by Joe Wheeler
“No, Laura, we’re not awfully late.”
“I don’t know why we have to dress that stupid doll of hers anyway,” complained Cindy. Since she was 6 and in the first grade, she thought of herself as all grown up—and to her, Charlie was a big waste of time.
Two years ago Mary might have agreed with her. They had been well off then and wanted for nothing. Mary’s thoughts traveled back to other times and compared then to now as she had done a million times. One day everything was fine, and the next day her husband was gone. All he had left behind was a note to say goodbye. No, he had also left behind a wife, three small girls, and an empty bank account.
As soon as the shock had worn off, Mary tried to start a new life, but it was so hard. She had never had to work outside the home before. Now she was cleaning houses to keep the girls fed. Their clothes were handed down from her employers’ children. Most of all she regretted having to make them walk so far every day, especially in the cold.
As for the radical change in lifestyle, the girls had just accepted it as part of life. Laura and Cindy helped as much as they could and tried not to complain. Becky found happiness in her doll. Charlie was her whole world. She never quit smiling as long as she had Charlie. He was always to be dressed for the weather and then wrapped in the precious blanket. It was just an old scrap of a blanket that somebody must have dropped in the parking lot; Becky found it there, Mary washed it, and now it was Charlie’s. Was Charlie a waste of time? No, Mary decided; he was Becky’s happiness, and that most certainly was not a waste of time.
As they neared the school, the girls hugged Mary as they always did day after day, then ran in. Farther down the street, Mary turned in at the Littles’—Monday’s house. The Littles had been getting ready for Christmas, it seemed, because there was a wreath on the door with a big red bow. Mary was prepared to see all the fancy trimmings inside. Becky wasn’t.
“Ooh, Charlie,” she whispered as if afraid that her voice might disturb the splendor, “look at what Mrs. Little got.” The room was gaily decorated for Christmas, and in the corner stood a huge Christmas tree. The silver star shining on the top almost touched the ceiling. Glass ornaments, garlands, and tinsel were tastefully arranged on the branches, and underneath was a mountain of parcels wrapped with ribbons and bows.
Mary took Becky’s coat and hung it up. The little girl just stood looking at the tree. “Becky, I have to get to work now. Promise you won’t touch anything.”
“I promise, Mama.” And she crawled into a big easy chair, and there she stayed for the entire morning, pointing out the pretty ornaments to Charlie and guessing what might be in each of the packages.
Laura and Cindy came in at lunch, but they hardly looked at the tree. It hurt to look at it. They knew that there would be no tree for them—just like last year. Money was not to be spent on anything they could do without. They knew it—but it still hurt.
The day replayed itself on Tuesday at the Johnsons’, on Wednesday at the Harrises’, Thursday at the Krebbs’, and Friday at the Fishers’. But on Saturday they were home.
After spending a week in the various houses all decked in glorious holiday fashion, Becky suddenly seemed to realize that she was missing out on something. “Why does everyone have a tree in the house, Mama? Why are there so many presents? Is it somebody’s birthday? Why don’t we have a tree?”
Mary had known the question would be asked. Laura and Cindy looked up from the floor where they were playing, waiting for her answer. Mary put away her mending and pulled Becky up onto her lap. “You’re a very smart girl. It is somebody’s birthday, and I’ll tell you all about Him. His name is Jesus, and He was born Christmas Day.” And Mary told the girls how it came to happen and why there is a Christmas.
Becky hugged Charlie close. “Ooh, the poor Baby. Was it very cold in the stable? I wouldn’t want to sleep in a stable, would you? I wish I could go there and see it, though.”
“We can see it,” Mary said, and she put her daughter off her knee. “Girls, get your coats on. We’re going for a walk.”
Down the street was a church. Every Christmas a large crèche was set up. There was a wooden stable full of straw and large ceramic figures. High above hung a star. The girls were awed by the simple but beautiful scene. It was just as Mary had said it was from the story in the Bible. Becky didn’t want to leave even when the cold seeped through her clothing and made her shiver.
The next week was just as hard for them. Everywhere they went, it seemed that the world was taunting them with a Christmas that wasn’t to be theirs. In the malls carols played, and parents loaded up with the latest toys and games. As Mary picked out economy packs of socks and underwear for the girls’ gifts she tried not to look in the other carts. At Safeway she whipped through the express line with one lone pack of spaghetti for their Christmas dinner. She laughed at the long line-ups of people with their carts full of turkey and fixings. But the laugh was hollow, because she would have loved to be one of those standing in line. Outside, families shouted and laughed as they picked out what each considered the perfect tree and then strapped it to the roof of their car. Mary tried not to notice. It was Laura and Cindy that finally made her heart well over with bitterness.
Somehow, when you are an adult, you can take whatever is dished out. You take things in stride and make the best of a situation. But, oh how different it is when your child is hurting! Nothing hurts a mother more than the sorrow of her child. And that’s how it was with Mary. The school was focused on Christmas, which was only to be expected in December. The teachers had the children making ornaments and stringing popcorn for their trees at home. They wrote letters to Santa. At recess, the children told of the gifts they were expecting. Laura and Cindy said nothing. They did as they were expected in class and tried to avoid the other children at recess. It was at home that they expressed their hurt and anger at the world for leaving them out of Christmas. So the bitterness grew in Mary from the heartache of her girls.
Every carol and decoration seemed to make her colder. Every Christmas card or call of “Merry Christmas” made her hate the season more. Laura and Cindy, taking the cue from their mother as children often do, developed the same attitude. Only little Becky was immune. She rocked Charlie in her arms and told him again and again about Baby Jesus, who was born in a stable. She begged the girls daily to take her to the church so she could see the story “for true.” They would take her grudgingly and drag her back home long before she was finished looking.
Christmas morning came in a flurry of snow. Laura and Cindy woke up cold. They ran into Mary’s room and burrowed under the covers with her to warm up. Mary cuddled them close and kissed their foreheads.
“Merry Christmas,” she said.
“Merry Christmas, Mama,” they echoed.
“I’m afraid there aren’t a lot of gifts for you girls, but you go wake up Becky, and you can open what there is,” she said resignedly.
The girls jumped out of the bed and ran to get their sister while Mary got up and dressed. Too soon, they were back.
“Where is she, Mama? We can’t find her!” The words hit Mary like a truck. The three raced through the house calling her name, checking every closet and corner. They checked the yard and the neighbor’s yard. No Becky! They must have missed her when they checked the house, Mary thought. She never goes off alone. They searched the house again.
“Dear Lord, please help me find her,” she prayed as she rechecked every spot a child could possibly be in. “I’m sorry for my selfishness. The gifts and the dinner that I prayed for are not important. Forget them and just give me back my Becky.” She was frantic now.
Then she noticed Charlie. He was carefully positioned in a chair facing a window. Mary’s heart raced with her thoughts. Charlie was never out of Becky’s sight. And where was his blanket? Becky always insisted that his blanket be wrapped tightly around him at all times. Suddenly she knew!
“Stay here!” she admonished the girls as she flew out th
e door into the dark and snowy morning. Down the street she ran, until she could see the church. Then she slowed, and tears of release ran down her face as she caught sight of her daughter. The star from the crèche was shining down on the manger where Becky had climbed in and was busily covering the Baby Jesus with the ratty scrap of a blanket. As she neared, Mary could hear Becky talking:
“You must be cold. I knew the snow would be falling on You. This is Charlie’s blanket, but we will give it to You. He has me to keep him warm.” She looked up when she heard the footsteps. “Oh! Hi, Mama.” Becky smiled her beautiful innocent smile. “I was afraid He might have thought we forgot about Him on His birthday.”
Mary plucked her out of the straw and held her tight, the tears now raining unchecked. “I did forget, Honey.… Dear Lord, I’m sorry I forgot.” Then she tenderly carried her daughter home, filled at last with Christmas joy.
With Christmas carols to cheer them on, they hung the popcorn strings and ornaments on Mary’s tallest houseplant. A star made of tin foil perched on the top. They put the presents underneath, and there was just enough to fit nicely under the little tree. And best of all, Mary made a birthday cake. With their hands joined around the table, they all sang “Happy Birthday, Dear Jesus, happy birthday to You.…”
As for Charlie, cradled tightly in Becky’s arms—even without his blanket, he was warm.
Star Across
the Tracks
BESS STREETER ALDRICH
“The wrong side of the tracks”—what an image that phrase conjures! Even in America, sad to say, those six words carry loaded freight: that anyone from the unfavored side is already prejudged, presorted, and predetermined. Perhaps “Can anything good come out of Nazareth” was an earlier equivalent of “living on the wrong side of the tracks.”
Bess Streeter Aldrich (best known for her best-selling A Lantern in Her Hand and A White Bird Flying), along with Willa Cather, attempted to recreate in words just what it took for women to survive in Plains America. “Star Across the Tracks” is one of her most unforgettable short stories.
Mr. Harm Kurtz sat in the kitchen with his feet in the oven and discussed the world; that is to say, his own small world. His audience, shifting back and forth between the pantry and the kitchen sink, caused the orator’s voice to rise and fall with its coming and going.
The audience was mamma. She was the bell upon which the clapper of his verbal output always struck. As she never stopped moving about at her housework during these nightly discourses, one might have said facetiously that she was his Roaming Forum.
Pa Kurtz was slight and wiry, all muscle and bounce. His wife had avoirdupois to spare and her leisurely walk was what is known in common parlance as a waddle. She wore her hair combed high, brushed tightly up at the back and sides, where it ended in a hard knot on top of her head. When movie stars and cafe society took it up, mamma said she had beat them to it by 35 years.
The Kurtzes lived in a little brown house on Mill Street, which meandered its unpaved way along a creek bed. The town, having been laid out by the founding fathers on this once-flowing but now long-dried creek, was called River City.
For three days of his working week pa’s narrow world held sundry tasks: plowing gardens, cutting alfalfa, hauling lumber from the mill. For the other three days he was engaged permanently as a handyman by the families of Scott, Dillingham, and Porter, who lived on High View Drive, far away from Mill Street, geographically, economically, socially. And what mamma hadn’t learned about the Scott, Dillingham, and Porter domestic establishments in the last few years wasn’t worth knowing.
Early in his labors for the three families, pa had summed them up to mamma in one sweeping statement: “The Scotts … him I like and her I don’t like. The Dillinghams … her I like and him I don’t. The Porters … both I don’t like.”
The Porters’ house was brick colonial. The Scotts’ was a rambling stone of the ranch type. The Dillinghams’ had no classification, but was both brick and stone, to say nothing of stained shingles, lumber, tile, glass bricks, and stucco.
The Porters had four children of school age. Also they had long curving rows of evergreens in which the grackles settled with raucous glee as though to outvie the family’s noise. The grackles—and for all pa knew, maybe the young folks also—drove Mrs. Porter wild, but pa rather like the birds. They sounded so country-like, and he had never grown away from the farm.
Mr. Porter was a lawyer and a councilman. Mrs. Porter was a member of the Garden Club and knew practically all there was to know about flora and fauna. She went in for formal beds of flowers, rectangles, and half-moons, containing tulips and daffodils in the spring and dahlias and asters later. She ruled pa with iron efficiency. With a wave of her hand she might say: “Mr. Kurtz, I think I’ll have the beds farther apart this year.”
And pa, telling mamma about it at night, would sneer: “Just like they was the springs-and-mattress kind you can shove around on casters.”
Mrs. Scott went to the other extreme. She knew the least about vegetation of anyone who had ever come under pa’s scrutiny. Assuredly he was his own boss there. Each spring she tossed him several dozen packages of seeds as though she dared him to do his worst. Once he had found rutabaga and spinach among the packages of zinnias and nasturtiums. But pa couldn’t be too hard on her, for she had a little crippled son who took most of her time. And he liked the fresh-colored packages every year and the feel of the warm moist earth when he put in the seeds. The head of the house was a doctor and if he happened to drive in while pa was there, he stopped and joked a bit.
The Dillinghams’ yard was pa’s favorite. The back of it was not only informal, it was woodsy. Mrs. Dillingham told pa she had been raised on a farm and that the end of the yard reminded her of the grove back of her old home. She had no children and often she came out to stand around talking to pa or brought her gloves and worked with him.
“Poor thing! Lonesome,” mamma said at once when he was telling her.
Mrs. Dillingham had pa set out wild crab apple and ferns and plum trees, little crooked ones, so it would “look natural.” Several times she had driven him out to the country and they had brought back shooting stars and swamp candle, Dutchman’s-breeches and wood violets. Pa’s hand with the little wild flowers was as tender as the hand of God.
When Mr. Dillingham came home from his big department store, he was loud and officious, sometimes critical of what had been done.
In winter, the work for the High View homes was just as hard and far less interesting. Storm windows, snow on long driveways, basements to be cleaned. It was always good to get home and sit with his tired, wet feet in the oven and tell the day’s experiences to mamma. There was something very comforting about mamma, her consoling “Oh, think nothing of it,” or her sympathetic clucking of “Tsk … tsk … them women, with their cars and their clubs!”
Tonight there was more than usual to tell, for there had been great goings on up in High View. Tomorrow night was Christmas Eve and in preparation for the annual prizes given by the federated civic clubs, his three families had gone in for elaborate outdoor decorations.
There was unspoken rivalry among the three houses, too. Pa could sense it. Mrs. Porter had asked him offhandedly, as though it were a matter of extreme unconcern, what the two other families were planning to do. And Mr. Dillingham had asked the same thing, but bluntly. You couldn’t catch pa that way, though, he reminded mamma with great glee. “Slippery as a eel!” Had just answered that the others seemed to be hitchin’ up a lot of wiring.
But pa had known all along what each one was doing. And tomorrow night everybody would know. The Porters had long strings of blue lights, which they were carrying out into the evergreens, as though bluebirds, instead of black ones, were settling there to stay through Christmas.
The Dillinghams had gone in for reindeer. They had ordered them made from plyboard at the mill, and tonight the eight deer, with artificial snow all over them, were prancing up the p
orch steps, while a searchlight on the ground threw the group into relief.
The Scotts, whose house was not so high as the others, had a fat Santa on the roof with one foot in the chimney. In a near-by dormer window there was a phonograph which would play Jingle Bells, so that the song seemingly came from the old fellow himself. It had made the little crippled boy laugh and clap his hands when they wheeled him outside to see the finished scene.
All this and much more pa was telling mamma while she ambled about, getting supper on the table.
Lillie came home. Lillie was the youngest of their three children and she worked for the Dillinghams, too, but in the department store. Lillie was a whiz with a needle, and a humble helper in the remodeling room. She made her own dresses at home and tried them on Maisie, the manikin. That was one of the store’s moronic-looking models which had lost an arm and sundry other features, and Lillie had asked for it when she found they were going to discard it. Ernie, her brother, had brought it home in his car and repaired it. Now she hung her own skirts on Maisie to get their length. That was about all the good the manikin did her, for Lillie’s circumference was fully three times that of the model.
The three of them sat down to eat, as Ernie would not arrive for a long time and mamma would warm things over for him. As usual, the table talk came largely from pa. He had to tell it all over to Lillie: the blue lights, the reindeer, the Santa-with-one-foot-in-the-chimney.
Lillie, who was a bit fed up with pasteboard reindeer and synthetic Santas at the store, thought she still would like to see them. So pa said tomorrow night after Carrie got here they would all drive to High View, that he himself would like to see them once from the paved street instead of with his head caught in an evergreen branch or getting a crick in his neck under a reindeer’s belly.
They discussed the coming of the older daughter and her husband, Bert, and the two little boys, who were driving here from their home in another county and planning to stay two whole nights. A big event was Christmas this year in the Mill Street Kurtz house.