Inland Passage

by Jane Rule

  But Anna was exchanging friendly greetings with the old man next to her.

  “Nice to see a couple of kids,” he was saying. “I said to my wife—this is Rachel, my wife—funny place with no kids around, quiet as the grave.”

  “Oh, Sam, don’t exaggerate. There are children right next door to us. We’re renting. We just come down from Oregon for a month,” she confided to Anna, “and renters can’t have children, but owners are allowed to have grandchildren visit.”

  “It’s unnatural!” Harry said.

  When Sam and Rachel heard the dilemma that faced these Canadian visitors, they were as irate as Harry and agreed that it was not only unnatural but un-American, and they would do something about it.

  “Listen,” Sam said. “We’ve got plenty of space, twin beds in the spare room, a second bathroom, big fold-out bed in the living room.”

  “But children aren’t allowed,” Harry reminded him.

  “We’ll just smuggle them in,” Rachel decided. “When we finish here,” she continued in a lowered voice, “we’ll put the children in our car under a blanket. Then a little while later, you come along…”

  “What about Petey?” Sally asked.

  “We have a canary,” Harry said glumly.

  “If we can smuggle a couple of kids, who’s worried about a canary?”

  “But you could get evicted,” Harry reminded them.

  “So that’s the end of the world?” Sam asked.

  “You’re wonderful,” Anna said, “Thank you.”

  Once the plan was approved, all six of them took their parts with elaborate seriousness. Harry insisted on paying the whole bill while Rachel and Sam took the children and hid them under their own lap robes on the back seat of their large and impressive American car.

  “God, I hope they’re not kidnappers,” Anna said suddenly as the old couple drove off.

  “You’re the one who agreed!” Harry shouted, rushing to their own car.

  When Anna got in beside him, she was laughing. Then she said, “I’m sorry about being so dumb about making reservations.”

  “I would have settled for a stable if I could have found one.”

  They found the car parked in the carport of number one-hundred-and-thirty-one in the mobile home park, and they found the children in the living room, eating cookies. Harry put Petey in his covered cage on top of the television set.

  “They’ll think it’s on tv,” Rachel said, “whatever noise we make. As long as we keep the curtains closed, and the kids stay off the screened porch.”

  Anna helped Rachel make up the guest room beds and then settled the children while Harry accepted a drink and a look around, never having been inside these giant kleenex boxes on wheels before.

  “Come say goodnight,” Anna called.

  “Dad,” Sally said, “You said Christmas was everywhere.”

  “And so it is,” Harry said, smiling at his clean, comfortable children as safely settled as they might have been with grandparents.

  “I don’t see any tree. I don’t see any presents.”

  “Well, older people, on their own, sometimes…”

  “The thing is, Sally,” Anna interrupted. “Sam and Rachel are Jewish, and Jewish people don’t celebrate Christmas.”

  “Jewish people don’t believe in Santa Claus?” Sally asked. “I don’t really either, but everybody can pretend.”

  “Jews don’t believe in Jesus,” Joey said.

  “Neither exactly do we,” Anna said. “There are a lot of different ways to believe in kindness and hope and love. There’ll be surprises in the morning. Just don’t worry about it.”

  Out in the living room where Rachel was making up their bed, another worried conversation had obviously taken place.

  “Rachel says we can make a tree out of palm fronds,” Sam explained. “And…”

  “You mustn’t go to any trouble,” Anna protested. “We came away partly to get away from all the elaborate fuss Christmas gets to be. We’re not really believers either.”

  At that moment, they heard the voices of carolers outside the door, mostly wavering old voices with one true soprano, singing of a child born to Mary, and they all went out to listen.

  “We’re not all that much Jews either,” Sam said as they went back into the house. “Anyway, there’s no real way to get away from Christmas, not with kids in the house.”

  The courteous argument turned into the joy of finding palm fronds in the desert moonlight for the men, baking for the women. It was nearly as late as it always got at home when Sam and Rachel finally retired to their bedroom, leaving Harry and Anna to sleep in the splendor of a room-high tree of palm fronds, decorated with dozens of freshly baked and brightly frosted cookies, presents for everyone stacked underneath it, Harry’s gift to Anna and hers to him relabeled for Sam and Rachel, the piñata hanging over the breakfast table.

  Harry woke at dawn, for a moment uncertain where he was until he saw the tree, and he was very glad that he had a wife who believed in miracles rather than reservations, that Christmas would be as secret and illicit as it had been in the beginning, for the sake of the children. He got up and opened the curtains just a crack. Then he took the cover off Petey and let him sing. Outside a mocking bird in the ocotillo answered that caged, illegal carol.

  YOU CANNOT JUDGE A PUMPKIN’S HAPPINESS BY THE SMILE UPON HIS FACE

  PERHAPS BECAUSE HARRY HAD not had the conventional joys of childhood himself, he was enthusiastic about them for his own children. He was so good at holidays that Anna, his wife, often thought of him as a misplaced kindergarten teacher. But she and the children humored him through Santa Claus suits, egg decorating contests and valentines enough to embarrass the most indiscriminate lover. Usually his energy could carry the day, and they ended by laughing with him instead of at him. But there was always the danger that Harry would go too far. When a full month before Hallowe’en Harry was already planning Sally’s and Joey’s costumes, Anna tried to apply the brakes.

  “The kids like to pick out their own costumes.”

  “Well, I asked Sally last night what she wanted to be, and she just shrugged,” Harry protested.

  “Kids are getting a bit turned off by Hallowe’en. It’s all those stories about razor blades in apples and poisoned cookies.”

  “Not in our neighborhood!” Harry exclaimed. “If Hallowe’en isn’t what it used to be, all the more reason for us to get into the act and save it. Traditions are important to kids.”

  “I broke my ankle one Hallowe’en,” Anna recalled, “running from the cops.”

  “What had you done?”

  “I don’t remember,” Anna said. “I just remember the cast and the crutches.”

  “But I’ll be with the kids.”

  “And what do you want to be?” Anna asked.

  “Their father,” Harry answered.

  So Anna finally agreed to make two pairs of black, long-sleeved pajamas. When they were finished, Harry went to the library for a reference book and to a hardware store for white paint that would glow in the dark. Then he shut himself into the basement and began to work. He had thought at first to keep the costumes a surprise, but once they were finished, he was too proud of his efforts to keep them a secret.

  “After dinner tonight,” he announced, “we’re going to have a preview of coming events.”

  Anna and the kids, seated in the entirely darkened living room, listened to Harry stumble and curse in the hall.

  “Is it a movie?” Sally asked.

  “It’s a simulated air raid,” Joey said and introduced a high pitched whine of a plane passing, followed by a K-BANG of a bomb exploding which threw him out of his chair.

  “Are you ready?” Harry called.

  “Get back in your chair, son,” Anna said.

  “I can’t find it,” Joey answered from the floor. “Hey! Look!”

  Moving into the living room were two glowing skeletons.

  “Daddy?” Sally called out.

>   “This is you, punkin,” Harry’s voice replied, and the smaller skeleton wobbled violently. “And this is Joey.” The other did a similar dance. “Trick or treat!”

  “Neat-o!” Joey exclaimed.

  “Scary,” Sally decided.

  “You’re supposed to be scary on Hallowe’en,” Harry said, but he turned on a light so that Sally could see the two pairs of black pajamas hanging on coat hangers. “And they’re accurate. This is a girl skeleton, and this is a boy skeleton.”

  “How do you know?” Sally asked.

  “I copied them out of a medical book. Girls’ bones are different there so that they can have babies.”

  “They really are marvelous!” Anna admitted.

  “Can we sleep in them?” Joey asked.

  “Can I wear mine when I stay overnight at Cricket’s?”

  “Well, I guess so,” Harry said, “after Hallowe’en.”

  “Do we really have to go trick or treating?” Joey asked.

  “What do you mean ‘have to?’” Harry demanded. “It’s supposed to be fun.”

  “Yeah, well, it’s just that maybe I’m getting a little bit…old for it, you know?”

  “At nine?” Harry asked, incredulous.

  “Well, some of the other paperboys said maybe they’d go round and fill up their carriers, but not in costume or anything.”

  “Undisguised greed,” Anna said.

  “My friends aren’t allowed,” Sally said. “Cricket isn’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “Cricket’s mother says children get molested.”

  “Do you know what that means, Sally?”

  “Hurt?”

  “Well, you can’t be hurt when I’m right there with you. And think of all the disappointed grown-ups if nobody came for the candy and cookies. Why, it would be like kids deciding not to get up on Christmas morning. It would be like not wanting to blow out the candles on your birthday cake. Do you know something? Without kids, there probably wouldn’t be any holidays at all, except maybe New Year’s and Memorial Day.”

  “They’re really great costumes, Dad,” Joey said. “Can we try them on?”

  “Sure.”

  Both children accepted their skeletons and raced upstairs to change.

  For the rest of the evening lights went off and on as two skeletons fled from room to room until Joey and Sally has scared themselves sleepy.

  “No, you can’t go to bed in them tonight,” Anna said. “Wait until after Hallowe’en.”

  “We’re really going to have to do that?” Joey asked.

  “Do you want to disappoint your father?”

  “Sometimes having to be a kid is pretty embarrassing,” Joey said;

  “Nobody will recognize you,” Anna comforted him.

  The day before Hallowe’en Harry came home from work early. Sally and Anna were in the kitchen cutting out Hallowe’en cookies. Joey hadn’t yet got home from school.

  “Say, we’ll be the most popular house on the block with those,” Harry said, admiring the pumpkins, cats and witches about to go into the oven.

  “They’re not for here,” Sally said. “They’re for kindergarten tomorrow.”

  “All of them?”

  “The teacher said to bring things to school, and then we won’t have to go out after dark.”

  “Another killjoy!” Harry said in disgust.

  “Shhhh…” Anna said sharply and suddenly, looking at the clock and listening.

  Faintly, off in the distance, a cry could be heard. “Pepperrrrr.”

  “That’s Joey!” Sally said with satisfaction.

  “He’s three blocks away,” Anna said.

  “What’s the idea?” Harry asked.

  “To see how far away he can be and we can still hear him,” Sally explained.

  “Who’s Pepper?”

  “The dog Mom won’t let him have.”

  Joey banged into the house, shouting, “Well, did you hear me?”

  “We heard you,” Anna said.

  “Oh, hi, Dad,” Joey said.

  “Pretty much of a kid game for a guy as old as you are.”

  “Aw, Dad…”

  “Come on, both of you,” Harry said. “There’s a sale of the biggest pumpkins you ever saw.”

  “Can we each have one?”

  “Yep, and you can pick as big a one as you can carry.”

  “But we don’t have to carry them around, do we?” Joey asked. “They’re just for the window, aren’t they?”

  “Dad’s not going to make you wear them on your heads,” Anna said.

  After dinner, Joey and Sally settled at the kitchen table, a bit intimidated by the size of their enormous pumpkins.

  “Its head’s as big as God’s,” Sally said.

  “Go on,” Harry encouraged. “The bigger they are, the easier they are.”

  “Mine’s going to have two teeth,” Joey decided.

  “Mine’s going to SMILE,” Sally said, drawing out the word as she traced a mouth with her knife.

  Then, as she began to cut, she hummed a tune which then turned into a song with words, which ended, “You cannot judge a pumpkin’s happiness by the smile upon its face.”

  “Where did you learn a sad song like that?” Harry asked.

  “At school,” Sally said. “Did Dad show you the suckers he bought to hand out at the door?”

  “No,” Anna said.

  “I hope we like them,” Joey said.

  “They’re not for you,” Harry said.

  “I mean, just in case…”

  “In case what?”

  “In case nobody comes.”

  “Listen, by the time those two pumpkins get into the window, they’ll attract ghosts from all over town.”

  Though it was only five o’clock, it was already dark as Harry drove home on Hallowe’en, and it was raining. As he came off the bridge into the residential section of the city, he looked in vain for bands of small children in costume. Here and there, there was a pumpkin in the window, and, as he passed the high school, Harry spotted two patrol cars. Too early, that was all. He wasn’t taking his own kids out until after dinner.

  Sally didn’t want anything to eat. She had a stomach ache from all the sweets she’d had at school.

  “My stomach wants to throw up,” she announced, “but I don’t.”

  “Do you mind?” Joey asked sarcastically. “Some people are trying to eat.”

  “You could go up and put on your costume, Sally,” Harry suggested. “And be all ready.”

  “Do you think she ought to go out on a night like this?” Anna asked. “She’s already feeling sick.”

  “She’ll be fine,” Harry said firmly.

  “Won’t our skeletons melt?” Joey asked hopefully.

  “We’ll take umbrellas, and you can put sweaters on underneath.”

  “We’ll be pretty fat skeletons,” Joey said.

  They, in fact, looked like skeleton brand sausages as they stood by the door, getting into their rain boots.

  “Part of my bones are in my boots,” Sally said.

  “You man the door while we’re gone,” Harry instructed Anna hopefully, though there had as yet been no callers.

  It was very wet, and there was no sign of anyone else out on the street. Far off they could hear an occasional fire cracker and the wail of a siren.

  “We’ll just go to the houses with porch lights on,” Harry said in a voice more confident than his spirit, for there were very few porch lights in evidence along the block.

  Harry waited on the sidewalk while Joey and Sally trudged up the first walk under a shared umbrella. When he heard the first exclamations of admiration of their fine costumes, Harry felt vindicated, and he smiled at the polite “thank yous” coming from his two small skeletons.

  “You didn’t sound very scary,” he said to them as they joined him.

  “I was scared,” Sally said. “I didn’t even know that lady.”

  “What did you get?”


  “A couple of apples,” Joey said.

  His tone discouraged Harry. Maybe he shouldn’t have given Joey permission to deliver papers, for Harry seemed to have a world weary man of independent income on his hands instead of a kid enjoying himself.

  After the next call, Sally said, in surprised delight, “They gave us a couple of cigars!”

  “What?” Harry demanded.

  “Candy cigars,” Joey explained.

  At least Sally was beginning to enjoy herself. She’d forgotten about her stomach ache, and she felt quite bold at the next house where she had a friend.

  “Do you both look adorable! Harry, are you out there? Come on in for a drink, why don’t you?”

  “No, no thanks. We’ve got to make the rounds,” Harry called back.

  “Adorable!” Joey snorted, and suddenly he turned on Sally and gave a harsh scream.

  At the next walk, Joey balked. “I can’t go up there. She’s the old bat who doesn’t pay her bills, and she says I throw her paper in the bushes.”

  “And we can’t go in there either,” Sally explained at another house.

  “Why not?”

  “The man acts funny all the time,” Sally said.

  “He’s drunk all the time,” Joey amplified.

  “I see.”

  Fire crackers exploded in the next block, and a car screeched around the corner. Sally dropped back and took her father’s hand.

  “Not this one,” Joey said, “or this one.”

  After explanations like “There’s a vicious dog” or “Mrs. Hale just broke her leg.” Harry gave up asking why. Joey’s knowledge of the neighborhood gave him an authority Harry hesitated to dispute, but he was by now thoroughly exasperated with his son and the evening.

  “Look, Joey,” Harry finally said, “We aren’t just out for a walk in the rain. You make this neighborhood sound like a cross between the loony bin and the emergency ward at the hospital. There must be some people who aren’t too dangerous or sick to call on.”

  “Well,” Joey said, looking up at a large, brightly lighted house with some uncertainty, “I guess this one would be all right.”

  “It’s got a lot of stairs,” Sally said.

  “Go!” Harry ordered.

  He stood in the street, the rain drumming on his umbrella, and watched his doggedly unenthusiastic children trudge up the steps, slick with water. Where were all the other fathers and children in the world who should be filling the streets with happy calls and friendly spookiness?