1635: Music and Murder (8 page)

Gigue

Grantville
A few days later

"C'mon in, guys," Marla said to Franz and Isaac, holding open the door to her Aunt Susan's house. "The rest of the group is already here." She led them into the living room, where the only seats left open were the hard wooden chairs that had been brought in from the dining room. The sofa and easy chairs had already been claimed. Thomas, Hermann and the others grinned at them from the soft seats as Marla's aunt bustled around handing out glasses of apple cider and water. Cookies were evident all around, and Thomas was almost oblivious to their entry as he blissfully devoured a slice of apple pie that must have occupied a quarter of the pie pan it came from.

"Sit down, boys, sit down," Susan said, as she went by them on her way to the kitchen. She came back out with glasses of ice and pitchers of cider and water and set them down on the coffee table in front of them. "Fill up with whichever you like," came back over her shoulder as she returned to the kitchen once more.

She reappeared carrying another plate of cookies, which Isaac took from her with alacrity, fending off hands that reached toward it from those who had been there before him.

"Away with you, jackals," he mock-snarled, holding the plate out of their reach. "'Tis bad enough that you usurp the chief places, leaving poor Franz and myself to set our nether portions on the hardest seats. 'Tis not enough that you have already wreaked destruction upon good Frau Garrett's provisions. But when she takes pity on poor Franz and myself and brings forth the fruits of her labors to revive us, you attempt to acquire them as well. Nay," he laughed, leaning away from Hermann, "nay, you will not have them. Look to your own!"

"But there are only crumbs here," Hermann whined.

"Then lick the platters clean," Franz weighed in, taking a handful of cookies from Isaac's plate, "for you'll have none of ours."

He took a bite, and the expression that came over his face rivaled that on Thomas', who had finished his pie and was now diligently scraping his plate clean and licking the fork.

Franz stood and bowed to Susan. "Frau Garrett, once again you have demonstrated your command of the baker's art, and produced what might be a model for the ambrosia of Olympus."

"Enough of your foolishness, Franz Sylwester," Susan said, blushing slightly as she wiped her hands on her apron.

Marla's aunt was indeed one of the best bakers in town, but at this point in the post-Ring of Fire existence of Grantville, she had what some in town considered an unfair advantage. Her husband, Jim, had owned and managed Garrett's Super Market when the Ring fell. As soon as she had recovered from her shock and thought through the implications of that event, she had marched right down to the store and commandeered all the spices that were left on the shelves. As a result of her foresight and her sparing use of them, she had bottles of cinnamon, nutmeg and other spices hidden away long after most of the other households in town had run out. True, spices were now available from the down-time merchants that serviced Grantville's economy, but their supplies were low in quantity and erratic in availability, which kept the prices high. As a consequence, in the late summer of 1634, if a baking mood settled on her, children from all around could be seen gathered around the screen door to her kitchen inhaling the aromas, and it wasn't unknown for grown men to plead for the privilege of licking her mixer beaters and bowls.

Franz and Isaac gave testimony to Susan's skills as they wasted no time in reducing their plate to mere crumbs as well. There was silence as everyone was either chewing or chasing crumbs around their plates, obviously thinking hard about licking them, but resisting the temptation. Finally, Marla stood up.

"Okay, guys, let's get started. English or German?"

"English," several voices replied.

"Good," she said, "because I'm not sure I could discuss today's topic in German.

"I asked you to meet here today, because I needed access to a good stereo." She put her hand on a stack of black metal cabinets piled on a small table next to where she stood at the head of the room, and then pointed to some fairly large wooden boxes in the corners of the room. Franz noticed wires running from the metal cabinets to the boxes in the corners, and deduced that they must be some type of the "speakers" that were used elsewhere in Grantville to produce sound and music from the shiny silver discs called CDs. The speakers had the letters "JBL" on an emblem. He wondered what that stood for.

A sad expression crossed Marla's face, and she said quietly, "This was my brother Paul's stereo. Before the Ring fell, he spent hours listening to it. This is the first time it's been hooked up since then."

She fell silent for several moments, then sighed. The others waited patiently, knowing that her brother, along with her parents, had not been within the radius of the Ring when it fell. Franz in particular knew how hard she had been struck by the knowledge that she would never see them again.

She looked up and, with an obvious effort, said, "Anyway, I want to spend tonight talking about popular music.

"There has always been a difference between the music done for art's sake, and the music done to please the common man. You know that's true. The music you create for patrons, and I include the church in that category, is different from the music you create on street corners and in taverns. It may be related—you know as well as I do that melodies from the street and the taverns have a way of sneaking into even the music written for the churches—but there is a definite difference in complexity between the two. The more complex the music grows, the smaller it seems the audience is who can truly appreciate it.

"As I said, this has pretty much always been the case, but until the early 1900s the music of the streets was more of an undercurrent in the stream of music. That changed with the invention of mechanical devices that could record music played in one place onto some kind of medium, such as wax or types of plastic—" They all nodded at the reference to the magic stuff that was so prevalent in Grantville. "—or even the CDs.

"What happened was once the average citizen could own a device that would play whatever music he wanted whenever he wanted it, he began buying the music he liked. That changed the way music was created and performed. By the 1970s, it was becoming difficult for many orchestras to exist, partly because people were buying different music than what the orchestras played, and partly because even the music the orchestras did play could be recorded, bought and played at any time.

"The popular music, the outgrowth of the music of the streets, took many forms. Most people would like a few types. Very few people liked them all. But in almost every case, the popular musicians became like heroes, and it became a status symbol to people to have a lot of these recordings. The more you had, especially of rare or new or avant-garde musicians, the more status you had among your friends. By the time I was in high school, a ridiculously large amount of money was being spent every year by people all across our nation to purchase these recordings.

"The styles of music diverged for a while, but inevitably they began influencing each other again, both between different types of popular music and between the popular music and the art music."

Marla stopped here, took a drink of cider, then picked up a CD and began to turn all the equipment on. "We're going to listen to a number of different kinds of popular music tonight. Some of it you may like; most of it you will find discordant; some of it you will out and out hate. But this is part of what music was right before the Ring fell."

****

Susan turned back into the kitchen from the door into the living room as music began to flow out of the speakers. She recognized the tune: "The Entertainer," by Scott Joplin. She was slightly pleased with herself that she knew it . . . Lord knew that music was not her strength, not like Marla and Paul and their mother Alison. Now that Marla was so involved with this bunch of boys—young men, rather—she had rather the feeling of the duck that had hatched a swan. Marla was growing and stretching her horizons, and Susan could only stand behind her and watch her go. It was good to see her living and laughing again, but it still was a little scary to see her surrounded by these young men all the time, talking about things that Susan didn't understand. If only John and Alison could have been with her. They would have been so proud of Marla, and Alison at least would have understood her and what was going on.

She dabbed at her eyes with her apron, then muttered, "Standing around leaking tears isn't going to get the dishes done, silly." She began running the water in the sink, added the soap, then gathered up the bowls, pans and plates and put them in the sink. As she was turning the water off, the outside screen door opened, and she looked around to see Ingram Bledsoe and Hans Riebeck coming in.

"Sorry we didn't knock, Susan," Ingram said, carefully closing the door, "but we didn't want to disturb anything."

"That's all right," she said, drying her hands on a towel. "You all want some water or cider? I'd offer you some cookies, but those two-legged vacuum cleaners in the other room have already Hoovered up everything I baked today."

Ingram chuckled, and said, "I'll take some cider, thank you kindly."

"I, too,
bitte
," Master Riebeck said. His English had rapidly improved since he had first come to Grantville back in March, but he was obviously still thinking in German and translating to English as he spoke. Occasionally, what came out sounded a little odd or stilted to American ears.

In the other room, the music had ceased, and there was a murmur of conversation. Ingram looked that way, then looked back at Susan and said, "How's she doing?"

She shrugged. "You're askin' the wrong person, Ingram. I'm a Linder born, and ain't no Linders been great musicians before Paul and Marla. Grandpa used to say that he was goin' to sing in Heaven, but it would take Heaven for him to do it. The Linder women all sound like rusty gates, and the men all sound like asthmatic bullfrogs. Even Marla's older sister Jonni takes after us. No, it was the Easterly blood that brought Paul and Marla their talents."

She picked up her glass of water and swirled it around. "Alison used to say that her great-grandmother was half Black Irish and half Cherokee and was what the old folks used to call a cunning woman, but that even in her eighties when Alison knew her, she could still sing the birds out of the trees onto her fingers. She said all the talent came from her."

She raised the glass and swallowed the water. "John was mystified by them two kids," she continued. "He didn't understand them at all. Called them his cuckoos sometimes. He was proud of them, though. He'd about bust his suspenders any time that Marla sang, and he just about couldn't keep his feet on the ground when Paul played that guitar." She set the glass in the sink, and she stared into the soapy water. "It about killed him when Paul got the cancer. He lost about as much weight watching Paul suffer through the chemotherapy for the leukemia as Paul did. That's why they weren't here when the Ring fell . . . they'd driven Paul to his next treatment. Oh, drat," she said matter-of-factly, wiping her eyes with her apron again. "It's been over three years. You'd think I could talk about them without crying."

She was surprised when Master Riebeck reached a gnarled hand over and patted her shoulder. "Frau Susan," he said, "those we love, we love forever, we miss forever. My brother was younger than me. He died years ago; I miss him still."

"Thanks," she said softly. "I miss them, I worry about how they felt and how they handled our being gone, but I think the worst is that we don't know what happened to Paul. Marla had a bad cold, so she'd been sleeping over here for several days so she wouldn't infect him. She didn't even get to say goodbye. She took it hard, real hard."

Ingram nodded in agreement. "The Bible says Hell is a place of fire, but I seem to remember readin' about some guy who said that there was a place of ice in Hell."

"Dante Alighieri," said Master Riebeck.

"Whoever. I could almost believe that, 'cause that's what Marla was like after the Ring fell," Susan said. "Her soul was frozen, and she was pure cutting edge. I thank God every night for Franz Sylwester. I mean, I'm sorry he got hurt and all, but I think it was purely the hand of God that brought him to Grantville and to Marla. Whether they marry or not, he's made her live again, and he'll always have a place in my heart and my home because of it."

"
Ja
, and we say
danke Gott
for Fräulein Marla, because she gave him life and worth again."

"Ain't it funny how God works?" The two men raised their glasses in a toast to that simple truth.

A long moment of quiet followed, and the music from the other room intruded. A man with a silky voice began singing. Ingram raised his eyebrows. "Frank Sinatra? What's she doing tonight?"

"She said she was going to walk them through one hundred years of popular music tonight."

"Well, it sounds like she's only up to about 1940. She's got a ways to go yet."

****

Franz's head seemed full to bursting, and he was very glad to hear Marla say, "Okay guys, we're almost done. Let's take a quick break, and then we'll wrap it up with one last song."

She disappeared down the hallway to the bathroom, and everyone else just seemed to slump in their chairs. Isaac leaned over, rested his elbows on his knees and put his head in his hands.

"Oooh," he moaned. "My head is spinning. Ragtime, Dixieland, jazz . . . "

"Southern gospel, black gospel . . . " Hermann added.

"Blues . . . " from Leopold.

"Country and western . . . " Josef and Rudolph said together.

"Rock and roll," finished Friedrich.

"Louis Armstrong . . . "

"Glenn Miller . . . "

"Harry James . . . "

"Billie Holiday . . . "

"Frank Sinatra . . . "

"Elvis Presley . . . "

"Brubeck . . . "

"Hank Williams . . . "

"The Beatles . . . "