath her blue veil as she eyed the prize. Big Mel was a champion.
Sleigh Ride was a fine Christmas tapping song as far as it went, but Big Mel knew that it would take something special to win. She’d already won this year’s grand prize at the Fourth of July parade in Kingsport and the Veteran’s Day parade in Galax, and she saw no sense in reinventing the wheel. Leroy Anderson’s Sleigh Ride was okay for tapping the parade route, but for the competition she’d hung her star on another, more famous, composer.
The judges pulled out a new scoring sheet as the truck came to a stop, positioning the float directly in front of the courthouse. The two kings wasted no time in jumping down from the flatbed and pulling a set of hidden steps from underneath the trailer. The twirlers, dressed in angelic, gold-sequined spandex, poured quickly down the steps and took their place in front of the stage as the opening notes of Stars and Stripes Forever bellowed forth from the giant speakers in the back of the pickup.
Meg’s mouth dropped open. Pete’s eyes grew wide. Nancy gulped. I just stood there, unable to look away.
Fifty tap-dancing shepherds waited out the four-measure introduction, then attacked the oak stage like the little stars they’d been trained to be. Big Mel had shortened the march by cutting the beginning section and splicing the introduction straight onto the most famous part of John Philip Sousa’s magnum opus: the trio, the part that every child knows as “Be kind to your web-footed friends, for that duck may be somebody’s mother.” The speakers blared, the kids tapped their well-rehearsed routine, the twirlers twirled, and the two wise men, who had gotten back into the stable, were spinning a couple of flags that were emblazoned with “Merry Christmas” on one side and Mud Creek Academy’s logo on the other.
The Organist Wore Pumps (The Liturgical Mysteries) Page 10
