After small-talk the conversation settled down for a time. The stranger gazed into the campfire and toyed with the tip of his moustache. I guess we were all hypnotized by the flames because when he spoke, it felt like I had been shocked awake.
“I was a child at the time, no more than eight years of age.” He fell to silence for a while and then, as if he just remembered he had an audience straightened up and looked at us. “That would have made it 1972, or so, and Uncle Dick was grey around the whiskers even then.” He paused while Gary and I exchanged a nervous giggle.
“We never called him Uncle Dick to his face but that’s what my dad called him, amongst other disparagements. Would you hand me that bottle?” The bottle of high-charge brandy was worse for wear, but our storyteller showed no impedance.
“Uncle Dick was a music-man in my hometown. He was the leader of the local orchestra, a heady-duty post, I suppose, ‘though nobody ever called him Maestro Dick. Orchestra may be a grand name for the battery of 19 fiddlers, bassists, trumpeters, a single trombone and a bassoon.” He took another zap of brandy; I signalled Gary for a drag on the joint sagging from his knuckles.
After a time of staring into the fire, he resumed “He was no bright spark and looked a mite foolish on stage with his back to us, in his old tuxedo and toupee – his wife died young and he had to look after himself. I guess by then he was married to the likes of Mozart and Mendelssohn.” The stranger spat in the darkness beyond the fire. “He’d wave his little white baton in fury to the music and I’d try not to sleep.”
“Most summers he would direct concerts in our old town hall, between the basketball court and the hospital. Come the off-season, he’d be on the tour circuit in a flash, packing his little white baton in its little case and putting on concerts in the likes of Whistler, Hamilton or Edmonton.”
“Have you been to Southam Hall? In Ottawa? Me neither. That was his last performance. Funny thing about life is that it’s always the quiet ones who go out with a bang. Nobody expected that though, they had other things on their minds…
“Now, you young fellas wouldn’t know about the great blizzard of 1975 and the folks in the concert hall didn’t either. Oh, it was a cold winter and a storm was forecast but when the lights went out the snow was already piled against the doors. More than 200 souls was trapped, with no light but cigarette lighters and a shocking cold.”
The old man stared into the fire for a time, perhaps recalling the first truly cold winter of his youth. He resumed in a mutter.
“Old Maestro Dick weren’t always a musician. He’d apprenticed under his dad, my grandfather, for a time. The usher had a working flashlight and they climbed down to the basement where the main fuse-board was housed. It was pretty clear to Old Dick what was up – the main breaker had tripped. A few tries at resetting it just made sparks and pops, probably ice on the latch. He said if he could brace it long enough the ice would melt, the heat would come back on and they would be saved. He was right, the heat did come back on and the 200 were saved, but not old Dick.”
Now the old man coughed hard and took another powerful swig of brandy.
“I don’t reckon you boys know much about orchestras, but the maestro’s baton is made of alum-min-um,” he pronounced carefully, “and Old Dick used it to brace the switch shut. Braced himself against the side of the box while he was at it and was instantly electrocuted.”
The last sentence was deadpan and I was pretty stoned by then, so it took me a second to absorb what had happened and I started as if shocked myself.
I thought that was the end of the story, the old man was quiet so long, staring into the flames. Then he turned and looked me right in the eye:
“Uncle Dick may not have been much in any man’s regard, but in the end, he proved himself a fine conductor.”