by Lynn Austin
“No, thank you,” I mumbled. “I have to go home.”
“Are you sure?” Mrs. Hayworth asked, smiling. “We’d love to have you.” I shook my head and shuffled toward the door. “Maybe you can worship with us next week,” she called after me as I hurried away.
I spent all afternoon searching for a place to store my Sunday school paper where the boys wouldn’t wreck it. I wanted to learn the memory verse for next week so I could win a prize. I could think of only one place to hide it where the boys would never go: Mom’s sanctuary. Somehow, it seemed appropriate.
On Monday morning May Elizabeth burst into our classroom with shocking news. “Our house got broken into yesterday!” she told us breathlessly. “The thieves stole Ron’s transistor radio and his reel-to-reel tape recorder and Daddy’s new color TV and some money and a couple of kitchen appliances and a whole bunch of Mommy’s jewelry and her fur coat. …” She paused to gulp another breath. “They even took the liquor bottles right out of Daddy’s cabinet!”
We stared at her in slack-mouthed horror. This was just like a TV show. If only Perry Mason or the cops from Dragnet were around to solve this terrible crime. We all felt bad for her family’s losses, but I could tell that May Elizabeth was reveling in the drama of it all.
“They broke in while we were at church!” she huffed, as if that was the lowest blow of all. She had everyone’s attention as she finished with, “Daddy says we’re going to get a watchdog!”
Suddenly I had the same funny feeling in my stomach that I had on the day we went shopping for May’s birthday present. I couldn’t help wondering about my daddy’s detailed questions after the party and why he had particularly asked about a dog. I wanted to talk to him about it so that the funny feeling would go away, but when I got home from school that afternoon Daddy wasn’t there.
“He left for work yesterday while you were at church,” Mommy said. “He’ll be on the road all week. Why?”
“I just wondered… never mind.” I felt scared and angry at the same time, and I didn’t know why. I went into our bedroom to try to think things through and discovered that my Hula-Hoop was gone. I heard my brothers laughing maliciously in the backyard, and I ran outside.
“Stop! Give that back!” I yelled. “You’ll break it!” The boys had tied my Hula-Hoop to a tree branch with a piece of rope and were about to use it as a swing. I raced across the yard but was too late. The hoop snapped in two beneath Poke’s weight, and he tumbled to the ground on top of JT. I walked away in tears, hoping the collision had broken both of their necks.
That Halloween, May Elizabeth invited me to go trick-or-treating in her neighborhood. The rich people on her side of town actually gave out treats; our side of town was better known for its tricks.
“You can go with her,” Mommy said, “but you have to take Poke and JT.”
“Mommy, no!” I wailed. “I won’t have any fun if I have to drag them all over town with me.”
“Well, someone has to take them. They’re too little to go trick-ortreating by themselves.”
“Can’t you or Daddy or Uncle Leonard take them?” I didn’t think it would require much make-up to dress up my uncle as Frankenstein.
“Fine,” Mom said in a voice that told me it wasn’t. “Your brothers don’t have to go trick-or-treating this year. But you’ll have to share all your candy with them when you get home.”
I took the boys.
May Elizabeth dressed up as a fairy princess in a long, glittery gown with feathery wings on her back. She wore a rhinestone tiara on her golden curls and carried a magic wand with silver streamers. Mommy said that the boys and I could dress up as hobos, but I didn’t see a whole lot of difference between our costumes and the way we usually dressed. Poke and JT didn’t care about costumes, anyway—they were after the free candy. They each carried a paper bag to collect their loot, but they walked up and down the streets eating the candy as fast as people handed it to them, scattering a trail of Milky Way and Tootsie Roll wrappers behind them like dead leaves. JT had three lollipops sticking out of his mouth at the same time. They gorged themselves until their faces turned green.
We saved May Elizabeth’s house for last because her mother was going to give us hot cocoa and a ride home. We rang the doorbell as if it was any other house, and May and I stood giggling on the doorstep as we waited for our treats. Poke was suspiciously tranquil.
“Trick or treat!” we chorused when Mrs. Hayworth opened the door.
“Oh, my! Who do we have here?” she asked. She was pretending to be surprised, but a moment later her expression changed to genuine shock as Poke leaned inside the doorway and threw up on her gold shag carpeting. JT, who mimicked everything Poke did, promptly threw up alongside him. May Elizabeth screamed.
I closed my eyes, wishing May could wave her magic fairy princess wand and make me disappear.
Chapter
7
D id you write up your list for Santa, yet?” May Elizabeth asked a few days before Christmas vacation. Nearly four months had passed since school had started, and amazing as it seemed, we were still best friends.
“No… not yet,” I mumbled. She must have noticed that I quickly ducked my head, and she knew me well enough by then to know that I was avoiding the question.
“What’s wrong, Kathy?”
“Santa Claus doesn’t come to our house.” I gave what I hoped was an indifferent shrug so she’d know I wasn’t asking for pity. “Uncle Leonard called him a fraud and the creation of greedy capitalists, so I think Santa’s mad at us.”
“Santa doesn’t get mad, silly. He only cares if you’ve been naughty or nice.”
“Yeah, well, my brothers were born naughty,” I said hopelessly. “They would have set the hospital nursery on fire if they could have gotten their tiny little fingers on some matches. The word nice isn’t in their vocabulary.”
“But you’re nice, Kathleen.”
I shook my head. Santa seemed to avoid our whole neighborhood every Christmas. I had always figured that there weren’t enough “nice” kids on the block for him to put his sleigh and reindeer at risk. Danny Reeves would have climbed up on the roof of the house as soon as Santa’s back was turned and hijacked his bag of toys. And Charlie Grout would probably make reindeer burgers out of Dasher and Dancer.
“Well, you never know…” she said, giving me her dimpled smile. “Maybe he’ll come this year.”
I wasn’t holding my breath.
I had been attending Sunday school regularly with May, and I decided to go to the Christmas program with her on the Sunday night before Christmas. She played baby Jesus’mother, Mary, in the pageant—a wonderfully poignant and dramatic performance. When the innkeeper turned her away, sending her to the stable to sleep, May got so carried away with her role that she wept real tears and asked, “Can’t we even come in for a drink of water?”
The innkeeper wasn’t the experienced performer that May Elizabeth was; he shook his head and said, “No! That isn’t in the script.”
May was outraged. “You’d better not get leprosy,” she yelled, “because I’ll tell Jesus not to cure you!”
I wasn’t very familiar with the original version of the story, so I thought the altercation was quite gripping. The rest of the audience found it hilarious.
After the program, the Sunday school superintendent passed out candy and oranges to all the kids, and Miss Trimble gave everyone in our class a present. Mine was a necklace with a little gold cross on it. I couldn’t seem to keep the tears out of my eyes when I thanked her for it, especially when she patted my hand and said, “Jesus loves you, Kathleen.” Her eyes looked a little watery, too, but it might have been because she was old.
The church looked so pretty with all the decorations and colored lights that I made up my mind to ask Daddy if we could buy a Christmas tree for once. I sat down beside him on the couch when I got home from the pageant, and he got very quiet when I showed him my new necklace. May Elizabeth had helped me
put it on, and I’d already decided that I would never, ever take it off.
“That’s real pretty,” Daddy said. “Looks like good quality, too. It shouldn’t turn your neck green.” His words were meant to reassure me, but I was so alarmed at the thought of my neck turning as green as a Martian’s that I almost forgot what I wanted to ask him.
“Can we get a Christmas tree this year, Daddy?”
He sighed. “A tree is only half the problem. We’d need lights and decorations and all that malarkey… and then people might expect to find some presents underneath it, too. No, we don’t have that kind of money, Kathy. Things are pretty tight, right now.”
I was disappointed but not surprised. If we did get a tree, Poke and JT would probably demolish it faster than you could say “Kris Kringle.” And what good was a tree without any presents? But later that night, after Daddy and Uncle Leonard had polished off a six-pack of beer, he suddenly changed his mind.
“Get your coat on, Kathleen. I think I know where I can get a tree— and lights.”
We jumped into my uncle’s car, and Daddy let me sit up front with him. Our crummy neighborhood looked festive with a handful of Christmas lights twinkling and all the trash and junked cars buried under a layer of snow. We took the road to Bensenville for a ways, then turned off on a side road and headed out to the country where the farms were. As the houses and barns got farther and farther apart, Daddy slowed the car and turned off his headlights. My stomach began to make sickening little flips as we drove another mile in the dark.
“What do you think of that one?” Daddy suddenly asked, pointing to a little pine tree at the end of a farmer’s driveway.
He had lowered his voice to a near whisper, so I answered in a hushed voice, “Isn’t that someone’s front yard?”
“That tree has a nice shape to it, don’t you think? And see? It even has lights.” He pulled the car to a halt beside it and left the engine running.
“I don’t think those people will like us taking their tree, Daddy. …”
“Shh… Let’s listen a minute and see if they have a dog.” He opened the car door and stepped out, scanning the quiet farmyard, listening. “All clear,” he whispered. “Come on.”
He pulled an axe and a saw out of the trunk and motioned for me to follow him. I didn’t know what to do. Getting a Christmas tree had been my idea, so I could hardly back out now. Even so, I was pretty sure that whoever had decorated the row of trees and bushes at the end of this driveway had never intended for people to come along and chop one down. But I couldn’t disobey my father, could I?
I zipped up my coat all the way to my chin and tried to scrunch down inside it as I stepped from the car. The words to “Silent Night” kept playing over and over in my mind as I tried to summon the peace and contentment I’d felt in church earlier that night: All is calm… all is bright. …
“Stick your hand through the branches, Kathy, and hang on to the trunk for me. Like this…” Neither of us wore gloves, and the pine needles pricked me like pins as Daddy guided my hands through the branches and showed me where to hang on. The trunk felt cold and sticky. “Try to hold it steady, honey. This should only take a minute.”
Daddy crouched down and started chopping away at the trunk of the tree. I wanted to burrow into a snowbank and hide. I kept my eyes glued to the farmhouse at the end of the driveway, waiting for the front door to burst open and a shotgun-wielding farmer to run out with his pack of snarling Dobermans.
… Sleep in heavenly peace. … Why had I ever mentioned a Christmas tree?
“We’ve almost got it now,” Daddy said cheerfully. “Hang on tight.”
The trunk vibrated beneath my hands as he switched from the axe to the saw. My toes were starting to go numb.
Hur-ry up, I silently sang to the tune of “Silent Night.” Please, hurry up. … I was afraid I might wet my pants.
“Wait!” Daddy said at the last minute, “the lights are still plugged in.”
He crawled around searching for the extension cords, and the lights abruptly blinked off—not only the lights on our tree but on all the trees and bushes to the left of it.
“Oops!” Daddy said, stifling a laugh. “Guess we’d better hurry!”
I wished he would stop saying “we.”
Daddy sawed as if he were in a race with Paul Bunyan, and suddenly the tree started to fall over, pulling me with it. “Daddy, help!” I squeaked. He grabbed hold of it just in time, saving the tree and me from crashing to the ground. He started to laugh, and it was such a rollicking, joyful sound that I couldn’t help giggling along with him. My laughter verged on the hysterical side at first, but once we’d finished stuffing the tree into the trunk of the car and had roared off down the road, I felt genuinely happy. We had a Christmas tree! With lights!
We were flying high, and my wonderful, happy-go-lucky daddy began to sing: “Dashing through the snow, in a one horse open sleigh. …”
I joined him on the chorus and we roared into Riverside with a Christmas tree bouncing in our trunk, singing at the top of our lungs: “Jingle bells, jingle bells… jingle all the way. …” We were still laughing and singing as Daddy carried his prize up the porch steps, and we crammed it through the front door.
“Merry Christmas!” Daddy crowed. He set the tree trunk down on the floor with a triumphant thump. Poke and JT started dancing around the tree like two little pagans. The commotion set Annie wailing.
“It’s covered with snow, Donald!” Mommy said. “You’re getting the floor all wet.” As if that would be a disaster in our house.
“How are you going to keep it up without a tree stand?” Uncle Leonard asked. “Or are you planning to stand there until Christmas is over?”
“It even came with lights,” Daddy said with a grin. “Plug them in, Kathy. Show everybody how nice it looks.”
I got down on all fours and groped around for the plug, then crawled over to the wall socket. It was already overflowing with wires and plugs and extension cords, and I hoped we wouldn’t blow a fuse. That was a regular occurrence at our house. I unplugged a floor lamp, just to be on the safe side, and a moment later our glorious tree sprang to life.
“Ta-da!” Daddy sang.
“The capitalists at the power company will be delighted,” Uncle Leonard said. “That’s why they invented this pseudo-holiday.”
I refused to let my uncle spoil this great moment. “Christmas is Jesus’birthday,” I told him.
“Then he must be a capitalist, too.”
Eventually, Daddy got tired of holding up the tree, and he and my uncle rigged a stand out of scrap lumber. It looked as dilapidated as everything else in our house, but at least we had a Christmas tree. It seemed like a miracle.
On Christmas Eve, an even bigger miracle happened. I was lying in bed, trying to fall asleep, when I heard someone knocking on our front door. My heart began to pound. If Santa Claus did decide to venture into our neighborhood, he would have to use the front door since we didn’t have a fireplace. I heard voices, and I crept out to the hall for a peek. It wasn’t Santa, but the man in our doorway was carrying an armload of brightly wrapped presents. I wondered if he was Santa’s bodyguard. Then I recognized the second man—the Sunday school superintendent—and he had an armful of presents, too.
“What’s all this?” Uncle Leonard asked. He had been getting ready for bed and had answered the door in his undershirt and boxers.
“Some presents for your children,” the superintendent said. “Merry Christmas!” The two men piled their packages beneath our stolen tree and left as quickly as they had come. I was so overwhelmed that I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. I had to pinch myself the way they do in stories to see if I was dreaming.
When I finally crept back to bed, Uncle Leonard was still standing in front of the tree in his boxer shorts, slowly shaking his head.
Spring brought flowers—and another stomach-churning crisis. The entire school had to undergo a head-lice inspection. Mrs. Wayn
e made everybody in our class line up and walk down to the nurse’s office in a single file. The nurse wore rubber gloves as she examined us one by one. When she lifted the hair on the nape of my neck with a wooden tongue depressor, I heard her gasp.
“Look here,” she told the high school girl from the Future Nurses’Club who had volunteered to help. “Those are nits!”
The future nurse leaped backward so fast that she tripped over the scale and brought it crashing to the floor with a loud clang. Charlie Grout, who stood in line behind me yelled, “Kathy has cooties!” and Mrs. Wayne’s orderly line dissolved in chaos. The boys hooted with laughter and the girls shrieked in fear as if the Russians were attacking us.
I was hustled home from school, thoroughly humiliated. They sent my brother Poke home with me. We slept in the same room and used the same comb and brush, so naturally we all got the same lice infestation. We were a perfect example of an equitable society with a free distribution of goods, just like Uncle Leonard wanted. Even Annie had lice in her matted snarl of hair.
Mommy gave the boys crew cuts, which solved their problems. I’d always worn my hair long, but she had to cut it all off and throw it into the burning can along with our comb and brush. When I glanced in the mirror, my hair looked as though Mommy had plopped a mixing bowl on my head and trimmed around it. Afterwards she scrubbed me down with a special shampoo that smelled terrible and burned like fire. It was powerful stuff. Then she wrapped what was left of my hair inside one of our threadbare towels for fifteen minutes to make sure all of the nits died. I’d seen photographs of the devastation that followed a nuclear explosion, and I was certain that my poor head would remain bald for the next fifty or sixty years from the fallout.