Everyone had been fired up by the angel’s visit and the task ahead, functioning as one well-oiled engine set to deliver more than the usual payload of presents this Christmas Eve. If they paused for anything, it was to appreciate yet again Herbert’s newfound voice, which spoke nothing but blessings—brief ones throughout the day and a far more elaborate one, extempore, from his bedside before lights out at night.
As for Wendy, she glowed all week, helping at one workbench or another. And each day just before Anya rang the dinner bell, Wendy slipped into her stepfather’s office and enjoyed quiet conversation with him. In the cozy warmth of that inner sanctum, by lantern light, they spoke in wondrous tones about the gift that had fallen into their laps.
“You can do it, Father, I know you can,” she said, gripping his anxious hands.
“To pause before them one by one, to stare into their depths,” he said with a shake of his great head. “I don’t know. I’m so judgmental these days. And they’re all so tainted, far too many of them anyway; if not with homophobia, in other ways. Yet I must observe in minute detail every fallen soul, to insure the egg-seed’s proper fit. One at a time, I’ve got to do it, ignoring wounds to my own sensibilities, or rather acknowledging them and letting them go. I fear it will break my spirit. But if that were true, why would God’s emissary come with such assurance to grant us this gift? And yet, how can it not change me?”
Wendy gazed at him with adoration. “If you change, it can only be for the better. You’re already so wise and kind and generous, those qualities can only grow in you. And I’ll be there most of the night to give moral support.” She told him how proud she was of him, no matter the outcome. “Even if, by some quirk of fate, your efforts come to naught, I will love you all the more for having tried.”
Santa broke down and wept.
Making a finger ghost with a tissue, Wendy dried his cheeks.
“I have to remind myself that they were all once children, free of prejudice and open as the sky. I always feel so small, right about now. Yet, when we return home, I recall in wonder the vast terrain we have crisscrossed, me and my team, and our great dispensation...of goods, yes, but of generosity above all. What, I wonder, will I recall after this trip?”
Wendy laughed. “We won’t know until it’s over, will we? But we’ll share every moment of it, except when I break away to visit my hundred children—and I promise I’ll keep that brief.” She threw her arms around his neck. “Daddy, I wouldn’t miss this night for the whole wide world.” Then she kissed his forehead, and he crushed her in a giant bear hug in return.
Thus did Wendy buoy Santa’s spirits, and thus the busy week went by, animated by anticipation, the slightest edge of anxiety, and plenty of love and exertion. When the day before Christmas arrived, they were prepared.
* * *
Gronk had never known magic time could stretch so thin. He knew of course that it allowed his mother to visit as many homes each night as there were teeth under pillows. And that it could extend further to encompass the far more ambitious annual night-journeys of Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny.
But that Christmas Eve, as Santa’s rounds grew by three and four orders of magnitude, as he visited not only slumbering homes he had never visited before, but homeless people, and bustling time-frozen souls in day-lit agoras on the far side of the globe, and the ailing elderly, and all manner of naughty boys and girls of every age, and disease-wracked sufferers on their deathbeds, Gronk’s marvel grew with his dismay at the nearly interminable list of places he had to commit to memory. Magic time must truly approach stopped time, he thought, where immortals could spend, if they chose, an eternity wandering through halted humanity.
Gronk watched Santa and Wendy closely as they worked with great efficiency. The girl held up the egg-seed, Santa brushed its tip with his index finger, and its clone popped into his other hand. Then came a touch upon the mortal’s chest, a moment of intense concentration, a shift infinitesimal in the clone, and its insertion with a deft twist of the wrist. Santa withdrew his hand. Then he sighed, nodded to his daughter, and they were off to the next abode, Gronk scurrying to keep up.
Halfway through their itinerary, the imp feared his skull would burst from the list of visited places. Then he realized they were far from halfway, and that the mind-map his mother had insisted he create had plenty of white space yet to be inked in. “Leave no address out,” she had commanded, “none, or I shall torment you unending through all eternity, every speck of you aching for surcease, and suffering tenfold with each fruitless plea.” Fear was a great motivator, especially if one’s energies were vast and one’s life unending.
Then Gronk wised up. If he closed his eyes, he could grasp the golden cord of Santa’s travels—from the instant his sleigh swept up into the polar air to its ever-moving endpoint—as one visual whole. And once he trusted that image, he dared to stop memorizing street names and house numbers, every zig and zag of the sleigh, every venture up stairs and down midnight corridors. Moreover, from this golden cord he found it easy to untwist and toss aside all threads having to do with traditional Christmas activities in the homes of “good” mortals, the placing of gifts inside stockings and beneath trees, the consumption of milk and cookies, the scribbled “Thank you” notes placed beside unconsumed carrot remnants. All of that he gratefully elided.
Even so, Gronk would be relieved when this night was over. He wished his mother weren’t quite so demanding a taskmaster, for she was capable of inflicting great pain and quick to do so. He hated pain at the moment it was delivered, even though in recall it was exciting and it assured him he was alive.
What capped his dismay, though, was missing out on the Christmas Eve mayhem. But his brothers had vowed to bring back the bones of a few hapless brats, so that he could feed on cold remnants as they shrugged off their black Santa suits and regaled him and his mother with nasty tales.
So Gronk held on, settling in beside Santa’s pack in the back of the sleigh, racing after him into each house, and adding yet another inch to the umpteen million miles that made up the length of Santa’s serpentine journey across the globe.
* * *
Heading into his great adventure, Santa harbored one fear which he had shared with no one. He wondered if his helpers’ shoddiness might have been caused by his first-ever proximity to the four mortals on Thanksgiving Eve. And having so wondered, he feared that tonight’s intimacy with so many, planetwide, could prompt a breakdown in their work entire. Might his cozy little community crumble? No more toys, no more deliveries, his purpose gone, naught but thumb-twiddling and idle sighs for all eternity?
This unsettling thought had come to him in the process of saving Jamie Stratton. He had considered, for an instant, abandoning that effort rather than jeopardize his larger mission. But he had rejected the idea at once. If he could not, given the opportunity by God’s archangel, save one small boy from suicide, if he had caved in to fear and walked away from that challenge, it would have rendered meaningless all else he achieved for the rest of his life. For that same reason, Santa was determined to overcome his distaste for grown-ups and embrace with gusto the task of implanting each perfectly calibrated egg-seed.
That task could not be done on autopilot. He had to be completely present to each mortal’s failings. To keep the host from rejecting its implant, the witness he bore must be intense, precise as clockwork, and full of a compassion which, while not overlooking the slightest flaw, sees all and judges naught.
Indeed, the divine surgeon in him did its work dispassionately. Behind that, where emotion could not skew his deeds, Santa began the evening appalled at the depth and blackness of the tincts he found on once-innocent babes devolved into adulthood: murderous urges barely suppressed if suppressed at all; easy acquiescence to addictions; ethnic hatreds; envy of more fortunate gatherers and hoarders; self-denigrations without cause, learned in school or from scornful parents; emptying reservoirs of empathy in the stony hearts of politicians as they scr
ambled up the ladders of power; all the general and specific unhappinesses of a lost race of beings. These shocked Santa for a time. But shock yielded eventually to empathy and the complete dissolution of his fear of emotional intimacy. He even developed some small tolerance of Pan, fearing not quite so much the goat god’s possible reemergence.
How mortals devolved continued to vex him. But it wasn’t his mission to unravel that mystery. Nor was it his mission, even if he knew how it might be done, to fix them in every particular. He had simply to calibrate the egg-seed clone, insert it into the heart before him, and move on to the next.
Santa felt neither rushed nor overwhelmed. He found his rhythm and moved to it, growing in compassion, changing, even as Wendy—who watched each transplanted clone take root—changed and grew in compassion before his eyes.
When she summoned Galatea and her sleigh from the North Pole and broke away to pay night visits to her hundred handpicked children, Santa felt a twinge of misgiving. But by then, they were very much of one mind, and he felt Wendy’s spirit with him as she carried on with her task and, millions of abodes into his deliveries, returned to his side.
Thus did they cover the world, person by person, house by house, until the last clone had been implanted, the last mortal touched, the last imperfect heart made a bit less imperfect, in potentia.
The original egg-seed glowed suddenly warm and brilliant in Wendy’s hand, spinning with a thin high hum and vanishing in a whirr and swirl of benediction. “I think we’re finished,” she said simply.
“We are indeed,” said Santa. “Let’s go home, darling.”
“All right, Daddy.” She wiped a tear from his cheek.
Arm in arm, they left the final house, found the reindeer waiting patiently on the lawn, hugged and thanked each of them, and took their seats in the sleigh, which swept up—at Santa’s whipsmack and joyful shout—into the night sky, setting a bead straight north through early hints of dawn.
* * *
On the ride home, Wendy’s spirits soared. Between herself and the sleigh’s front scroll, she began to project the future in miniature scenes.
“Do it against the snowflakes,” suggested Santa, gesturing past Lucifer’s glowing antlers to the flurries into which they flew. “Make it big.”
“All right,” said Wendy, loving his boyish enthusiasm.
Off to one side, where the blindered team wouldn’t be distracted, Wendy projected revised futures for those her past projections had brought before them. The change was still too recent to allow for more than a few months’ prescience. But she was able to observe the growth of the implants, the deepening of their roots, the spreading of righteousness into mortal psyches, into the locus of limbic emotion, the seat of reason, and the place where civility and thoughtfulness judge which impulses are appropriate to act upon.
Santa pointed. “Stay with that one. Meg Weddle. I turned her in your absence. She was the most wonderfully accepting girl-child. It was heartbreaking to find her, at twenty-six, on our list. Someday, I’ll have to peer into her past and try to figure out what brought her to judge other people with such a breathtaking lack of shame.”
Wendy never tired of hearing how much her stepfather cared for these mortals, even when they had disappointed him in their growing up. Could ever anyone love so well as him?
“How good it will be to watch her change,” he continued. “When the change has taken root, let’s pull Meg up again and watch her shrug off the heavy cloak of prejudice.”
Thus did they beguile the time on their journey northward, Lucifer needing no guidance, after centuries of honed instinct, to point him toward home and a well-earned rest.
Chapter 27. Unnoticed Replantings
DAWN, AS IT BREAKS UPON THE TOOTH FAIRY’S island, merely replaces a charcoal sky with an ashen one. No hint of sunlight has ever touched mountain or shore, nor have the roiling clouds and the battering storm ceased for one moment their battering and roiling, though odd catch-breaths of rhythmic variance occur to keep them from becoming background noise.
As Gronk came in, he saw Mommy squatting beside the blasted cedar tree, a long-dead starfish impaled on its top. Soon her sons would return from their Christmas mischief. But not before she forced Gronk to retrace Santa’s journey. Keeping up with jolly old Saint Nick for decades of magic time had exhausted him, but that counted for nothing with her.
“Report,” she barked as he landed.
And he launched into it.
“Cut the dross. There’s no time.”
He began again and she cuffed him.
“Bare essence, boy, or you’ll squeal.”
Terrified, Gronk skimmed the cream only: the number of stops, the way it was done, the pride expressed, the concluding gestures. Then he closed his mouth.
“Let’s be off.” She swept them into magic time. “Begin at his first stop, and don’t dawdle.”
“Yes'm.” Up he rose, piercing the cloud cover, his harrying mom close behind, heading for a squalid street in Anchorage, where Santa Claus and Wendy had begun their impossibly long journey, a journey he would take twice, no rest between. I’ll be able to forget each place we visit, he assured himself. Each time, the burden will grow lighter by one mortal. I’ll survive.
“Faster,” she said, “faster.” It was a word Gronk soon grew to hate, now and for the rest of his life.
* * *
The elves’ traditional snowball fight, as they awaited Santa’s return, was far more spirited than usual, and that was saying a lot. Big bulky spheres, loose-packed, flew from mittened hands and landed smack on buttocks and backs, leaving huge white splats on pants and jerkins and knocking caps to the ground. Volleys from this or that contingent, hastily formed behind trees and as hastily disbanded, were launched without mercy, ‘midst spirited shouts of “Look out, Fritz!” and “Obliterate the bastards, boys!”
Two things filled them with excess energy. One was the special nature of Santa and Wendy’s journey this year. They had all seen the archangel, heard his words, and witnessed the making of the egg-seed. There was no doubt in anyone’s mind that Santa would succeed, and the anticipated celebration fired each elfin heart.
But also contributing mightily to their zeal was their day off. For a day off meant that, for the moment, they had wriggled out from under Gregor’s thumb. A work-free Christmas Day had ever been their abbreviated version of Saturnalia, when all authority, even Santa’s benevolent sort, was utterly defied, toppled, and trampled underfoot. Not a few elves remarked on the prudent absence of Gregor, Engelbert, and Josef from the snowball fight and the avalanche that would surely have buried them more than once, had they dared show their faces.
Rachel’s shouts cut through the elves’ more rambunctious cries. She was bundled up in snow gear, a knit hat and the finest Gore-Tex-lined coat and boots. Anya stood at the cottage window alternately enjoying the mayhem and lifting her eyes to the heavens. Though the picture window muted voices, she heard them perfectly: Knecht Rupert leading a charge down snow-covered hills into the commons, Rachel’s mock-panicked warning to Herbert (a special target this year), and Herbert’s blither of blessings upon everybody, even as he vanished beneath a volley of snowballs only to reappear from the obliterating mound, shake snow from his ears, and bless them yet again through his ear-to-ear grin. The converging elves screamed their thanks, then buried him once more beneath a punishing barrage.
But Anya’s immortal ears, despite overlapping waves of sound washing in from the commons, had no trouble picking out the first, thin, high, barely-discernible harness-shake of bells out beyond the protective dome that kept their winters mild. That sound she heard now, savoring her private knowledge a moment longer.
At last, she went out onto the porch in her bright red and green dress and her blue-gray woolen shawl. Brushing past her skirts, Snowball and Nightwind leaped onto the railings.
Several helpers raised a shout at her appearance. Anya pointed toward an empty quadrant of sky as the elves swar
med into the commons. Some collided, then picked themselves up to resume the swirl.
The sleigh and its team grew from nothing to a vibrating smudge, to a brown-black blot with hints of antler and pronounced dots of red and white, to a miniature conveyance whose parts became recognizable, the nine pulling Santa and Wendy behind. Santa made his traditional spiral over their heads and around and back again, Wendy waving wildly despite her weariness, and Santa waving in more stately arcs.
When at last they landed, the community swamped the sleigh until there bobbed to the surface of that roiling sea Santa and his daughter. Passed from hand to hand they went, wrestled at last to the snow and reemerging to hug and be hugged in a frenzy of joy.
Shoulder high to the porch were they carried. Then Anya and Rachel ushered the travelers inside, while the elves stood in awe and clapped and shouted with glee in the commons, as happy and high as anyone could remember.
* * *
The Tooth Fairy, driven by revenge along Santa’s itinerary, never flagged. In her fury, she whipped Gronk like a whining guide dog. She called him names, laggard, mewler—worse names, some of them, than she shamed Chuff with. “There next,” he would say. “Everyone in that house, eldest to youngest.” And down she sped, not waiting for him to catch up.
Cowering over each mortal while Gronk squatted nearby, the Tooth Fairy reached in and gave the egg-seed a vicious twist so that the little end pointed down. Were the mortal not frozen in normal time, she knew a twinge of pain would wince across their faces. Indeed, she vowed, when they were back on the island and ready to leave magic time, to summon up views of a host of them and witness it.
Heartburn. That’s what they would chalk it up to.
Santa Claus Conquers the Homophobes Page 21