Emma's Gift (22 page)

At least being occupied was helping. I'd given everybody some kind of job to do. Willy and Robert were chopping vegetables for a big pot of stew, but since they weren't too happy about that kind of job, I soon sent them outside to split logs by the shed. Kirk had the baby again and was holding her hands and trying to get her interested in walking, though she was only seven months old. With Emma's little turn-handle grinder, Joe was grinding up all the nuts they'd shelled. I really appreciated him, because he'd started in without me even asking, and he was being just plain decent to his brothers and sisters. Sometimes Kirk and Willy, and even Rorey, were not that way.

“Hey, Harry, you wanna pour some in the top?” Joe would say. And then when Berty crowded in, he'd give him a chance too and pick up the spilled pieces without saying a word.

Lizbeth took over the stew pot, seasoning it before I had a chance to see how much of what all she'd put in. Then she started in making corn bread, because, as she said, “If you got that with a stew, you don't need nothin' else.”

There were no tears in the kitchen. We just all did what we were doing like there'd been nothing to yesterday, like we hadn't just put their mother and my best friend in the ground. What they were all feeling on the inside, I didn't know, but they probably just did the same as me—hid all that to go on doing. I guess we knew better than to talk about it, because nothing good would come of it. But to think too much, that could be a problem too, and there was no way I could stop them from doing that. I couldn't even stop myself.

We made triangles of the cookie dough for the angel robes and added on little circles for heads and bigger circles cut in half for the wings. Franky loved cutting all of the circles out of the dough with two different sizes of jar lids, and Sarah and Rorey dampened their fingers and stuck all the shapes together. I knew what a mess we'd have letting Harry and Berty help sprinkle the sugar, but I let them anyway, because they wanted to so badly. Before long, Berty's little fingers and all around his mouth were red from tasting the sweet stuff.

“Quit eatin' it!” Rorey complained. “We got lotsa cookies to pretty up!”

But when she thought no one was looking, I saw her sneak a taste too.

“These is beautiful, ain't they, Mommy?” Sarah asked me, and I was suddenly dismayed at hearing her sound so much like the Hammond children.

“Aren't they,” I corrected gently.

She nodded her head. “Yeah. They are.”

“Let's do canes now,” Rorey piped up.

But Franky shook his head when I started to bend a single strip of dough into shape. “That won't look like Emma's.”

That was the closest I'd come to crying in a while. I couldn't duplicate Emma's cookies. I'd never seen Emma's cookies. She was so good at everything when it came to baking, I couldn't hold a candle to it. There was so much to miss not having her here, and we'd be missing it all, over and over again.

“Take two strands,” Lizbeth told me. “Roll one in the red sugar, and twist them together. You want me to help?”

She was looking at me funny. Maybe the sadness I felt was showing more than I realized. Hers was too. But only in her eyes.

“Please,” I told her gladly and then let her and the other kids finish shaping those cookies while I mixed a batch with nuts and raisins and little chopped-up bits of candied cherry.

Lizbeth cut two triangles of dough and laid them across each other to make each star. She twisted together strands just like for the canes but joined the ends to make little wreaths. Then she made tree shapes and let the kids ornament the tops with pieces of the nuts, raisins, and cherries.

“Do you folks get a tree?” Lizbeth suddenly asked me.

Well, that hadn't occurred to me. Not even once. And I wondered why. “We used to. Last year we couldn't because of where we were staying.”

“We never had one,” she said. “Pa ain't again' it or anythin', he just says there ain't no place to put it that somebody wouldn't knock it over and muss it up.”

Rorey asked to help stir the batter I was making, so I gave her the bowl, and she started in with her brow all furrowed in concentration.

“Maybe we could get a tree for you here,” I told Lizbeth. “I'll ask Samuel about that.”

“Good!” Harry declared. “Can I put candles on it?”

“Well, no,” I said. “That would be a problem if it did get knocked over. That happened once when I was a little girl. Scared me awfully bad.”

“Burn up the house?” Kirk asked.

I should've known better than to bring up a thing like that. They certainly didn't need anything worrisome to think on. “No,” I said quickly. “They stopped it in time.” I guess it was automatic to me, remembering that near fire every time I thought of a Christmas tree. Some things you just never forget.

Just then, Rorey slopped some of the batter over the side of the big mixing bowl. She tried hard to catch it, but it landed with a splot on the floor. She looked up at me with her wide eyes, waiting to see the sort of reaction she'd get. And as soon as she realized I wasn't mad, she set the bowl and spoon down, scooped the mess up off the floor with two fingers, and shoved it promptly into her mouth. “Umm. These is gonna be good cookies. Did ya put in honey?”

For a minute I wondered just what I should say. This wasn't my child, after all. But it was my kitchen, at least for now.

“Yes, they have honey. But Rorey, dear, please don't eat off the floor.”

“Why not? Mama says it's a sin to waste food.”

That created quite an awful picture in my mind, of the filthy floor at their house, far dirtier than this one. And children sitting, playing, even eating off it. Ugh. “It isn't clean, honey. That's why.”

She shook her head, still not comprehending. “The ground ain't either, but that's where food grows up outta.”

“But we wash the food.”

“Oh.” She started to reach for the spoon again, but I handed her a dishcloth.

“Please wipe your hands and the spot on the floor first.”

Rorey complied, but with a look on her face that said I was asking too much. She turned to Sarah with a whisper. “You got some strange ways 'round here.”

“We pick up things a lot,” Franky told me, sharing his sister's wonderment. “We'd lose a lot a' good food if we didn't. Ain't hard to wash somethin' in the water bucket if it's got hair on it.”

That wasn't a pretty picture either. “It's all right if you wash it. If it's something that can be washed,” I said. “But that doesn't apply to unbaked batter.”

I already knew that it didn't occur to most of these kids to wash up before a meal. And their table manners were atrocious. Those who'd slept on our mattresses didn't seem to know why I wanted to put sheets down beneath them. And I couldn't help wondering how the Hammonds could be so backwards, when most everyone else around here was not that way. Maybe George and Wila had simply never been taught when they were kids.

Wilametta had made the best blackberry cobbler and the finest jam I'd had anywhere. She'd made her own butter and enough homemade bread to keep a troop this size happy. But they were never really neat. Not even at church. And if Wilametta hadn't known how, then none of these little souls did either. “They need us,” Emma had told me more than once. “George and Wilametta ain't got enough to go around.” Enough of what, I hadn't questioned. Hands, I'd figured. Or undivided attention. I could easily see how that might be the case.

But Emma'd meant something different, I knew that now, but I couldn't quite put a finger on what to call it. We were poor too, and Emma'd been poor, but with a difference. I could look at my two children and see all kinds of dreams, like they could be whatever they wanted to be. But I'd never heard George or Wila ever mention any expectations for their children, except when Wila, on her deathbed, had said she wanted the girls to sing, that she'd seen it in a dream. And maybe it was dreams that Emma meant.

Without a dream to strive for, maybe they thought it pointless to strive at all, even in everyday things. Maybe they thought it didn't matter how clean you were or how you conducted yourself, if nothing ever changed. God might have had all that in mind in bringing them here around Samuel and me this way. We could at least show them that when you're down and out, there's no reason to expect to stay that way. That what you do with the little details of your life really matters, not only in the way others perceive you, but even more in the way you perceive yourself. Because people generally live out the picture they have of themselves, good or bad.

“If we get a tree,” Sarah said, interrupting my thoughts, “can we make popcorn ropes and stuff?”

“Well, yes. We'd have to make things.”

But Rorey looked a little worried. “It might just get knocked over and mussed up.”

“I never knocked over a Christmas tree,” Sarah informed her.

Across the room, Kirk scowled at them. “I think you're dumb to even talk about it.”

“Would it be easier not to?” I asked him. “We'll be talking about something, or at least thinking about something. And it may as well be something pleasant. Don't you think?”

He frowned, but he didn't argue. Emma Grace started bouncing up and down, and he tried walking with her again, holding her little hands.

“We had a Christmas tree at school,” Rorey told me. “I helped dec'rate it, an' it was nice. Us younger wanted a angel on the top, but some a' the bigger kids wanted a star, so teacher let us make 'em both.”

“I'll bet that was pretty.”

“Better'n book lessons,” Franky declared.

Before long the oven was full of shaped and decorated sugar cookies. But there weren't enough cookie trays to hold them all, so I used the metal lids from Emma's cake pans to hold as many as I could. My minced fruit cookies would have to wait until the sugar cookies were out of the way, so I set that bowl aside and started mixing ingredients for Willy's snickerdoodles. We'd had a neighbor in Pennsylvania that used to make those. So cinnamony good. Soon the whole house was smelling delicious, and I expected we'd done something at least to improve the kids' appetites. Who could resist cookies, after all?

We had three trays out of the oven when Willy and Robert came in, stamping snow off their boots. “Can I have one, Mom?” Robert asked right away.

“Sure. Have two.”

He gave me a look, probably remembering me not being quite so generous with cookies, especially before supper. But he did exactly as I'd said and helped himself to two. Willy followed his lead and grabbed one in each hand. “They don't look too bad,” he said.

Rorey took a table knife and carefully sawed the wings off an angel and solemnly whacked off its head.

“You're going to eat that, aren't you?” I asked her.

“I guess so. I like 'em in pieces.”

Lizbeth let Bert and Harry help themselves, but she didn't eat one. Kirk gave a plain one to Emma Grace, but he didn't have one either. Before I could say anything, the baby just clunked her cookie against the table leg a couple of times and threw it on the floor. I picked it up without a word and set it out of her reach.

Sarah seemed like my sunny little Sarah again, helping me spoon out the drop cookies and then roll the snickerdoodles in cinnamon sugar. Joe came and helped, much to my surprise, and Franky sat there, right in the middle of things, watching.

“We're almost like a family,” he said.

“Pooh,” Lizbeth told him immediately. “We're good neighbors. Good neighbors always work together, no matter what they come to be workin' on.”

We had the whole tabletop full of cookies and the last of them in the oven when Samuel came home. Everybody got quiet as soon as they heard him. I dearly hoped that when they asked about their father, he'd have something good to report.

He stood in the doorway a moment, just making sure he had all the snow brushed off outside. When he came in, he looked at the table full of cookies and then at us with a pleasant smile.

“You've been busy.”

“We made umpteen dozen!” Sarah proclaimed. “That's what Mommy said.”

“Well, it looks like it. Smells good in here too.” He looked at me warmly. I could see the strain in his eyes, but his smile was larger, better than I'd hoped for.

“George is coming Christmas,” he said. “And he said to tell Lizbeth that any of them can come over there until then, if they want.”

“If we want?” Lizbeth questioned. “He don't mean some can stay here, does he?”

“Well, yes. Since you'll all be back day after tomorrow anyway.”

“Seems like home is the place to be,” she said, but without the smile I might've expected.

“Can we take cookies?” Harry wanted to know.

“Shush,” Lizbeth scolded.

“Of course, you can take cookies,” I assured the boy. “You all did such a lot of work making them, they're yours as much as mine anyway.”

“We need to get our coats and ever'thin' together,” Lizbeth said. “And we'll take some of Mrs. Gray's preserves too, if you don't mind me askin'. Pa'd like that, I'm pretty sure.”

“Certainly,” I told her, but I was looking at Samuel with questions swirling in my head. No more explanation than that? Was George all right, then? What if he changed his mind or carried on in some kind of way in front of the children? Was he really ready for this? Were they?

“No great hurry,” Samuel was saying. “Let me sit and rest a minute first.”

“I'll make you some coffee,” I told him, wishing I could have him alone for a minute and get him to tell me what was said.

“He misses you,” Samuel told the children. “I know he does.”

“I'll stay here,” Willy said. “Since we'll be back Christmas anyway.”