A Christmas Blizzard (15 page)

Oscar didn’t know. They hadn’t heard from him since he got out of the Navy and got a job in New York driving a double-decker London omnibus.

“I remember waiting for the schoolbus when I was a kid,” said James and was just about to launch into a story about that, but Uncle Earl jumped in and talked about the winter of 1931. “There never was a winter like it. Snow blew into big drifts a hundred feet high, like mountains, and though it was only ten miles to school, they sent Mr. Turner to pick us up in his sleigh. He wore a big fur cap and had eyebrows the size of rats and a big handlebar mustache, and he drove a team of black horses pulling a sleigh with a bearskin rug with the head of the bear still attached and us youngens dove under the bearskin and Mr. Turner cracked the whip and off we went to school. We crossed the river over the ice and rode through the swamp and were attacked there by ragged men in gray who leaped out from behind stumps, the last desperate remnants of the Army of Northern Virginia looking for little Yankee children to kidnap for ransom in hopes of raising money to buy gunpowder from the Canadians and put the Confederacy together again. Old men in gray waving their rifles and whooping and yelling, and we had to race away across the frozen tundra and get to school, which was held in a cave back then. You crawled in through a long narrow hole to a cavern where you could stand up, and there were flaming torches set in iron brackets in the stones, and deep down below the earth, there was an enormous room heated by hot springs that bubbled up in a pool, and dazzling bright because the walls were quartz and jasper and mica which reflected the lantern light and made it feel like sunlight, and acres of precious stones lying loose all around, and we sat down at our desks feeling warm and happy and I don’t know where our teachers came from—children didn’t ask so many questions back then, we were brought up to accept things as they were and be grateful and not ask why—but they were very beautiful women with long golden hair in soft tendrils who circulated among us singing in low voices and their feet were bare and did not quite touch the ground. We were so grateful to be safe from the blizzard, we did our lessons faithfully and learned how to spell, which children today who grow up with reliable electrical power, and computers, never learn. Their spelling is atrocious. No reason not to love them, of course. They are wonderful kids. But I just wonder sometimes.”

Twelve people around the long table, and out came a crock of fish soup redolent of onion and garlic and platters of meat and potatoes and a boatload of gravy and Uncle Earl arose to say grace, holding his internal organs in his hand. “This is my last Christmas, Lord, and I am fully grateful for it. Thank you for bringing me this far. I ask no more. Thank you for Rosana and thanks to Jefferson County for the generosity. And thank you, Lord, for this brief time of peace and contentment and everybody getting along. And now let’s eat.” Rosana stood in the doorway, dabbing at her eyes. “Dig in!” he hollered. They sat and chewed and the sheer butteriness of everything, the turkey and gravy, the glitter of fat in the spuds, made them dozy, and then Liz, who had had three glasses of red wine, clinked on her glass and stood up and said, “I’m glad you’re all having fun and I hope that in the midst of it all, you stop to consider that this may well be our last Christmas in a free country unless people listen to the truth and take action. But I promised Leo I wasn’t going to talk politics on Christmas so I won’t. I want to thank you, Daddy, for making me feel good about myself and not have to be like everybody else. And when you’re gone, I’m going to stay here in Looseleaf and build a community of people dedicated to freedom.” And she plopped down.

Well, Faye was not about to let Liz hog the spotlight, so she popped right up and spread her hands out in a long lingering beneficent gesture, her eyes closed, and said, “This is a thank you to the force of love that watches over all of us now and at all times, without which we would be lost forever.”

“Oh god,” said Liz.

Faye was unfazed. “In the great Ojibway tradition and in the traditions of all of us in the storytelling community, this time of year is sacred because it is a time of going back to origins and first causes, and whether we tell the story of the Christ-child come to earth in Bethlehem and surrounded by cattle and shepherds, or we tell the story of the Great White Bear who led our ancestors over the ice bridge from Siberia and down into the New World, this is nonetheless a sacred time and a time when each of us can pause and recollect our own story of who we are and where we come from and in this way get a clearer visualization of our journey—”

Oscar dinged on his glass. “Excuse me but your ancestors didn’t come over on an ice bridge from Siberia, they came from England on a ship. You’re English, same as us. You’re not Ojibway.”

“I was made Ojibway in a spirit healing ceremony on the Arizona desert six years ago,” she said. “I was born again on the desert, holding the sacred yucca in my hands, smoking the sacred mesquite.”

“You’ve been smoking too much mesquite, then,” he said. “You’re one of us, Faye. Indian you ain’t.”

“Don’t limit other people, Oscar. I’m a traveler. I am not defined by your opinion of me.”

“Not defining you, Faye. Just telling you who you are so you don’t make a fool of yourself.”

Uncle Earl got to his feet and dinged on a glass for silence. “I just remembered more about 1931. I was just a kid. I knew we didn’t have much money. Our clothes were thin and we ate bean soup twice a day and I gave Mama all the money from my paper route, but nonetheless she wanted to have Christmas. She went to the store and bought a big orange for me and a book,
The Chilstrom Boys On the S.S. Araby
, about two farm boys who stow aboard a freighter for the South Seas and solve the robbery of a sacred jade. We had beeswax candles and she lit them and we waited for Dad to come home from the farm where he was hiring out to muck out the barn for an old lady. He had to walk five miles to get home and it was late when he arrived, all worn out and discouraged, and Mama waiting up for him with two cups of eggnog and a shot of bourbon and two cigarettes. They were staunch Methodists but on Christmas Eve they made an exception. So they smoked a cigarette and sipped the eggnog and she put on the radio, and a jazz band was playing, and she danced with him. But his heart wasn’t in it. She put his hand on her thigh and tried to kiss him but he turned away. My mother and dad standing on an old linoleum floor in candlelight and the old Atwater-Kent turned up and a man was singing about a cottage for two, and her trying to kiss him and him turning away. It broke her heart. They thought I was asleep but I wasn’t. She sat down and smoked that second cigarette alone and he looked out the window. He said, ‘We can’t afford to have another baby now. Can’t even afford the one we got.’ And she said, ‘I’m not talking about that.’ And he said nothing, and she said, ‘I’m taking Buddy and going to live with my sister in North Dakota.’ And that’s how I came here.”

Rosana brought out bowls of walnuts and dates and a pitcher of eggnog with rum to flavor it, and Ozzie sat down at the piano and banged out “
On The Road to Mandalay / where the flying fishes play / and the dawn comes up like thunder / out of China cross the bay
” and “
Nita Juanita, tell my soul that we must part . . . Nita Juanita, lead thou on, my heart
”—they stood shoulder to shoulder behind Ozzie, their voices mingling, coming with all the faithful upon a midnight clear to see the radiant streams from Thy holy face. And then Uncle Earl started singing “Silent Night” and Faye turned out the lights and the candles flickered, the fragrance of pine in the air, and coffee and saffron, and outside the snow was falling and James, who hadn’t cried real tears since last Christmas, could feel them coming around again.

Everyone was in a mellow mood, even Liz.

Uncle Earl opened up a fresh bottle of brandy. “Clean glasses!” he said to Faye and she jumped up and got a box of Dixie cups. “Glasses!” he said. “The good ones!” So she rustled up the family heirloom Waterford crystal goblets and washed the dust off and Earl poured a couple fingers of brandy in each and swished some around in his mouth and leaned back and closed his eyes. James stood in front of him, a camera in hand, and shot pictures of the old man, his eyes closed, as any storyteller does when delving deep into memory.

“I remember the year I went up to Alaska to drive truck when they were building the Alcan Highway and I stuck around in November to go bear hunting with some Eskimos I met in a bar in Fairbanks and that was the year a storm came through on Armistice Day and dumped about six feet of snow. Well, we just stayed with the truck and got out okay, but we heard about a mining camp just south of there—they hadn’t gotten their provisions in, and when two weeks passed and no help arrived, they looked around at each other and made some difficult choices. They scratched off the bonier ones—too hard to clean—and they marked a couple of the fat ones for harvesting. And of course the fat men knew it, even though the others tried to pretend it wasn’t happening—‘Huh? What shotgun? Is this a shotgun? Oh. This shotgun. Well, I don’t know how it got here.’ And late at night, after devotions, the two fat men made their escape. They snuck out and put on their snowshoes and headed for the highway. Two great big guys. One was the camp cook and the other was the dynamiter who set off the charges in the mineshaft when they needed to go deeper. Well, being hefty men and no athletes, they got winded after a couple thousand yards, and the alarm bell rang, and the camp organized a rescue party to go find them. A hunting party, I should say. The moon was full and the fat men’s trail was easy to follow, the way they thrashed around in the snow, and the hunters spotted them making their way around the south face of Golden Girl Mountain and saw how slow they were moving. So the hunters circled down to the lower slopes to intercept them at a line of aspen trees. They’d shoot both of them right there, gut them, skin them, butcher the meat, and pack it out on a toboggan. Easy pickings. They hid in the aspens, licking their chops, waiting for dinner to arrive, and then they saw a flash of flame. They knew what it was and tried to run but the snow was too deep. The dynamiter had set off a charge and started the biggest avalanche you ever saw. Half the mountain came sliding down and the two fat men rode down on it, paddling and kicking like crazy to stay afloat, and the hungry men in the aspen trees were never seen again. The fat men rode the snow for six miles all the way down to the Matanuska Valley and slid up to the highway just as a bus came along. It stopped. On the bus were fifteen attractive young ladies who were part of an evangelism crusade and ten lumberjacks who thought they’d died and gone to heaven. Fifteen women for ten men seemed like the right ratio to them, and of course the ladies were all born-again Christians, but—if only the bus would get stuck and all of them be snowbound for a week or two or three, the lumberjacks figured that human nature would take its course and the pleasure urge prevail. And then these two fatsos climb aboard all snowy and wet, and that promised to screw everything up. The lumberjacks bided their time until the bus came to a snowslide and stopped. It was twilight. The lumberjacks got out shovels to dig and the dynamiter spoke up nice and pert and said, “Hey, I know a better way!” So he prepared a charge of dynamite. A couple big red sticks tied together and a long fuse and he got it all rigged up, the lumberjacks hoping he’d set it off accidentally and blow himself sky-high, and he laid it in the deepest part of the snowbank and hollered ‘Fire in the hole!’ and all the lumberjacks dashed for cover. But while the charge was being rigged, the cook had gone around and let air out of the bus tires and so he and the dynamiter jumped on board the bus with the girls and drove right over the snowslide. And when the lumberjacks gave chase, the dynamite went off and the lumberjacks slid into a deep crevasse and it took ten days to rescue them by which time they’d gone berserk and were drooling and pulling out their hair by the fistful. Two men with fifteen young women who were praising God for their deliverance. The cook and the dynamiter had a day and a half to get to know the girls and when they got to Anchorage, each of them had found a wife, and of course they had to go to church and get saved but that was a small price to pay for the love of a beautiful woman.”

And then Leo stood up. James looked up at the man and he thought Leo looked quite festive and jolly but no, that wasn’t the case.

“This is the fifteenth Christmas I’ve spent with all of you here in Looseleaf and I want to thank you for all these wonderful stories of bygone days of yesteryear and now I have a little story of my own. But not so sweet.”

Liz looked at him thoughtfully.

“Next week I am moving to Washington, D.C., to take up a new position in the anti-terrorism office of the F.B.I.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out the badge. ‘My name isn’t Wimmer, it’s Krainis. Lawrence B. Krainis, Special Agent. I’ve been here undercover and now my job is done.” He turned to Liz. “I just want you to know, from the heart, that you were everything I ever wanted in a wife. It’s not about you at all.”

Liz did not seem fazed whatsoever. “If it’s the Possum Comatosis you’re after, G-Man, you’re a day late and a dollar short.”

He nodded. “I realize that. You’re a step ahead of me, Liz.”

“Three steps, G-Man. I knew somebody was watching us because I sense satellite waves and so I moved the Freedom Center out of the power plant last fall. Put them on a truck and wished them well and I have no idea where they went. But somewhere in America, they’re working to re-establish the Constitution of the United States of America. You can count on that big time.”

Leo—or Lawrence B. Krainis—shrugged. “I admit defeat. But you can’t expect me to go back to my superiors empty-handed.”

“You’ve got nothing on me, G-Man.”

Faye rose and grabbed a carving knife from beside the platter of turkey.

“If this is about the sacred medicinal plants of the Ojibway, you’ve bitten off more than you can chew, white man. I may talk like a hophead but I could put this knife between your ribs as easy as I could filet a walleye, maybe easier.”