Chapter 14

Bobby found Tilly and Jake in the hallway. Tilly hugged him.

“I don’t think this is a good idea,” she whispered in his ear.

“I know,” he whispered back. He pulled away from her and looked at Jake, who looked a little worried. Bobby didn’t think it had anything to do with Tilly hugging him.

“So ... this was your idea?” Bobby asked Jake.

Jake seemed to give himself a mental shake and looked at Bobby.

“Yeah,” he said, his voice a little husky. “I just think it’s time I got out more.”

“You get out all the time,” Bobby pointed out. That was true. Ever since Tilly had started having babies, which people just naturally thought were Jake’s, he’d been going more places with his wife and being seen in public.

“I know,” said Jake. He smiled a tentative smile. “There’s no critic like a kid,” he said.

“I thought the idea was for you to be the critic.”

“What do I know about this stuff?” asked Jake. “The last musical I went to was in this auditorium.” He pointed to the doors that led to the stage. “That was for an assembly we had to go to. It was called ‘Bye Bye Birdie,’ and I still don’t know what it was about.”

“Okay,” said Bobby, as if something had been explained. “But why drag Will into it too?”

“You can’t hide,” said Jake. “I tried. I don’t want him to go through the same thing I did, sitting alone someplace, hating the world, because you never have anything to do with it.”

He would have gone on, but the sound of Erica and Will’s arrival made them all turn and look at the couple coming up the hallway. Bobby peeked in through the double doors. Mrs. Staffordshire was apparently through with her comments, because the first act had started again. From the little Bobby saw it wasn’t much different from when they’d done it for him. He turned around as Erica pulled Will’s wheelchair to a stop. She looked almost panicked.

“They’re going through it now,” he said, for lack of anything else to say. “I think Mrs. Staffordshire gave them a pep talk.”

The women dithered, while the men sat, looking stern, until Bobby just pulled the double doors open and stood back. Neither woman moved until Jake said, “Tilly!” She and Erica both jerked, and the chairs started moving again.

The two men were pushed past the young actors, most of whom stopped and stared, instead of making the motions that were supposed to suggest a country fair was going on in Brigadoon. The song “McConnachy Square” was being sung, and by the time the men were sitting side by side at the front of the stage, only about half the kids were actually singing. Julia bellowed “KEEP SINGING!” and the song began picking up voices, one or two at a time, until suddenly no one was looking at the two men in wheelchairs.

It was almost comical how the kids, in trying not to look at the two men they thought of as “cripples,” fell back on the only routine at hand at the moment. That routine was the lines and movements they had practiced for so long. There were still occasional darting glances toward the front of the stage but, by and large, the actors were suddenly very interested in their lines, and who they were supposed to be interacting with.

Meg Brockie, the amorous dairy vendor was introduced, along with Angus McGuffie, her employer, and then Archie Beaton, the plaid merchant, and his son Harry. The plot tumbled on without the stops and starts that were usual as the audience met the McLaren family and found out that Harry Beaton was still madly in love with Jean McLaren, who was about to be married to another man that day.

Erica finally felt capable of leaving Will alone, and joined Julia Staffordshire to watch as “Waitin’ For My Dearie” was sung by Emily Emerson, playing the part of Fiona. Bobby just stood by Tilly, on the opposite side of Will, and watched with them.

There were the inevitable hang-ups, as players who had had to pretend they had props, and imagine the sets that hadn’t been finished yet, interacted with the real thing. But, for the most part, Erica only had to prompt things four or five times as the kids ran through the first act. It was a first for them all, because that act had never been done from start to finish in one episode.

In fact, working on that first act took the whole night, because once they got started and actually did it, the kids wanted to correct every little problem. It was one of those “elephant in the room” situations where, to be able to ignore Will and Jake, the kids concentrated on the only other thing available to take up their mostly full attention.

That is not to say that no one paid any attention to the two disabled men. A fair number of the cast were off stage at any given time, and clusters of teenagers gravitated toward each other to sneak quick and not-so-quick peeks at the two wrecked men sitting at the front of the stage. Those men just sat and watched, their faces not quite stony, but certainly not betraying any clue as to what they were thinking. It was like they were some kind of grotesque statues.

Eventually Bobby took Tilly’s elbow and led her to the stairs and down to sit in the seats. That movement drew Erica’s eyes, which took in Tilly’s hand in Bobby’s. Later she looked for them and saw them in the second or third row back, off to one side so they could see around Jake and Will. They were still holding hands. Erica had no time to evaluate that information, because the show ground to a halt as a set change was made to move to the forest, where Meg was going to try to seduce Jeff. They had never had all the sets to deal with before and had to figure out a way to stand them side by side off stage. By the time they had that figured out and the two actors were on stage, and Erica turned to look, Tilly was sitting alone.

Bobby had left the auditorium.

The next week wrought almost astonishing changes for the whole group of people involved with bringing Brigadoon to life. Some of those things were directly related to the production, and some were not.

It didn’t quite work out the way Jake had thought it would. His and Will’s presence, just sitting in their chairs at the front of the stage each night, didn’t really do anything about stage fright.

The elephant was still in the room ... two of them, in fact. What their presence seemed to do was require the kids, on some mystical social level, to completely ignore the two men, at least initially. The best way to do that, it turned out, was for the uncomfortable teenagers to pretend they were the characters in the musical, and give that their full attention. And, once the two disturbing men had been examined through hasty peeks, the kids who weren’t on stage turned their attention to the production, to concentrate on something not so disturbing. Nobody even thought about asking what the two men thought.

It took four nights before a teen, walking past them, shyly said “Hi.” That was returned with a similar greeting, delivered in a deep voice.

Then it became “Hi, I’m Sarah,” or, “Hi, I’m Jimmy.” It was inevitable, once the elephants were found to be able to speak, that someone ask, “So ... what do you think?”

It turned out that that person was, of all people, Tabitha Jenkins, the cheerleader/artist who kept coming to play practice, even though the sets were finished. She was forever dabbing paint here or there, to improve her canvases, but spent a lot of time just watching rehearsal too. She was the one who eventually spoke more than one or two words to the men. She was walking from one side of the stage to the other, trying not to disturb the flow of the funeral in act two, and so chose to walk around the arc of the front of the stage. She stopped behind and between the two men.

“So ... what do you think?” she asked.

Will had been asked that question almost nightly by his sister. His initial judgments had been kept to himself, because he didn’t want to hurt her feelings. He had been vague in his comments, for the most part. But things were coming together rapidly. When the kids actually paid attention to what they were supposed to be doing, the improvement was almost palpable.

Jake was the only one who could turn his head far enough to actually look at her, over his shoulder.

“Men aren’t supposed to like this stuff ... are they?” He grinned.

“I don’t see why not,” said Tabitha. Jake wasn’t so hard to look at. His face looked just like the face of any other older man.

“I’m definitely into it,” said Will, looking forward. He didn’t even try to turn, because he knew the tight skin on his neck and shoulder wouldn’t allow it.

“Cool,” said Tabitha.

That was it, for that night. But the elephants had been spoken to. Other teens had seen her stop, and seen her mouth moving ... seen Jake turn and address her. Their curiosity was not assuaged by Tabitha when she was questioned.

“I just said hi,” she claimed.

Those who had seen, though, knew that much more had been said than a simple one word greeting.

That led to more kids wandering by the wheelchairs ... and more words being exchanged. Their youthful curiosity had been pushed away by the strangeness of the two men, but familiarity with that strangeness seemed, somehow, to allow curiosity to bubble back up to the surface.

Rough spots were identified, and Erica stopped things to go over those scenes, again and again, until the roughness was smoothed over. That meant large numbers of kids had nothing to do. Watching the same scene over and over again was boring.

The two men at the front of the stage were not.

It took another three days before Donald Thompson had the courage ... or foolishness, depending on how you looked at it ... to finally say what was on every young mind in the place.

“So ... what happened to you, anyway?”

He was immediately corrected by four of the nine kids who, for some reason, had nothing better to do than stand around the two men in the wheelchairs. Jake corrected the correctors.

“It’s a normal question,” he said. “I was in a mining accident, and my buddy Will here was in Vietnam.”

That was all that was said at that moment, but the dam had been cracked. On a Thursday evening, when the boy playing the part of Jeff bumped into the edge of a set and drove a long splinter into the flesh above his knee, Erica stopped everything and took him to the nurse’s office, hopefully to find antiseptic and bandages.

That left the whole group alone with Will and Jake ... and with nothing to do.

Erica got back to find the entire cast standing, or sitting, in front of the two men. Will was describing how the helmet he had been wearing had shielded the top and sides of his head from the napalm, which was why his hair looked completely normal, even though it was above a ruined face, with a lump of scar for an ear.

Had she known this would happen, Erica would have done anything to prevent it. She would have believed quite strongly that such a description had no place in the ears of teenagers ... that they would neither understand nor be able to tolerate such graphic knowledge.

She stood, jaw slack, though, as first one then another teen asked questions about what it was like to be in that much pain, and to be afraid that you might die, and to say things like, “If that happened to me I don’t think I’d want to live.”

Part of her amazement was that such a serious conversation was being thoughtfully approached by all present. She could tell by the pink tint on Will’s right cheek that his emotional level was high, but he didn’t pull back or tell them to leave him alone. Jake drew the line when someone wanted to see the stump of his arm, but even that seemed to be just a wave that sank back into the sea of interest and questions.

It had only been quiet for ten seconds ... a somewhat natural lull in the group conversation, as kids evaluated what they had just heard, and before another question could be voiced, when Erica cleared her throat.

“We’re here to practice, not grill these men,” she said.

She was left astonished when the group rose, almost as one, and went back to work.

From that moment on, Jake and Will were almost never left alone long as they sat on the stage. What Erica never learned, though, was that once the kids’ curiosity was satisfied, they began to ask the men other questions.

Those questions had to do with what the men watched the cast do every night.

Something else that happened while Will and Jake were being “normalized” by the kids, and which also caused a lot of uproar, was when a pair of men walked down the aisle between the right and middle seats of the auditorium and asked for Erica. She told the kids to keep working on the scene being rehearsed and went down the steps to meet him.

“I’m Erica Bradford,” she said, approaching the men.

They were about as different as it was possible to be, physically. One was much older and short, while the other was so thin and tall that he looked almost emaciated. She held out her hand to the short man, who was half a step ahead of the tall one.

“How can I help you?” she asked.

“I hope it’s the other way around, actually,” he said smiling. “I’m Chester Chumley. This gentleman with me is named Sidney McGregor and I’ve hired him to provide his services to your musical.”

“Services?” Erica was at a loss. “I don’t understand.”

She knew who Chester Chumley was, of course. Everybody in town knew about the Chumleys. She’d never actually met either this man or his wife, though, and had no idea whether whatever he was talking about came with strings attached or not. Most rich men didn’t do anything without some kind of strings being attached.

“I’m a bagpiper,” said Sidney, reaching past Chester to take the hand Chester had just released. “I live in Kansas City and belong to a bagpiper club there.”

“I’ve heard that there are several places that a real bagpiper might add drama to the production,” said Chester. “I made some inquiries and found Mr. McGregor through his club and hired him. I hope I haven’t overstepped any boundaries.”