A Season of Gifts (14 page)

I thought we were done, but she said, “We’ll need us some greens for wreaths.”

So back we trekked. She’d brought a folding knife. We
worked farther into the trees, looking for the right branches, full and feathery. She cut, I carried.

Then she went too far. She’d pushed past one last fir tree, stopped dead, and staggered back. I almost walked up the back of her gum boots.

There ahead of us past freshly laid sod was a brand-new house, ranch style with attached garage and picture window. Even a bird feeder. We were standing in somebody’s backyard.

“Where in the Sam Hill did that place come from?” she wondered. You rarely saw her astonished, but she was. We thought we’d been out in the middle of nowhere. I heard voices, a door, the scrape of feet.

She spun around and nearly knocked me flat. “Run for your life,” she said. “Don’t drop the greens.”

We plunged, skimming the undergrowth, clearing logs. She had the saw. Gunfire behind us would have come as no surprise. Neither would snarling dogs. I ran like a blind boy with my face in the feathery greens. To this day the smell of fir and pine brings back that morning.

Back at the car it was all a blur. Somehow the trunk lid was down, and Mrs. Dowdel and I were in the front seat, fighting for breath.

“Lay rubber,” she said.

“Where’s the fire?” Mrs. Wilcox said.

Then she vanished out of my rearview mirror because I
found first gear with no trouble. The Pickle rocketed down the track. I aimed between the fence posts and screeched out on the road on two wheels. Once again if something had been coming, I wouldn’t be telling this.

We headed back the way we’d come, top-heavy with trees. I was working through the gears like a pro now, and Mrs. Dowdel was wiping up under her specs with a blue bandanna. “Hoo-boy,” she said. “Busy, busy, busy and rushed off my feet. Not enough hours in the day. I’ll die standing up like an old—”

“Ox,” Mrs. Wilcox said from behind. “Did you see anything of the Dempseys?”

“Who in tarnation are the Dempseys?” Mrs. Dowdel asked.

“Why, they’s the folks who bought up that whole tract of land and put up a new house on it.”

My eyes were mostly on the road, but I noticed Mrs. Dowdel’s fists clench on her knees.

“Many thanks for sharin’ that news, Effie,” she said in a dangerous voice.

And we drove on back to town.

I did.

S
ince Christmas is also the season of miracles, we were back before we were missed. On the last lap, I got a little overconfident the way you do at twelve. I needed more work on my steering and nearly took out Mrs. Dowdel’s mailbox. But then we were creeping back past our house. I managed to park the Pickle in its regular ruts. It lurched one last time, and the engine died. I put the keys back where they belonged.

Maybe Mother and Dad thought the tree that turned up in our front room was Mrs. Dowdel’s payment for chores I’d been doing for her. Maybe they thought that both that tree and the big one that filled Mrs. Dowdel’s bay window had come from the VFW tree sale up at the IGA. Maybe I let them think it.

Mrs. Dowdel and Ruth Ann decorated for days. They gilded pinecones and strung enough popcorn for two trees. The first graders made paper chains at school, and Ruth Ann made extra. The tree in the bay to show him the way glowed like Times Square with strand after strand of fat-bulbed lights.

There were no presents under Mrs. Dowdel’s tree though. She said she didn’t give any because of inflation.

*  *  *

There was a tree in every front window in town, against the blue glow of television sets. And a wreath on every door. A full-size beaverboard nativity scene, floodlit, appeared in the park uptown where Gypsy Piggott’s big top had stood last summer. Woody’s Zephyr Oil filling station gave out inflatable plastic snowmen with every lube job.

And night after night the strains of a heavenly host singing al-le-lu-ia welled out of our church as Mother rehearsed the concert choir.

Actual heavenly hosts looking down on the town could have taken it for the toy village under a Christmas tree, complete with train track and winking lights. A light dusting of snow on Christmas Eve was the final touch.

The town bustled now with company coming: kids home from college, soldiers on leave. Company for Christmas.

After a sketchy supper at our house, the bustle turned to panic. Mother said the Christmas choir concert was her first opportunity to share Methodist music with what she called
The Larger Community. She was worried sick they didn’t have all the bugs out of “Ring Out Wild Bells.” Then she couldn’t find her pitch pipe.

The Methodist women had made Christmas choir robes out of army surplus sheeting. Phyllis said she looked like Casper the Ghost in hers. She and Mother had given each other Toni home permanents, but this hadn’t calmed them. Ruth Ann’s choir robe was a mile too long. She kept tripping over it and stumbling into things. She was sure she had her solo down pat. Mother wasn’t.

The house vibrated with women. They were in and out of every room. You couldn’t hear yourself think. And the concert was still an hour off. Dad and I got our coats and went outside, but it was too cold on the porch. We went around back and sat in the Pickle to be out of the wind. Dad had on his old pea coat from the navy, over his robe with the velvet. He hadn’t worn it since the princess’s funeral.

As soon as we were in the car, I knew it wasn’t a good idea. There was a heavy evergreen smell and pine needles everywhere. For some reason.

We had a clear view of Mrs. Dowdel’s house. Lights were on upstairs and down. The kitchen glowed like a blazing pumpkin with last-minute cooking. She’d sent Ruth Ann home way before dark, and she’d been seen down at the depot, waiting for somebody off the train.

“She has a fine tree,” Dad remarked, brushing pine needles off the Pickle’s dashboard.

To change the subject, I said, “But there aren’t any presents under it. She doesn’t give gifts.”

One of Dad’s hands rested on the steering wheel, there in the dark. “You sure about that?”

I thought I was. “She mentioned inflation.”

“Maybe she doesn’t wait for Christmas. Have you had a gift from her already?”

“You don’t mean anything wrapped up with ribbon, right?” I said.

“No,” Dad said. “Nothing that small.”

I thought. But I couldn’t get past the day she’d told me to drive the Pickle. That was a great day. Every night since, I’d dreamed myself back to it. In my dreams I was behind the wheel, gearing down, double-clutching. And there was never oncoming traffic, and I was always in the right gear. I drove with one elbow out of the window in my dreams. And I was sixteen and six foot tall. With shoulders out to here. And nobody, but nobody was going to tie me up and pitch me in the crick. Let them try.

Dad sat there, giving me some time. You could see our breath. The glow from Mrs. Dowdel’s tree spilled out of her bay across the white yard like a welcome mat.

“Dad, who’s that tree lighting the way for? Mrs. Dowdel didn’t mean the Christchild, did she?”

“No,” Dad said. “The Christchild’s been there all year long.”

A moment passed, pine-scented. “Then who?”

Dad stirred, reached for the door handle. “Somebody
we’re just about to meet. And he’s due now. We’d better get in the house to make him welcome.”

I was stumped. “To our house?”

Dad nodded. “A visitor from afar.”

“You mean like one of the three Wise Men?” I was as lost as usual.

“Not exactly,” Dad said. “But he’ll probably be bearing a gift.”

We headed up to the house then. Dad’s hand was on my shoulder, which I liked.

“And son,” he said, “when you get a minute, take that crosscut saw out of the Pickle’s trunk and put it back in Mrs. Dowdel’s cobhouse.”

I
n the house the countdown to Christmas was ticking like a time bomb. Mother had found her pitch pipe, but her sheet music was out of order. They’d pinned up Ruth Ann’s robe. Phyllis was at a mirror, biting her lips to make them pinker. Dad and I hadn’t been missed.

A knock came at the front door.

Ruth Ann began to turn to it. Dad’s hand came out to hold her back. Mother never looked up from her sheet music. She made sure Phyllis had to answer the door.

A boy was standing out there with something in his hand. It looked like a cellophane-covered brick, tied up in Christmas tinsel. He took one look at Phyllis, and his eyes bugged slightly. Evidently she didn’t look too much like Casper the Ghost. She may have seemed like an angel in all that white, if you didn’t know her.

“Hello. I’m Brad Dowdel. Mrs. Dowdel’s great-grandson. Joey’s son.” His voice had already changed. “Here for the holidays.”

Phyllis made a small squeaking sound. It took her a while, but she got out of his way so he could come in. Ruth Ann’s eyes were saucers. He was one good-looking dude of a boy. Blond-headed. And he was wearing a bomber jacket with some fine Levi’s and white buck shoes. No sideburns, yet. But come to find out, he was just fourteen, Phyllis’s age. Her real age.

And very polite for a Chicago guy. We all introduced ourselves, and he handed Mother the present, which was a fruitcake.

“There’s more where that came from,” he said. “Great-grandma thought I might go on up to the Christmas concert with you folks.”

“I expect she’ll be along later,” Mother said.

But I wondered, since Mrs. Dowdel wasn’t a church woman. Still, I was beginning to figure out that adults move in mysterious ways.

“Phyllis will be up in the choir loft,” Mother told Brad. “And of course Ruth Ann. But you can help Bob usher.”

So as Dad predicted, we did have a visitor from afar—Chicago. He was even bearing a gift, if you count fruitcake.

*  *  *

Brad Dowdel and I had our hands full finding everybody
a place to sit. Finally people were standing at the back. It wasn’t quite the overflow crowd we’d had for the princess’s funeral, but it was getting there.

As Mother said, we were making a joyful noise for the larger community. There were people there you wouldn’t expect. Not Miss Cora Shellabarger. But then, she’d been spotted off her porch only twice since before the Korean Police Action. But I myself showed Miss Flora to a pew.

Everybody noticed everybody else. As the pews filled, a murmur swept the congregation. People craned to look back to a disturbance at the door.

Barging in were four or maybe five of the roughest characters I ever saw. Not a haircut among them and only about six teeth. They were bundled up against the winter night in a raggedy combination of caked army surplus and dirty denim. All wore farmer caps, and all were chewing something. As the saying went around here, hogs wouldn’t have stayed on their place. One or two of them may have been women.

A whispered name fanned like a breeze across the pews: “Burdicks.”

Just in case Brad and I thought we were going to show them to a pew, one of them put out a big banged-up hand, meaning “back off.”

And in they ganged, sticking close. They were carrying something, a bundle in their midst. People in the back pew
scooted over to make room for them. Way over. There in the pew the bundle they’d brought stirred. And sat up. One minute it was a pile of rags with an old floppy hat on top. The next minute it was Aunt Madge. Aunt Madge Burdick.

She glared around at the crowd, who were all staring back. There must have been plenty of people here who hadn’t seen her in this century.

“Are they goin’ to give me any supper?” she demanded in a high, cracked voice. “Where
is
my teeth?”

We heard singing from outside then, not a moment too soon. I switched off the lights. Voices rose from out on the sidewalk, “O come, all ye faithful, joyful and triumphant . . . ” The choir proceeded inside, two by two, carrying candles. It was a choir twice the Sunday size.

O come let us adore Him, O come let us adore Him,

they sang, all the way up to the choir loft.

The VFW had donated all their unsold trees, so the choir gathered in front of a somewhat scrubby pine forest.