Till Morning Is Nigh

by Leisha Kelly

  “You ain’t gotta wait at home for Pa,” Franky suddenly said from across the room. “He knows t’ find us here if he wants. But he won’t look tonight.”

  “What d’you know?” Kirk scoffed.

  “I know he tol’ us ’fore we lef’ this morning to mind Mrs. Wortham good.”

  “He always means for us to do that,” Kirk continued his argument.

  “But he don’t always say it.”

  Kirk and Lizbeth both stared at Franky. But Rorey was the one to speak up. “That don’t mean nothin’! Not nothin’ at all!”

  “Hush,” Lizbeth told her and turned her attention immediately back to Frank. “I was busy with Emmie this morning. Did he say anythin’ else?”

  Franky shook his head. “I jus’ thought a’ that. Jus’ now.”

  “It don’t mean nothin’,” Kirk echoed Rorey’s words. “He jus’ knowed we was stoppin’ here ’fore school like always, that’s all.”

  Franky didn’t say a word. He didn’t have to. The coldness of the idea that their father may have planned to leave settled over me as well as over Kirk and Lizbeth. But Berty just didn’t understand.

  “Pa gonna sleep here tonight too?” he asked his big sister. “We gonna make him a bed?”

  “If he comes with Mr. Wortham,” I said quickly before Lizbeth had a chance to answer. “We can fix him a bed when he gets here.”

  Lizbeth looked at me in question.

  “Who’s gonna do chores over t’ home in the mornin’?” Kirk suddenly asked.

  “Any of you boys could go,” I said. “Once it’s daylight, all right?”

  “Please, Kirk,” Lizbeth added. “Let’s stay together tonight. I don’t wanna be wonderin’ ’bout you too.”

  “I wouldn’t go nowhere but home,” he said softly.

  “I know. But the doctor kinda wanted us all to stay in anyhow, ’case any of the rest of us was to catch somethin’. Remember? Even tomorrow.”

  Joe and Robert were maneuvering down the stairs with Katie and Sarah’s mattress. Willy followed with one of the blankets that had been on top.

  “You should pull the mattress off our bed too,” I told the boys. “That way I think we can keep everybody off the wood floor.”

  Without a word, Kirk headed into the bedroom for the mattress. There was no more talk of anyone leaving that night.

  I pulled out all of the spare sheets and blankets we had and got all the bedding situated for everybody. Of course, the beds wouldn’t be quite so comfortable tonight without the top mattresses, but we’d all make do. Katie and Sarah on their bed, Willy and Robert on his. And Samuel with me, when he got home. I’d put Kirk and Franky on the mattress in Robert’s room and Harry and Berty on one down here. Rorey really wanted to sleep in Sarah’s room, but Lizbeth thought she ought to stay downstairs with her and Emmie on the other mattress since she’d been sick too. I fixed a bed for Joe on the davenport where he’d be close if Lizbeth needed him like she’d suggested.

  “Do we hafta go to bed a’ready?” Rorey asked me, and I was a little surprised that she didn’t want to, but I guess I shouldn’t have been, considering the nap she took.

  It seemed late. It seemed like half the night had progressed, but one look at the mantel clock told me that it really wasn’t late at all. Time never seemed to flow the same when Samuel was gone in the evening. I tried not to worry about what he might have found, or not found, but it was hard to keep such things out of my thoughts. And I wasn’t the only one. A sleepover with neighbors ought to be fun, at least a little bit, even if some of the kids were feeling a little under the weather. But nobody looked very happy, even though the youngest seemed to feel a little better after their first dose of the medicine Dr. Howell had left.

  I knew Emmie was tired. But Lizbeth didn’t try to settle her down yet, knowing she’d be up in the night if she did. Everybody looked at me with a quiet sort of expectation. I wished Samuel were here to tell them all a good story. When we’d had them over before and things seemed so uncertain, his storytelling seemed to make everything a little easier. But I couldn’t do it. Not the way he could. And anyway, a story would be best when everybody was ready to lie down. It wasn’t even 6:30 yet. They weren’t ready.

  It might have been a good time to get everybody involved shelling and chopping nuts and mixing and shaping cookies. But that would take a while, and maybe wasn’t the best project with a few upset stomachs in the house. But I had to do something to take their minds off of illness and the glaring absence of their fathers. And I caught a glimpse of a stray red Crayola that must have rolled into the corner when the rest of the box got put away. Franky’s idea came to mind. I still wasn’t sure if a stand-up paper nativity would be workable for us, but at least we could give it a try. Even if we accomplished nothing more than making a mess, it would keep the little ones busy.

  I got out the scissors, paper, Crayolas, pencils. But what in the world could we use to hold the paper in its cone shapes? I thought I knew. I had the little girls’ interest already, and they followed me to the kitchen cupboard to pull out a small bowl and a spoon or two of flour. Just a bit of flour-and-water paste ought to do the trick. And we could keep quite a few hands busy holding things in place until the paste was dry enough to set.

  Oh, it would have been wonderful if we could have gotten the radio working to play some Christmas carols for us in the background. At least we would have had a lovely festive atmosphere. As it was, I had a difficult time convincing particularly the older children that this was a project worthy of their attention. Eventually Kirk and Willy abandoned us entirely and sat by the fireplace playing checkers. At least they were in the same room, and somehow, despite our numbers, I found that comforting tonight.

  Lizbeth let Emmie play with a piece of paper and try her hand scribbling on it. She seemed to like that really well, and though she still seemed feverish, she wasn’t fussy anymore. Franky cut out a circle with a slit on one side and showed the others how to make the cone bases. Joe and I became the designated “cone holders” while paste was drying. In no time we had seven little paper cones, some with lovely colorful scribbles.

  “Them don’t look like people,” Harry observed.

  “That’s just the bottoms,” Franky explained. “Ever’body wore robes then, so that’s why it’s okay to look so wide like that.”

  Sarah nodded. All this apparently made wonderful sense to her. “We have to put heads on.”

  “What heads?” Berty questioned immediately.

  “We gots to make ’em,” Franky answered. “I think I know a way.” He cut a smaller rectangular piece of paper and rolled it to make a tube. I’d wondered how he’d thought to do that, but he’d worked it out in his mind, and I was impressed. A little paste held the paper tube together and a little more held it atop a cone in just the right place to be the head resting over a generously wide cone robe.

  But Rorey wasn’t satisfied. “He’s got a hole in the top of his head. That looks really dumb.”

  “That’s where you put a shepherd’s hat or maybe some yarn for hair,” Franky told her.

  “They’s still gonna have a hole in their head,” the little girl complained. “Just covered up. An’ a hole in the bottom too. Real big.”

  “Oh well,” I said quickly. “I’m sure if we picked up our pretty little glass nativity and looked at the bottom, whatever the figures are standing on wouldn’t look like feet.

  It’s just for show.”

  “Can I see?” Rorey asked immediately.

  “Well . . .” I hesitated, but surely if I kept our precious little figurine in my own hands it would be all right. I lifted it down from the mantel and turned it over carefully. “See. At the bottom of the robes there’s nothing at all. It’s even partly hollow.”

  “From the top it looks like Mary’s kneeling,” Sarah observed. “But underneath, she don’t even have legs!”

  “It’s just for show, like I told you. A fun way to display the reason we celebrate C
hristmas.”

  “’Cause lidda Lor’ Jesus is borned in a manger,” Berty added.

  “Right. Just like your song.”

  “Can I make the paper Jesus?” the little boy asked.

  Franky frowned. “I been thinkin’ ’bout that. He’ll hafta be smaller. I don’t think a cone is gonna work right for him.”

  “Let’s just work on some of the others for now,” I suggested as I put the glass nativity away. “We can figure that out tomorrow.”

  “But we have to have a Jesus,” Sarah began to protest.

  “It’s okay.” Katie supplied the answer quietly. “He isn’t born yet.”

  “Yeah!” Sarah’s whole face lit up as though it were revelation. “It isn’t Christmas yet!”

  Rorey picked up a cone and turned it around in her hand. “These sure would smash easy.”

  Why did she have to be like that? I hoped to goodness she didn’t take to destroying what was already made. Rorey had such an awful attitude so much of the time. But nobody else seemed to pay any attention.

  “We’ll have to make the manger bed for Jesus too,” Sarah continued. “And some paper hay ’cause he’s asleep on the hay. Only not yet, ’cause he isn’t born yet. And some of these other guys have to be shepherds.”

  “And angels,” Franky added, suddenly the expert. “We’ll hafta make some more cones, so we can have plenty shepherds an’ angels, plus the kings too. And those guys’ll hafta have crowns on their heads.”

  Robert looked at me skeptically. “These might look awful funny.”

  “That’s all right,” I assured him. “I’ve seen unusual manger scenes in my life. I’ve even heard that in Russia they have one where all the pieces stack inside the biggest piece.”

  “Which one’s biggest?” Harry wanted to know. “A really fat shepherd?”

  “Or an angel big as the sky,” Sarah supposed.

  “Nothin’s that big,” Rorey contradicted again.

  “I didn’t mean really.” Sarah shook her head. “It’s just a saying.”

  Kirk and Willy finished one checker game and started another. I thought maybe Robert or Joe might want to play the winner of their first game and leave us to our paper creations, but neither of them said a word about it. Robert helped Berty paste a paper-tube head while Joe was helping Harry. Franky cut a few more rectangles to size. Sarah thought it might be easier to color on the faces before they were pasted, so she started adding eyes and merry smiles to a couple of Franky’s rectangles. Katie claimed one too and said she wanted to make shiny angel faces. And Rorey seemed to be following their example. But soon Sarah was expressing dismay at Rorey’s work.

  “Why’s that one frownin’?”

  “’Cause he don’t feel like smilin’, that’s why.”

  Sarah set her Crayola down and faced Rorey with a huff. “But everybody’s happy about Jesus being born!”

  “This here’s a scared shepherd. ’Cause the angels showed up so sudden. He got startled out a’ his bad dream, an’ now he’s wonderin’ what’s goin’ on.”

  I looked Rorey’s way and drew a quick breath. I hadn’t expected anything like this, and somehow I felt that she was telling us something.

  “That’s not in the Christmas story!” Sarah continued her protest.

  “It could be!” Rorey argued. “How do you know? Maybe there was a shepherd sleepin’. How would you feel if you was sleepin’ outside someplace, an’ then a bunch a’ folks in the sky started yellin’ all of a sudden?”

  “Excited, that’s how I’d feel.” Sarah pouted. “Mommy, tell Rorey the shepherds isn’t supposed to frown.”

  “Honey,” I tried to calm her. “It won’t hurt to let Rorey make one the way she wants. It’d be perfectly understandable for a shepherd under the circumstances to feel unsettled and a little afraid. Remember that the angel told them to fear not. It must have been pretty startling to see the angels there.”

  Rorey smiled, and I was glad to have even a little reason to back her up and not scold her for once. It seemed something of a miracle that she’d decided to participate in our little project, and I certainly didn’t want her discouraged.

  Sarah was not very pleased with me, however. “Well . . . okay. But all the shepherds shouldn’t be frownin’. ’Cause some is thrilled. And none of the angels would frown. Not even one.”

  “I think that’s right,” agreed Lizbeth, who was holding a sheet of paper in place while Emmie scribbled over it in purple and green.

  Rorey ignored them both and worked quietly for a while on her frowning shepherd. But then she took up another paper rectangle and drew another frowning face.

  “Mommy!” Sarah protested as soon as she saw. “Look! Look what that Rorey did again! We told her only one frowny shepherd!”

  “This here’s a angel,” Rorey said calmly and proceeded to draw teardrops dripping from one eye.

  “Mommy!” Sarah looked like she could cry. “I want a happy manger scene!”

  Lord have mercy! I was about to take both girls aside when Katie’s quiet voice stopped me before I could speak.

  “I unnerstand why an angel would be sad.”

  “Why?” I had to ask her, hoping that all this talk wasn’t going to turn everyone’s minds back to our grief and troubles.

  Katie looked so small, and almost scared to have attention suddenly shifted onto her. “Didn’t Jesus used to live with the angels in heaven?”

  “Yes, honey. And he came to earth to save us.”

  “But maybe a angel is sad ’cause Jesus wouldn’t be there now, so he wouldn’t get to see him for a long time.”

  Franky suddenly nodded. “Maybe he even knew that Jesus was gonna die. Maybe the angel was sad about that too.”

  I might have expected such thoughts from him. Franky was often thinking and putting ideas together in surprisingly deep ways for his age. But little Katie? And Rorey?

  “I must admit,” I told them, “it does sound understandable. There may have been both tears and smiles in heaven on that day. But mostly smiles. I’m sure Sarah’s right. It’s okay, Rorey, to have one frightened shepherd, and one angel that’s thinking about the sad parts of Jesus’s life. But his birth was a joyous time, and a reason to celebrate— then as much as it is now. He left heaven and endured sad things to set us free. And now he’s in heaven again, and there’s no reason not to rejoice.”

  Rorey kept on drawing tears. “Does that mean you don’t want no more’n two frowny faces?”

  “I think two is all right among all the smiles,” I told her gently. “But two is enough.”

  Beside me, Katie hung her head and covered her paper rectangle with one hand. “What’s the matter?” I asked her. “Can I see?”

  Slowly, without a word, Katie slid her hand away from her angel face. There in the corner of one eye, above a radiant orange smile, was a tiny blue tear.

  She sniffed. “Do you want me to throw it away?”

  “No. What a pretty happy face. Sometimes I cry a little when I’m happy.”

  “You do?”

  I put my arm around her shoulders. “Sometimes joy gets so big you feel it’s just running over inside you. And the tears come out, but it’s still joy. That’s another reason for an angel to cry, I guess.”

  Katie smiled. “My angel really is happy. About Jesus.”

  “That’s good then,” Sarah pronounced.

  Rorey spent the rest of her time coloring an entire sheet of paper yellow to be cut in shreds for hay, so there was no more conflict over her interpretation of shepherd and angel faces. Katie and Sarah started pasting, and I held the little paper tubes in place until they would hold on their own. It was getting later now, and I was ready to start children on their way to bed, but Harry and Bert didn’t think it would be right to leave so many cone people without their heads attached. So we glued all the parts together and started picking them up to set them in a safe place to dry.

  “They all live in Bethlehem,” Sarah said. “So we get to pic
k a place to be Bethlehem, right?”

  “The kitchen table’s the safest place with plenty of room,” I suggested. “So none of them get stepped on overnight.”

  “Then the table is Bethlehem!” Sarah declared with excitement.

  “That’s okay,” Franky agreed. “But they don’t really all live there. Joseph and Mary was just on the way for a while. An’ the kings come to visit ’em from far off.”

  That was innocent enough information, and I doubt he could have imagined what he was starting.

  “Oh!” Sarah started looking around. “Mommy, Joseph and Mary aren’t ready to be in Bethlehem! Baby Jesus isn’t here yet, and it’s not Christmas Eve.”

  I shook my head, surprised that she seemed to be taking all this so seriously. “Honey, we’re just setting these up out of the way so you all can go to bed.”

  “Can we put Mary and Joseph someplace else? Please?”

  “Sarah—”

  “And the kings,” Berty joined her. “They’s far off.”

  How could I argue? “All right. Whichever ones are Mary and Joseph, set them over on the cupboard.”

  “And the kings!” Berty repeated. “The kings!”

  “How about the pantry shelf?” Robert suggested. He had a twinkle in his eye like his father’s, and I knew he was enjoying the younger children’s flight of fancy.

  “Fine,” I told them. “Take the kings to the pantry.”

  “Hey. That’s even east,” Franky announced to us. I was surprised he knew that, but I probably shouldn’t have been. He’d surely heard someone talking about the directions out here, and he usually remembered what he heard.

  Lizbeth and Harry moved Mary and Joseph to the cupboard. Robert took three more of the cone figures away, and Sarah climbed on a chair and examined the rest. “Yep, these are shepherds and angels. Franky, is it okay for the shepherds and angels to be in Bethlehem already?”

  He nodded. “The shepherds must live ’round there ’cause they gots their sheep grazin’ close by. An’ the angels is prob’ly gettin’ things ready.”

  Sarah smiled. “Then let’s move the shepherds over here.” She scooted a couple of cone figures to the left. “Then the angels can stay here with Rorey’s hay. They’re trying to figure out how we can make the manger bed tomorrow.”