Free Grand Change by William Andrews Page A

must.
    Jackie Wall just about got things going right off. He was flapping his arms and crowing like a rooster at centre stage and a poke from behind the curtain knocked him off. He hit the floor with a ka-thump and came barrelling at us. He just missed the chair Wally had laid his fiddle on in a potato sack. It took me and the teacher and a couple of others a while to keep Wally from going at him with the coal scoop.
    Except for our rehearsal as two dumb shepherds, we sat by the stove, with Wally burning his initials into a scrap of board with a hot poker. He had a sober, determined look on his face, sitting there with a twist of smoke curling past his ear.
    When our time came, the teacher got us set up on stage with the air of someone who would just as soon do something else. The rest of the class sat up close in the chairs as if this was something not to be missed. But Wally kicked in big time, with a glaring stare, getting a fair junk of the tune and the rhythm— no tongue loll, his jaw set.
    Everyone, including the teacher, stared with his or her mouth open. I had to kick Wally’s chair and knock him off key to get him to stop; he must have went ten turns. The teacher had her hand flat on her face. “My,” she said, after a dead silence. “My, my, my. Well, I guess we’ll try the tea skit. I guess you boys can just keep practising until the concert, at home on your own.”
    Wally peered sidewise at me when we got back to the stove. “We showed them owl hoots a thing or two,” he said.
    For the rest of the time, we went through the rerun lines of skits and solos, in that halting try-again manner, with the teacher’s patient prompting, spaced by the bumps and scrapes of the old sofa, table, chairs and back wall arrangements. Outside of our shepherd stints, Wally sat beside me at the stove in supreme smugness. I guess you could say we both sat that way.
    The big day finally came. The trustees hauled in the tree, with its fresh, septic smell, and we dragged the big cardboard box of decorations down from the attic, decorated the tree and nailed up wreaths and bows.
    Wally and I didn’t bother to go home for supper; we came in the morning wearing our good clothes, with a few extra sandwiches in our lunch cans so we could rehearse with the place to ourselves.
    The place looked magical and cozy now, with tiny, coloured lights peeping among the wreaths frilling the cut-out “Merry Christmas” at the jaw of the stage, and the decorations on the tree: the raining icicles, silver sprig lines, coloured balls and crepe ropes.
    I can’t remember the like ever happening, but if a thief had plied his trade in the district on concert night, he would have done well.
    Only the sick, infirm and the odd person with some kind of grump didn’t attend. They came singular and in groups, in overcoats and buckle overshoes, with that quiet, wondering expression reserved mostly for church and funerals. And they squatted to the chairs, glancing around and murmuring barely above a whisper, sometimes moving to a better viewing site.
    Except for when we trooped on stage for the opening chorus to the piano plunks of “Marching to Georgia,” and our shepherd stint at the nativity scene, when my beard came unstuck and I had to hold it to with my hand, we sat and watched the others as they wobbled their way through, taking nervous glances at the audience sitting in semi-darkness, intent on catching every word, be it choked, flubbed or stammered.
    Our time came after the intermission and the hard fudge sale, when the usual lump or two rattled off the walls and the odd bald head while Jim Mackie and Alban Gallant played a few reels and the Gallant children stepped her off.
    We made our way to the two chairs set up for us at centre stage. Wally’s movements were quick and deliberate, his eyes like burning coals. He cut in before the teacher finished her introduction. We were pretty well into