Mother heard people talking, too and this old maid business worried her something awful. “Mother, I am happy,” I said time and again. “I love my job at the school and I enjoy coming home and working in the garden and spending time with you.” She’d look at me with those aging eyes and tree-like wrinkles that branched out from them and try to smile and there we’d stand: me trying to convince her that I was really okay and her not believing a word of it.
Time to time she’d get real quiet and glance up into the hills, the sun landing bright on her face, and say, “Don’t live with regret, Ivorie. It’s an awful thing.”
For the longest time I thought she meant the regret of me not having a man but one day something struck me on the top part of my brain and I said, “Mother, what regrets do you have?”
Law, she was quiet! A beetle made more noise breathing than she did. She stared up into the hills and finally said, “I have one and it plagues me terrible.”
There was something in her voice that I’d never heard, or rather, something not in it that I wanted to hear. Her eyes and her mind were some place I couldn’t go. “What is it, Mother?” She didn’t answer. “Mother?” That’s how we lived out what ended up being the last of her days.
I knew she was tired and grieving. I knew her body was frail and knobbed with bone. What I didn’t know was that her heart was weakening and breaking down. I woke up one morning and put the coffee and sausages on like I’d done every morning for years. Like clockwork I would hear the padding of her feet across the wide-planked floors but that morning the silence stretched from one room to the next and all I heard was the deafening tick, tick, tick of the clock hanging on the kitchen wall. The fire stopped burning and stars fell from the sky. I buried her six months ago in January, a month before my thirtieth birthday and on some mornings that time feels long as a mountain’s shadow but short as a day. The void she left blows through the house and sometimes the emptiness chokes me. Death sure can work you over.
The house is quiet now and settled in sadness. On the most silent of nights, when the dark is cold and still I swear I can hear her shuffling down the hall toward me with the tap, tap, tap of her cane but when I turn to look, I know it’s just me wishing she was here. There’s always some maddening noise of emptiness here—the breeze against the windows, the rustle of trees, a creak in the floor or from the roof settling.
Each night, I wander the rooms and walk to the table with three legs that sets in the corner of Pop’s bedroom and pull the chain on the lamp with the too heavy white base. The amber globe colors the room in a dull shade of yellow. This furniture is practical, sturdy, like Pop himself and while I don’t particularly like it, it’s too sentimental to sell. I reach for the dust rag I keep on the trunk at the end of the bed and polish the knobs on the iron bed that were always too much work to keep shiny. I move to Mother’s room with the pretty eyelet curtains in the window and the cherry chest of drawers with the tall paw-footed legs that held her Bible on top. I haven’t moved it since she died. I walk to the half-made quilt that lay in the rocking chair by the window. What will happen to it now? Who would take the care that Mother did with each square? What about that whining kitchen door she always complained about? What of the tractor tire that Pop said was bent or the dress without arms that lay on the cedar chest at the end of Mother’s bed? Who would finish all this unfinished business and what would be the point?
When I’m busy during the day I don’t mind the thoughts or the quiet but never does the house seem as silent—so much like granite, as when I clunk around the empty rooms at night, when even the hushing noise the breeze makes sounds like a branch of iron against the windows. These rooms hold too many memories—too much laughter and anger and tears and outrageous moments happened here. Some people’s lives are imprinted into a home like handprints. Seven children left their imprint here: Grady’s robust laugh, James’ disappointment, Lyle’s gift of mercy, Howard’s dry and ironic humor, Caleb’s flash of anger, my spirit for fun and Henry’s common sense way of meeting the day. Seven children were born here and two people left the world here. When Pop lay withering, the smell of his illness clung to the curtains and towels and when I took a breath it felt as if the house was consuming me. The morning that Mother died, the house didn’t feel like death—smells of coffee and sausage saturated the rooms and seeped into the sheets, making her death so jarring to me. All the imprints of life are here but loneliness is as thick as mud inside these walls.
School let out the second week of May and besides the two weeks at the end of the year and the two weeks prior to the beginning of the year when I either tie up loose ends or begin my secretarial work in the office and organizing the school library, I get the whole summer off. It’s just me and my garden to harvest, berries to pick, Gertie to milk and this old house to keep running. These first six months of 1950 have gone by as slow as molasses in January; I can’t imagine what the rest of summer is going to feel like.
The screen door groans as I open it and I sit out on the back porch, looking out over the garden. Sally runs to me, pushing her shaggy, blond head under my hand. She looks up at me at with sorrowful, brown eyes. She misses Mother too. We are a pitiful twosome but surely things will get better. Or worse. I never know.
The Boy
The water took him every night. It pulled him down past the slippery vines and gliding fish into the muddy depths below where the muck and the murk all but shut out the sun. He sank further, his arms spread and his mouth and eyes open, into the dark waters where nothing stirred, into the still, hazy world of deepness. But before the darkness blinded him, her hand reached in and grabbed his, pulling him up like a bubble rising to the surface and out into the light where he sucked for air in great, gasping breaths. That was the dream. Each night he’d awake drenched with sweat and clawing for breath like a man pulled from the sea.
When he awakens tonight his heart is banging against his ribs and he pulls his knees into his chest hoping the man can’t hear it. Bang, bang, bang! The sound is so loud that the boy covers his ears. When his breathing slows, he lifts his head, watching the man; he is asleep on the cot on the other side of the shack. His pot gut stands as tall as the hills they live in and it hides his face. The boy leans over on his palette to see the man and notices that his mouth is open and sucking air like a sleeping animal. The boy straightens his palette on the floor and lay down.
“What are you doing, boy?” The boy lays still and closes his eyes. Moments later he hears the man roll over and begin to snore.
Before the sun rises, the boy slips by the man and pushes open the door. The oaks meet high above him and make the woods as dark as dusk in the early morning. Chickens scatter when he steps off the porch of the shack. He pulls the straps of his overalls over his shoulders and begins to run through the trees and onto the well-worn path. He smells bacon and knows it is wafting out of the stovepipe from the cabin that sits at the edge of the trees. He remembers one time when she took him to that cabin. He was in her arms and a blur of faces surrounded him, one pressing something to his forehead, while another put something under his nose. When he awoke, he was back in the shack and she was stroking his arm. “You’ll be better soon,” she said, kissing his head.
Two days prior to the nighttime visit to the cabin, he had awakened sick and vomited in the shack. She wasn’t there, but out on the hillside pulling up wild onions. The man awoke and slipped on the mess, screaming at the boy to clean it up. He snatched the boy up by his drawers, rubbing his face in the slippery bile. “Clean this slop up!” he screamed, sliding the boy’s face through it.
The boy tried to rise to his knees.
The man latched onto his arm and heaved him through the door. “Clean that puke up, you worthless sack of shit!”
The boy’s head felt like it was loose on his neck and there was a roar in his chest.
The man picked him up and shoved him headfirst into the rain barrel, the boy’s head banging the bottom. His throat and lu
ngs filled as he tried to push up with his hands. The man’s voice was muffled through the water. “Clean it up! Clean that shit up!”
The boy’s head smashed again and again on the bottom. Whack. Whack. He sucked in another gulp of water and fragments of light dimmed with each thud. The light faded and his lungs stopped flapping as he felt himself suspended, bobbing, floating in the barrel.
The air hit his chest like a brick through a window. He strained to see her through the fuzz. She was crying and broken into a thousand pieces. The man lay next to them, the frying pan next to his bleeding head. “You’ll be okay. You’ll be okay,” she murmured, rocking him. “I’ve got you. He won’t hurt you.”
As his mind fills with images of her, a new day dawns in the woods. Sunlight reaches like fingers through the trees and in the same breath the boy feels warmth and then shadow on his back as he runs down the hill, planting his feet first this way and then that to steady his steps. When the cabin is in view at the bottom of the hill, the smell of bacon is stronger and the boy runs faster. It’s been three days since he’s eaten. The man had made rabbit stew but it was a puny thing, no bigger than a mole, really and the man shared only a couple of bites.
He runs under the tree with the colored bottles dangling at the end of each limb. “They think evil spirits live in the trees,” she had told him. “And on the way out of the tree the spirit gets trapped inside the bottle.” She ran her hand through his hair. “Do you believe that?”
He squinted up at her that day and shrugged.
She tapped one of the pretty green bottles. “Evil’s not inside a bottle,” she said. “It’s too big for that.”
The bottles jangle as he lifts his hand above him, ringing them like bells as he runs to the stump and leans against it, panting. He doesn’t know how long it has taken him to get here but the sun has made him sweat. He brushes his arm over his forehead and turns in all directions. Nothing is here. He looks on the ground and inside the hollowed-out tree but there is no food today. The pot isn’t here.
Days after she was buried, he ran as fast as he could and stumbled upon a black pot sitting on this, the biggest stump. He lifted the lid of the pot and discovered two biscuits with sausage in the middle of them. He clutched the pot to his chest and spun on his heels like a trapped felon but there was no one after him; no one was looking. The boy shoved those biscuits into his mouth and left the pot as he had found it. The pot was there every second or third day and inside he found a fried chicken leg with cornbread and a slice of melon or a pork chop with fat yeast rolls and corn on the cob. He never knew where the food came from but envisioned an angel leaving the pot and then hovering above the treetops to watch him eat. When he was finished he would squint up through the trees flickering light down on him and nod.
This was, in her words, their secret place together. She would tell him stories here and they’d play hide-and-go-seek amongst these mighty oaks and the big, dead pines that stood around the stump. “How much do I love you,” she asked, every time.
He’d point to the sky and she’d grin.
“To the stars and back. That’s right! How much do you love me?”
He looked at a tree. “To that tree and back? That’s no more than five feet away!”
He shrieked when she crouched down as if to chase him. He ran out into the dazzling brightness of the hillside and fell, laughing.
She jumped on top of him and held him down. “How much do you love me?”
He giggled and pointed to the sky, holding up two fingers.
“To the stars and back two times?” She asked, hugging him tight. “That’s more like it.” They sat and looked out over the houses of Morgan Hill in the distance below. “Someday, we’ll get out of these hills and live someplace like that.”
He looked over at her face; she was sad, thinking.
“Don’t you listen to him. There are good people who live down there.”
He watched her face; she was looking beyond Morgan Hill.
She picked up his hand and put it in her lap. “Someday, we’ll get out.” She kissed his hand and pulled him to her. “I promise.”
He slumps down against the stump and listens as a train passes below. He stands and runs out of the trees onto the hillside overlooking Morgan Hill. Clackety, clackety, clack, the train shakes along the rails and he sits on the hill, watching it. Three children run after the train, a white boy and girl and another boy the color of the coffee the man drank each morning. The boy strains to hear what they’re saying but it doesn’t matter. They’re laughing and carrying on so he can only imagine that they’re happy about the sight of the train, or the way the sun makes them feel after so many days of rain, or maybe because their mothers have promised them a piece of chocolate cake when their chores are through. They keep running behind the train and the boy stands to his feet, moving toward them. In his mind, he can hear the man yelling at him to stay put on the hillside but her voice shouts over his and urges him to keep running. An hour passes or maybe more before he makes it to the jagged bottom. He grasps the rocky ledge and shimmies his way down onto the grass of the valley. The last time he was this far from the shack he was with her and she was picking buttercups and daisies and sticking them out of the pockets on her dress, the one with the faded blue flowers on it.
He crosses the valley and stops at the creek, watching the water ripple over the protruding rocks. The dream plays out in his mind and he stumbles backward, held fast to the ground as his heart blares like a siren in his ears. He looks to his left and notices the creek narrows further down the valley. He runs alongside it and spots a cluster of rocks sticking up from the water, dry and brown as buns. His heart leaps like a horse let out of its stall and he crosses to the other side. He doesn’t know what to do now; he feels like a bird freed from its snare but with nowhere to fly. The track rails beam in the sun and he reaches down to touch them; they are hot and smooth and he steps on top, teetering as he walks. He stays on the rail closest to the bank and sees the roofs of houses that face the hills where he lives. If anyone is home they won’t be able to see him on the track below. He races along the bank and stops at a set of stairs dug out of the earth that leads up the bank. He steps onto the earthen bottom stair and cranes his neck to peek over the top of the bank. A plain, white house sits in front of him with sheets hanging out to dry. They flap toward him in the breeze like curtains on a windy day and he leaps up onto the bank and runs behind the sheets into a patch of tomatoes.
He crouches low and listens for any sound. Something wet pushes against his arm and he jumps, turning on it. A dog’s yellow body sways with each wag of her tail and she pushes his arm again, nuzzling her head under his hand. He pets her head and she licks his face, making him smile. A tomato dangles in front of him and he pulls it from the vine, pushing it to his mouth. Red juice drips down his chin and the dog busies herself cleaning it. A row of onions is next to the tomatoes and the boy pulls one from the ground and peels off the first muddied layer, revealing the slick white head. He gnaws into it and shoves the rest in his mouth. He notices cucumbers on their vines and steps over a row of beans to get to them. His pockets bulge with the cucumber, two more onions and a handful of peas. The boy looks over his shoulder to make sure no one has seen him and grabs another tomato before dashing down the side of the bank. The dog runs to the top of the embankment and barks, watching him on the rails below.
Ivorie
I throw open the back door, waving my way through the sheets on the line. Sally’s down on her front legs with her hind end up in the air, barking. “Sally! Hush that yapping!” She turns to look at me and sniffs my hand before looking back to the track to bark some more. “Nothing’s there,” I say, taking a sheet off the line and folding it. She barks again and I kick my leg toward her and then grab my back. “Now look what you did! You made me put a hitch in my back.” She rubs against my leg and I ignore her. “No point in trying to make up. What’s done is done.” I fold another sheet and put it i
n the basket. I head to the house and notice something in the garden. I set the basket down on the steps and walk to my tomato vines. One is broken and dangling like a puppet from the weight of the tomatoes. “Did you do this?” I ask Sally. She lay down and wags her tail. “It’s funny how this wasn’t like this two hours ago when I was out here working but the minute I turn my back one of my best producing vines gets broken.” I pick the two drooping tomatoes and snap off the limb, tossing it aside. Sally nudges her head under my hand and I smooth out the yellow fur, brushing away bits of grass and weeds. “You and your making up.” I hold onto the tomatoes and pick up the basket of sheets. “Stay out of my garden!”
St. Martin’s Press New York
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
THE CHRISTMAS NOTE. Copyright © 2011 by Donna VanLiere. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
www.stmartins.com
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
VanLiere, Donna, 1966— The Christmas note / Donna VanLiere.–1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-312-65896-0
1. Neighbors–Fiction. 2. Mothers–Death–Fiction. 3. Family secrets–Fiction. 4. Identity (Psychology)–Fiction. 5. Christmas stories. I. Title.
PS3622.A66C4787 2011
813#39;.6–dc22
2011025835
ISBN: 978-0-3123-6777-0
The Christmas Shoes (Christmas Hope) Page 13