“Decided to do my Christmas shopping early this year,” he says. “So Lou, here’s your present, but I expect you’ll share it with the whole family.”
Ma’s so surprised all she can do is watch as he reaches into the bag and pulls out a set of those icicle lights you see in catalogs, and then another, and another, till there’s four sets laying there on the table. Dara Lynn and I give a shout when we see what they are.
“Oh, Ray, those are expensive!” Ma says, but I can tell by the smile lines on her face that she’s happy about it.
Dad’s grinning too. “I know we wanted our addition done by Christmas, but no reason we can’t decorate what we have, is there?” he asks.
Now we’re in the spirit! All we’ve had in the past is a tree with red and blue and green lights on it, and another string of red and green and blue around the door frame. That and a wreath on the door. But this . . . wow!
It’s starting to get dark, but we can’t wait one minute to put those lights up, so we bring out the stepladder. Ma and the girls have carefully uncoiled the lights, and with me holding a flashlight, Dad’s screwing cup hooks along the edge of the porch roof, up the little diamond-shaped peak above the front door, and then on down the rest of the way under the eaves.
Judd drives up in his truck just then, and pretty soon Ma’s handing a string of lights to him. Judd hands it up to Dad, and he starts looping it over the hooks at one end of the porch roof. I keep the flashlight aimed at wherever it’s needed most. When that string is up, the little jiggery icicle lights hanging down all along the eaves, Ma hands up the second set; Dad connects it to the first and takes it all the way to the top of the peak. Then he starts down the other side with the third set, and finally, with a little adjusting, the fourth set is connected, the end hanging down.
It’s a big project, ’cause if you plug too many in the same outlet, you could blow a fuse. But finally we got the stepladder moved out of the way, and Ma’s standing in the doorway, her hand on the porch light switch.
“Everybody ready?” she calls, and we’re all out there in the yard facing the house, like folks waiting for a flag to go up.
“Ready, set, go!” says Dad.
It’s like our front porch turned into a fairyland. Becky shrieks and Dara Lynn oohs and even Judd Travers gives a whistle.
Ma comes out to enjoy it with us. “That is just the prettiest thing!” she says, over and over.
Tiny trickles of light, like dripping water, dance in the wind, sparkling and twinkling. Didn’t ever know our house could look so beautiful.
“Do you think they can see us clear out on the road down as far as the bend?” asks Dara Lynn. “Can anybody over there the other side of the bridge see it, do you think?”
And when Ma tells her yes, they can see it from far off, she wants to know if people will drive all the way up from Friendly to see the Prestons’ Christmas house. Guess we haven’t driven that girl around enough at Christmas to think it’s all that special.
At dinner the next night, we’re all talking about Judd naming his dog Norman. Judd Norman Travers. Never heard Judd’s full name before. But I guess it’s his business. Just like I was the one who named Shiloh, Judd could name his dog whatever he liked.
“Ruthie hates her name,” Dara Lynn says, and flips over her pork chop, like maybe it’ll look better on the other side. She don’t much care for meat.
“Dara Lynn, will you please quit bothering that chop and eat it?” says Dad.
“Why does she hate her name?” asks Becky, giving Dara Lynn a chance to fool around a while longer.
“Because her dad keeps telling her she was named after a famous woman in the Bible who was helpful to other people, and when Ruthie doesn’t obey, he tells her she’s not being ‘Ruth-like.’ She wants to change her name to Rocky.”
Dad thinks that’s funny. Ma laughs too.
“When I was little, I wanted to change my name from Louanne to Stephanie,” Ma tells us.
“Why?” asks Becky.
“I don’t know. Just liked it, I guess.”
But Dara Lynn’s losing our attention, so she says, “Whenever Ruthie’s being bad at the table, she used to have to sit in the ‘thinking chair.’”
“The ‘thinking chair’?” says Dad. “Wish I had one of those!”
“No, you don’t!” says Dara Lynn. “It had clamps on the arms, and Ruthie had to sit with her wrists fastened—couldn’t even scratch her nose—while everybody else ate.”
“Dara Lynn!” scolds Ma. “Quit making things up!”
I’ve stopped chewing.
“It’s true!” says Dara Lynn. “Once she even had to sit in it during supper just because she said a cuss word, and her dad said if she couldn’t use her mouth for what God intended, she couldn’t use it for eating, neither. She could sit and think about it, and watch the rest of them eat.”
“What kind of chair has clamps on the arms?” asks Dad.
“I don’t know!” Dara Lynn says. “That’s all Ruthie told me. But she said she and Rachel hated that chair so much that one day Rachel threw it in the creek. The next time her dad wanted to use it, it was gone, and she wouldn’t tell him where it was. She got locked in her room for a whole day and a whole night, and finally she told, but when they went to look for it, it had disappeared.”
“Dara Lynn, if you are making up that story—” Ma begins.
I push away from the table. “She’s not making it up,” I say.
I pull on my jacket, take a flashlight, and go out the door, around the chicken coop to the old shed we keep our junk in. I open the door and haul out that chair David and I pulled from the creek. Brush off the dust and mice dirt and carry it back into the house.
Then I set it there beside the table. “This is it,” I say.
fourteen
EVERYBODY’S STARING AT IT.
“It’s just like she said,” Dara Lynn cries, and jumps up to go sit in it.
“Where did you get that, Marty?” asks Dad.
“David and I found it in the creek when we were looking for bottles and cans,” I tell him. “I was going to use it for Halloween for a Frankenstein man in the laboratory.” Dara Lynn’s already trying the crab claws nailed to the ends. She puts an arm in one, pulls real hard, and the clamp opens. “I can get right out of here,” she says.
“I can’t believe this!” says Ma.
“I wanna try it!” says Becky, and she slides down out of her chair and runs over.
“Girls! Dara Lynn! Get yourself out of that chair!” says Ma.
Dara Lynn gets out and pulls Becky away. “We can’t sit in it, Becky. It’s Ruthie’s.”
“Oh, my goodness! It’s nobody’s, Becky!” Ma tells her. “It was thrown away and it’s going to stay thrown away. I think it’s disgusting. Get back up there and finish your dinner.”
Dad pats me on the arm. “Go put it back, Marty, and we’ll talk about it later.”
“Later” is when the girls are making marshmallow-toothpick snowmen at the table, and Dad and Ma are in the living room, the TV turned low. They don’t mind that I’m there.
“Maybe it’s time to report this, Lou. The chair as evidence?” Dad says.
Ma’s got one hand over her mouth. “Maybe so. But . . . oh, Ray! What it would do to Judith and the church!”
“Well, you’re the one wanting to report it up till now. You want to hold back just ’cause he’s a preacher?”
“No. If it’s wrong for everybody, it’s wrong for the preacher, too. And if we don’t . . . Ruthie’s so little and vulnerable—probably why Dara Lynn’s so fond of her, a second grader.”
Dad stretches out his legs and runs one hand through his hair. “I don’t know . . . it’s a tricky thing. Dawes seems to be just on the edge of what’s legal and what’s not. You give a child the choice of sitting out dinner in that chair or being spanked, maybe she’d take the chair. We don’t know what goes on in the homes of everybody in West Virginia or any other place.”
Ma’s quiet a long while. I sit there listening to the crackle and hiss from inside our wood stove.
“I’ve an idea of something I might do,” she says finally. “Judith keeps asking is there anything she can do for me, for keeping Ruthie here after school when she drives Rachel to her piano lesson. Well, there was a flyer on the bulletin board at Wallace’s store about a weekly parenting class. It’ll be over in the New Martinsville Library starting in January, folks getting together with a social worker to talk about being better parents. What if I told her I’d like to go, and could she drive me? I’ll say now that we have children in middle school, we want to be raising them right. It said they offer child care if you have to bring a preschooler.”
Dad thinks that over. “What if she offers to drop you off and pick you up later? If you’re the only one who stays for the discussion?”
“It’s a forty-minute drive to New Martinsville, Ray. I’d think she’d stay. But . . . well, if that happens, I’ll just be a better parent,” says Ma.
“It still doesn’t involve the preacher,” Dad tells her.
“No, but maybe it would help Judith stand up for herself and the girls,” says Ma.
“Can’t think of anything better,” says Dad.
The next Sunday, as Dad is putting on his old work pants and shirt—his tool belt around his waist—I put on my oldest clothes too and find a warm cap and gloves from the box by the door.
When Dad sees me waiting after Ma and the girls have gone to church, he stops for a minute and sighs. “Marty, I’m not working on the new addition today,” he tells me.
I say, “I know.”
“I’ll be over across the creek,” he says.
“I’m ready,” I tell him.
And then his face breaks into a smile. “C’mon, then,” he says.
It’s hard business, clearing land of all that burned-up stuff, and in five minutes, I’m sweating under my jacket. Most of the folks who lived across the creek have hired contractors to do part of the building for them. But some are doing the rebuilding themselves to save money, and anything we can do to clear the land, dig out the foundations, the more they’ll save not paying someone else to do it.
We’re working at Clay Fisher’s house, digging all the debris out of the place used to be his garage, when Judd drives along in his pickup.
He stops to wave at me and Dad and sees the pile of charred wood and metal we’ve piled up alongside the road.
“You want that hauled away?” he calls. Wonder if he knows that Clay Fisher was one of the people saying Judd had set the fire.
Dad turns to Clay for an answer.
“It’s not sittin’ out there for decoration,” Clay yells back, not even looking at Judd.
I see the way Judd stiffens up, way he used to look sometimes before he’d gun the motor and roar off. But then I see him take a breath, and he says, “Some folks want the metal sold to the junkyard. Just asking.”
The other men stop their work and they all look at Clay.
“Uh . . . no, you can take the lot,” Clay says. And when Judd gets out of the truck and starts piling the stuff in his pickup, I go over to help. And then, so does Clay.
Some of the church ladies come by around one o’clock bringing us fried chicken, coleslaw, and rolls, and we dive into that food like we haven’t eaten for a week. Then we set to work again, and Judd’s right there helping push a wheelbarrow and lift a cement block, shovel out a new trench, load his pickup for another run to the dump.
Near the end of the afternoon, Judd and I go on down to where his trailer used to be, and I help clear out his property. Most of his neighbors’ burned houses been picked over, folks pulling out metal picture frames and medicine cabinets, eyeglasses and bedsprings . . . almost none of it any good, but it’s all that’s left after the fire.
But Judd hadn’t done nothing yet. When his dogs ran off, he couldn’t make up his mind to stay or leave. But now we pick over what the fire didn’t get—not much—and at the end of the afternoon, Judd’s ready to see it all go and start over.
He comes back to our house to use the shower, then drives all the way down to Middlebourne to visit his dog. And after dark sets in, we turn on those Christmas lights, and Dara Lynn talks Dad into driving us down the road to see if we can see them as far as the bend; then he drives us back and crosses the bridge, driving along Old Creek Road to see how far north a driver will see the lights. And when she’s satisfied we got the most beautiful Christmas decorations in the whole neighborhood—meaning she’d flunk the Christmas Spirit test if there was one—we head back home.
Fifteen days before Christmas, and I finish Rachel’s biography. I don’t say what kind of work her dad does. Don’t mention her parents at all, just that the family had lived in a number of different places in West Virginia, two of them being Hinton and Weston, before they moved here.
Told what she’d said about how it feels to move to a new place, start all over again with everything, and how the person she likes most in the whole world is her little sister, Ruthie. How much she likes dance, would like to take interpretive dancing if she goes to college—the kind of dance that tells a story. At the end of the piece, I say that the most noticeable thing about Rachel Dawes is her smile, and that the question I’d most like to have asked her was what kind of story Rachel would tell if she ever became an interpretive dancer.
I let her read it before I turn it in. She smiles again when she reads that last line. Changes a couple things, where I don’t have the facts right, and then I hand it in. I’m still working on my own autobiographical essay. Asked Rachel, does she want an extra copy of hers to take home, and she says no. But later, she comes by my locker to say yes, she’d like one to give her grandmother when they go there for Christmas.
We get our first real snowfall on Sunday. Becky wakes up that morning, looks out the window, and yells, “Is it Christmas?” Snow sure can make things look Christmas-pretty. For the first time I get Shiloh to walk across the bridge with me, and I wonder what it was that made the difference.
I can tell, what with Judd Travers staying with us, that Shiloh don’t fear him as much as he used to. Maybe not much at all. Or maybe it was because the snow made the landscape look a lot different from what he remembered, covering up the things that brought back feelings he didn’t ever want to have again. I look at the burned-out places that’ve now got a sparkly white blanket over them. The trees that stood scorched, their bark half-burned, all have an inch of snow covering their wounded branches.
We get us a normal snowfall here in West Virginia, we can deal with that okay. The trucks are out all night sprinkling salt, and plows get the highways ready. But if we have a really heavy snow—three feet, sometimes—not even Moses and the Israelites could get through some of the mountain passes. This one, though, we do just fine. Dad tells Judd he’s welcome to bring his sleeping bag inside, but he just laughs, says he’s so used to the tent now that he maybe can’t never sleep under a roof again.
Snow puts Doc Murphy in the Christmas mood, though. He says if I’ll put up his Christmas tree, my bill will be paid off, and I’m glad to do it. He’s got the artificial kind, the branches flocked with white, and I take it out of its box in his attic and set it up there in his living room.
Then I get the boxes of ornaments from a closet, and after Doc sees his last patient of the day, he closes his office door and sits down in his favorite chair.
“How ’bout if I put the hooks on and hand them up to you,” he says.
“That’ll work,” I tell him, glad for the company.
“Now . . . this one was my wife’s favorite,” he says, holding up a little silver teapot with a sprig of holly painted on one side, and smiles. “We had a cat back then and had to put it up high enough that Molly couldn’t swat at it with her paw.”
I find the right branch for the teapot, and he’s already handing me a little glass violin with a story to go along with it. I look at the boxes of orname
nts lined up there on the couch and figure if there’s a story to go along with each one, I’m like to be here till New Year’s.
At one point, though, he gives me a red glass ball with a miniature snowman inside and tells me that one of his patients gave it to him years ago, then called him a month later. “Said he had something he wanted to talk over with me about a decision he had to make, and I told him I’d be glad to see him the next day. Next day comes, he never kept the appointment. Found out he moved away the following week. Always wondered what that decision was, and how it turned out,” Doc says.
“I guess folks tell you a lot of secrets,” I say, as I hook that glass ball to a branch near the window.
“Oh, I don’t know I’d call them secrets, exactly. But when you’re discussing your body, the conversation’s going to be on the private side,” says Doc.
I reach for another ornament and study it a minute before I hang it. “What if . . . you was to find out things going on in somebody’s family that . . . don’t break the law, exactly, but don’t seem right neither.”
“This would be . . . uh . . . let’s say, a hypothetical family, I guess?” Doc asks.
Not sure what hypothetical means. And then Doc must figure I don’t know too, because he adds, “An imaginary family?”
“Yeah,” I say. “Just ‘what if.’”
He shrugs. “Depends. Anybody getting hurt?”
I think about Ruthie having to sit with her feet in ice water, if that really happened. “Let’s say no. Not physically, anyway.”
“Hmmm. Well, if this family just does things a little differently and everybody’s happy . . .”
“What if they’re not happy?” I say. “The kids, anyway.”
“Well, if they came to me . . . as their doctor . . . and they were being sexually abused or physically abused or psychologically tortured or something, I’d have to report it. That’s the law.”
I pick up the next ornament, a candy cane, and hang it on a branch.