Vinyl Cafe Turns the Page

by Stuart McLean

  Everyone was lined up in front of the wall, their knees on their arms in a sort of tripod, squatty way.

  Finally!

  Something he could do better than everyone else.

  While everyone else balanced, Dave counted to himself. One for the money. Two for the show. On three to get ready, he put his forehead on the ground. He looked over at Handstand Guy and kicked his feet up with all the force he could muster.

  His heels hit the wall like some sort of medieval weapon—like two iron balls on the end of a heavy chain. They hit so hard he broke right through the drywall.

  There was a thud.

  An explosion of dust.

  Everyone in the class dropped to the ground and stared.

  Dave’s arms had given out.

  But he hadn’t fallen.

  He was hanging on the wall like a picture. Held in place by his planted heels.

  He hung there, bits of broken drywall dribbling down his legs, thinking to himself, What else could possibly go wrong?

  And that’s when he heard a faraway rumble from his stomach—like the sound a volcano makes before it erupts.

  The last thing he saw before he passed out was his classmates running for the door.

  They checked out that afternoon.

  Three days early.

  They didn’t charge him for the damage to the studio walls, but they weren’t pleased.

  “In light of circumstances,” said the lady who checked them out, “you’ll understand if we don’t give you the third of your complimentary cocktails.”

  Dave nodded.

  “Nama-stay,” he said.

  They spotted Handstand Guy sitting on a rock as they walked along the path to the parking lot.

  “Leaving early?” he called after they’d walked by.

  Dave stopped but didn’t turn around.

  Stephanie whispered, “What a jerk.”

  Dave just smiled.

  “Bro,” he called over his shoulder, “we’re just going to town for a burger. Why don’t you join us. You like burgers, don’t you?”

  Handstand Guy started to get up, then he sat down again. He started to say something but nothing came out.

  Dave just smiled and put his arm around Steph and they bumped their way toward the car.

  “Well I do declare,” said Dave as they wandered through the trees. “I’ve been trying for that all week. And I do believe I just got it.”

  “What’s that?” said Steph.

  “Humbling pose,” said Dave. “You can’t force it. It takes great patience, good timing, and a little luck, of course. But then all good things do.”

  TOWN HALL

  Everyone in town heard the lightning hit. It was well after midnight and most everyone was asleep, but they all heard it.

  The next morning at the Maple Leaf Café, the group sitting in their regular spots at the back table were replaying the moment, and Smith Gardner said, “I heard it even woke Gordie Wilson.”

  Smith got a good laugh for that one.

  They buried Gordie last summer.

  But it was loud. The lightning hit town like a cracking big whip. And if anyone did manage to sleep through it, the thunder got them.

  “Like the end of the world,” said Alf MacDonald.

  “Like the old days,” said George MacDonnell—meaning the days when things used to happen at the mine. Though those were more bumps than bangs—muffled and deep. Those days were long gone. The last shaft closed fifty years ago.

  Dave’s cousin Brenda was the first in town to know what got hit.

  Brenda was sitting in her taxi, right under the portico, her engine running, the Halifax radio playing along to the slap of her windshield wipers. Brenda was thinking she might as well pack it in, go home and play some online bridge. When … BAM!

  It was so close that Brenda ducked, smacking her head on the steering wheel. It had been pure reflex.

  The next thing she did was reach for her radio. That was reflex, too. Brenda called it in before she even saw the flames.

  She knew right away it had hit the bell, which is ironic when you consider all the work that went into saving that bell, and getting it up there.

  The fire department couldn’t have got there any faster. Ten minutes at the most, although it seemed far longer to Brenda. It occurred to her that she should go in and save something. She had a key. Half the people in town had a key. But what was she going to save? The coffee machine? And then sparks started landing on the hood of her cab, and that settled that. Brenda threw it into reverse, backed out from under the portico, and started calling people instead.

  Dave was her third call.

  The firemen didn’t even have the hoses out when, some two thousand kilometres away, the phone on Dave’s bedside table rang and he lurched up with a gasp.

  He did that thing everyone does when the phone wakes them in the middle of the night—he pretended it hadn’t.

  “Hi!” he chirped, as if he’d been sitting around, waiting for the call.

  Brenda, who wasn’t fooled and didn’t care, said, “The hall’s on fire.”

  The Big Narrows Community Hall.

  Dave made some indistinguishable worried sound, and Morley, who’d also been woken by the ring, sat up abruptly.

  Her mother is old. Their daughter has moved out.

  “What?” she said.

  So it was a relief, for Morley anyway, when Dave covered the mouthpiece and whispered, “The hall is on fire.”

  Brenda said, “I’ve posted a picture. I’ll put up a video. It’s not over.”

  But almost the moment she said that, the flames burst through the roof and started crawling down the walls.

  Brenda said, “I got to go.”

  Next thing you knew, Dave’s cell phone was beeping.

  It was a text message from his boyhood pal Billy Mitchell.

  “You awake? The hall is on fire.”

  Now that would be a thing—to get two calls in the middle of the night about a fire in your hometown—even if Billy still lived in the Narrows. But Billy is in Afghanistan.

  “What kind of crazy world is this?” said Dave.

  Morley and Dave were wide awake now. Morley had fetched her laptop and had it perched on a pile of pillows between them. They were staring at the videos Brenda was posting, at the people in the crowd as much as the fire.

  “There’s my mother,” said Dave. “Is she in her nightgown?”

  And then Morley said, “Okay. If we’re staying up, I’m making tea.”

  While she was doing that the phone rang again.

  It was either the kettle or the phone that woke Sam.

  “Is something wrong?” he said. “Did someone die?”

  “Sort of,” said Dave.

  And so the three of them sat on the bed staring at the computer and Dave told them the story of the hall that was burning right in front of their eyes.

  It was the summer he was twelve.

  Someone had the idea to tear down the old schoolhouse and build a community hall in its place.

  The honest-to-God one-room schoolhouse, where Dave’s dad had gone to school.

  Dave had heard so many stories that he sometimes wondered if he hadn’t gone there himself. Sometimes it felt as if he was the one who’d grown up on the farm, a concession to the north, and had walked two-three miles every day, there and back. Except, of course, in the winter, when you could ride a toboggan the first seven hundred yards if the snow was good—then stick it in the snowbank by the south fence and pick it up on the way home.

  But it was his dad, Charlie, not him, who’d done all that.

  In the spring, if no one was using the tractor, the little grey Ford, Charlie was sometimes allowed to drive it to school—once he was in grade four, that is.

  By the time Dave came along, a school had been built in town and the Women’s Institute had taken over the little one-room schoolhouse. So Dave never got to experience what it was like—all those kids and just the o
ne teacher.

  “Mostly,” Margaret had told him, “you learned from the older kids. The older kids would check your work while the teacher was busy with others.”

  Most teachers only lasted a year. Two at the most.

  Anyway, they’d closed the school before Dave got his chance, and the Women’s Institute ran it for a couple of years—euchre nights and Friday suppers and whatever else it was they did.

  And then it sat empty.

  A deserted schoolhouse.

  In those days if you had an idea to build something like a community hall, you could just go ahead and do it.

  “I think they got a little money from the town,” said Dave. “They used it to hire an architect from Glace Bay. But I don’t think they followed his plans. Mostly they just did it themselves.”

  They were miners, and fishermen, and farmers, and they knew how to do things with their hands. There was no question of fixing up the old schoolhouse. The schoolhouse was done. They decided to take it down. But first they had to save the bell.

  The whole town gathered to watch. They used a lift from Harrison’s hayloft and jerry-rigged a pulley like you might use to run a man up the mast of a schooner.

  As for the building, they had four tractors, with chains attached to each of the four walls. The moment they started pulling, the roof smacked down. A big cloud of dust rose up and suddenly there was an empty lot where the school had been.

  It was every schoolkid’s dream. All the kids thought it was fantastic. Everyone, however, who had gone to the school watched with tears in their eyes. The kids were cheering and the old folks were crying.

  Isn’t that the way of the world.

  Of course, the older generation wasn’t so broken up about the loss to ignore the practical advantages of the school’s demolition. Everyone went through the building before it came down and carted away what they could. The windows, the wood stove, the heavy wood door, and all the hinges and hardware.

  Dave’s dad, Charlie, grabbed a big pile of the hardwood floor. It was good one-inch maple, and he had the idea to redo the living room with it. He ripped up the lino and nailed the boards down. Then he got a sander from the Co-op and set to smoothing it.

  The moment he started the sander, great clouds of foul-smelling dust filled the air. Before long, the whole house smelled like a horse stable. All those kids, all those years, tramping out of the barn and into the schoolhouse. The planks had been marinated in manure.

  Charlie had to rip up all the boards and get new lino for the living room.

  “Like father,” said Morley. “Like son.”

  Once the schoolhouse had come down and the wood and rubble was carted away, they set to building the new hall.

  Sam said, “Did you help?”

  “Of course,” said Dave. “Everyone pitched in.”

  The kids would come home from school, the adults would come home from work, and they would gather at the hall—start in the late afternoon and work until ten at night. Five nights a week, then all day Saturday. People would bring supper. And they’d sit around the picnic table out back and eat together.

  Mostly the kids did things like clean up—sweeping up nails and dead bits of wood and burning them out back.

  “I hammered in the subfloor,” said Dave.

  His little sister, Annie, hammered in the window frame at the back of the kitchen, the one to the right of the sink. If you examined it, you could see the dents around each nail, as if they’d blindfolded her before they gave her the hammer.

  “How old was she?” said Sam.

  “Probably three,” said Dave.

  She was seven.

  Dave reached for the phone.

  “We should call her,” he said.

  It was Annie who reminded him about the basement.

  “Your grandfather had a thing about concrete,” said Dave.

  Every time he poured concrete, Charlie got Dave and Annie to put their prints in it.

  So the night they poured the slab for the community hall, Charlie waited until everyone had left and then snuck them back in.

  “I will never forget it,” said Dave.

  They had to use flashlights. They crawled along a plank so that they were out in the middle. There’s a picture somewhere: two sets of little hands and feet in the concrete floor of the Big Narrows Community Hall.

  “I just can’t believe it’s burning,” said Dave.

  It’s not often you get to hear your parents talking like this, and certainly not in the quiet, confessional middle of the night. Sam was lying at the foot of their bed, praying they wouldn’t send him back to his. He was sleepy enough to go, but he didn’t want the moment to end.

  He needn’t have worried. His father was staring at the videos of the burning hall and reeling off one story after another.

  Sometime early that summer, the men had arranged to have a skid of lumber delivered. That evening, when they got to the site, the lumber, which they’d been told had arrived in the morning, was nowhere to be seen. Whoever took it—and they had a pretty good idea who that was—had dragged the skid away, so it was easy enough to follow the trail down the dirt concession roads.

  Charlie and Fred were deputized to go after it.

  “I went with them,” said Dave.

  Just as everyone expected, the skid marks led from the half-built hall directly to Digger Flowers’s farm.

  Now, the Flowers family had always been different. You hardly ever saw them in town, or even when you drove by their place. Maybe a shadowy figure going from the house to the barn, but no more than that.

  The Flowers had been like that for generations. The grandfather, long dead, used to steal chickens and then try to sell them back to the farm where he’d stolen them.

  Charlie, Fred, and Dave were standing by the road staring at the tracks that clearly turned down the Flowers’s driveway.

  “What did you do?” said Sam. “Did you call the police?”

  “Nope,” said Dave. “We drove in.”

  They found the skid, just as they expected, behind the barn. And not a Flowers in sight.

  Dave said, “They were there. You could feel them. But we pretended no one was home. And they accommodated that.”

  “What happened?” said Sam.

  “We hooked up the skid of lumber to Fred’s truck and we de-stole it,” said Dave.

  Morley said, “Didn’t they steal an outhouse or something?”

  Dave glanced at the clock on the bedside table.

  It was three in the morning.

  Sam caught that glance and said, “Tell about the outhouse.”

  “The outhouse,” said Dave, immediately forgetting the time. “That wasn’t Digger Flowers. That was a fellow from the city.”

  When he said “the city” he meant Sydney, or maybe Glace Bay.

  What happened was someone had donated an old outhouse, and they’d set it up at the back of the hall to use while they worked. Then one day, just like the skid of new lumber, the outhouse had disappeared.

  They didn’t find it for months, though they knew they would eventually. And when they did, it was this city fellow who had a camp along the creek at the base of Macaulay’s Mountain.

  “He was a hunter,” said Dave. “He would drive up on Friday nights and sleep in a trailer.”

  By the time they located the outhouse, they had a new one and didn’t need the old one back. Everyone figured that if this guy needed an outhouse so badly that he was prepared to steal one, they’d let him keep it.

  Of course, a group did go out and serve the guy a dose of small-town justice.

  “What did they do?” said Sam.

  “Well,” said Dave, “they picked that outhouse up, and they moved it three feet back from where the guy had it placed.”

  “I don’t get it,” said Sam.

  “Think about it,” said Dave.

  “Tell me more,” said Sam.

  His father seemed to have forgotten about the time.

&nbs
p; “Well,” said Dave, “there was the Moonlight Ball.”

  The hall was about half built. They had the subfloor down and the studs were up, but the walls weren’t covered or anything and the roof wasn’t in place. They’d done a lot, but there was a lot still to be done and people were starting to run out of steam.

  “They needed to build morale,” said Dave. “They needed to do something.”

  So they held the Moonlight Ball.

  The whole town came. Everyone brought something for the dinner—salads and pies, and they had the barbecue going. When dinner was done, they set up a record player on the pile of trusses in the corner. And everyone danced on the rough subfloor.

  While the adults danced, the teens hung out in the parking lot and the kids played tag on the hay bales in the field next door.

  “Which pretty much established the ground rules for every dance we ever had after that,” said Dave.

  That was the night they invented the world-famous Big Narrows Lobster Race.

  It was late, and everyone was feeling festive, and there were these barrels around and about. Someone got the idea to tie rope handles on a couple of barrels, two handles a side. The way it worked, you had four guys carrying each barrel. They were called the claws. And then you had someone sitting on it, who was called the fisherman. They had to run fifty yards down and back. They ran heats. The Lobster Race became a local tradition: Big Narrows has run them every July 1st ever since. There’s a lobster trap in the hall that’s got all the winners’ names on little plaques.

  Or there used to be.

  “I hope they got it out,” said Dave. “Your grandfather won it three years in a row. I was the fisherman for the first year, but then they started using Annie because she was lighter.”

  “And she didn’t fall off,” said Morley.

  There were so many stories from that summer. In one way or another, everyone chipped in.

  Even Earl and Merle Declute. They were sworn bachelors who lived on what was left of the old Declute farmhouse on the Salt Cove Road. Earl and Merle had sold most of the shoreline in one-acre lots to people from the city. Mostly Earl and Merle sat on their porch, drinking beer and arguing about hockey.