Connie Willis - The Best of Connie Willis

“Mr. Ledbetter?” a voice said tentatively, and a balding man in a clerical collar leaned in the door. “How much longer will you be? I need to lock up.”

“Oh, sorry, Reverend McIntyre,” he said and stood up. “We’ll get out of your way.” He ran up the aisle, grabbed his music, and came back. “You’ll be at the aches, right?” he said to Reverend McIntyre.

The aches ? You must have misunderstood what he said, I thought.

“I’m not sure,” Reverend McIntyre said. “My handle’s pretty rusty.”

Handle? What were they talking about?

“Especially ‘The Hallelujah Chorus.’ It’s been years since I last sang it.”

Oh, Handel, not handle.

“I’m rehearsing it with Trinity Episcopal’s choir at eleven tomorrow if you want to come and run through it with us.”

“I just may do that.”

“Great,” Mr. Ledbetter said. “Good night.” He led me out of the sanctuary. “Where’s your car parked?”

“Out in front.”

“Good. Mine, too.” He opened the side door. “You can follow me to my apartment.”

I had a sudden blinding vision of Aunt Judith glaring disapprovingly at me and saying, “A nice young lady never goes to a gentleman’s apartment alone.”

“You did say you brought the music from the mall with you, didn’t you?” he asked.

Which is what you get for jumping to conclusions, I thought, following him to his apartment and wondering if he was going out with the redheaded second soprano.

“On the way over I was thinking about all this,” he said when we got to his apartment building, “and I think the first thing we need to do is figure out exactly which element or elements of ‘all seated on the ground’ they’re responding to, the notes—I know you said they’d been exposed to music before, but it could be this particular configuration of notes—or words.”

I told him about reciting the lyrics to them.

“Okay, then, the next thing we do is see if it’s the accompaniment,” he said, unlocking the door. “Or the tempo. Or the key.”

“The key?” I said, looking down at the keys in his hand.

“Yeah, have you ever seen Jumpin’ Jack Flash ?”

“No.”

“Great movie. Whoopi Goldberg. In it, the key to the spy’s code is the key. Literally. B flat. ‘While Shepherds Watched’ is in the key of C, but ‘Joy to the World’ is in D. That may be why they didn’t respond to it. Or they may only respond to the sound of certain instruments. What Beethoven did they listen to?”

“The Ninth Symphony.”

He frowned. “Then that’s unlikely, but there might be a guitar or a marimba or something in the ‘While Shepherds Watched’ accompaniment. We’ll see. Come on in,” he said, opening the door and immediately vanishing into the bedroom. “There’s soda in the fridge,” he called back out to me. “Go ahead and sit down.”

That was easier said than done. The couch, chair, and coffee table were all covered with CDs, music, and clothes. “Sorry,” he said, coming back in with a laptop. He set it down on top of a stack of books and moved a pile of laundry from the chair so I could sit down. “December’s a bad month. And this year, in addition to my usual five thousand concerts and church services and cantata performances, I’m directing aches.”

Then I hadn’t misheard him before. “Aches?” I said.

“Yeah. A-C-H-E-S. The All-City Holiday Ecumenical Sing. ACHES. Or, as my seventh-grade girls call it, Aches and Pains. It’s a giant concert—well, not actually a concert because everybody sings, even the audience. But all the city singing groups and church choirs participate.” He moved a stack of LPs off the couch and onto the floor and sat down across from me. “Denver has it every year. At the convention center. Have you ever been to a Sing?” he said, and when I shook my head, “It’s pretty impressive. Last year three thousand people and forty-four choirs participated.”

“And you’re directing?”

“Yeah. Actually, it’s a much easier job than directing my church choirs. Or my seventh-grade girls’ glee. And it’s kind of fun. It used to be the All-City Messiah , you know, a whole bunch of people getting together to sing Handel’s Messiah , but then they had a request from the Unitarians to include some Solstice songs, and it kind of snowballed from there. Now we do Hanukkah songs and ‘Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas’ and ‘The Seven Nights of Kwanzaa,’ along with Christmas carols and selections from the Messiah . Which, by the way, we can’t let the Altairi listen to, either.”

“Is there children-slaying in that, too?”

“Head-breaking. ‘Thou shalt break them with a rod of iron’ and ‘dash them in pieces.’ There’s also wounding, bruising, cutting, deriding, and laughing to scorn.”

“Actually, the Altairi already know all about scorn,” I said.

“But hopefully not about shaking nations. And covering the earth with darkness,” he said. “Okay”—he opened his laptop—“the first thing I’m going to do is scan in the song. Then I’ll remove the accompaniment so we can play them just the vocals.”

“What can I do?”

“You,” he said, disappearing into the other room again and returning with a foot-high stack of sheet music and music books, which he dumped in my lap, “can make a list of all the songs we don’t want the Altairi to hear.”

I nodded and started through The Holly Jolly Book of Christmas Songs . It was amazing how many carols, which I’d always thought were about peace and goodwill, had really violent lyrics. “The Coventry Carol” wasn’t the only one with child-slaying in it. “Christmas Day Is Come” did, too, along with references to sin, strife, and militants. “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel” had strife, too, and envy and quarrels. “The Holly and the Ivy” had thorns, blood, and bears, and “Good King Wenceslas” talked about cruelty, bringing people flesh, freezing their blood, and heart failure.

“I had no idea Christmas carols were so grim,” I said.

“You should hear Easter,” Mr. Ledbetter said. “While you’re looking, see if you can find any songs with the word ‘seated’ in it so we can see if it’s that particular word they’re responding to.”

I nodded and went back to reading lyrics. In “Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence” everyone was standing, not seated, plus it had “fear,” “trembling,” and a line about giving oneself for heavenly food. “The First Noel” had “blood,” and the shepherds were lying, not sitting.

What Christmas song has “seated” in it? I thought, trying to remember. Wasn’t there something in “Jingle Bells” about Miss Somebody or Other being seated by someone’s side?

There was, and in “Wassail, Wassail,” there was a line about “a-sitting” by the fire, but not the word “seated.”

I kept looking. The nonreligious Christmas songs were almost as bad as the carols. Even a children’s song like “I’m Getting’ Nuttin’ for Christmas” gaily discussed smashing bats over people’s heads, and there seemed to be an entire genre of “Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer”–type songs: “Grandma’s Killer Fruitcake,”

“I Came Upon a Roadkill Deer,” and “Grandpa’s Gonna Sue the Pants Off Santa.”

And even when the lyrics weren’t violent, they had phrases in them like “rule o’er all the earth” and “over us all to reign,” which the Altairi might take as an invitation to global conquest.

There have to be some carols that are harmless, I thought, and looked up “Away in a Manger” in the index (which The Holly Jolly Book , unlike the hymnal, did have): “… lay down his sweet head… the stars in the sky…” No mayhem here, I thought. I can definitely add this to the list. “Love… blessings…”