Hang Down Your Head

by Janice Macdonald

  It was just turning five o’clock and Steve wasn’t coming by till seven. I grabbed an apple to tide me over and figured I would get a couple of hours’ work done before he arrived. Even though I had explained to Steve that Dr. F hadn’t been expecting me to put in full-time hours from home, it did feel sort of funny to be taking a holiday because Paul’s head had been bashed in.

  I took a jump drive to my laptop and transferred some of the documents from work over to my desktop computer in my office/dining room. I figured I could listen to some of the Folkways tunes while searching various databases for ethnomusicology papers on folk music and the collection of folk music. To my way of thinking, Moses Asch had been the twentieth-century Childe, and it wouldn’t hurt our folkwaysAlive! site to have some evidence that corroborated that claim. I Googled Childe Ballads and wasn’t surprised to see over 2,590 hits. The whole concept of searching out and recording for posterity is the connection I wanted to highlight, and I was looking for a good biography.

  I reserved seven books at the Edmonton Public Library and two more were going to be interlibrary loans through the NEOS system. I doubted I was the first person to consider the connection between Asch and Childe, and there were likely to be more supporters of people like Alan Lomax and Mike Seeger and Edith Fowke as the North American stand-ins for the historic collector of English ballads. However, it wasn’t a bad comparison, and Moses Asch was certainly a visionary with a scope beyond the imaginations of most. To determine from the beginning that everything recorded would always be for sale and in circulation, and to have that written into the agreement with the Smithsonian Institute when they took over the collection, was truly a great accomplishment. In most contemporary recordings and publications, it isn’t cost-effective to reprint a book or remaster a disc. Novelists published by small publishers often find it impossible to reprint a book, since the money has to come straight from the publishers’ own pockets instead of some grant for their new list. One Canadian publisher went bankrupt when a book of poetry won the Governor General’s Award and became a bestseller, requiring a reprint. Joseph Heller would have had a field day with Canadian publishing.

  Steve called from his cell as he was getting into his car, telling me to get ready as he’d only be about ten minutes. I ran into the bathroom to wash my face and hands and check my hair, grabbed a light sweater and my handbag, and went to the back door of the apartment to wait for him. Steve was going to pick me up in the alley, rather than double-park on the busy road out front.

  At seven, the sun was still pretty high in the sky. It would continue to be daylight till around ten-fifteen, before the hazy beginnings of evening drifted into twilight. Even though we had to endure darkness at four-thirty in the winter months as a result, I revelled in our long summer evenings. It felt as if you could accomplish anything in this place where you’d been given longer days in which to do it.

  Accurate to his word, Steve rolled up almost exactly ten minutes later and I got into the passenger seat and buckled up.

  “Where to?”

  “I have an outrageous urge for bread pudding,” he admitted.

  “Colonel Mustard’s it is,” I nodded. “I wonder what their soup is today.”

  We made it over to the north side via the Groat Bridge, and Steve whipped up the first exit ramp and onto 107th Avenue with the panache of someone who regularly drives flashing, marked police vehicles. I settled back in. The sun on my shoulders and the company made me feel like singing. I’d been considering all the tribute albums to various Folkways artists, and wondering where I might put links to them on the website. Maybe that was what made me start into “Mary Don’t You Weep,” having just been listening to Springsteen’s masterful rendition. I turned to look at Steve, who was smiling indulgently while keeping his eyes on the road.

  “Sing along!” I urged.

  “You know I don’t sing, Randy.”

  “Not even on rowdy old camp songs? Not even in the shower?”

  “Not even in my dreams,” Steve stated, turning left onto 124th Street and revving up to speed before he had to slow down a couple of blocks away. I pushed my back into the passenger seat and willed myself not to brace my feet on the floorboards or work my imaginary brake pedal. I am not averse to speed entirely; there are just times when I get nervous about hurtling through space in a ton of steel and plastic. Mostly, this feeling occurs when there’s a lot of traffic around, which wasn’t actually the case here. Maybe I was just tense from everything that had been happening lately, or perhaps my body had just had its quota of riding about in cars for the day. Maybe Steve needed to do less speeding and more singing. I just couldn’t understand why he didn’t feel the urge to warble from time to time. It was one of the major differences between us. He loved concerts and music in general, but he had no predisposition to making music of any kind himself, whereas I couldn’t imagine life without it.

  We made it to the restaurant within minutes, and lucky for us there was a parking spot open alongside it. Steve pulled in sharply and smiled the grin of the successfully landed pilot. I swear that he became a cop just because of the toys. We got out of the car and headed to the door of Colonel Mustard’s. I loved this restaurant, which combined a chic sensibility with hearty home-style cooking. We were waved in to a free table, where I snaffled the wall seat, making Steve pull out a chair across from me. The waitress handed us the menus clamped to their little clipboards and went off to get us a bottle of water.

  The soups listed were tomato basil and carrot curry. I opted for the tomato basil, with bread pudding for dessert. Steve ordered the meatloaf and, of course, bread pudding. I think there would be serious consequences if the owners ever considered taking Steve’s pudding off the menu.

  A look usually seen only on Raphael’s cherubim appeared on his face with the first bite.

  “This is all you really need, you know? Think about all the permutations and combinations of pastry and sugar confection that go into various desserts, but all you need is warm, sweet, melt-in-your-mouth bread pudding. The added consideration that it’s helping you to use items that would only get stale and go to waste anyway is a bonus. Why does anyone bother with anything else?”

  This pronouncement took quite a while to deliver, since he kept stopping to dig in and then to savour spoonfuls of his dessert. I happily ate along, nodding, although anything that even emitted a vague resemblance to an argument tended to trigger a knee-jerk reaction in me.

  “There’s no chocolate in it, of course. Lots of people would say the perfect dessert required chocolate,” I pointed out.

  “Lots of women, you mean.” Steve waved his spoon at me to make his point more forcefully. “What is it about women and chocolate, anyhow?”

  “Serotonin, isn’t it? Eating chocolate releases serotonin in the brain, and serotonin makes you happy, so you eat chocolate and you don’t mind being fat.”

  Steve laughed, and I bowed my head slightly to receive my due. He wasn’t done, though. “Not bad, Randy. Triptophan, I think, is what is in chocolate, along with some other compounds that elevate your happiness quotient with endorphins and stimulate your nerves much the same way as good sex. The thing is, though, that given the choice between good sex and Bernard Callebaut chocolates, very few men would choose the chocolate. I’m not so sure about women.”

  “Maybe we want sex with Bernard Callebaut.”

  “Seriously, I can’t imagine any guy I know getting that sort of cult-worshipper look in his eyes when discussing chocolate.”

  “I don’t go crazy for chocolate,” I countered.

  “That’s true, you don’t. Of course, you are unusual in so many ways. You’re one in a million, Randy Craig.”

  “You’re just saying that because you want the rest of my bread pudding.”

  “Well, it would be a crime to leave it.”

  “And you took an oath to prevent crime, after all.”

  Steve polished off what was left on my plate, which admittedly wasn’t m
uch, and we took ourselves out. Steve didn’t have any calls on his pager, so we headed back to my apartment, where we sublimated any desires for chocolate I might have had for quite some time.

  20

  ~

  As Steve had to be up for early report, he didn’t stay over on the grounds that he didn’t want to disturb me in the ­morning. Perversely, I woke early anyhow, full of energy. This sort of vim should never be squandered. I figured that even though the Centre was temporarily closed, I could take my laptop over to the music library in Rutherford and listen to some of the CDs of the Folkways collection while working on some content sections for the website.

  I wandered into Rutherford from the ground level, since it had seemed too nice a day to spend one minute more inside than I needed to. The girl at the information booth in the atrium smiled at me as I walked past her and up the main staircase. I entered the library on the second level, which had been the main door when I’d been in grad school. Old habits die hard. The music library was all located on the second floor, anyhow.

  I headed back to the corner where Carmen’s office was located, and came face to face with the wobbly but effective plastic and metal barricade. Somewhere down the line I must have known that the music library’s summer hours were now officially from one to five but it hadn’t registered with me that morning. So, I wasn’t going to be tuning into the dulcet tones of Dave Van Ronk while I worked this morning, after all. I stood in front of the counter, probably looking as blank as I felt. Heaving a sigh, like Algernon the Mouse at a dead end, I tried to rethink my proposed day’s schedule.

  Deciding that a quiet place to work was a positive thing, I headed over to the north wall, where a line of study carrels sat under windows facing the Arts Court. With the music library closed and summer session resulting in a bare five percent of the students normally found on campus, I could choose whichever carrel I preferred, a luxury not possible from September through April. Maybe I would start at one end and move every hour, taking advantage of every empty space. Maybe not.

  I sat in the last carrel, closest to the east corner, thinking that if I were still here when Carmen or her assistant Bill arrived, I could easily pop up and check out a CD or two. The chances of me sitting in the same place from eight-thirty till one were unlikely, however. It wasn’t that I couldn’t get caught up in reading or writing or research for long periods of time; I ha’d been getting lost in books since I was three. These days, though, my distractibility had less to do with the power of words and more to do with bladder control. More and more, I was turning into someone with a forty-five-minute bladder in a fifty-minute lecture world.

  Here is the inherent problem with portable computers. We are given the ability to carry our work with us anywhere, making life such a smorgasbord of possibilities, and yet it now becomes impossible for us to stop what wea’re doing to run an errand or hit the toilet without having to pack up everything and move it with us. Portable means easily stolen. So, while my laptop made life nicer in some ways, it sometimes ended up being an albatross for me to lug everywhere. At least I didn’t have to explain my purchase of it to every wedding guest I happened upon, like some contemporary ancient mariner. Thank heaven for small mercies, or I’d never get to the bathroom on time.

  I had worked on five or six paragraphs dealing with some of the peculiarities of Asch’s recording choices before I acknowledged to my inner plumbing that I had to move. If I had to pack up everything to move across the stacks to the washroom, I figured I might as well turn the expedition into a full coffee break and head for HUB afterward. A little voice in my head commented that maybe the core of my haulage problem could be linked to the amount of coffee I drank, but I quickly silenced her by hitting the hot air hand dryer button.

  I ducked under the shoulder strap of my carryall, and slung it behind me the way Robin Hood would wear his quiver. I felt sort of like Jane Russell in one of her bra ads, with the strap diagonally across my chest, but it made hauling the “lightest” laptop around a whole lot easier. Technically, it flattened out my left breast, Amazon-style, the way Wonder Woman would actually look if drawn by women. I made a quick check of my hair and teeth in the mirror and headed out for HUB.

  There’s a turnstile installed in the exit area of the second floor of Rutherford North that is made of interlocking bars all the way up to the ceiling. It reminded me of a zoo exit, or perhaps the entrance to a maze, something so incongruous about the image of all those bitey metal cogs and teeth being encased in a hedge somewhere had obviously implanted itself in my subconscious. For what it was worth, it might have been an image I’d lifted from an old episode of The Prisoner. Being mildly claustrophobic, I was always afraid of getting stuck in the turnstile, so I chose to take the service stairs back down to the ground level of the library.

  I scanned left and right, trying to decide from which stairwell to access the mall level of HUB. Because it was summertime, it didn’t make all that much difference, as there would be room to stroll rather than be swept along in the sea of humanity that marked class change times in the fall and winter terms. I opted to head north and went in by the old Arts Court stairs, which were now the A&W stairs. I moseyed toward the home baked treats of Java Jive, thinking I might as well fortify myself while I was at it. All this walking and computer-lugging probably should entitle me to a cinnamon bun without fear of embedding calories.

  I was almost to the glass case when I heard my name. I stopped and scanned the area. It was a good thing Denise had filled me in yesterday on Mary Montgomery and her beef against the Centre, because there she was, sitting in front of my destination, stirring a piece of biscotti into a foamy cup of coffee. I figured I would just pretend I had no inkling of her disfavour and bluff my way through on hearty bonhomie. The trouble is, I am painfully transparent when I put on any kind of act. I probably looked like Oliver Hardy trying to sneak a cookie.

  “Mary! How are you? Gee, it’s been ages.” I smiled and felt my cheeks crack with the pressure. I immediately stopped smiling. Mary looked a little alarmed, but it was most likely the vision of me looking like some sort of automaton greeting her. She probably expected me to next proclaim, “Thunderbirds are go!”

  “So, I hear there may be trouble on the Folkways Project,” she said matter-of-factly. That was Mary, no beating around the bush for her. It reminded me of what one of my professors once said about a particular Canadian playwright: “She’d never use a door if there was a wall handy.” I hesitated. What did she want me to say? I decided to keep playing naive until I got the general feel for what she was after.

  “Oh, I don’t know about that.”

  “Haven’t the police closed the Centre?”

  “Well, there is that. But my work can be done pretty much anywhere, for instance, Rutherford Library. I’m just grabbing a coffee, and then it’s back to the grindstone.” I smiled manically once more. It wasn’t going to work. She motioned to the other chair at her table.

  “Get your coffee and join me.”

  It felt like a command more than an offer, but I was feeling too feckless to find any easy way out of it. It wasn’t as if I could head back to the Centre with my coffee and cinnamon bun, and I couldn’t take food or drink back into the library and Mary knew it. If Mary walked south toward the library after I’d declined to join her and found me sitting there scarfing down my pastry, she would really have reason to hate me. Right now, as far as I knew, she only disliked me in principle, and that made me uncomfortable enough. Heaven knew what would happen if she felt I’d somehow personally scorned her.

  I smiled and walked over to order my coffee and cinnamon bun, although I wasn’t sure I would be able to swallow, given the sudden departure of appetite due to apprehension. Pretty soon I was sitting across from Mary Montgomery, who looked the way real Amazons looked, even when she wasn’t wearing a book strap across her chest, a sort of redheaded Brunhilde thing going. She was a tall woman even when she sat, which I’ve always admired. I, on the
other hand, seem to carry all my height in my legs, so that when I am sitting down I am inevitably the shortest one at the table. This tends to surprise short men at cabarets and wedding dances.

  It was Mary’s intensity that always sort of scared me, though. I felt like those knights in Monty Python having to answer skill-testing questions in order to cross the medieval bridge, wherein failing to state one’s favourite colour resulted in being flung far into the abyss. It paid to stay on your toes with Mary, which never made for a relaxing time.

  “How are things going over at the Centre?”

  “Well, what have you heard besides the fact that we’re closed for the moment?” I thought I was being superbly discreet.

  “The attack on Paul Calihoo? Yes, I heard about that. Scary stuff.”

  How did everyone hear these things so quickly? If I hadn’t actually walked in on him I probably would still be in the dark, even if Steve had been assigned to the case. Come to think of it, how the heck did Mary know Paul by name? I’d never met him before going to work for the Centre. I pulled my cinnamon bun apart. It didn’t pay to wonder about Mary. She had a sixth sense for nosing out gossip.

  “So, are they putting a hold on things till they get all that ballyhoo about the Finster money settled?” she prodded.

  I couldn’t help myself. “How in heck do you know about all this? I thought it was supposed to be completely anonymous in the first place and very hush-hush still.”

  Mary looked smug.

  “It’s a very small world, Randy, especially when it comes to university money and foundations.” For whatever reason, she seemed to take pity on me and throw me a crumb. “I heard his company was bidding on the project to reinforce the Arts Building floor to make way for the Folkways Collection and heard the precise amount of the bequest the Centre had received. He put two and two together and hit the roof. I think he and his sister tore a strip off the president before heading for Dr. Fuller. Who knows? All this negative publicity for the university may make the president rethink the specificity of the bequest, eh?” She crumpled up her now empty styrofoam cup, and stood, hovering over me like a fearsome Emma Thompson in Angels in America.