The Fool of New York City
Page 23
I was not a believing person, and yet I did not feel out of place. It was as if I had always known this small island of light in the surrounding darkness, these people, the embraces and the sincere greetings, the sounds of children singing, the ringing of bells, and the flickering red lamp behind the altar. As if this, here, was the humble center of the universe, and I had reached it at last. No one, not even a person like me, was excluded. Though I did not yet fully know it, I was home.
Afterward, back at their homestead, the feasting and gift giving began. For each of the pond boys, I had brought a bag of foil-covered chocolate coins. For Katie’s mother, a set of quilted oven mitts. For her father, an antique wood planer. They gave me the painting of the sorrel horse that had once belonged to the Uffingtons, then to the Franklins, then to Billy, and now, coming full circle, to me.
After numerous toasts with apple cider and elderberry wine, and too many mincemeat tarts, I reluctantly prepared to go. They all saw me to the door, exacting my promise to return for the morrow’s great feast. Katie threw on her coat to walk me to the van. Outside we paused under the porch lamp.
I had saved a gift for this private moment, a gift I had made for her. We stood shivering under the stars as she unwrapped it. It was a little painting of the mountain-top where we had first held hands. She knew the place immediately.
“The light is fantastic!” she breathed, and looked up at me.
“Light fantastic,” I said, smiling.
“But I have nothing like it to give you, dear Max,” she said. “The horse was from all of us, and my canned preserves, but. . .”
“You are the gift, Katie,” I said. “You.”
She embraced me and then she gently broke away. As she turned to go back into the house, she told me everything with a look. And I knew by her look that there would be time enough for kisses, and that we would have a lifetime’s worth of kisses.
On Christmas morning, I awoke with a feeling of peace, brilliant sunlight pouring through the bedroom window. The glass was covered in frost, a garden of ornate swirling luxuriance. I hopped around the freezing floor in my long johns, pulling on clothes and hunting for socks. Downstairs in the kitchen I got the fire going and the coffee started. I heard blue jays whistling outside in the yard.
Yawning, peering out the window, I noted that fresh snow had fallen during the night, though the day was going to be clear and bright. Opening the front door, I stepped out onto the porch to gather a few sticks of birch, and nearly trod on a cardboard box tied up with red ribbons. Opening it, I was at first puzzled, then speechless. Inside was a crested merganser duck, preserved by a taxidermist, lovingly repaired by two sets of hands. Leading toward and away from the porch, large footprints had been impressed in the snow.
I wanted to call out, to make my voice ring through the woods, to leap off the porch and run after the prints, until I realized they had been half filled by new snow. The giver had departed hours ago.
I stood without moving for a time, with the merganser cradled in my arms. As the sun climbed higher, a golden light spread slowly across the yard. I gazed long at the south, over the mountains, toward a city where a giant roves by day and by night in search of the lost. And I knew that its best son, its uncrowned prince, is ever vigilant, ever awake.