Fiction Feature: O Holy Night

BY BILL RICHARDSON

Do you recognize this title? We ran “O Holy Night” one year ago, and readers wanted to know “what happened?” So in July we ran a contest on our website to see who, in author Bill Richardson’s opinion, could best close his story—and win a $500 prize. Here it is, with the winning conclusion.                                                 

Eds.

The trouble with stories is that they have to end, and the trouble with endings is that they’re hard to get right. Nothing is more worrying to a writer than wrapping things up in a way that doesn’t seem too contrived, too hurried, too out of keeping with what’s gone before. The best endings, I think, are ones that are ambiguous, that leave a whispered question hanging in the air. I was flattered that so many readers took on the challenge of imagining the implied “what’s next?” at the end of “O Holy Night.” Did Weldon hit the note? Did Gary get his wish? What was his wish? It was so interesting for me, as a writer, to see the way readers take a story into their hearts and make it their own. Choosing a winner was every bit as tricky as writing an ending, but I finally settled on the elegant submission from Craig Holland of London, Ont. I appreciated his turn of phrase, and his sense of the importance of continuum; that traditions aren’t static, they evolve. Congratulations to Craig and my thanks to everyone who took the time and trouble to write. By way of conclusion, I’ll tell you that Weldon is named for the American poet and novelist Weldon Kees. He disappeared, mysteriously, in 1955, leaving nothing but rumour behind. Almost certainly, he has passed from the scene. But in the absence of hard proof, that little question mark must dangle, an emblem of the enigmatic, mysterious ending.

B.R.

Invisibility is no impediment to weightiness. What can’t be seen can still be cumbersome. Tradition and its second cousin, faith, are among the heavy imponderables. If tradition and faith had a family crest, it would feature an anchor. Anchoring is the business of tradition and faith. They steady us when the going gets choppy. They are ballast in the hold.

Weldon Bedford joined the church choir when he was 30 and growing anxious about the future and unexpectedly full of dynastic longings. At 30, Weldon found he was of a mind to marry. He had been told, by people whose judgement he didn’t discount, that he had a pleasant tenor voice. Also, he’d heard from a friend at work, who had a friend for whom this strategy had paid off, that a church choir was a first-rate place to find a wife. Church choirs, he was told, were magnets for women who were sprinting towards spinsterhood and who were possessed, as was Weldon, of procreative urges.

That was 50 years ago. Now, Weldon is 80. He is still single. The closest he came to the end of bache- lorhood was an episode involving a choir party, some spiked punch and a willing alto. Something happened between them, but by tacit, mutual consent they both thought it best never to mention it again. As time passed, his longing after union faded. Commensurate with its dwindling, his attachment to the choir grew. For 50 years, he has been a mainstay of the tenor section. In all that time, he never once missed a rehearsal or a performance—a fact much marvelled at by other choir members and by congregants and which is occasionally reported, on a slow news day, in the community press.

Gary Hunter is a midstream boomer. He belongs to the last generation of men to be saddled with the name Gary. For the past 40 years, at least, no one has thought to name a baby Gary and it seems unlikely that anyone, anywhere, ever will again. Gary is a name like Dorcas; popular once upon a time, but not susceptible to revival. Gary is 50, and like many who share his niche in the space-time continuum, his only brush with faith is hinged to tradition. He was born on December 15, and his first public outing was with his mother to the Christmas Eve service at their neighbourhood United Church. Christmas Eve was the only time she thought to attend, and Gary always went with her, first at her instigation, as a babe in arms, then as a toddler, and later on, willingly. He kept her company of his own accord, even during the awkward, rebellious years of his adolescence. It was a tradition, and he was, constitutionally, someone to whom that kind of thing mattered, even if the story that was told on that night meant little to him; even if he found it dubious and wanting in logic. For 20 of his 50 years, Gary had lived away, but had always made it a point to be home, with his mother, for Christmas Eve. Their date, they called it. Now, she is one of the many who lives with deepening forgetfulness. For this reason, and for others that pertain more to his own situation, and because his evolving circumstances had made the move possible, Gary has come home for good. He sleeps in his old room, with the worn, flocked wallpaper. He looks out for his mother. He sees that the kettle doesn’t boil dry and that the saucepans don’t burn on the stove.

Here is the “as it happens” part of the story. As it happens, the church that Gary and his mother attend is the same church where Weldon has been a choir member for 50 years. As it happens, Weldon’s first year in the choir coincided with Gary’s first year on earth. As it happens, that was the first year that Weldon was pegged to sing “O Holy Night” at the Christmas Eve service. As it happens, Gary has heard Weldon sing “O Holy Night” every year of his life. It is a tradition, and as it happens, that performance has also come, for Gary, to be portentous, uncomfortably freighted with meaning.

Gary couldn’t say at what age he became actively aware that “O Holy Night,” for a singer, is a daunting exercise. He would listen to Weldon’s clarion call of Fall on your knees, O hear the angel voices, O night divine, O night when Christ was born, and would inch forward in the pew, would white knuckle the little shelf that held the hymnals, as Weldon ramped up to the awe-inspiring climax, the high C reprise of O night divine, which was full of danger, ripe with the risk that that note, teetering at the extremity of the voice’s range, would crack and crumble and that every good thing that had been poured into the carol until then would drain out. Gary can’t say at what very young age he began a game of magical association with Weldon’s singing. He knows that he’s never spoken of it to anyone, that he is ever so slightly embarrassed that this tradition within a tradition endures, within the low-ceilinged cathedral of his own brain. Over the years, Gary’s own prospects and happiness have come to rely on Weldon’s successful execution of that note. Over the years Gary has told himself, If he hits it, I will get an A on my English paper, I will ace the spelling bee, I will win first prize in the science fair, I will get into Queens, I will get lucky before the end of the year, I will get the job, I will get the transfer, JoAnne will say yes when I ask her. And every year, as it happens, Gary’s wish and Weldon’s success have dovetailed. Every year. It has been a remarkable partnership, even if one half of the firm lives in ignorance of it.

And now, Weldon is 80, and over the past several seasons, it has been impossible not to notice that he is not in the most elastic of voice. Nonetheless, he has somehow pulled it out of the bag—O night divine, O night when Christ was born. Weldon has thought of retiring, of ceding the song to a younger man. But it is a tradition, and he has something like faith that he can still pull it off, one more time at least. And that time, if it is to come, is now. For the organ is playing the opening chords, and Weldon is standing, and Gary is clutching at the pew, and his mother, who all afternoon insisted on calling him by his father’s name, is beside him, and she is rustling through her purse, looking for the humbug she’s sure is in there somewhere. It can’t go on much longer, none of it, but Gary is so reluctant to let it go, it can’t end yet, not yet, just one more year, just one more year. And outside the cold light of the stars spills down the night divine, on the earth as hard as iron, and it is a light that is millennia old and Weldon begins to sing, without any idea, none at all, of just how much is riding on all of this.…    

For this year, Gary had a special wish, one that would undoubtedly be the most important and most sacred of his life. This time Gary’s thoughts weren’t consumed by hopes of promotion, marriage or monetary gain. This year was reserved for something much closer to Gary’s heart.

Gary’s fingers tightened and his knuckles whitened as Weldon’s aging vocal chords stretched towards the climax. Gary held his breath and looked at his mother with undying love and he held her in his view until the end. It was truly Weldon’s finest performance.

Gary reflected on this as he sat alone in his mother’s favourite pew the very next Christmas. Gary could not have known it at the time, but six months later he learned that it was to be Weldon’s last performance, as he had followed Gary’s mother into the afterlife not two months after she had passed away—peacefully, surrounded by family, just as Gary had wished.

Christmas, of course, would continue in the absence of Weldon and Gary’s mother, as would the yearly Christmas service. At church this year, they introduced Weldon’s replacement. Gary gazed at this newcomer with a heavy heart, but even though the two people he held dear to his heart were no longer with him, he was bolstered by the knowledge that faith and tradition would hold strong.

Read submissions Bill Richardson felt worthy of “honourable mentions”