Tinsel and Temptation

by Eileen Rendahl

  “I thought we should get this out again,” he said, his face hovering above the eyepiece, his hands making familiar adjustments along the lower mounts and the focus tube.

  “What do you see?” I asked, part of our old routine.

  “I see it all,” he said, “it’s a clear, cloudless night. You only get these in winter.” He leaned into the telescope and shifted his shoulders to pivot it around.

  I looked up also to the giant sky, and could appreciate the complexity of it, that the matter made clusters, which became stars, which formed constellations, which created galaxies. All of it moving, exploding, growing. All of it connected.

  “Let’s look at Orion,” I said, “it’s always been my favorite.”

  “Mine too,” he says, “It’s an obvious choice, but it’s so powerful in the sky, an icon really; historically it’s been a navigation anchor across civilizations.”

  “Sometimes I have to stop, look really close at one thing so when I zoom out again, I have more appreciation for what I’m seeing. You know what I mean?” I close one eye and settle into the telescope, controlling my breathing to a slow, even exchange; I focus slowly, watching the stars morph from wooly fingerprints to clear pinpricks in the black sky.

  “I do,” he says. “I understand.”

  I shift away and step back so he can see. As he approaches, he leaves a hand, warm and connected, at my hip. “I’m glad we still have this,” I say, placing my hand over his. “I like that we share this together.”

  “We share a lot, Halley. You and I are like two sides of a reflection. Not exactly alike, but one feeding off of the other. I’ve always felt like I just knew you, and I guess I’ve felt so lost recently. You changed, and it’s taken me a bit to find you again, to refocus on that same girl that’s stamped in the cosmos. You’ve always been one the brightest stars, you just changed color.”

  He doesn’t see me smile in the darkness, but we both feel a familiar warmth seeping into the dark cold. I lean my shoulder into his and give him a nudge.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Evelyn G. Walker writes short stories, and is currently working on a novel. She lives in the Bay Area with her husband, two kids and a dog. (He’s a rescue, a boxador, in case you’re curious.) You can contact her at evelyn.walker1234@gmail.com.

  Not Even A Mouse

  Spring Warren

  It was a whiningly cold winter in the ill-named town of Fiji, Dakota Territory. Chocked with gray skies, mud underfoot, and stretches of time good for nothing but polishing boredom, it seemed an unending season. I rented a room in a boarding house serving single men that simmered with enough loneliness and bluster that fistfights broke out with the regularity we all wished our bowels possessed. I was pressed into a single room that I suspected had in better times been a closet as there was not enough room for the mattress. The thin pad, hardly more than cardboard and ticking, steepled against the wall at one end. This provided a foyer of sorts for the mice that darted in and out of a little hole in the wall to stare at me. Even they pitied my situation.

  Worse, I’d run out of money and faced eviction. I suspected my sweetheart, Phaegin–who managed her life and the Fiji hotel with the efficiency of a cleric–was beginning to think less of me, with my complaints and my volatile health. She was yet sweet to me, sure—“Ah, Neddy, we’ve been through thick and thin together, haven’t we though?” she’d said—but the truth of it was we’d been through nothing but thin. I’d taken her from the cream life in Connecticut, where she’d been poised to marry a fine fellow with a finer bank account. I was the bomb that went off in her life. We’d had to hightail it from the law, and also from ease, comfort, culture, and the wedding to a life she deserved.

  “Ah yeah, Ned. I deserve more,” she’d agree with me. “I should have roast beef and sugar pie every day. But I’ve got you, and it’s kept me from getting fat.”

  I thought Phaegin would look very good indeed round as an apple, though. Her boss at the Fiji Hotel seemed to agree. Randall Allan paid her more than the going wage, and gave her a work chair with a flowered cushion. He gazed at her with eyes more fitting a cow than a businessman.

  Oh, I could see where this was going. If I wanted to keep my Irish rose I’d better act soon. Christmas was coming, and I told myself that the holiday was the perfect time to ask for Phaegin’s hand. If I didn’t pledge my troth, I worried that Randall Allan would pledge his. Which meant I desperately needed some troth to pledge. I needed a stake, and a ring, and some measure of certainty that I could give Phaegin a life she deserved.

  I, with great fervor, searched for a job; but no respectable position was to be had in the tiny muddy town of Fiji.

  With my standards dropping like mercury, I finally found employ with a shady distiller named Wraque.

  Wraque distilled what he called whiskey and others called moonshine, and still others a means to murder. My job was to lubber the leftover ferment from the rough distillery—a small room clamped up with fumes—into the pig sty behind the building that stunk even more than the rotting rye and barley.

  Mine was a short-lived employ with Wraque, for within a week the florid man lit a match, ignited the toxins rising from the still and blew the windows out of the building. Wraque was lucky to escape with his life, but he did forfeit every hair on his head and face, which made him look something like an earthworm thereafter as it never grew back.

  Now bankrupted, Wraque gave me a barrel of raw alcohol in recompense for my week’s work that at a rip-roaring 90 proof was better suited for tanning leather and peeling paint from metal than drinking.

  I hatched a plan to utilize the noxious alcohol to good profit. As it was the barrel of hooch was worth less than five dollars to someone anxious to lose their senses to a night of belting back rotgut. But if I were to use the spirits to make cordials I figured I could sell the stuff in small bottles and make a goodly profit.

  Once a member of well-heeled society I was knowledgeable of liqueurs, cordials, and apertif. Quality concoctions render the triple experience of warmth, coolness, and tingling by sophisticated mixtures of herbs and fruit. For my Dakota elixir I used elderberry—which grew like weed on the streambeds—deeply wizened off-color apples, and an ancient sack of horehound candy to sweeten the stuff. Pouring it all together created a viciously aromatic swill that was the unfortunate color of snot.

  Poor Wraque was still recuperating with ringing ears and pink skin from his near-death experience and was yet addled enough from the explosion he agreed to lend me his mule to pull my creaking wagon on my sales foray. Loading up my bottles, and kissing Phaegin goodbye, I went to make, if not a fortune, at least enough to presume my ability to make more.

  The two major flaws to my plan were a dearth of population in the great Dakota Territory and a dearth of a population that had any two pennies to rub together. Stopping at well-distant houses to further distant houses I was turned away time and time again, hours and sometimes days between rejections.

  Inside these houses I caught pretty glimmers and olfactory delights of Holiday cheer that even the most impoverished seemed to have engineered: fragrant evergreen boughs, spicy gingerbread, flickering candles and ribbon. Apparently I cut the figure of a complete ne’er do well with my snot-colored hooch and my crumpled unwashed garb, as I was not once invited inside one of those homey abodes.

  In a week of wandering in dismal cold, and spending the nights bellied up to Wraque’s mule, I sold only two bottles. Then, when I was mired in hopelessness, I stopped at a saloon in Deadwood and was granted a Christmas miracle.

  Some fella had hit it big in a gold mine over by Sturgis, and he was celebrating his riches by buying everyone in the bar a drink who was willing to make a toast to his success. Toasting had been going on all day and the town had celebrated their way through every barrel of whiskey, every bottle of rhubarb wine, and every cask of sloe gin to be had in 20 miles. The now-dry bar was turning the celebration testy and my 67 bottles of elixirs were welcome as wi
ngs in heaven. I sold 63 bottles for a dollar each.

  I stopped at the Deadwood General Store and bought a five-dollar ring for ten dollars, a loaf of bread to stave off hunger, a small bag of oats for the mule, and two peppermint sticks that I wrapped with a length of fine silk ribbon looped through the gold ring. I delighted in the image of presenting such a festive proposal for Phaegin’s Christmas, imagining how happy she would be with me, how beautiful with the ribbon in her hair, how heartfelt her acceptance.

  Then, as the shopkeep gave me directions back to Fiji and the assurance I could be there in a few short hours if I kept a steady pace, I further delighted in how warm that closet of mine was going to be, and how absent the smell of a mule.

  I could blame the shopkeep’s instruction, but it was more likely my lack of a sense of direction that brought me, eight long hours later, wandering lost in the dark hours. I was trying to stomach the idea of yet another night of unrelenting cold balancing teeth, stench, and fatigue, when I saw a glow of yellow ahead, shivering in the night like a dropped star.

  I headed toward the beckoning glow with the fervor of one of the wise men and soon found the shimmering was the steady light through a window, cut by wind-tossed branches. Soon enough I found myself outside a roughsawn cabin. The building didn’t look like much but smoke was redolent, and I sniffed the woodsy, homey scent like I could fill my belly with the thickness of the air. Inside, I imagined, all the delights of Christmas from plum pudding to pork pie awaited. I tied Wraque’s mule to a tree, tried to slick my hair and coat into some semblance of respectability, and raised my fist to knock on the heavy pine door.

  The man who opened the door of the little shack was built powerfully as a sledgehammer and had a mop of dark curls as wild and luxuriant as deep summer ivy. The pelt seemed so eager to grow that it was not content to remain rooted on the man’s head but continued swirling down the side of his face and along the curves under his chin and nose and, I would conjecture, further down his neck, along his rotund belly, onward to his toes. He, although looking a bear, stepped backward at the sight of me and with a quick step and a graceful flourish ushered me in.

  Entering the homestead, I was disappointed that my imagination had so let me down. Inside, though warm, there was not a sign of Christmas to be seen. In fact the place looked practically derelict with the glow of light emanating weakly from the wood stove and a flicker from a single kerosene lantern. There was not a ribbon, a package, a candy cane, or a candle to be seen. Indeed, the place was almost bereft of furniture. There was a rough cot with waxed ropes woven across the surface, a four-spindled desk on which a mound of pebbles were stacked, a trunk that had seen far too many years, a bag which certainly wouldn’t do for Santa (its weft and weave in certain compromise), what looked like some sort of musical case leaned into a dark corner, and a ladderback chair that an old woman was sitting on. Two children, a boy and a girl looking to be maybe about nine, looked up wide-eyed from a palette by her feet.

  When the bear announced, “We have a visitor!”, the old woman and children all clapped as though I were on the stage.

  I made the visitor’s dance of stomping and hello-ing, rubbing my arms in show of appreciation of the warmth, then introduced myself.

  “Edward Turrentine Bayard, pleased to meet you.” I bowed and a giggle emanated from one of the children, I couldn’t say which, and I heard the whisper, “Turpentine.”

  The bear shook my hand and said, “I am Roman.” He gestured toward the old woman, “This is my mother, Deka.”

  The old lady grinned at me with not a tooth in her head, coal-black eyes, and her face creased into such a myriad of wrinkles it was hard to believe she was actually made of flesh and not carved of weathered wood. She spoke with an accent that buttered her words exotic as they rolled from her lips. She said, “Pleased to meet you, Edward Turrentine Bayard. I foresaw your arrival.”

  I didn’t know what to say about that and so merely asked her to call me Ned.

  Roman ushered his children into standing. The boy, who looked much like a miniature version of his father with a curly mop and sturdy build, was Lugar. He lacked any of his father’s animation, however, and stood looking around the room as if he wondered which corner he was being introduced to. His hands shifted and turned lightly at his side as I told him it was a pleasure.

  The girl was as far apart from her brother as could be. Where he was dark, she was so white as to almost be aglow in the dim room, with platinum hair and pale eyes. Whereas Lugar stood stolidly ensconced in whatever land his own thoughts took him to, she was as alight to circumstances as if she herself was in charge of making it all happen. She took me in with the sharpest of glances, seeming as though she had already sized me up and now knew my birthplace, pants size, and the fact that I was fearful of heights. She made a swooping curtsy, her bright full skirt swirling with a twist of her wrist. “Charmed.”

  It was a curious group to have sprung up here on the prairie. It was as though I’d found a ring of scarlet lilies sprouting through the snow and I wondered where they had come from. It seemed a forward question and so, as I accepted a seat by the fire, I instead asked Roman what he did.

  “I am a farmer.”

  He looked no more like a farmer than I did. Further, when I had shaken his hand, I’d noted his palm was soft as risen dough.

  Roman sat beside me and leaned on one knee, his tone changed from energized cheer to one of terrible gloom. He intoned, “I came to the Dakotas a young man but will leave it old indeed. This wretched land has aged me five fold in but a few years. When rain is needed, there is none. When sun is needed, there is rain. What will grow is eaten by locusts, the soil is blown away by the unending wind.”

  Deka, Sinta, and even Lugar burst into another round of applause. I was more than confused. “You are a farmer…”

  Roman bellowed laughter. “Of course not, man!” He handed me a sheet of paper. It was a letter, yellowed with time. On it was penned the exact words that Roman had intoned. Under them was one more line. “I leave this piece of rock dusted with barren soil to whomever is foolish enough to want it. Sincerely, Lars Oppenheim.”

  Roman flicked the paper. “It was here with the deed on the table—and just like that, I am a landowner.”

  “Are you a farmer?”

  “Of course not. I am a thespian! And what are you, Ned?”

  The four of them stared at me, perhaps expecting a performance to match Roman’s. I shrugged. “Not much of anything, really.” I reached over and shook my valise. “I am a seller of cordials and apertif right now.” I pulled out a sample bottle. “Made from the finest ingredients to be had, it will increase your appetite, ease your liver, and cheer your heart, all for only a dollar a bottle.”

  I recognized I had made an error in mentioning the price. Though dressed in colorful garb they were obviously rubbed raw by need: the weft showed in their clothing, Deka’s toes poked from her the ends of her shoes, Sinta’s hair looked like it had been chewed by weasels and overall they had such a sense of hunger and desperation I could feel a dull menace rise from the group. I amended my spiel. “But on Christmas Eve, they are nothing but gifts.”

  I presented Roman and Deka each with a bottle that they took as though I’d handed them each a gold bar. Roman surveyed his bottle and apparently saw no disconnect between my appearance and his subsequent conjecture: “You must make quite a profit with such a product.”

  I grimaced. “Likely the profit the product is due, unfortunately.” I made ready to go, feeling strangely eager to leave the warm room. “Can you tell me which direction Fiji lies?”

  Roman protested. “You aren’t leaving are you?” At my ascertaining that yes I must go, he insisted, “You must drink with us!”

  Sinta and Lugar leapt up, gathered around my waist, squeezing like a skirt two sizes too tight and demanding, “Stay! It’s Christmas! Yes, yes!”

  I insisted they let me loose, the effect of Lugar’s grip in particular making me
lightheaded from lack of oxygen, and I was almost certain one of them was trying to filch my pocket watch, but the children only released me when Deka shouted, “Vermin!”

  Roman cocked his elbow and let fly. There was an abbreviated squeak.

  The children clapped and shrieked, “You got it, you got it!”

  I realized Roman had taken up one of the pebbles on the desk and flung it with such invective and sharp aim he’d gollywobbled an unfortunate mouse who now lay inert on the dusty floor.

  Roman gave me a meaningful look, and I wondered if I was confederate with the mouse in some like jeopardy. Roman tossed a pebble from one doughy but alarmingly deadly hand into the air, catching it with a snap, and spoke with what

  I discerned was an edge to his voice. “Let us hear a toast from our new friend, Ned!”

  I wasted no time in taking a bottle for myself from my valise. We all jimmied the corks out with a resonant pop and made our toasts. I spoke most hopefully, “Here’s to Christmas – Peace to all.”

  Roman raised his bottle to the webby ceiling, “Christmas—merriness to all!”

  Deka raised hers and said, “Christmas—may we all be rich.”

  It seemed an extraordinarily hopeful toast on her part.

  Sinta reached for her father’s bottle and asked if she could have a drink. Roman shook his head, the curls swayed like kelp in a turgid sea. “I’m sorry my sweet, this is no Christmas for littles.”

  Sinta’s light clouded a moment then she rallied and said, “Santa Claus will bring us our gifts in the morning.” She addressed me: “Lugar has asked for a carved horse and Santa Claus will bring me a china doll with a lace dress.”

  Roman said, “Of course he will!”

  I doubted this was so and thought it might be a bit irresponsible for Roman to agree so easily. I could not help but imagine the children in the morning, searching for their doll and horse or even potato gun and posy to no effect. I then thought of the peppermint sticks I’d purchased for Phaegin. She’d be just as happy with one of the sugary sticks as two, I figured, and so I disentwined the ribbon, ring and peppermint, slipping the ring into my pocket. I brought forward one piece of the candy, and snapping it neatly in half, handed a piece to each of the children, meriting heartwarming and gleeful thanks.