by Gary Paulsen
They both hugged Mother and hugged me and Marilyn took Mother’s suitcase and was crying and Mother was crying and Ben picked me up and carried me to his car.
“Thirty below,” he said to Mother. “I wasn’t sure the car would start. I’ll have to drain the radiator when we get to the store.” Then he turned to me and smiled, holding me out. “Do you think Santa will be able to get his reindeer going?”
“There isn’t a Santa Claus,” I said. “I saw Mr. Henderson drinking red wine.”
“Ohhhh.” Ben shook his head. “Are we so old then that we have outgrown Santa Claus?”
But before I could answer, we came to the car and Mother and I climbed into the backseat.
“I’ve had to keep her running,” Ben said, getting in. “It was hard to do, what with the gas rationing—but I was afraid to let her stop. If the oil stiffened we’d never get her going again.”
“Why is the car a girl?” I asked Mother, but she didn’t hear me and was too busy talking to Marilyn, leaning over the front seat and laughing, to notice anything else.
It wasn’t a long drive to the store, but I fell asleep again. Bundled in my snowsuit and coat and scarf, which Mother had left on because it was cool in the backseat when I fell asleep, I didn’t move except to fall forward when we stopped.
Mother helped me upright and out of the car, and Ben picked me up again and carried me into the store.
It was in a large wooden building made of white boards. The store was downstairs in the front part, and there was a place for living in the back. The store was built right on the edge of a huge lake—Winnipah Lake—and went out over the water on posts. In the summer, part of the lake was under part of the store, and there was a big dock that went out into the lake still farther.
I only got one or two whiffs of icy air through my scarf, then Ben had me in the store along with Mother and Marilyn and our suitcase, with the door shut tight to stop the cold.
There was so much in the store that I couldn’t see it all. It was a large, long room, open all the way, and the ceiling was very high and made of squares with pictures of flowers and things in them.
Down the left side of the store there was a long wooden counter with a glass front, full of all sorts of things—candy and caps and knives and small cards with flowers on them. The rest of the store was all shelves, except for the back, where there was a big black stove with a fat face that looked like a smiling monster on the door blowing smoke. And back in the corner away from the stove was a Christmas tree that went all the way to the ceiling, but it was all dark.
As Ben carried me down the length of the store, I saw all of this the way I saw things out the train window, moving and blurred; and then we were through the store and into the back, where there were rooms for living.
The back was very small and very bright after the dark of the store out front.
There was a room with a couch and a kitchen table. It looked a lot like our apartment in Minneapolis, except that there were two other rooms off to the side. These were bedrooms and one was for Marilyn and Ben and the other was for Matthew.
“Matthew is asleep,” Ben whispered. “You can see him in the morning.”
Marilyn and Ben pulled the couch out into a bed for Mother and me, and Mother helped me undress and use the bathroom next to Ben and Marilyn’s bedroom, which was smaller than the bathroom on the train. We went to bed, all whispering, so as not to wake Matthew. I felt like we were still moving on the train and stayed awake a little trying to make the couch quit moving.
It’s easy to miss things in the mornings.
I often sleep and sleep through things, and Mother has to wake me up, but this first morning at Uncle Ben’s store I was awake almost as soon as the grown-ups.
Mother got out of bed, and I opened my eyes and it was still dark outside the window over the sink. Ben and Marilyn were up and Marilyn was making oatmeal on the stove and Mother helped her. They put cinnamon in the oatmeal and the smell was somehow part of Christmas the way the store was part of Christmas and the train ride was part of Christmas.
Matthew was still not awake because they gave him medicine to sleep, so after we ate the oatmeal Mother sat talking with Marilyn over coffee and Ben went to open the store and I followed him out from the back.
I had only been to the store once before, in the summer, when I was very small. I caught a fish with a yellow stomach and blue eyes off the dock, but I couldn’t remember much of the store.
Now that I was older I could see things I hadn’t seen when I was small and I thought how full everything looked. Full and more full.
I walked along the glass case and looked at the candy and thought how it would be fun to be in the case, just be in the case with all that candy. I wouldn’t even have to eat any of it, I thought, just be with it.
Mother had told me not to ask Ben for things because of the war and how everything was hard to get, but Ben saw me looking at the candy and opened the back of the counter.
There was a bowl of white candy made to look like ribbons with green and red stripes in it, and he handed me one. It was colored so that the colors went all through the candy and I almost hated to eat it, but I put it in my mouth and sucked on it and would take it out and look to make sure the colors were still there.
The candy lasted a long time because I kept taking it out and looking at it, long enough for me to go around the store and see all the things I had missed the night before and in the summer when I was so small.
I thought Ben and Marilyn must be very rich to have so many things in their store. There were boxes and boxes of food and blankets and snowshoes on the shelves, and guns hung shiny and new in racks. The head of an animal stuck so far out from the wall I could get under it.
“What is that?” I asked Ben, pointing up at the head.
“It’s a moose head.”
“Is it live?”
Ben was putting wood in the stove, split chunks that smelled like paint thinner, and he stopped to look at me. He smiled and shook his head. “No. They stuff them like that after they shoot them. It’s full of cotton.”
“Who does that?”
“The people who shoot them.”
“Why do they do that?”
“So they can keep seeing it after they kill it,” Ben said.
I thought, if they wanted to keep seeing it why do they kill the moose in the first place, but I didn’t say it. I went the rest of the way around the store, seeing the things to see and smelling the smells that made me think of spices Mother had in our apartment in Minneapolis, and finally I came to the tree.
Standing by the tree made it seem bigger.
It went up and up to the ceiling, and the pictures in the squares on the ceiling were puffy and painted white, so they looked like clouds, and it made the tree look like it went up into the sky.
There were so many decorations. We had a tree in Minneapolis, but it was not like this tree—nothing was like this tree. There were silver balls and red balls, with dented-in sides so that they made all the light in the room seem to come out of them; and tinsel hung, each strand separate and straight, but so many that they were like water falling; and there were lights, lights that went around and around and up. While I was watching Ben plugged them in.
“Oh.…”
Each light had a little star around it, so when the lights came on the stars made them seem bigger and glow out in streaks of light that mixed with the streaks from the other lights.
Red and blue and yellow and green and white, all shining in the tinsel and the colored balls, so no matter where you looked there was some new light and color to see and if you lived to be forever you could not see them all. And on top, on the very top, was an angel with long white hair and a pink face and she was so beautiful, smiling down from the top of the tree, so beautiful.
“Merry Christmas,” Ben said, even though it wouldn’t be Christmas for two more fingers on one hand, which is how Mother had me count the days until Christmas.
“I’ve never seen a tree like this,” I said.
“It’s a special Christmas,” Ben said, but his voice was breaking. When I looked at him I could see a tear, just one, come out of the corner of his left eye and run down along his nose into his beard. I couldn’t see how anything as pretty as the tree could make him cry, and I was going to say that to him, but Marilyn and Mother came out of the back room.
“Come and see Matthew,” Marilyn said. “He’s awake and wants to see you.”
They took me to Matthew’s room, which was all made up like the hospital room I stayed in when I was sick and Mother thought I was going to die in a tent you could see through, except that Matthew didn’t have a clear tent over his bed.
The room was all flowers and pictures of dogs and cats and pretty places on the walls, with the bed against one wall surrounded by tables and tubes and bottles and hoses.
Matthew was on the bed.
I had only seen Matthew once before, in the summer when I came up, and he didn’t look different now except for his color. He was more yellow, almost as yellow as some of the lights on the tree, and so puffy-looking that it seemed if you poked him it wouldn’t come back out. His eyes looked more red, and as soon as Mother and Marilyn left he waved me closer to the bed.
“I’m dying.”
“I know,” I said, because I did. “Except that I haven’t been able to figure it out yet.”
“Oh, hell, I thought it was my secret.” He smiled and I saw that even his teeth seemed yellow.
“I heard Mother say it to Marilyn.” I had forgotten about Matthew’s swearing. He was two years older than me and had learned lots of swear words and used them all the time and was really good with them. Or bad, if you were thinking of Santa Claus. “I wasn’t supposed to, but I did.”
“Did they say when?”
I tried to remember and then shook my head. “No. I don’t think so.”
“Not too long after Christmas,” he said, raising up. “Maybe in January or the next month, I can’t remember the name of it.” He was proud that he knew something I didn’t, but it didn’t make any difference, because I didn’t know about months yet and was still trying to figure out how he would get to Europe so he could die and not get home.
“Now you have to tell me something,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“I told you something you didn’t know—now you have to tell me something.”
“We rode on the train all day yesterday to get here and I ate liver and onions that didn’t taste like liver and onions—”
He shook his head. “Not like that. Not just stuff. It has to be something important—something only you know.”
And of course I thought of Mr. Henderson.
“There isn’t any Santa Claus,” I said. “I saw Mr. Henderson in a Santa suit, only without a beard, and he was drinking red wine with his wife.”
Matthew waited.
“So. That’s it. I saw him, so there can’t be a Santa Claus.”
Matthew shook his head. “Is that all? I knew that last year and maybe even the year before—I can’t be sure because the medicine they give me makes me remember things funny. But I knew it. It’s just something they make up.”
So I didn’t have any secrets to tell Matthew like he had to tell me, especially not one where I was dying like him. But it didn’t matter so much because we started to play then and we forgot secrets.
Matthew had me scout for him.
He couldn’t leave the bed unless somebody was carrying him a certain way, so he would send me out in the store to see things and come back to report to him.
“Like soldiers,” he said. “You report to me like a soldier.”
I felt bad because I didn’t have a uniform or gun or helmet like I’d seen the soldiers wearing in the newsreel when Mother took me to a Roy Rogers movie. But Matthew sent me just the same and I would sneak out to the store and watch and come back to tell Matthew what I saw.
“A fat woman bought some bread.”
“An old man bought some pipe tobacco.”
“Three boys came in and bought a bag of candy.”
“Germans,” he said. “They’re all Germans and you must report to me that they’re Germans.”
So I did.
“A skinny German bought a little box of candy.”
“Two Germans bought bottles of Coca-Cola.”
Each time Matthew would salute and pretend to write down what I said on a piece of paper with a pencil, but I saw that he was just making marks. Because of the medicine he had to take, he didn’t know letters any better than I did, except that he made some A’s that looked pretty good.
And finally, after lunch, I came in to get orders and Matthew’s eyes were closed and he was asleep, and Ben said he could not play anymore until the next day because it took him down so. I couldn’t see that he was down, but that’s what Ben said, it took him down so.
The rest of that day I sat in the store and watched people come in and go out and ran around the aisles without knocking anything down and played under the tree until I noticed that there weren’t any packages under it. We had brought some presents for Marilyn and Ben and Matthew and even those weren’t under the tree and I asked Ben about it.
“Santa puts them there.” He was cutting meat with a slicer that he had to turn by hand and he stopped to look at me. “He puts all the presents there on Christmas Eve.”
“Even ours? That we brought?”
He nodded. “All of them.”
“But there isn’t a Santa Claus.”
“Of course there is.”
“But I saw. I saw Mr. Henderson. And he doesn’t live at the North Pole and he doesn’t have a sled or reindeer and hates me, so there isn’t a Santa Claus.”
“We’ll see,” Ben said, smiling, only when grown-ups said that it was the same as saying nothing. Or at least it was when Mother said it. “We’ll see” meant the same as “nothing.”
But Ben stopped cutting meat then and gave me a bottle of 7Up, which I took to the corner by the tree to sit and drink. In the summer I had seen a plane making smoke all over the sky, and I ran in to get Mother, and she said it was a smoke writer writing the name of 7Up to make people buy it.
I watched it until the plane was all done and gone and all the smoke had blown away and saw the 7 and the U and the P and knew what they were, letters across the sky, and the same letters were on the green bottle with the girl diving and the bubbles.
I thought the green was the prettiest green in the world because you could see through it, hold it up and see through it, and I sat in the corner and looked at things through the bottle. Ben and the tree and the stove and the store and people who came to buy things from the store—looked at them all through the green bottle even after the 7Up was gone, until it was time for dinner.
Mother and Marilyn laughed all the time when they were together, laughed so hard that Mother, and Marilyn, too, had to squat and hold herself sometimes not to pee, but they laughed while they cooked.
They cooked all the time.
I asked Mother once why she cooked so much, because sometimes she cooked at night after working all day in the laundry, made soup and cookies and cake and all so good that I would sneak and eat them when she wasn’t looking, and she said, “Because your father isn’t here.”
Which didn’t make any sense to me and wouldn’t work with why Marilyn cooked, because Ben was home, not over in Europe fighting in the war, because of his feet, Mother said, but that didn’t make any sense either, so I stopped asking.
They had been cooking all day and that night for supper we had dumplings with butter on them and some soup and fresh bread and an apple pie and I ate until I couldn’t move.
Matthew woke up for a little time and I went in to sit with him, but the medicine made him not talk or see right, so it wasn’t the same as the afternoon and in a little while Mother pulled the couch out and I went to bed.
She and Ben and M
arilyn sat at the kitchen table and drank coffee and talked, and their words all mixed until it was like a song and I was almost asleep when I heard them say Santa Claus and Matthew, but nothing else. Nothing that made sense because by then I was dreaming of Father and Europe, and wondering if when Matthew died would he be with Father if Father died, and could I go and see them?
· · ·
Christmas Eve day.
In the morning Mother and Marilyn made cinnamon rolls and I got to eat two of them before I went in to play with Matthew.
But he wasn’t feeling very well and was more yellow than he’d been the day before, so we didn’t scout or report, but just sat and looked at magazines and picture books and worked in some coloring books except that I couldn’t stay in the lines so well and he made fun of me.
But after a little time he put his coloring book down and looked at me and was crying.
“What’s wrong?”
“I don’t want to die.”
“It won’t be so bad.” I was coloring a pig jumping in flowers and I put my crayon down. “Mother says it just means you go to sleep and don’t come home from Europe.”
“I still don’t want to die.”
He turned away from me and faced the wall and I thought it was wrong for him to be sad on Christmas Eve day, so I made a face with my fingers in my mouth, and when that didn’t work I said, “Maybe I was wrong and there is a Santa Claus and he’ll come and bring us lots of presents—”
“Oh, hell, there isn’t any old Santa Claus.”
And I turned and saw that Ben had been coming through the door and had heard it, all of it, and that his face was white and his eyes pinched and he wiped his nose and coughed.
“Maybe he’s right,” Ben said to Matthew, but his voice was scratchy and he was having trouble talking. “Maybe there is a Santa and he’ll come and bring wonderful things, wonderful things, wonderful things.…”
He rubbed his hand on Matthew’s cheek and pushed his hair back the way Mother pushed my hair back sometimes, the same touch, and I thought how white and red Ben’s skin looked where his hand touched Matthew against the yellow. How white and clean. And then I thought how they were the same, how Ben looked at Matthew the way Mother looked at me when I was in the clear tent in the hospital and the minister was there and how soft that look was, how soft his touch was, and saw that Ben was crying. I sat with the picture of the pig on my lap and wondered why everybody felt so bad.