The Talent Show

Every November, the small town of Millbrook, Ontario, holds a talent show in the community hall to raise money for the hockey rink. It is not, it has to be said, a show that attracts a great deal of talent. What it attracts is enthusiasm: magicians who drop their cards, dancers who forget their steps and, every single year, Mr. Peterson from the hardware store playing the same song on the bagpipes.

This year the organizer was Jen Kowalski, an elementary school teacher who had foolishly agreed to the job in September. By the week of the show she was regretting it deeply. The rehearsals were absolutely terrible. The barbershop quartet had become a trio after one member lost his voice. The teenage rock band played so loudly that a ceiling tile fell down. A seven-year-old magician made his sister's hamster disappear and then could not make it reappear for forty-five minutes.

The act that worried Jen most, however, was the last one on the list. Next to number fourteen, someone had written in small, neat handwriting: "Margaret Ellis. Song." Margaret was the town librarian. She had worked in the library for twenty-six years, and in all that time, as far as anyone could remember, she had never raised her voice above a whisper. She wore gray cardigans, she said very little, and she always looked slightly surprised when people spoke to her.

At the dress rehearsal, Margaret's turn came at nearly eleven o'clock. She walked onto the stage, stood next to the piano and opened her mouth. Nothing came out. She tried again and produced a sound so tiny that the pianist leaned forward to hear it. After a minute, Margaret shook her head, said, "I'm so sorry," and hurried off the stage. Jen found her in the parking lot, wiping her eyes. "Perhaps I should just stay at home on Saturday," Margaret said.

"It's entirely up to you," said Jen kindly. "But you put your name on the list. Somebody must have wanted to sing." Margaret was quiet for a long time. "My mother wanted me to," she said at last. "She was a singer. I promised her I would do it once, on a real stage. She died in the spring."

On the night itself, the hall was packed. The magician's hamster behaved perfectly. The barbershop trio was surprisingly good. Mr. Peterson played his bagpipes, and the audience clapped politely, as they did every year. By the time the fourteenth act was announced, people were putting on their coats.

Margaret walked slowly to the center of the stage. She was wearing a long dark blue dress instead of a cardigan, and she was holding a small photograph. She looked at it, put it in her pocket, nodded to the pianist and began to sing.

It is hard to describe what happened next. The voice that came out of that small, shy woman was enormous. It was rich and warm, and it filled every corner of the old hall. She sang an old French song that nobody in Millbrook understood a word of, and it did not matter in the slightest. People stopped putting on their coats. Mr. Peterson took off his cap. Somewhere at the back, the hockey coach was quietly blowing his nose.

When she finished, there was a second of complete silence. Then the whole hall stood up. The applause went on for so long that Margaret had to come back and sing a second song, and then a third.

She won, of course. The prize was a fifty-dollar voucher for the hardware store, which she gave to Mr. Peterson. What people in Millbrook still talk about, years later, is not the voice, extraordinary as it was. It is the fact that the next Monday, Margaret was back behind her desk in the library, in a gray cardigan, whispering, "That book is due back on the fourteenth," as if nothing had happened at all.