Earl and Merle were twins. And best known because of their beards. One of them would grow out his beard and the other would shave. They started this the year they turned twenty-five. The idea was that it would help people keep track of who was who. The trouble was that they kept switching it up.
“It was easy enough for me,” said Dave. “I just called them both Mr. Declute.”
Anyway, one of them used to show up at the site every Friday night with something the other had cooked, a pie or something. And whatever it was, it was always burned beyond use, and often beyond recognition. But it was offered in earnestness, and was received the same way.
Earl and Merle always drove, but they never drove sober. In deference to the Mounties, however, they drove on the farm lanes and through the fields rather than on the concession roads.
One lunchtime that summer, Merle was crossing the concession by the hall, and the laneway jumped or something, and he ended up in the ditch.
There happened to be a young Mountie there, a new recruit from Saskatchewan.
Well, you could smell the alcohol from a hundred yards. The Mountie wandered over and asked Merle how much he’d had to drink.
It was only eleven in the morning, and Merle seemed genuinely confused by the question.
It happened that Charlie walked out of the hall at this moment.
Merle spotted him.
“Charlie,” he called from the side of his car, “how much do you think I’ve had by this time of day?”
He wasn’t trying to be smart. He was looking for clarification. He wanted to give the young Mountie an honest answer.
They finished the town hall in the early fall, although it’s hard to pinpoint when, exactly—it had been the social centre of town all summer long, ever since that morning in April when everyone had gathered to watch the old schoolhouse come down, and through the afternoon in June when they found the skid of wood hidden behind Digger Flowers’s farm, and the night in July when they held the Moonlight Ball and danced under the stars on the subfloor before the roof was on. Through all that and everything else. And it just sort of continued.
After they’d gotten the bell out of the old schoolhouse, they sent it to Boston for refurbishing. When it came back, they hauled the lift out of the Harrisons’ hayloft again and spent the whole of one weekend installing it into a bell tower they’d added to the hall. The tower looked just like the one on top of the old schoolhouse. In the years to come they would ring the bell for any occasion that remotely called for a bell—not only weddings and wakes, but just about any event you could imagine.
“If someone wanted to get a ball game going on a Sunday afternoon,” said Dave, “they would ring it. You didn’t need social media or anything like that. If you heard the bell ringing you knew what it meant, and you’d get on your bike and head down.”
They had an opening ceremony, of course. Moose MacIsaac was the mayor at the time, and instead of cutting a ribbon, someone suggested that Moose mark the moment by sliding down the metal slide that was still in the yard from when the hall was a school. Moose, who was a robust man, was always happy to oblige a constituent’s request, and he struggled up the ladder but got wedged halfway down the slide. It took all the men there a good hour and a half to pull him out.
When Moose passed, they had his wake at the hall. Everyone had their wake there. And there was a lot of talk of getting him out of the casket and running him down the slide one last time, but out of respect for the widow MacIsaac they didn’t do that. Although there are folks who will tell you they were there, or knew someone who was there, late that night, and that Moose did have a final moment of glory.
“Is that true?” said Sam sleepily.
“I don’t know,” said Dave. “I was too young for that sort of stuff. I’ve heard people swear it’s true, but I’ve never found anyone who’ll swear to have been there when it happened.”
The phone hadn’t rung for an hour. They had shut down the computer. There was more and more silence between Dave’s stories. Morley was drifting in and out of sleep.
Not long after that, Sam got up and went back to his bed.
“Goodnight,” he said.
Dave was left there lying on his back, with his hands behind his head, staring up at the ceiling.
A few minutes after Sam left, he said, “It makes me sad that he hasn’t had a time like that.”
He thought Morley was already asleep and was surprised when she answered.
Morley said, “He has his own times.”
Dave said, “Yup. You’re right.”
And then he said, “Maybe what I was trying to say is that those were my times. And I am thankful for them.”
We all have our own times.
In Dave’s time monumental things have happened. We have flown to the moon and back. And by moonlight, we have seen the downtrodden both rise up and bow down.
But the times are always monumental. And the things we remember are never the monumental things. When the phone rings in the middle of the night, it’s always about the things we hold in the small of our hearts.
They will rebuild the hall in Big Narrows this summer. Dave will go down for the ceremony the weekend it opens. The hall will look much the same, for they will do their best to recreate it. But Dave will no longer know the secret place where the floorboards creak, or the spot where you mustn’t dance if you don’t want to get the DJ’s records skipping.
Before the night is over, Dave will go outside and get down on his knees by the front door, and because he knows exactly where to look, he will find a few small letters carved into the side of the old concrete steps that are all that will be left of his hall. SK heart ML 4EVER. It will make him happy to see them. Stephen and Megan still sitting in a tree. Maybe not forever, he will think, as he stands and brushes the dirt off his knees, but maybe long enough.
He will do one last thing before he leaves the hall. He will stand on the top of those stairs by the door for a brief moment. And he will slip his keys out of his pocket and try his key to the old hall in the lock of the new door. It won’t fit.
It will make him strangely happy. He had his times. But life moves on. He will leave the key on his ring, however.
And every now and then when he notices it, it will unlock these memories. For it is no longer a key to a hall he seldom visits. Forged by fire, it has become a key to a small corner of his heart.
VIKING
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Published in Viking hardcover by Penguin Canada Books Inc., 2015
Copyright © Stuart McLean, 2015
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LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION
McLean, Stuart, 1948–, author
Vinyl Cafe turns the page / Stuart McLean.
Short stories.
ISBN 978-0-670-06943-9 (bound)
I. Title.
PS8575.L448V55 2015C813′.54C2015-902068-9
eBook ISBN 978-0-14-319429-3
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