“Deal,” says Dad. “I think we can do it.”
Talk about smooth.
eighteen
MA’S GOT CAROLS PLAYING ON the radio, and we’re waiting for Aunt Hettie to get here from Clarksburg.
I let Shiloh out to do his business and run around a little before company arrives, but after ten minutes I go whistle to call him back in. Can see the tip of his tail where he’s moving around by the shadberry bush, so I whistle again. Finally he trots across the lawn and up onto the porch.
Takes me about two seconds to see that he’s been rolling in fresh deer poop.
“Shiloh!” I yell, and yank him by his collar, a little more roughly than I should, and I feel bad I do that on Christmas day.
But I feel even worse that his breath smells all poopy too.
“Ma, he’s been in deer poop again,” I call.
“Oh, Shiloh!” says Ma, in disappointment.
You can love a dog and hate the mess, I’ve discovered.
It’s too cold to bathe Shiloh outdoors, so the only thing to do is put him in the shower.
“Anybody want to use the bathroom, do it quick, ’cause I got to bathe this creature,” I call out, and both girls take a turn.
Then I pull Shiloh into the bathroom, close the door, take off my shirt, and turn the water on. A minute later I know I should have put on a bathing suit, ’cause I’m practically in there with him.
“You miserable mutt,” I say as I lather him up.
“You stinkin’ hound,” I tell him as I run my fingers through his coat, and pieces of poop fall off and dissolve over the drain.
“You freakin’ numbskull,” I growl as I spray him from nose to rump.
Finally I turn off the water and towel him dry. Going to have to give him a breath mint or something before the company gets here, but meanwhile I try to avoid his big brown eyes looking up at me.
“Why do I love you so much?” I ask him.
I bend down to wipe his paws, and he licks my cheek.
“Why is it you do these weird things and I forgive you? Even though I know you’ll go do it all over again?” I say.
He licks the other cheek.
“Even if I build a fence, no guarantee you won’t get out of it. What you gonna do when I go off to veterinary school, huh?”
My voice must be getting softer and gentler, because all at once he turns himself around and around—doing his little “happy dance,” like he knows we’re friends again. His white coat with the big brown spots is all fluffy and clean, and if only there was such a thing as doggie mouthwash, he’d be ready to greet the guests.
Aunt Hettie pulls in about twelve. She says it was snowing in Clarksburg when she left. I look out and sure enough, snowflakes are coming down slow, not a one of them in a hurry. We already got six inches of snow that’s stayed since our last snowfall. We tell Judd his tent’s likely to become an igloo.
“I smell turkey!” Hettie says, coming in the kitchen door, a bag on each arm. Looks to be mostly food, though. Don’t see any gift wrap peeking out the top.
“Merry Christmas, Aunt Hettie,” I say. She’s Dad’s sister, but she’s not that tall. Her hug’s big, though, and she swoops up each one of us in her arms. Even Shiloh stands there, tail wagging, waiting his turn for a pat on the head.
“Look what I made for you!” Becky says, holding up a macaroni necklace, pieces of pink- and green- and orange-colored pasta on a string.
“What’s this, precious?” Hettie says, and then, without missing a beat, “Now isn’t this the prettiest!” and she slides it right on over her head, macaroni hanging down the front of her jacket.
Then she turns to us and says, “I decided on one big present for the five of you this year, and I need somebody to help me get it out of my station wagon.”
Can’t for the life of me think what that could be, that every one of us wants—a forty-inch TV maybe, but Hettie hasn’t got that kind of money. So we throw on our jackets and troop out to the car, and there in the back is this sled, must be big enough for five people—four, anyway, and Becky can always scrunch up.
“Hettie, I swear, you’re still a big kid,” Dad says, while we haul it out, our grins saying our thank-yous.
“Can we try it out now?” Dara Lynn begs.
But Ma tells us the turkey’s almost ready and folks’ll be coming soon. “After dinner. And not till the dishes are done,” she tells us.
So we just surround Aunt Hettie with a group hug and move her inside. All I can think about is how much fun David Howard and me are going to have on that sled over Christmas vacation.
We got twelve people there at our table—the dining room table Ma inherited from her mother, Grandma Slater. It’s got two extension boards for it, so when it’s opened up as long as it will go, it stretches all the way into our living room.
Just after everyone gets here, it’s awkward for a while, standing around the potbellied stove with cups of cider in our hands. Dad does the introductions, and when he gets to Judd and the preacher, I realize it’s the first time they come face-to-face, yet one of ’em been preaching against the other, and that one cussing him out.
But once we sit down at the table, it’s not so bad. There’s a decorated name card at each place. I’m at one end with Dad; Ma and Becky are at the other, and then we got four more people on either side.
Of course, Pastor Dawes is asked to give the prayer. I’m hoping it’s not one of his five-minute variety, ’cause we got sweet potatoes and turkey and dressing and green beans cooked with bacon waiting, all of it steaming hot. Preacher must be hungry too, ’cause he keeps it short. He don’t mention sin or blasphemy, but he ends his prayer with, “Bless us as we partake of your bounty, for we know your love shines down wherever two or more believers are gathered in your name. Amen.”
“Now, please, everyone just help yourself to whatever’s closest to you and pass it around the table,” Ma says. “Pastor, if you’ll start the potatoes . . .”
“Call me Jacob,” the preacher says, so Jacob it is. Wonder if his closest friends call him Jake. I could no more call him Jacob than I could stick my hand in the stove, but of course he means grown-ups, not kids.
Dara Lynn and Ruthie are sitting side by side, whispering and giggling through the meal. Rachel’s beside her ma, but we grin at each other when I drop a little blob of sweet potatoes in the dish of green beans and try to dig it out. She’s wearing a white sweater, and Ruthie’s in a red one. Maybe it’d be easier to think of the preacher as “Jacob” if he had a red-and-white tie ’stead of the blue-and-black one he’s got around his neck.
Doc Murphy asks Aunt Hettie where she was raised, and she tells him how she and Dad grew up in Ripley with their brothers, but two of those brothers moved out of state. “I can’t ever imagine myself living in a place where I don’t look out and see hills around me,” she says. Now, she tells Doc, she works in a bank, but she can see hills on her way home.
“Was there ever a holdup at your bank?” asks Dara Lynn. If anyone can think of an inappropriate question to ask at the Christmas table, it’s Dara Lynn. Couple weeks ago, she waits till we’re eating dessert and tells how the school bus run over a possum that morning. She saw it. And when the bus was going home that afternoon, the insides of that possum was still out there on the road. Try to imagine that while you eat your cherry pie!
But it don’t bother Aunt Hettie. “Not while I was working there,” she says. “Though I saw a man come in with a ski mask on once and I hid under the counter, but he’d just forgot to pull it up off his face before he came in to make a deposit.”
We laugh about that.
I manage to get some dark meat when the turkey comes to me, and almost wish we’d stop all the food making the rounds so I could take a bite of something.
Then Dara Lynn’s question about bank robbers reminds Doc Murphy of the time a man come to his house at night and wants him to take a bullet out of his arm. Doc knows better than to ask how it come to be
there. But all the while he’s working on the man’s arm, man gets so talkative he starts saying where he was going and where he was coming from, and later the police are able to track him down and arrest him for homicide.
But then the conversation goes back to Christmas again, and Mrs. Dawes tells us how her ma—the grandmother who’s got the flu—used to make marshmallow fudge on Christmas Eve, and now she makes it with her girls.
“Do you have any?” Becky asks right off.
And everyone smiles when Mrs. Dawes answers that as a matter of fact, she does. “Rachel and Ruthie helped me make some yesterday, and I’ve brought it along to go with our dessert,” she says. Becky and Dara Lynn both cheer.
I realize that Shiloh’s not got his muzzle on my thigh, trying to look pitiful so I’ll slip a bite his way. How come that dog’s being so quiet? I wonder. My eyes travel around the table. Then I notice that Doc Murphy has his fork in his right hand, but his left hand is down at his side. And sure enough, every once in a while, I see a bite of turkey go from his right hand to his left, and if the room is real quiet that second, I hear the soft thump of a tail hit the floor.
“Where did you grow up, Jacob?” asks Dad. “Any marshmallow fudge in your background?”
“I’m afraid not,” says the preacher. He picks up his napkin, wipes his mouth. “We did have a special dinner on the twenty-fifth, I remember, but Christmas was a time for reflection, not celebration.”
Dara Lynn stops eating and studies him a minute. “Didn’t you never have any fun?”
That seems to stop the preacher cold. “Well . . . I’m sure my brother and I climbed trees and played in the meadow. Must have, because we had a lot of trees. . . .” Preacher pauses. “But you see, my father believed that the whole point of being a child was to grow up, and of course, the whole point of growing up is to grow in God’s grace so you can enter the kingdom of heaven.”
“Dying, you mean?” says Dara Lynn. “The whole point of living is dying?”
Wished I’d said that. For once I really admired my sister.
“To become a credit to the Heavenly Father, and”—Pastor Dawes shakes his head, ever so slight—“I’m afraid my own father felt I never measured up, and often told me so.”
Rachel steals a quick glance at him, then turns away again.
“Seems we have that in common, Jacob,” Judd says, first time he’s said much of anything since the meal started. And when the preacher looks over at him, Judd says, “My dad let me know every day of my life that I didn’t measure up, and to get his point across he took the belt to me.”
There’s a hush around the table.
Finally the preacher says, “Guess a parent does what he thinks is right. ‘Spare the rod and spoil the child,’ the good book says. But . . . I don’t know. . . .”
“You think a child ever figures it’s right?” says Judd. “You got a parent doing that way with a kid . . . saying those kinds of things to his boy . . . Don’t come across as anything but pure meanness.”
“The worst part is, if children don’t know any different, they pass it along,” says Doc Murphy.
The whole conversation’s taken such a serious tone all of a sudden, hardly anybody can stop it. Not sure they should. I don’t see that there’s any foot nudging under the table.
And then Dad says, “But the good part is, their meanness can end with you. Don’t have to let it go one more day.”
“That would be a wonderful thing,” says Mrs. Dawes.
Ma says, “The girls and I made some special cookies, when everyone is ready. But please help yourselves to seconds and thirds.”
“Let’s get everything going around one more time,” says Dad. “Doc, would you pass that dressing down my way?”
Hands start moving again, and there’s chatter here and there. But at some point in the meal, just when I think maybe folks took Dad’s words to heart, I hear the preacher say, “Rachel, you’ve got cranberry sauce on your new sweater.”
I see the color rise in Rachel’s cheeks, just like they did that first day of school on the bus. She stares down at her sweater, not knowing quite what to do. The spot is about the size of a pea. Ma fumbles around for a napkin, and then Becky leans forward and tells the preacher, “But the whole rest of her sweater is clean!”
Now we really are speechless, ’cause not a one of us could have thought of saying anything that perfect.
The preacher studies Becky a moment, then turns back to Rachel and says, “That’s right. It’s only a tiny spot. And Rachel, you and your sister look lovely in your new sweaters.”
The girls are so shocked they stare at their father, and Ma adds, “Indeed they do! Now if everyone is through, you can pass your plates down to me and we’ll think about dessert.”
We pass our plates to the end of the table, where Mrs. Dawes is helping Ma scrape them off. Ma has mince and pumpkin pies to go along with her cookies and the fudge from the Daweses. I take a huge slab of fudge first, and boy is it good, but my mind’s on the big sled Aunt Hettie brought us. I see that stack of dishes on the counter, though, and know that none of us are going sledding till those are clean and put away.
Then the grown-ups get to talking again, which tells me it’s going to be a long time before that kitchen’s cleaned up. I look around the table and notice that the preacher’s got such a wistful look on his face, I turn to see where he’s staring. I find that Becky has slid down from her chair and climbed up on Dad’s lap, the way she’ll do sometimes when she’s tired of eating but don’t want to miss out on grown-ups’ conversation. She’s snuggled down in the crook of his arm, twisting a lock of hair with one finger. Dad’s eating his mince pie with his other hand and having a conversation with Judd about the little trailer he’s got coming in January.
I look back at the preacher and see that his eyes are wet. Those are tears for sure—just enough to make his eyes watery. So I turn away and don’t look back. It’s a moment so personal he gets it all to himself.
With twelve people helping, those dishes are washed and dried and put away like nobody’s business. The turkey’s cut up and divided in little packets to go home with everybody for sandwiches the next day, and the minute the last cupboard door is closed, Dara Lynn sings out, “Sled time!”
I see the preacher look at his watch and can tell he wants to go home. We’ve had another inch or two of snow during dinner, but then it tapered off, and the roads shouldn’t be too bad. I expect he’ll say something about how he’s got a sick person he’s got to visit, but since he’d already set the day aside to take his family to their grandma’s, he can’t hardly expect anyone to take that seriously.
Since the Daweses hadn’t known we were going sledding, though, the next five minutes is spent fishing more boots out of the closet, more caps and scarves and mittens. And when us five kids look like we’re headed for Alaska and Dad’s got on his work boots, we find a rope to put on the new sled and go out to the long hill behind the house.
Rachel and Ruthie hold back, wanting us to go first, see how it’s done, so Dad tramps up the hill, Dara Lynn and Becky and me following behind. I want to go down all alone, so I volunteer to push them off. Dad sits down at the back of the sled, Dara Lynn in front of him, Becky in front of her, and then Dad stretches his long legs out so his feet are on the steering bar in front.
“Ready?” he asks. The girls lean back, Dara Lynn against Dad, Becky against her. I give them the hardest push I can manage, and the sled whizzes down that hill, the girls screamin’ their heads off.
Dad knows where the stump of the old locust tree is buried in the snow, and he steers away from it, but the minute he gets to the bottom, he turns too quick to stop the sled and they all fall off, laughing and hooting.
I’m next. Take a running start to do a belly flop. Don’t do much better than Dad when I get to the bottom, but man, that sled goes fast. Shiloh’s running up and down the hill, following every sled trip to the bottom and back up again.
Now
Ruthie’s dancing up and down, pulling at Rachel’s hand. “C’mon,” I say. “Sled holds four,” so Dara Lynn goes up with us. This time I’m the one in back with my feet on the steering bar, Rachel against me, Dara Lynn against her, and Ruthie in front. Dara Lynn and Ruthie are already screaming, and we haven’t even took off yet.
I dig my fists in the snow to tip us forward, and then we shoot off. Got my hands holding tight to the sled on both sides, the girls holding on to each other, and I got to say, I make a perfect half circle when we get to the bottom.
Then Aunt Hettie says she’s got to start back to Clarksburg pretty soon before the snow gets any deeper on the roads, but she’s not going till she gets a chance on that sled herself. We all of us cheer as she lies down on her stomach and I give her a push. Gets halfway down—don’t know what she hits—but she falls off the sled and it goes on without her, and she is lying there on her back in the snow, laughing like a kid. Shiloh goes over and licks her face, and she laughs some more.
“Hettie, you sound just like you did at thirteen,” Dad says, going up the hill and helping her to her feet.
“Wanted to do that ever since I can remember,” she said. “You boys always hogged our sled for yourselves, and it’s about time I got a turn!”
“Well, take another,” Dad says, and she does. Then we’re all of us telling Judd to try it out.
So he climbs to the top of our hill, and we figure he’ll take the same path the rest of us have taken. But he must have decided to carve out his own sled tracks there on the hill, ’cause he weaves first to one side, then the other, and even though Dad shouts a warning, he’s heading right for where we know that tree stump is buried.
And suddenly Judd Norman Travers is airborne, that sled going up the slant side of the stump, and in that split second I see a look on his face that must have been his look when he was just a kid. And then he is down on the slope again, still holding on, and he gives this loud “Ye-haw!” that makes us laugh and clap, and when he gets off at the bottom, he’s grinning wider than I can ever remember.