Murder of A Drummer

Birdsboro is a gritty stinking town that sits at the Intersection of the Schuylkill river where it is met by Hay Creek. The town has slowly recovered from the flood of 1972 when a June hurricane sat stalled on top of the hard luck steel town. Many of the young people in town, those below the age of sixty, meet the holiday with a flippant sense of humor usually reserved for those in progressive towns such as Douglasville, Reading and Limekiln.

There is a game played within a network of friends, and friends of friends, and anybody who catches wind is very much part of the game. There are no scoreboards, and the game is pretty much played on the honor system. However it is taken quite serious. Most people in Birdsboro partake in the usual holiday rituals such as decorating one’s house and having an eggnog or two. But the game of LDB is an underground legend in this little town. All that is needed is a group of interconnected friends. The method of interconnection does not matter. It is all about bragging rights, until the following year. And the winner and the loser of the game is usually determined by luck and happenstance. The game takes very little intelligence and it utilizes the honor system. In some circles this bears repeating. Somebody who cheated the system , is guaranteed to come out on top, but that’s besides the spirit of this particular game in this season of the year.

Local legend, why let the truth get in the way of a good story, has it that somebody named Carl Doaty once blatantly cheated the game and was called out years later. The story gets bigger and bigger all the time, but the saying remains the same. Don’t be a Carl Doaty.

The objective of the game was plain and simple. To succeed at this game all one had to do is not hear the song Little Drummer Boy during the holiday season. It is a monumental task if you do not work too hard at it. The nature of this game, the song will blindside you when you least expect it. You will hear it hidden in a commercial, part of a once a year Christmas event, or some band of boozy merry carolers singing in the streets. Once you hear these words

I played my drum for him
Pa rum pum pum pum
I played my best for him
Pa rum pum pum pum

It simply was not enough, you are out of the game.

Felipe was usually really good at the game and usually did not get booted from the game until pretty close to Xmas. Just last year he did not hear Pa rum pum pum pum even once.

This year he was blindsided the day after Thanksgiving. The sneak attack was administered as hold music as he waited to make an appointment with his doctor. No wonder some people are afraid to see their doctors so close to the holidays. Yeah he fessed up and told his friends in a social media post or maybe it was an apply all to an email thread his friends still insisted upon.

His buddy, well actually he has no idea how he ended on the email thread, from back in his college days ribbed him mercifully. Felipe simply did not like Chip. Anybody who was named after a gold club had a distorted silver spoon introduction to life. Yet, they had stayed in touch over the years. Chip was god damn competitive. And by some obscure quirk in the cosmos he was really into the Little Drummer Boy game. Felipe reminded his friend it was a game for fun, yet Chip would not let it go.

An integral part of living in a small town is understanding that it is a small town and variations in life are less numerous then most other places. Chip was also Felipe’s co worker at the Chocolate Factory (Godiva) just a few miles south. Felipe works as an accountant and Chip is his boss. When Felipe first met Chip he assumed he was named by the Chip on his shoulder. It was only after he started working at Godiva, and he signed up for a Corporate golf outing ( paid day off) , the nuance of being named Chip. He abhorred Chip, yet kind of had to be friendly. And Chip would not let it go that he had been eliminated in the Little Drummer Boy (LBD) so darn early.

One thing that Felipe excelled at was living in a world without borders. He was incapable of setting them. He had somehow got himself into helping Chip fix a roof that needed repair. It was not Chip’s roof rather the roof on the church that Chip apparently attended.

Felipe did not relish getting up so early on a weekend morning yet he felt energized by the the early morning air. He found himself on the roof with two other people apparently from the congregation. It was simple mindless work replacing the the shingles on the northwest corner of the roof. He learned the names of the other two on the roof with him. There was a man named Jesus and and another man named Jorge who spoke to him with ease and grace. They spent the first hour joking and digging around at the shingles on the roof. There were lapses where the other two would speak to each other in Spanish not knowing, or actually caring, that Felipe spoke a language other than English.

Felipe did not speak Spanish all that well. Many people assumed he spoke Spanish. What he learned he learned the less than traditional way and that was his two years of high school Spanish class. At Daniel Boone High School. He could speak in the present and future tenses, and he had never really got around to master the past tenses. Idioms were lost on him. But from the conversation on the roof it was pretty easy to figure that the other two were rather pissed that Chipper had not yet made an appearance. Heavy sporadic white song flakes started falling from the suddenly lowering clouds moving in from the west.

In the narthex, just fifty feet below, the choir gathered for their usual walk through for Sundays service. They were busy doing what choir members do on a Saturday morning. They drank percolated coffee while discussing what songs they were going to perform for the Sunday service. They usually did the same songs year after year yet some of the newer members of the choir wanted to do some songs that were not straight out of the hymnals. Many were keen on the idea of playing “Wish You Were Here. One must admit, that would be an awesome song for a Sunday Church service. Just not this Sunday’s service.

They were pleasantly surprised when snowflakes started falling in their practice area. They looked up and saw two legs dangling from a hole in the roof.

“Are you okay up there? Came a shout from one of the choir members.

“We shall have this patched up by the time you are through a song or two. Do you mind if my buddy here uses the bathroom.”

“Be our guest, is there any song you want to hear?” and the choir immediately started singing a funky version of Silent Night. They appeared to be enjoying themselves immensely.

Felipe made his way gingerly off the roof and scurried toward the bathroom. On the way he ran into Chip who looked like he just rolled out of bed. “Nice that you could make it Chipper.” Felipe quipped more subdued then he would have liked given they were in a church and Chipper was his boss. “Have you been up on the roof. It was a mess with plenty of rotting wood. We are cleaning up the rotten wood and we can put a tarp over the hole. Go up there and check it out yourself. I’ll be right back as I really need to use the bathroom.”

On his way back he sat and enjoyed the music the choir was practicing. They were now doing a more traditional version of Silent Night in the form of a round. He walked over to a person who seemed to be part of the group but was not singing at the time.

Hi there, I am really enjoying listening to your group practice. I really enjoy Xmas music, especially what was the chaos of the this past year.

“For you lads up on the roof we could play a song for you. With the snow coming through we could do Let It Snow or something to make you boys laugh.”

Which indeed made him laugh, yet he could not decide what song to play but then he had

Then he get an idea
An awful idea
A wonderful awful
Idea

He heard a scream coming from the roof and wondered silently, what all the bluster was about. Upon inspection, it looked like the ladder leading up to the roof had recently come crashing down , leaving Jesus, Chip and Jorge stranded on the roof in what was now a twirling dervish of a snow squall.

He just stood there and took in the beauty surrounding him. The snow swirled and glimmered against heavy grey clouds. It seemed the entire world was silent, the world was beautiful. The absolute quiet that is the beginning of a snow storm can fill the loudest quiet one can hear. It is beautiful if you take the time to listen for it. He sat and watched and was almost moved to tears by the beauty of the setting.

He then heard music from 
within in the snow flakes
It started off as a whisper, 
barely to be heard
And built rather slowly like
a movie cliche.
It grew slowly, surely until
He could make out the words
But it wasn’t quite words rather
Something a rather different.

Pa rum pum pum pum

Pa rum pum pum pum

You could hear Jorge and Jesus chuckle with glee.