“Hey, you two go on without me,” Grant said to them. “I need to go talk to Slider.”
“Can I come?” they asked together.
“Naw. He might be at the tavern. Mom wouldn’t like that.”
Shirley harrumphed just like Mamie did sometimes, but she turned, took Harley’s hand, and trudged toward home.
Slider wasn’t at Grumpy’s, but when Grant stuck his head inside the door, into the smell of burning tires, Grumpy said, “Grant! Lookin’ for your old man?”
“Yeah. Seen him lately?”
“He was here about half an hour ago. Check Sims’s.”
“Thanks, Grumpy.”
“Want a root beer?”
Grant’s mouth watered. “Thanks. Yeah, I want one, but I better get goin’.”
“What’s the rush?” Grumpy called, setting a mug on the bar. “You can slam this down. It’ll take ya forty seconds. My treat. For helpin’ save the Swanson kid Saturday night.”
“Shucks, thanks, Grumpy.” Grant pulled the door shut behind him. “But I didn’t do anything. That was my old man.”
Grumpy eyed him. Nodded. “I know. And I also know Frank woulda died or busted every bone in his body if you hadn’t been on your toes and high-tailed it over here to get Slider.” He nodded toward the mug of root beer. “On me.”
Grant slipped up onto a barstool. He sucked in a deep swig and felt the sweet liquid flow down to his stomach. He licked his upper lip and grinned at Grumpy. “Thanks. But Grumpy, if you hadn’t had your rope just in case, Frank still mighta’ died.”
“Your old man woulda thought of something.” Grumpy picked up a glass from the drainboard and started wiping it with a flour-sack towel. “Everybody laughs at the wall, but three times in three years, it’s saved somebody’s life.”
Grant grinned.
“In spite of that good-for-nothin’ worthless Big Joe. Shoulda been him danglin’ up there. Should string his worthless hind end up any day. Nobody’s loss. I’d string that louse up my own self.” Grumpy set the clean, dry glasses on the shelf behind the bar. “But that Swanson boy,” he went on. “That Swanson boy gets into more predicaments. Hope he lives to grow up and see age twenty.”
Grant nodded. “Me, too.”
“Good thing he’s got friends like you, or he’d a killed hisself a long time ago.”
“Good thing we all got friends,” Grant said.
Grumpy stopped his glass-drying and looked at Grant. “You’re your father’s son, aren’t you?”
Grant felt his face get hot, and he gulped down the last swallow of root beer and pulled his mittens back on. It seemed a waste to drink it so fast, but he didn’t want to sit here with Grumpy complimenting him. “Thank you, Grumpy. For the root beer. I better go find my dad.”
“Anytime, son.”
Sure enough, at the other end of Main Street, Slider was leaning on the counter at Sims’s Mercantile, chatting with Sims.
“Grant! What brings you?”
“Hi, Dad. Mr. Sims. Nothin’ much. Just need some ideas is all. Thought I’d come find you before it was time to go to the train.”
Slider nodded. He kept talking to Sims for a while, bought Grant a penny’s worth of Scotties, and Grant ate each little licorice dog slowly, biting off first feet, then head, then legs, then half the torso, then finally the last bit and chewed slowly, savoring the sweet black licorice flavor. He was scoring pretty good on the sweet stuff today.
They left the store, his last Scottie long gone, and they walked together to the end of the sidewalk and turned down Church Road toward home.
Grant told Slider about Sue. “How come nobody will talk to us about the TB? How come Sue just disappears, and we all know he got sent to the sanatorium, but nobody says nothin’? It doesn’t seem right. He was alive in class last Monday and now he’s just—poof—gone.”
“That’s how life and death goes, son. Poof. Gone.”
“But we have funerals. We talk about people. The TB is like some phantom that everybody’s scared of.”
“That’s ’cause it’s a phantom. Nobody knows when it’ll show up or take somebody. Or how to stop it from coming. It’s as if you don’t say the word, maybe the curse won’t come.”
“That’s loony. Like hocus-pocus malarkey. Besides. There oughta be a cure.”
“When I was little, they called it the consumption. At least we call it tuberculosis now because we know what it is. That’s progress.”
“That’s not enough!”
“Well, maybe you can grow up and be a great doctor and discover the TB cure.”
“Me? Heck no. You know I’m gonna be a major league pitcher. I’m not gonna be no doctor and be stuck holdin’ sticks in sick people’s mouths—and giving shots—in sick people’s houses and a doctor’s office or a hospital all day long.” Grant shivered at the thought.
Slider shrugged. “You got the brains for doctoring. And for all the schooling it takes. Don’t write it off just yet. Nobody can play baseball their whole life. But you can be a doctor when you’re old.”
“Slider, don’t you want me to be the next Bob Feller?”
“’Course I do, son. And I think you got what it takes. But keep your options open. Keep pitching your way to the big leagues, and study your brains out, too, so you got all the options.”
Grant frowned. He’d never, ever, not once thought of being a doctor. The idea was sort of terrifying—to have to run to anybody’s house who called you in the middle of the night and have to spend all day every day seeing sick people. And then there was having babies, for crying out loud. Thinking about it felt like thinking about the TB sanatorium—indoors, like a sterile prison, and white like the hospital. No freedom at all. Still, if he could find a cure for the TB, and keep more kids from getting sent to the TB sanatorium, he’d be glad.
But no, no. All, all, all he wanted to do was to pitch major league baseball. He couldn’t sit and study if he could be out playing baseball. Plus, he only had four more years to be as old as Bob Feller was when he started pitching for the Indians. He needed to get his fastball faster now.
“Wait, Dad?”
“Son?”
“I actually came down here to talk to you about Christmas. We had to draw names in school, and I got Little Joe.”
“Well, that’s convenient. At least you know what he’d like.”
“That’s just it. I know what he’d like, but we can’t spend money on these gifts. We’re supposed to make something. I can’t make anything he’d really like. And this year, I feel . . . sorta . . . ”
“Bad for him ’cause this year, you understand what his dad is really like and that he won’t get much for Christmas?” Slider finished for him.
Grant nodded.
“So what is it that you know he wants?”
“Skates. Ice skates. No idea what else to do or get. I’m sure I could make him a slingshot, but he can make one just as good as I can. But I know he really wants skates.”
Slider nodded, scratched his chin. “Let me think on this, okay, son? You run on home, and go meet the coal train, and I’ll see if I can think of something before tonight.”
“Thanks, Dad.”
The temperature hovered between twenty and thirty, so it wasn’t miserably cold except for the wind. Grant piled his sled extra high and dropped a scuttle’s worth down Grandma Beadlie’s coal chute on his way past. He ran on home before she could come out to thank him.
After Grant put his sled away and came inside, closing the kitchen door behind him, his father got up from the table.
“Grant, come here,” he said, and motioned him toward the cellar stairway. The cellar stairs were too cold to go down barefoot, so Grant left his damp shoes on and wiped them well on the crocheted rag rug by the door and tiptoed, to leave as little wet trace as he could across the kitchen floor.
At the bottom of the stairs, Slider held up two ice-skate blades. “I asked around to see if anybody had an old set they didn’t use. Got the
se. We’ve got a couple pieces of cowhide, and you could make new straps. It would be a homemade present and you won’t spend a penny.
“Dad! That’s the berries! Thanks.”
Grant told him about Suzy Matheison’s song and what Joe had said about Santa. He didn’t mention the bicycle. Slider nodded. They went upstairs to eat supper.
Twelve
Little Joe and the Silver Skates
After supper, Slider helped Grant sharpen his pocketknife razor-sharp, and Mamie let him use her oldest wooden cutting board. He set to work cutting one-inch straps of leather. He marked them carefully and used Slider’s celluloid straightedge to cut a straight line.
Grant worked all evening, his toes by the fire, fashioning the cowhide strips into straps for the skate blades.
Skates were a metal platform attached to blades that could be strapped onto anyone’s shoes. That way, anybody could strap a pair of skates onto his or her shoes and could pass them down through kids in a family and generations. All they needed was sharpening and new straps periodically. Grant’s family had five pairs hanging in the basement. Mamie was one of the best skaters in town, and when she glided onto the ice, every eye watched her twirl and float over the skating rink. However, since she had launched all three of her children onto the ice, she almost never strapped on her skates anymore. She was all work and no nonsense—which didn’t make growing up look very appealing to Grant.
Grant thought it was boring to skate circles around and around the ice. That’s why he didn’t understand Joe wanting skates, but it was probably because Mamie had taken Grant skating lots of times when he was little. Nobody had ever taken Joe.
When the straps were done, Grant took them to the cellar and pounded nail holes in the straps. Slider had three old buckles in his junk drawer from something or other. Grant fastened two of them that were almost the same size to the ankle straps and sewed the leather strap through the buckle with fishing line. For the toes, he used pliers and the hammer to make homemade toe straps with two strands of #9 wire.
Mamie gave him silver polish and a rag to shine the blades. When he was done, they sparkled in the lamplight.
“Every kid in your class is gonna be jealous of those,” Slider said. “’Cept maybe Frank. He’s probably got store-bought shoe skates.”
“I dunno. He never skates that I know of.” Grant sat holding his handiwork.
Slider smiled at him. “Feels good, doesn’t it?”
“What?”
“Job done well. For somebody else.”
Grant looked at his dad and his cheeks burned, and his insides felt so good for a horrifying second he thought he might cry.
Instead he stood and set the skates under the Christmas tree. “I guess I’d better go to bed. It’s pretty late.”
Slider nodded. “Night, son.”
Grant fell in bed, exhausted, but lay awake for a long time, imagining Joe’s face when he opened the skates.
It was hard to wait until Friday.
Friday morning, it was ten below when Grant walked to school with Shirley and Harley in the predawn dark, the brown-paper package of skates under his arm. The east horizon glowed pink as the first bell rang, but nobody dawdled in the schoolyard, not even Suzy. Grant looked at the swings to check, and he felt a twinge of disappointment. For a second, he wished he could give Suzy a present. He imagined her pale face lighting up when she said, “Grant? You got me a present?” But that was a foolish thought because he didn’t have one.
Inside the cloakroom, kids were whispering about whose names they’d drawn and what they were giving. Grant heard about two slingshots and Alice Moreland bragged that she had spent four hours on her gift the night before. Grant mostly worried that his gift was too big, that he might make somebody else feel bad for not being able to give something as nice as Joe’s skates. But he didn’t care. He couldn’t wait to give them to Joe.
Lorraine came bursting into the cloakroom, cheeks bright, green ribbons on her braids, and as girly looking as Grant had ever seen her. “Guess what!” she cried, slipping out of her patched winter coat. Before anyone could guess, she burst out, “My daddy came home! For Chirstmas.”
Orland beamed at her. “Gee, that’s swell, Lorraine. You’ll have the merriest Christmas of all. He bring you new ribbons?”
She bobbed her head.
“They’re real pretty.”
“Thank you, Orland.” She gave Orland the brightest smile Grant had seen on her face in a year, and she and her ribbons bounced into the classroom.
Frank punched Orland in the shoulder “See? I knew it. You’re sweet on her.” Frank screwed his voice up to mimic, “They’re real pretty.”
“Hush up, Frank,” Orland and Grant said at the same moment. They pretended to chase him, so Frank ducked into the classroom, where they all had to sit down and behave.
In arithmetic, they were doing geometry, and time dragged. Finally Racehorse held up a candy cane and said she’d give it to the first person who could figure out the volume of a perfectly conical giant Christmas tree nine feet high with a diameter at the bottom of eight feet.
They all bent over their books. Grant searched furiously. They hadn’t learned the formula for the volume of a cone yet, but they’d done cylinders and spheres. He flipped forward in the book, and then found “cone” in the index. He found the chapter. The formula wasn’t too tough.
Base was a circle, and radius was half the diameter, so the whole thing would be
So he wrote:
When he multiplied everything, he didn’t double-check. He shot his hand up. “One-hundred-fifty point seventy-two cubic feet.”
“Show-off,” muttered Frank.
“How’d you do that?” asked Violet Sutton.
“You’ve got it. Good job, Grant,” Racehorse said. She strode over to his desk and looked at his paper. “Nice.” She handed him the candy cane.
“Thank you.”
“Want to put that on the board for us?”
And so he did, his ears burning.
He put the candy cane carefully inside his desk.
For reading, Racehorse read them a story called “The Gift of the Magi” by a guy named O’Henry. Everybody was quiet and they all held their breath when the couple in the story exchanged presents and had no way to use them since the lady in the story had cut off and sold her hair to buy her husband a watch chain, and he’d sold his watch to buy her a comb for her long hair. They had both sacrificed their most precious possessions to buy each other presents that were useless.
Finally, finally, finally, at 1:30, Racehorse stacked her books on her desk and said it was time to exchange presents.
Racehorse put numbers one to seventeen in a hat, and they drew numbers to see in what order they would give their presents. Grant drew seven. Little Joe and he showed each other their numbers. Joe had seventeen. “Can we trade?” Grant asked.
“Sure.”
Grant was glad. Nobody would have to give a present after he gave Joe the skates.
Kids got slingshots, paper dolls, mittens with leftover yarn, and Orland got a hand-knit pair of socks from Martha Ryerson.
“Ooooh, she’s sweet on you,” Frank said.
“Enough!” Racehorse said, and Frank piped down.
Orland had Frank’s name. He walked over and handed him a large rectangular package. Frank opened it and stared, speechless, his face turning bright red. Everybody got out of their seats and crowded around.
A homemade wooden picture frame, polished to a sheen, held a hand-drawn and pencil-shaded scene of a winter night. A water tower loomed in the picture, and from a rivet on the roof dangled a figure, unmistakably Frank. Two boys crowded on the catwalk below, and Slider was captured mid-climb on the ladder, the just-in-case rope slung over his shoulder. Grant stood below him on the bottom rung of the ladder, staring up at Frank. At the base of the ladder slumped a dark shadow that only the boys would know was Big Joe Thorson. Every face, even though small, was unmistakably id
entifiable. In the background, kids skated on the ice rink, oblivious to Frank’s dangling peril.
It was good. Grant knew Orland was a good artist, but he’d never seen one of his pictures as good as this. It was like a black-and-white photograph. At first he could hardly breathe, taking in the talent he could see in Orland’s work, and then the next minute, he busted out laughing, glad Orland had captured the moment. He couldn’t help it. And pretty soon, Frank started laughing and so did the entire class. Racehorse Romney walked over to see, too, and she said, “I’m thinking there’s a story here. When we’re done with presents, perhaps you’d like to entertain us with the story?”
“Ah—no, ma’am, I’d rather not,” Frank said, cheeks and ears bright pink.
“I don’t think he’s got to tell it. Orland’s picture tells it all,” Lorraine Woods said. “And we know he lived to tell the tale . . . or not tell.”
Everybody laughed again.
Racehorse Romney studied the picture again, nodding. “That is a wonderful picture. You have a great talent, Orland Bjelland. Don’t let that go to waste.”
Orland looked down, his ears burning brighter red. “Thank you, ma’am.”
Grant got a hand-carved wooden box with a lid that fit from Lorraine Woods. “I made it,” she said.
“You did? It’s nice. Thanks.” Leave it to Lorraine, Grant thought, to do a boy’s hobby like whittling. He ran his fingers over the surface where the wood grain was sanded to a satiny sheen. He smiled at her, and she ducked her head, embarrassed, happy.
At long last, it was Grant’s turn to give. He walked to the Christmas tree and lifted the brown paper package that he’d tried to hide behind the tree. He walked down the row, and set it on Joe’s desk.
Little Joe held the package on his desk and looked at Grant, as if he didn’t want the moment of anticipation to end, as if he could just freeze the moment of Christmas if he never actually unwrapped the present.
“Hurry up,” Frank said.
Joe pulled one string.
“Come on.”
So Joe yanked the other string, ripped the brown paper, and lifted the lid. He sucked in his breath. “Grant! You didn’t.”
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