Finding Yuletide Karol

by L. A. Merrill

  And he looked exactly like the young man Lee had loved.

  Karol Walenty opened his arms and enveloped them both in a sandalwood-scented bear hug. “Thank the Goddess you’re here!” he exclaimed. “The napkin goats are a mess, and Rhiannon is losing her mind.”

  Lee and Bobbi exchanged a glance over Karol’s shoulders. What’s happening? Bobbi mouthed, and Lee shook his head.

  Karol stepped back and ushered them inside. Lee hesitated for only a second and stepped through into the dim hall. The walls of the farmhouse were very thick, and dark wood beams lowered the ceiling so that even Lee, who was only of medium height, felt he had to duck or risk a smack to the head.

  Karol placed a hand on Bobbi’s back and steered her toward a wide doorway on their right. “What’s your name, darling? My granddaughter found you online, I believe, and we only knew your—Twitter handle, is it called?”

  Lee saw Bobbi’s mask of politeness descend over her face like a portcullis. “My name is Bobbi,” she said.

  “Lovely to meet you, Bobbi. And you brought your father! How splendid!” Karol shook Lee’s hand. “You must be so proud of your daughter, running her own wedding-planning business. Come along in here, and you can meet everyone. Everyone, this is Bobbi and her father!”

  An eclectic group of people sat, stood, and lounged in the wide front room. Almost everyone wore a thick robe like Karol’s, in green or red or cream. They were finishing up a buffet-style breakfast from the banquet table under the mullioned windows that looked out over the front garden. Everyone stared at the newcomers.

  “Bright Blessings,” said a man with a pink-tipped beard, and suddenly everyone was following suit, showering Lee and Bobbi with blessings and greetings and offering them food.

  “Thank you,” said Bobbi, accepting a multigrain pistachio muffin. “A Christmas wedding, how exciting!”

  The chatter paused again. “It’s a handfasting,” a person lying on the hearth rug corrected.

  “Right, yeah.”

  “And it’s Yule,” said a woman with a tattooed face. “Not Christmas.”

  “Yes,” said Bobbi, “of course.”

  A tiny, silvery woman smiled kindly. “We’re witches, dear.”

  “Okay….”

  Lee and Bobbi exchanged another look, communicating with the sort of shorthand eye-telepathy they’d perfected after three years of tedious board meetings and truculent clients.

  I want to stay, said Lee’s look. I have to know.

  I don’t know how to get out of this with grace, now, said Bobbi’s look. Bobbi gave a minuscule shrug and turned back with a bright smile to the room full of witches. “Which one of you is the bride?”

  “I am!” Rhiannon was very tall and curvy, with a cascade of bright red curls and a beatific smile. She looked like a Pre-Raphaelite painting come to life. She leaped up from her seat on the floor and clasped Bobbi’s hands. “It’s so good to meet you at last! I can’t believe we’ve planned all this over email, but I’m so glad you’re here to see it all come together. And you brought your dad? That’s so awesome!” Her voice was husky and sweet. “That is a fantastic dress, by the way.”

  “Thank you,” said Bobbi faintly.

  Rhiannon hugged Bobbi, who looked overwhelmed. “Let me show you the fairy lights,” said Rhiannon, moving them toward the door, “and you can explain your vision for the glen to me. We’ve almost finished constructing the fertility arbor.”

  The rest of the witches dispersed to various tasks, talking, laughing, and singing snatches of songs Lee didn’t recognize as they went. Three boys ran through the front room, hitting each other with their Yule wreath headdresses and shouting that they were the Oak and Holly Kings, and the Holly King’s evil twin Lolly.

  Lee did not see Karol anywhere. He was left standing in the middle of a rapidly emptying room, next to a woman folding a pile of stiff brown napkins into four-legged animals. “Would you like some help?” he asked.

  “Sure,” said the woman with the napkin goats. “I’m Juniper, Rhiannon’s grandmother. Have a seat.”

  Lee felt an odd spasm around his heart. “You’re Karol’s wife, then?”

  Juniper laughed. “Oh no. We’re friends. We decided to have a child together. That’s her in the picture over there.” She waved a hand covered in silver rings and henna tattoos at a photo of Rhiannon and an older woman with the same tight red curls. “Chelsea. She’s gone to the Summerland, but I feel her presence here today.” Juniper smiled at the air in general. Her hair was dyed red and pulled back with a crescent moon-shaped hair clip, and she was wearing the same thick cream robe everyone else had on. She was barefoot in the middle of winter.

  It suddenly occurred to Lee that he was sitting in a house full of people who probably went to Woodstock.

  RHIANNON WAS marrying a strapping young man named Baldur, “or just Tim,” said Baldur/Tim. “Either one is fine.”

  And they weren’t exactly getting married. This was explained to Lee every time he slipped up and used the terms “wedding” or “marriage.”

  “A handfasting is a beautiful ceremony,” some well-meaning witch invariably began, “but it’s not always a marriage in the mainstream sense. Some pagan couples do follow a handfasting with a civil ceremony, or the high priestess is already a justice of the peace or something. But not all of them. A handfasting is like entering into a partnership of love.”

  How is that fundamentally different than marriage? Lee wondered, and then he remembered all the many different living room ceremonies he’d been to in the eighties and early nineties, the cheap rings exchanged at hospital bedsides, the boy in the striped leather jacket who’d stood on the bar in the Stonewall Inn and told the entire room that “Jason and I belong to each other!” and the entire room had cheered and bought them drinks and celebrated their love. And he thought perhaps he understood.

  IN THE late morning, Lee collected Bobbi from outside and brought her into the kitchen to warm up.

  “We need to stop this,” he said, keeping his voice low. “I need to tell them the truth.”

  “Yes. Great idea.” Bobbi shoved her hands under her arms and bounced a little. “I never knew what a fertility arbor is, but now I really, really do, and I’m not sure I needed that information.”

  “What is a fertility arbor?”

  “You don’t want to know.”

  “It’s time for sun cake making!” Karol boomed, entering the kitchen, the center of a hurricane of children. “Wonderful!” he exclaimed upon spotting Lee and Bobbi. “You can help!”

  Lee felt a powerful sense of déjà vu, except with the addition of eleven children in increasingly grimy robes. Bobbi gave him a look that clearly said after this you’re telling him, and then she hung up her coat and rolled up her sleeves to wash her hands and help the littlest kids wash theirs.

  The kitchen of the farmhouse was an amalgamation of styles and periods, containing everything from a fireplace big enough to cook in—with an antique wood-burning stove shoved inside it—to a modern refrigerator and a microwave from twenty years ago.

  Karol put Lee in charge of peeling sweet potatoes, since that involved a sharp knife and one of the children had already stabbed another in the eye with a spoon. They set up a rough assembly line around the farmhouse table, peeling and grating and mixing and shaping. There were herbs now, and sour cream instead of condensed milk. It went much faster with thirteen people working instead of two, and soon the first batch of sun cakes was disappearing into the oven.

  Lee watched Bobbi help one of the younger children, a small boy he thought might be on the spectrum, painstakingly count out the shreds of sweet potato it took to make one cake. A wave of affection for her sloshed over his heart. She was such an exceptionally kind person, and he didn’t know whether he’d ever told her that. She deserved to be told every day.

  Across the table, Karol shaped the sweet potato mixture into cakes with the help of two little girls. Lee had been incredibly aware of his pre
sence since he walked in the kitchen. He glanced up again and saw Karol take a fresh tray of sun cakes over to the counter to wait for the oven to be free. Karol stayed over there, leaning on the wooden counter, his head bowed, so long that Lee became concerned.

  Lee handed the paring knife off to the older boy standing next to him. “You want to try this for a while?”

  The boy nodded.

  Lee showed him how to hold and angle the knife. “Keep your thumb on the blunt edge of the blade and your fingers tucked in, see?”

  He edged around the table and over to Karol, placed a hand on Karol’s rounded shoulder. “Are you all right?”

  Karol nodded. He lifted his head and stared out over the heavily wooded backyard. “Get to be our age, you have a lot of memories, you know?” They stood together for a moment, Karol watching the proceedings outside, Lee wondering how to begin. Karol breathed deeply and straightened up. “Here,” he offered, “come help me shape some sun cakes. Everybody should shape a sun cake at least once in their life.”

  The little girls shifted over and very conscientiously showed Lee how to flour his hands and pat the potato mixture into shape. Karol passed him lumps of the orangey goop from the mixing bowl. It smelled of sage and cloves. My hands will smell like this for days, Lee thought, and I’m actually cooking! And nothing’s on fire!

  Karol watched him work.

  “You’re a wizard at this,” Karol said. “It’s like you’ve made them before.”

  Lee almost told him then. But a second later one of the children scratched themselves with the grater and started wailing, which set off a chain reaction of wailing children, and the moment was lost.

  DEVRA, A short woman with prominent streaks of silver running through her masses of black hair, snagged Lee after lunch and told him he was going to help her carve candles. She led him to a room upstairs that was filled with cream pillar candles and a heady vanilla scent. She handed him a printed sheet of squiggly lines and a small knife.

  “These are runes,” she said briskly, settling herself cross-legged on the floor with her own knife and picking up a half-carved candle. “They symbolize love and peace and prosperity and whatnot. Carve them into the sides of the candles. We need them for the feast table and the circle ritual.” She pointed to a plastic tub across the room. “Finished ones go over there.”

  Lee studied his sheet. “Do they need to go in any particular order, or—?”

  “Just make it look pretty,” said Devra.

  They worked in companionable silence for a couple of hours. Lee’s runes looked more like patterns left by sidewinder snakes at first, but he got better at it, and he figured it was the thought that counted. He made sure to really think about the concept the rune represented as he carved it. He wondered if that’s what magick was.

  “Karol is my brother,” said Devra in the late afternoon, not taking her concentration off her candle.

  “Oh?” said Lee. “That’s nice.”

  “Different fathers,” Devra explained.

  “I didn’t ask.”

  “I know.” She set her candle aside. She held on to the knife. “I know you and Bobbi aren’t the wedding planners Rhiannon hired.”

  Lee almost dropped his candle. The knife cut a huge gash in the side, straight through the rune for peace.

  “For one thing, neither one of you has any idea what you’re doing, although you’re pretty good at faking it.” She flicked the knife closed and twiddled it in her hand. “For another, I checked Rhiannon’s email for her, and the actual wedding planner sent her a message that she had the flu and couldn’t come today. I never liked the woman. Rhiannon’s so trusting she’d let a vampire in to supper. I never said anything, but that woman overcharged her and let Rhiannon do most of the work. But that doesn’t change the fact that your Bobbi isn’t her.

  “So tell me—” She leaned forward. “—who you are and what you’re doing here.”

  Lee laid the candle and knife aside and made sure to keep Devra’s eye contact. “I met Karol—your brother—in Vietnam. We were supposed to meet up after the war, only—we didn’t. I never heard from him. I’ve been looking for him for fifty years, and yesterday—last night, I found out he lived up here, and we drove up, and I… wanted to see if he remembered me. I wanted to see him.”

  “Well,” said Devra. She flipped her knife open and went back to carving her candle. “Then I think you’d better go and tell him that, don’t you?”

  “Yes.” Lee stood up. “Yes, I think I should.”

  DOWNSTAIRS, THE house was mostly empty, with all of the activity concentrated outside, or upstairs in Rhiannon’s room as she got dressed and ready. Lee descended the stairs and saw Karol gathering up ribbon and hemp scraps in the front room, tidying up and carrying leftover craft supplies to the hall closet.

  “Karol,” said Lee, snagging Karol’s sleeve as he bustled past. “Karol, could I talk to you for a minute?”

  “Of course! In here, should be pretty quiet for now.” Karol led him down the hall to the warm, sweet-smelling kitchen. “I’m so sorry,” Karol said, “but I don’t think I ever caught your name.” He laughed. “I’ve been calling you ‘Bobbi’s dad,’ all day in my head.”

  “Lee,” said Lee, watching him for a response, a flicker of recognition. “My name is Lee.”

  “Lee! What a lovely name. Have a seat, Lee.” Karol settled himself on a wicker-bottom stool at the farmhouse table. Lee sat across from him, feeling subtly wrong inside his own skin. “Now,” said Karol, “what’s up? Is it something about the ritual?”

  “No.” Lee squeezed his hands together in his lap, one inside the other, over and over. “I—we—we’re not who you think we are, Bobbi and I. I’m not her father. She’s not a wedding planner. Neither one of us are wedding planners.”

  Karol seemed slightly taken aback, as well he might. “You’re doing an awfully good job,” he said at last, “for not being wedding planners. What are you doing here, then? Who are you really?”

  “I work for Union Financial, in the city. Bobbi is my assistant. We—I’m here because—” His hands hurt, he was squeezing them so hard, but the pain helped him focus. He stared at the deeply scratched tabletop. “You and I, we met once before.”

  “Oh?” Karol sounded much cooler than he had all day, but still curious. “And where was that?”

  Lee managed a flash of eye contact, then back down to the tabletop. “Vietnam. Dak Lak province. Christmas Eve, 1969. You saved my life. I—helped you make dinner. I’m Lee. Lee.” He looked up and held Karol’s gaze. He needed to see him, needed to know. “Do you remember me?”

  For a moment, Karol’s expression did not change. Then his eyebrows climbed his forehead and he sat back on the stool, holding the edge of the table to keep his balance. “My God.”

  Suddenly he frowned. “But why didn’t you say all that when you arrived this morning? Why did you go along with—you spent two hours folding napkin goats! Why not just tell me?”

  “I am not very good with people?” said Lee. “And Bobbi is very polite.”

  Karol laughed. It sounded a little broken.

  “And I was afraid,” Lee added very quietly.

  “Afraid of what, me?”

  “Afraid you wouldn’t remember me.” I needed to see you. I’ve wanted to see you for so long. The words stuck in his chest. And you were so happy, and now you’re not.

  “I remember you. Of course I remember you, darling.” Lee was not confused by the endearment. He’d heard Karol call a tree “sweetheart” this afternoon; it was clearly a reflex. “I’ve thought about you over the years, wondered what happened to you. And I suppose”—his voice became stiffer than Lee had ever heard it—“you want to know what happened to me?”

  Lee tried very hard to keep years of hurt and loneliness out of his tone. “Where did you go?” he asked. “I looked for you and looked for you, in Army records, with the VFW, but I didn’t have your last name, only ‘Karol’….”

  �
�Ah, well, I can clear that up for you—I lied about my name on my draft card. Left out the ‘o.’ As far as the US Army was concerned, my name was Karl.” Karol rested his arms on the table and picked at his thumbnail. “I was a gay man, but I still wanted to serve my country. I was trying to sound more butch.”

  “Oh.”

  “How did you find me after all this time? I’m not on social media, and if you didn’t have my last name—you really never knew my last name?”

  “You never told me.”

  “No, I guess I didn’t. So how did you find—” He broke off as Lee got up, crossed to where his coat hung behind the kitchen door, and returned carrying the spiral-bound cookbook. Lee flipped through to the entry for “Yuletide Karol’s Sweet Potato Sun Cakes” and placed the book flat on the table in front of Karol.

  Karol looked at the cover and then back at the recipe, smoothing his fingers over the print. “I’d forgotten I did this.”

  “Karol?” Lee asked in a hushed voice. “Where did you go?”

  Karol closed the cookbook and set it aside, fidgeted a bit with the plastic binding, then laced his fingers together to stop the fidgets.

  “I was captured,” he said. “Early 1970. Only a few weeks after we met, actually. I was on a supply run, picking up a delivery that had gone astray. The helo was shot down over the Cambodian border, and the pilot and I were transferred to Hanoi.

  “I stayed there until ’73. Operation Homecoming. The pilot died in captivity. I didn’t.”

  A shocked silence yawned and settled between them. Lee wanted to hug him, to comfort him the way Karol had comforted Lee once, but he couldn’t move. Slowly, he made his hands unclench and laid them on the table, extended them toward Karol’s hands until the backs of his fingers were touching Karol’s. Karol gripped his hands and held on.

  “I thought about you, in the camp. I thought about you, and I thought about my family, and when I came home—I wasn’t right. It took me a long time to get right, and that meant—I couldn’t think about you anymore.” Karol squeezed his hands and started to cry. “My brown-eyed boy. I wanted to find you, but you reminded me of the war, and if I wanted my sanity, I couldn’t have you.”