The snow was not whirling round the lamppost when the old man sent his sleigh. The young man drove the horse; he was perched up on the seat, I sat with my back to him, Mama sat opposite with Gilbert on one side under the fur rug and Harold on the other. The snow lay very quiet, it did not whirl round the lampposts; it’s made like stars, you can see them if you get them separate, if you get one stuck to the other side of the window; they have different shapes although there are so many that if you wrote 1 and then 000 forever, you would never write out a number, that would be the number of the snowflakes.
One snowflake shall not fall to the ground without your father.
But that was not a snowflake, that was a sparrow, but it means the same thing. Your father walks a little way; we wait under the light of the lamp that falls in a circle on the snow. I hold Harold’s hand. He tugs at my hand, he does not say, “Why are you waiting?,” but that is what he means when he pulls at my hand in my mitten, with this hand in his mitten. He does not speak very often. Mama says she is worried because Harold is so quiet. But Harold can talk. He is not dumb, he is a small child, he is a year younger than me. I hold his hand. He has on his new blue reefer. He wore a white coat only a little while ago, but now he wears a blue reefer.
Gilbert has gone ahead. That is our father. No, I do not say that to Harold. I do not think it. I am so happy that I am not saying anything, I am not thinking anything. I am alone by a lamppost, Harold has hold of my hand.
Our-father is half way between this lamp and the next lamppost, and Gilbert has run out in the road and is making a snowball.
If this was Mama or Aunt Jennie, taking us down Church Street, they would turn round, they would say, “Come along, children.” He does not turn around. I will stand here by the lamppost because I am so happy. When you are too happy in the snow, Uncle Hartley told us, you might feel warm, you might think you were warm, then you might lie down in the snow and go to sleep, “So you children must race around in the snow.” As if he had to tell us. We race around in the snow. But I am not warm, not warm enough to lie down on the snow like on a bed, yet I am warm. The light makes me warm, but not warm enough to lie down on the snow, which is dangerous, if you are too happy, like that man in the snow where the dog brings him a barrel on his collar. Papa will maybe turn round now but he does not, but Gilbert shouts, “Hi, you better catch up, you’ll be late.” He throws his snowball at the next lamppost but it does not hit the next lamppost. Papa does not say, “Hurry, come along,” but on the Lehigh mountains he walks fast, so you have to run sometimes to catch up, but he does not say, “Don’t get lost.” He lets us get lost under the bushes and by the little stream when we go for pansy-violets and mayapples which have a white flower and two big leaves. The mayapple leaves are like an umbrella for the bunch of pansy-violets or the real violets we get.
It is not certain if he sees us. It is not certain if he knows that we are here.
Uncle Fred makes a doll out of the three corners of his handkerchief and it dances shadow-dances on the wall when he puts the lamp on the floor. Aunt Jennie threaded the smaller needle because the big needle was too thick to string the beads on. Indians have bead belts and moccasins. He walks ahead like an Indian who walks so quietly in the forest you do not hear him. Some boys (not the cousins) tied me to a post and played a game I do not remember. I know about it because Aunt Aggie told me how Gilbert rescued me from the strange boys in Aunt Aggie’s street, before they moved to Washington; Aunt Aggie said, “He brought you in the house, and said, ‘Aunt Aggie, will you take care of Sister, we are playing rough in the garden!’ ”
I can seem to remember being tied to a stake and wild Indians howling, and I do not know how soon they will strike at me with their tomahawks, but never in the snow.
Surely, I have not remembered this, only the lamppost stands there and Harold and I stand there and Gilbert is about to run back and say, “Come on, come on,” he will rescue us, though we do not need to be rescued; we were never so happy, could never be happier! The light from the lamp is a round circle.
We wait in the snow, with the lamp, with Papa there, going on to the next lamppost, with Gilbert waiting to shout, though he pretends he is not thinking of us and stoops down to make another snowball.
It goes on in what we later called slow motion, at the moving-picture shows.
Or we stop there.
If we do not remember, it is nevertheless there. It crept up and its edge was white like the lamp, and the way it came up the flat sand was the way the snow drifts round the lamppost.
I was high up; his bathing suit was blue and stuck to his shoulders as we went together across the sand; he said, “No, it isn’t cold, I’ll take her in.” He will take me in and that will be the end of me, but I am high up and the waves come close.
It is terrible to be taken in when the waves come up, but he does not drop me in.
He puts me down in the ocean. When the waves come up I run back and watch the waves come up after me, but it is a long way, the water goes on and on.
Mama does not like it. She does not like the hot sun; she sits under a parasol with Ida who is taking off Harold’s white dress and putting bathing drawers on him. Gilbert is far away with some big boys and a boat.
“It is too far for you to walk,” he told me.
There are pebbles, they are wet and shiny. There are shells.
Mama put the seashell to my ear and said, “Listen, you will hear the sea,” but when we got to the sea it was too hot, she said, and she lay down in her room.
Professor Harding came with us. We ride down to the ocean in a big coach. Ida has a bag with towels and our bathing things.
“Come, come, don’t be afraid.” This is a boat and the boys are catching crabs; a crab is on the floor of the boat, he makes a horrible scratching on the wooden floor of the boat. There is a little square of water in the bottom of the boat but the boat won’t sink, “Don’t be afraid, girls are always afraid.” Yes, I am afraid.
The crab comes along; you do not know which way he is walking, only that he is walking. He walks fast, fast. Girls are afraid. Don’t scream. This is the worst thing that has ever happened. The crab gets bigger and bigger and the boys laugh more and more. “He won’t eat you.”
How do I know he won’t eat me? The boat goes up and down with the waves and the crab opens his pincer-claws and one of the boys pushes him, even nearer. Then the crab comes nearer—girls scream sometimes.
“Here,” says Papa and he picks up the crab with his big hand and its claws grab round in the air and he is going to throw it back in the water.
“My crab,” says Professor Harding who has on a big straw hat like a farmer. “Taking privileges with my property.”
“Take your critter then,” says Papa. He calls things a “critter,” a crab or the alligator.
Professor Harding pushes a tub of water toward him, Papa drops the crab in the tub, the water splashes and the other critters claw round the edges of the tub.
When the alligator fell out of the attic window, the gardener screamed that it was the devil.
The gardener’s name was Mr. Cherry.
“It can’t be,” said the Williamses, “you made it up.”
“Mr. Cherry, Mr. Cherry,” we called and he looked up, where he was tacking up a vine that has a purple flower that fell down. There was the bleeding-heart bush under the kitchen window, and above that was the window of Uncle Hartley’s room where he slept in the afternoon, when he was at the steel mills the other side of the river at night. Then there was the little window above, just as you draw just the shape of such a house on a slate, when you do not draw the Christmas tree.
The alligator fell right into the bleeding-heart bush and the bush shook and waved, like blowing in the wind, and we knew what was there, but Mr. Cherry did not know and was surprised.
He ran away, but we did not.
We stood and watched the bush for the alligator to come out, but Uncle Hartley said, “You children
better run off,” but we did not because Papa was coming from the wash-kitchen door; he had on his big leather furnace-glove. He must have heard Mr. Cherry shriek or saw what happened, for he had on his big glove before Uncle Hartley could go back to the house and get whatever it was he was getting. I was glad it was not Papa’s pistol. Then I thought, “I am glad he is not going to shoot the alligator.”
He put his hand in the top of the bush and he had the alligator by the neck and he carried him into the house and up Papalie’s front stairs past the clock, round the corner and up the next steps to the attic. Uncle Hartley tugged at the little attic window that was left open, and fastened it tight shut. “But you children better keep away from the attic,” he said, “till we get some fresh wire nailed up here. Cherry will do it.” Papa laughed like he does with a snort and said, “Better let me do it, Cherry doesn’t like alligators.”
Papa has a workbench in the little room beyond the kitchen over the wash kitchen where we keep our shoe-blacking and shoe brushes. He can make willow whistles.
Mamalie said, “St-st-st-st, that alligator better go.”
We said and Tootie said and Dick stood watching, “Go where?”
“Well,” said Mamalie, “after all …”
We said, “After all, what? Didn’t someone send it to Papalie in a cigar box, wrapped in that Florida moss?”
Mamalie said, “Of course.”
It is moss that we put under the tree for the animals to stand on and for the sheep to lie down in, and eat.
We made cherries out of cotton (like Papalie stuck on the clay sheep) for May Day, and Mrs. Williams trimmed Olive and Mea’s leghorn hats with real tulips and leaves. Bessie had a crown of cherry blossoms on her hat, and when we had the May Day party in their garden under the cherry tree, Bessie was the queen because it was her birthday.
When we got home, Ida said, “Don’t worry your mother, you can sleep in my bed tonight,” and she woke me the next morning and her face was happy and she said, “Guess.”
I said, “Guess what?”
She said, “You have a new brother.”
I must have known all that, because we had talked about Mrs. Williams and the way she wore her raincoat all the time out-of-doors, even when it wasn’t raining, and her wrapper indoors and Olive told me what it was, and then Amery came, but I did not seem to know. I seemed to be surprised. The baby was born on the second day of May.
Now at this minute, while we stand under the lamppost, he is not born yet, because he was born in May and this is Christmas and Harold is the baby.
Slow motion. Slower and slower.
Clock-time and out-of-time whirl round the lamppost. The snow whirls; it is white sand from the desert. Ahead is Papa, stopped in slow motion and then going back and back in time, back through the ages, the Middle Ages, though I do not know that, Rome, Greece; but he does not stop at Greece. The snow that has stopped in slow motion and folds us in a cloud is a pillar-of-cloud-by-day. The lamp shining over our heads is the pillar-of-fire, and the snow is the pillar-of-cloud and never, in-time or out-of-time, can such children be lost, for their inheritance is so great.
Gilbert must go to France, for Gilbert must inherit the pistol from Papa who was in our Civil War. Harold will inherit the mills and the steel and numbers too and become a successful businessman like Uncle Hartley. Gilbert has been asleep for a long time, in a place called Thiacourt, in France. Harold is a grown man, a grandfather with three children of his own; he inherited the three children, too, a girl and two boys. Hilda has inherited too much but she cannot let it go. There is the lamppost and the pillar-of-fire, and there is the cloud-by-day, the mystery, and Papa far ahead, a dark shape in the snow.
There was a hut in the woods, but the sun was shining, rain did not beat on the windows. He took us there to get water lilies.
A man with a horse and trap met us at the station. We were drawn toward a new scent, a new feel of trees, of light. It was evening.
As the daylight faded, there was new definition or exact understanding of twilight.
We had never been out in the woods in the evening.
Papa talked to the man who drove the horse, Papa had been here before; with whom? Not Mama. Had he brought those other children, Alfred and Eric and Alice (who was dead), here, before he married Mama? There was a world, a life of mystery beyond him; we could ask him about Indiana and how his father had gone out in a covered wagon and how frightened his mother was and how disappointed his father was to stay in Indiana because he wanted to go to California and how he himself had run away to go off with Alvin to the Civil War, and where did he find the Indian skull?
But we did not ask him what lay nearest, “Did you come here with Alfred and Eric and Alice who is dead. Did you come with their Mama?”
There was another mother, she was a mystery, she was dead, her name was Martha, we must not ask about her.
Here, the cart wheels went along a track just as wide as the wheels, for there was no road in the woods, only this opening in the trees that brushed Papa’s head so that he had to duck his head, like going under a bridge in the canal boat when we took the canal boat and a picnic basket and a watermelon that Uncle Fred stopped to buy, on the way there.
Here there was no picnic basket, for we were going to spend the night in a place where we had never been, whose name was Sailor’s Lake; “Is it a big lake?” asked Gilbert.
Papa snorted the way he did like a horse, when he laughed; he said, “It’s a pond really.”
A pond is a flat muddy waterhole where there are mosquitoes, back of the shanty-hill houses behind the mill where the goat once was, that Gilbert said looked like Papalie. But were we going to a shanty hill? We were going through a tunnel in the woods and the leaves brushed Papa’s hat off and now he was holding his hat on his knees and looking up at the trees. Papa liked trees. He knew all about trees. We had a little chest of drawers he made, with little drawers and polished wood and brass handles to the drawers, that was too nice, Mama said, for me to use for my doll, but could I have it? Mama did not give it to me, but Mamalie gave me a little old chest that was hers, for my doll clothes.
The trees were deeper and maybe we were lost, but the man let the horse go along, he did not hold the reins, he was stuffing tobacco into his pipe. He offered Papa the tobacco and Papa laughed and said he had left his pipe in the pocket of his other coat, in the back of the cart; he said he liked a corncob pipe, too, best.
The horse was going to step on the little frogs.
“Stop the horse,” I told Papa, “tell the man to stop the horse.”
“Why?” said Papa.
“There is a little frog,” and the man laughed and Papa laughed. He stopped the horse and told us to get out and there were a thousand-thousand little frogs on the track; they looked like small leaves fallen on the track until they began to hop.
“We can’t help it,” said the man, “if they get in the way, can we?”
We saw that the thousand-thousand little frogs lay like leaves on the track in the woods, that had two marks in it, just as wide as the wheels on the man’s cart.
“Where is it?” we said. But then we saw from the porch, the way the field ran down along the side of the woods. There were no flowers along the edge of the porch, there was no wisteria, no climbing rose, no honeysuckle.
It was a hut in the woods.
There was the track from the wood-edge and marks where the cart stopped in front of the door. We came here last night. They said it was too late to run down to the lake.
“Then it is a lake?” said Gilbert.
“Of course,” said the man.
It was a lake.
Here it was; we could not see how far it stretched because of the bulrushes, but there were boats tied to a wooden landing, so it must be a big lake. We ran back, up the slope of the field to the porch; there were no porch steps, the porch floor lay flat on the grass, the grass ran up to the floor of the porch; it was a house without a garden, the field
was the lawn, the grass was long and short and you could see where the wheels of the cart stopped and went away again.
No one said, “Come along, come in to breakfast,” but we went along and saw through the window that they were eating in the dining room. Papa was there at the table and the man who had the horse and an old lady and one or two others. They sat at a long table; there was a glass dish of pickled beets on the table and a pie and Papa was drinking coffee.
We saw Papa at a table without us, drinking coffee from a thick white cup.
We went in the hall and in the door to the dining room. Nobody said, “Where have you been?” The man-with-the-horse said, “Mother” to the door and the voice said, “Coming,” and it was his mother we guessed or did he call his wife mother, like Papa called Mama sometimes? We could not tell if she was the cook or the man-with-the-horse’s mother or his wife.
There were no children.
We sat along the table where there were places, not in a row.
The man-with-the-horse said, “Beets, pie, pickles?”
We said, “Yes.”
Papa did not say, “You cannot have pie for breakfast.”
We had pie for breakfast. It was huckleberry pie and we had napkins with red squares.
The coffee in Ida’s house, when she took us to see her father-and-mother, smelt like this. But this was bigger than Ida’s mother’s-and-father’s house and the windows were all open.
He did not come; he said yes, he would have more coffee.
We sat on the porch; I looked in the window and he was talking and laughing and everyone had gone but the man-with-the-horse, and they were smoking their pipes. The lady came in and put the cups on the tray; “Now he will come out,” we thought, and he came out with his pipe and the man said, “Well, I better be off,” and he knocked out the tobacco from his pipe on the railing of the porch, and he went off.
The Gift: Novel Page 7