Hang Down Your Head

by Janice Macdonald

  “Well, I’m researching a particular project, and I don’t have access to Dr. Fuller’s appointment book. Maybe you’d like me to get Paul for you?” I pulled my headset off my neck, gracefully tangling my braid in the electric cord. As I unbent my leg, my knee decided to give out, so that as I stood I almost tipped right into Finster’s arms. This business of getting middle-aged would be fine if your body didn’t decide to let you down from time to time. I caught myself just before I lost all dignity whatsover and stood up, face to face with the man who obviously had a personal vendetta against my work. We were almost eye to eye. While I’m tall for a woman, Finster himself wasn’t all that imperious. He probably topped out at six feet, and wore heels to bring himself up to his personal ideal. His charcoal summer weight wool business suit was cut exquisitely, but that didn’t surprise me, given his status as the son of one of Edmonton’s leading families. What did surprise me was the yellow hard hat he held in his left hand. He followed my gaze and smirked again, which seemed to be his default expression.

  “We’re the contractors for the LRT stations’ additional pedways. I’m expected on site in ten minutes. I just popped in here to see if I could talk some sense into your boss about this ridiculous project my mother decided to toss my inheritance at. It seems, though, that your boss doesn’t keep regular hours. What can one expect from a woman in the arts? If she does show up, tell her to expect a call from me. I’m not going to take this lying down, and she’d better be ready.”

  He strode out of the Centre, making the door shudder in its frame just as Paul appeared from the back vault carrying an armload of sheet music that needed rebinding. His eyebrows shot up inquiringly.

  “Mr. David Finster,” I said. “He wants Dr. Fuller to know he’s not going to take it lying down.”

  Paul shook his head in disbelief. “I don’t know what he thinks he’s going to accomplish by getting all tied up in a court case contesting the will. It’s not even as if he needs the money. From the signs on the hoarding, it appears as if Finster Construction has a lock on half the new projects in town.”

  I thought about the light rail transit stations Finster had mentioned. Those at Health Sciences, McKernan/Belgravia and South Campus had been opened before those at Southgate and Century Park, but the whole south line still seemed like a novelty. The landscaping was just starting to take hold along the line. New elements like tunnels and overpasses were being finessed into shape. The scuttlebutt was that the city was pushing to expand all over the city, northwest to NAIT, into Mill Woods in the southeast and down Stony Plain Road to the west end. Eventually, the dream was to take it all the way to the International Airport. If Finster’s company was contracted to build even half the pedways involved in all those stations, he had no need of his mother’s money. So, if he wasn’t hurting for money, then this was personal. I didn’t like the thought of that. Money you could run out of. Hate just went on and on.

  The thought of this job going up in smoke was just more than I could bear to think about. I stopped the CD machine at my carrel and tidied up my notes, tossing my notebook into my backpack. I told Paul I was going to take a long lunch, thinking that a walk by the river might clear my head enough to get back to the big picture that was fuzzily just out of reach. Paul nodded, busy with his binding tools.

  “If Dr. F comes in, what should I tell her?”

  “Tell her I’ll be back around two. I’ll be in the library after lunch looking for a book on the blues.” I shrugged into my hoodie and hauled my backpack over my head and onto both shoulders. The right shoulder I’d cramped up when I’d been caught out by Finster was still hurting.

  As usual, it was about ten degrees warmer outside than in the Fine Arts Building. I held my face up to the sun like a starved flower. There was something so unsettling about the sort of vitriol Finster was filled with, even if it wasn’t directly at me personally. I knew that, if Finster had known my actual purpose there, I’d have been flayed alive with his snide commentary. Damn. Why did he and his snooty sister have to come around and ruin what was looking like the best job I’d ever managed to land? I headed toward a bench in the Arts Court where I liked to eat lunch, wishing the world wasn’t burdened with the presence of David Finster.

  Man, I really should learn to be careful about what I wish for.

  4

  ~

  After finishing my lunch, I cut through the Earth Sciences parking lot and headed west on Saskatchewan Drive and on down the hill, wandering past the statue of Emily Murphy, one of the Famous Five who petitioned for the vote for women, and I smiled at the kids rolling down the gentle hillside of well-tended lawn.

  The Edmonton river valley, designed by Olmstead, the same fellow who was responsible for Central Park and Boston’s Ribbon of Green, consists of a continuous set of parks running through the entire city. Bike trails, walking trails and cross-country ski trails connect one park with another, and in several places, footbridges span the North Saskatchewan River.

  I decided to stay on the south side of said river and head east along the riverbank. I could come up to the university near Kinsmen Park, past the LRT bridge, and return to campus back along Saskatchewan Drive. It would make a good loop, and I could clear my head. I conscientiously tightened my glutes and made little circles with my wrists as I walked, trying to get all the usefulness I could out of my exercise. Sitting for a living was a dangerous thing. Given that we humans are basically a bunch of water and gel in interestingly shaped Baggies, sedentary lifestyles tend to make the innards spread ever downward into an indeterminate blob. I was opposed to that happening on aesthetic principles, and tried in whatever way I could to reverse the pull of gravity.

  Gravity was certainly doing its best to best me as I huffed my way up the steep incline and stairs near the south end of the High Level Bridge. It would be nice to get into the controlled climate of Rutherford Library after this. The sun and exercise had pushed my normally chilly metabolism into a bit of a sweat, so I figured my exercise had done its bit. I stood at the top of the stairs, in the rounded turnaround bit of Saskatchewan Drive, and took several deep breaths, with my hands on my hips. I really did need a regular exercise schedule: I was too young to be winded, or at least too vain.

  I walked a bit slower past the various university-owned houses along the Drive. The Human Ecology house looked chirpy and shiny, and the Western Board of Music house behind it had piano sonatas floating out a front window. Of course, there on the corner was The House, where I had held an office when I was employed by the English department. After getting my MA, I’d spent a couple of years as a sessional lecturer and really enjoyed the lecturing and connecting with all the diverse students, although one of the best of the lot had been gruesomely murdered. As a direct result of that, I’d spent some quality time in the dark on the basement stairs of that House with a broken ankle. To be fair, the whole adventure had led to meeting Steve, but surely there are better ways to get a date.

  I jogged across the street and down the darkened path by the Humanities Building. Two young women in turn-of-the-last-century clothing were playing croquet in front of Rutherford House, while another one was tending some herbs in pots. If my best pal Denise had been in town, we could have gone for lunch, to the lovely restaurant in the sunroom of the historic site. I was missing her a whole lot, but her research in Stratford was likely going to mean at least a book chapter, so I’d just have to suck it up. I turned left past the anachronistic croquet players and headed for the library.

  I climbed the stairs in the atrium that bound Rutherford North to its older companion, Rutherford South, where I tried to never go on my own. Those closed-in little stacks are not where you want to find yourself with unfriendly types, as I had once learned. On the second floor of the newer building was the music library, and I figured that, even if Karen’s blues book wasn’t housed there, I might as well use the computer where people actually knew me. I looked into the corner office area for Carmen, the music librarian, bu
t the plastic and metal gate was drawn across the counter. Maybe she was on lunch, or perhaps this was her day off. Between me being new to the crew and altered summer schedules, I still hadn’t managed to gauge when to find people anywhere. All I knew for certain was that Paul Calihoo would rather be working than practically anything else. I had even caught him in the Centre on his days off.

  Carmen was nice to talk with, but at least her absence meant I wouldn’t have to haul a box of CDs over to the Centre on my way back. I didn’t mind pitching in, but I’d just as soon skip a chore here or there. I pulled a stool up to the computer and did a search of the listings for Karen Hanson’s book. Today’s Chicago Blues was indeed in the stacks, and I scribbled the call number and wandered off to find it.

  I love the stacks of Rutherford North. There is something so absolutely right about a library, maybe because it’s organized on the principles of everything being in a particular place. Rutherford has clean lines of brick and blond wood, and is hushed without feeling funereal. I had spent long hours in various carrels that were dotted along the outside, windowed walls when writing my thesis, and it made me feel young again, or at any rate, younger, as I walked down the long rows of shelved books.

  Pretty soon I was out of the library and heading back to work through the walkway to HUB Mall and the connecting overpass to the Fine Arts Building from there. I stopped at Java Jive to buy coffee for myself, and almond cookies to share with Paul. I checked my watch as I moved back into the gloom of the Fine Arts Building. I’d been gone two hours. Not too bad.

  Paul looked like he hadn’t budged from his desk. He thanked me for the cookie and turned his attention back to his work. He was in the process of compiling a batch of Indian music for Dr. F to take to a conference, trying to find the best way of maintaining a consistency of sound levels between some pieces recorded in studio and others that were field-recorded using a Nagra reel-to-reel, and still others that had been recorded on cassettes. I backed away to leave him to it, and snuggled back into my corner of the Centre. My notes were as I left them, and it didn’t take me long to get back into the mindset I’d left when Finster interrupted me that morning.

  I turned to the back of the blues book and found a few of the names I’d been listening to. While I loved listening to the blues, I was never able to keep the players straight or truly understand the subject matter. I guess it’s true that you can’t have been to a) grad school, b) Disneyland and c) IKEA and sing the blues. I was just too much a child of privilege to really get it.

  Bluegrass, Acadian, Celtic and country music in general were another thing altogether. Being a western Canadian of any pedigree at all meant that your grandparents or great-grandparents immigrated to Canada at a time when having entertainment meant providing it yourself, long after the chores were done. Fiddles, banjos, guitars and even a melodeon found their way into the wagons heading ever westward. Nova Scotia fiddle tunes were as familiar to me as nursery rhymes.

  I was always fascinated with the collection of traditional music, tracing various songs from their earlier roots in the British Isles through to their cowboy and Appalachian counterparts. I didn’t think there’d be any problem writing up the folk strains of Asch’s collection. I was grateful, though, for any help I could get on the blues music there.

  One of my ultimate duties was to create a through-line for the new concerts on the Folkways stage at the Folk Festival later in the summer. If I could create a playlist for some sort of entr’acte tape to play between sessions, we could publicize the collection and show the range and connections between the contemporary folks we’d be presenting and taping in workshop.

  Trying to assimilate connections could be whatever you decide they should be, I was starting to think. Leadbelly’s delivery of what now seem like classics wasn’t even codified as “the blues” back when he began busking on the streets of Dallas with Blind Lemon Jefferson. So, should I keep Leadbelly with Mississippi John Hurt? Or line him up with the Delta Blues anthologies?

  Eventually, I pushed myself back from my desk and pulled off my headphones. Though the room was kept chillier than most places on campus to help preserve the recording tapes, I could feel my ears sweating slightly from being encased in the puffy leather earpieces. I pushed escaping tendrils of hair back from my face and checked my watch. I’d been sitting hunched over the blues book for nearly three hours. It was time to pack things up and head home.

  Paul’s desk looked as if he was still around, since he usually cleared away everything but the phone and pen holders each evening. He told me he liked to arrive every morning to a new canvas, and I knew what he meant. I shelved the Leadbelly CDs on the wall behind me in their designated L alphabetical area and tidied up my notes and books along the top shelf of my carrel space. In such a cramped area, it didn’t do to leave things untidy. My shelving practice was creating a CD formation for the newly burned copies of the collection, which could eventually be borrowed from the Centre. The original LPs would be stored in our new museum area in the old Arts building, as soon as the floors were determined strong enough to take the load of that much double vinyl.

  That was an interesting thing about the Folkways Collection. Determined that his records were going to last, Asch had them pressed on double the accepted thickness of recording vinyl. As a result, the grooves were deeper and the sound was still amazingly clear. Even so, the vinyl records had been taken out of circulation, and were going to be stored as artifacts. CDs were burned of every record, and copies made of all the liner notes.

  So, my evening tidies were in turn benefiting the Centre by collating and unpacking the boxes of newly burned CDs. Eventually they’d all be here and in active circulation, available to the interested student or alumnus. But they went through me first. You had to love a job like this.

  5

  ~

  I am in no way psychic, but it occurred to me that I might want to grill up the chicken breast in my fridge and slice it up into a salad of romaine and cress, just in case Steve managed to drop by. I knew he was on day duty through the week, but I wasn’t too sure whether he was at the station or floating.

  It was just as well I listen to the little voices sometimes, because I was folding laundered napkins and thinking about setting the table when Steve knocked and opened my apartment door.

  “How many times have I told you to lock this door?” he asked as he shrugged out of his shoes. “Anyone could walk in here on you. This building has next to no security and there have been all sorts of break-ins around campus lately.”

  “No one ever comes in but you, Mr. Policeman, but I promise to lock up more,” I said, coming into the front room to kiss him. “You’re just in time for chicken Caesar. Hungry?”

  “Starving.” Steve held me firmly, allowing me to lean back in his arms and look up into his face. It was something I didn’t think I’d ever take for granted, having this wonderful man loving me. Of course, I probably would—people manage to take the most amazing things for granted, after all. People worked nine-to-five jobs smack dab in the middle of fantastically beautiful places like Vancouver and Hawaii; they assumed their partners would always be there in the same way Edmontonians knew there’d be potholes in the spring. The trouble with all that complacency was that, at some point, a person might not be able to reach out in the dark and find their someone. I knew I’d be tempted to take Steve for granted—after all, that was part of the delicious joy of certainty in one’s life partner—but that I never should. Divorce statistics were enough to show me that.

  I noticed one of Steve’s eyebrows going up and realized I must have been staring. He started to grin and I felt myself blushing. The combination of his being a very good cop and my being a very lousy card player likely told him everything I’d just been thinking. As if he needed any more confirmation of how completely appealing he was to me. I pushed myself backwards from his chest, and motioned toward the dining area.

  “It’s all ready to eat. I was just about to set th
e table. Come on.”

  Steve carried the bowl of chicken and lettuce to the table, and I followed with a loaf of bread on the cutting board and the Caesar dressing. I’d plopped two ice cubes apiece into water glasses and set the margarine tub on the table already, causing Steve to raise his eyebrows one more time.

  “Expecting someone?”

  “I thought you might be dropping by. Call it woman’s intuition.”

  “Call it sheer luck. I was almost out the door when a call came through about a body being found. I was sure I’d be called back, but when the captain called for Taylor and Georgas, I jumped for the car. That would be the last thing I need, just when the festival season is starting up.”

  “Why did you think you’d get called back? Was it a body on campus? Where on campus?”

  Steve tucked one of the huge cloth napkins I’d snaffled at Value Village into the neck of his shirt.

  “Randy, you know I’m not allowed to discuss police business. Let’s just say it was close enough for me to worry and far away enough for you not to.” While he sawed himself a piece of bread, I tried to think of another conversational gambit, which admittedly was rather difficult with a corpse hovering in my metaphorical peripheral vision.

  “Are you still okay to have the time off for the Folk Festival?”

  “Not exactly, but I will likely be able to set my hours strategically.” Steve slathered margarine on the thick slice of bread with a flourish. “Mostly what I’ll be doing is liaising with the security divisions of the Folk Fest to go over their contingency plans, determine how many officers they need to hire, and how many will be provided within the spectrum of keeping the city peace, that sort of thing.”

  He paused to wolf down some salad, and I popped up to get more water.

  “Off-duty rosters are being set up in all the stations now so that officers can sign up to be available for festivals they themselves particularly enjoy. That way everyone wins.” He looked at me with a wince of concern, the look he gets when having to admit something, like having broken the bathroom doorknob.