Once Upon a Christmas

by Richard J. Smith

  Grandpa and I sat on our side of the river with our slingshots loaded many a summer afternoon and never saw a rat. But I heard Grandpa tell some men at the bar one morning that he and I were going down to the river again that afternoon to get us some more rats.

  About a year after Pa opened Smitty’s Bar, he began hearing about the wonderful Friday night fish fries Norman’s Bar was putting out for thirty cents, five cents more than Pa was charging. So Pa gave one of his regulars thirty cents and sent him down to Norman’s about nine o’clock to find out what was so special about his fish fry.

  The report came back near midnight. The scout had to wait almost two hours for a booth to free up. He drank six beers while waiting at the bar, so Pa owed him another thirty cents. Norman’s perch, baked beans, and rye bread were the same, but he also served a generous helping of French fried potatoes.

  Pa retaliated. Every Friday afternoon I got the job of peeling enough spuds for Ma to cook for our fish fries that Pa now charged thirty-five cents for. The price which included a free beer. Norman lost customers, Pa made the profit on the beer as well as the fish fry, and nobody figured out they were paying for the free beer when they coughed up thirty-five cents for the food.

  One Friday afternoon after school, I was peeling potatoes in the kitchen and thinking about Christmas vacation coming up. Grandpa was helping me. Suddenly he shot up in the air like the Human Cannonball at the County Fair. “My God!” he yelled. “Look at the size of that rat!” He was pointing down at where his feet had been. I watched him until he landed, and then I looked at where he’d been pointing. Grandpa’s explosive elevation had been triggered by a small cat—not a large rat—rubbing against his leg. I figure Grandpa was always worried that some rat would try to get revenge for all its relatives Grandpa had lied about killing with a slingshot.

  Now I had never desired a cat as a pet. But I had prayed nightly, and sometimes in school when things got dull, that Pa would relent and let me have a dog. I pleaded with Pa, who explained his refusal. “You gotta male, he’s always bitin’ the milkman or the mailman or the iceman, someone you gotta have comin’ around all the time. You gotta bitch, she’s always comin’ home with a belly full of pups. There ain’t no winnin’ with a damn dog.” (Grandpa had to set me straight on the part about the bitch.)

  But I dreamed of owning a dog all the time. If I had a white dog, I would name it Silver after the Lone Ranger’s horse. If I had a brown dog, I would name it Scout after Tonto’s horse. And if I had a black dog, I would name it Blackie. Color was not an important factor. I just really wanted a dog—any dog—but when divine providence dropped that stray cat in the kitchen into my lap, I figured I’d make do until Pa changed his mind about a dog. “I’m gonna keep him,” I said to Grandpa. “A stray cat’s better than nothin’.”

  “That there cat ain’t no stray,” Grandpa pronounced. “Thatn’s been well-fed and kept indoors.” The cat had its eyes mostly shut and was licking at its paws as if Grandpa and I weren’t even there. “He don’t look like much of a mouser, but I’ll square it with your pa if you wanna keep him—and don’t tell nobody he wandered in here.”

  “What’ll I call him?” I asked Grandpa. Neither Silver nor Scout seemed to fit; and since he was grey and white, Blackie was out of the question.

  “That there cat belonged to somebody and like as not has got a name already,” Grandpa said. I failed to see how that was going to help me choose a name until Grandpa continued. “You can’t call him nothin’ else. A cat with more’n one name’ll never chase mice, and we sure as hell need us a mouser. Too bad he ain’t a she. No Tommy can catch mice like a female.”

  “Then what’ll I call him?” I tried again.

  Grandpa thought a moment; then he said, “Call him Cat. That ain’t a name.”

  So Cat it was. And if nobody saw him and claimed him, I had me a pet.

  When I looked down, I saw that Cat had fallen asleep next to my potato bucket, so I peeled real quietly so as not to awaken Cat. When I finished the bucketful, I looked up and saw Grandpa was still there, watching me.

  “You know, Dickie,” he said, “the bad thing about being old is you ain’t a somebody no more.” Then he smiled, and his eyes kind of smiled, too. “You’re keepin’ me a somebody, boy.” Many years passed before I knew what he had meant.

  Pa said I could keep Cat on two conditions: “He earns his keep by catchin’ mice, and nobody comes around sayin’ they lost a cat that looks like him.” So he was all mine!

  “Thanks, Pa. Thanks a lot.”

  Before Cat joined our family, we had mousetraps scattered all over our upstairs apartment and the tavern kitchen. Nothing much happened during the day, but all night long those traps caught mice. I remember lying in bed in the dark, hearing the traps snap shut one after another, each one hanging on to the neck of a furry mouse with its nose on the cheese bait:

  The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men

  Gang aft agley,

  An’ lea’e us naught but grief an’ pain

  For promised joy!

  Sometimes, Grandpa or Ma or Pa got up to release the victims and reset the traps. So they were especially happy when Cat turned out to be an excellent mouser.

  “Only cat I ever knew was a better mouser than this’n was a old female tiger cat we had on the farm. By God, she’d chase a mouse into a pile a horse manure, drag it out, lick it clean, and swallow it down head first, tail wigglin’ like hell all the way down. And Dickie’s cat is damned near as good!”

  So one of the conditions for my keeping Cat was met. But not Pa’s requirement that the original owner not show up. About a month after I adopted Cat, Gus Gustafson was drinking a beer at the bar and spied Cat licking his paws in one of the booths Pa put in for Friday night fish fries.

  “Hoo, boy!” Gus whooped. “Where you get dat cat?”

  “Just wandered in,” Pa answered. “Why? You see him before?”

  “You damn betcha. That there’s my cat. The Mrs. left the door open shakin’ out rugs ‘bout a month ago, and I ain’t seen dat devil since.”

  “You real sure about that, Gus?” Pa asked.

  “You damn betcha I’m sure. That there’s the meanest cat ever lived. Scratchin’ and bitin’ at me ’til I’m about to shoot the bastard. Never caught a mouse neither.”

  Pa didn’t say anything until he’d thought awhile. Then he said, “You know, Gus, that cat’s still a mean son of a bitch, and he wouldn’t know it if a mouse crawled up his ass, but him and the kid get along real good.” Then Pa rubbed his chin and pulled on his ear lobe like he was having a hard time making up his mind. “Tell you what, Gus. You say the word, and I’ll take that good-for-nothin’ cat off your hands.” Gus didn’t say anything, so Pa added, “And give you and the misses a fish fry and couple beers on the house Friday night.”

  “Throw in a Schnapps, too?” Gus bargained. Pa agreed.

  “By the way,” Pa asked, “what’s his name?”

  “Never gived him a name,” Gus replied. “Just called him the first cuss word come to mind.”

  Grandpa was at the end of the bar and heard it all. He told me about it, word for word, and he said Pa and Gus even shook hands on the deal. So I had me a cat now with no contingencies. And best of all, now I could give Cat a real name. But somehow Cat was better than any other name I could think of, so I just left it at that. Pa has never told about the deal he made with Gus.

  The week before Christmas was the best week of the year for Main Street taverns. The stores stayed open until nine o’clock every night except Sunday, and while the women folks shopped at Gambles and J.C. Penney and Kinney Shoes and Stancil’s Department Store, their husbands got tired of shopping and waited for them at Norman’s or Smitty’s. The wives stopped by at nine o’clock to fetch their husbands and, since it was the holidays, also had a drink. It was usually a whiskey and sweet soda or whiskey and sour soda that cost twenty cents, eight cents profit. By this time their husbands were full of beer and
ordered a Peppermint Schnapps “for the road.” That was also twenty cents. The cash register rang like Santa’s sleigh bells the week before Christmas.

  Christmas Eve the stores all closed at five o’clock, and at six (or seven), so did the taverns.

  The Christmas Eve I’ll never forget Ma and Pa and Grandpa were tired out and a little tipsy from drinking so much Christmas cheer with their regulars. They just wanted to lock up downstairs and go to bed right after supper. That suited me fine because I was only seven years old and wanted to be sure Santa didn’t pass us by due to the fact our lights were on.

  I snuggled between my flannel sheets with Cat lying on my feet. I gave him a couple of bounces from under the covers just to let him know I knew he was there. I must have fallen asleep right away because I had been dreaming when I heard Cat growling and no longer felt his weight. I sat up and looked into the darkness, trying to locate him. “Get back here, Cat!” I called, but not too loud so as not to awaken Ma and Pa and Grandpa.

  Suddenly Cat’s growls became frantic cries and shrieks, and I could tell he was bouncing around the room like a golf ball dropped on cement. I got the light on in time to see him leap at the closed door with his claws out so far he stuck there. Then Pa yelled, “What the hell’s goin’ on in there?”

  I yelled back, “Cat’s goin’ nuts in here, Pa. I’m scared!

  Pretty soon I heard Ma yell, “I smell smoke!”

  And then Grandpa hollered, “Everybody get the hell outta here!”

  Pa flung open my door, and Cat and I beat it out of there. Ma was already downstairs with her flashlight beam piercing the smoke, talking on the telephone to the night watchman at the mill. “Blow the whistle, Hank! We got us a fire over here at Smitty’s.”

  It took the volunteer firefighters thirty-five minutes to get to the station, start up the truck, drive it the six blocks down Main Street, siren going full blast, and come busting in our front door. They had been drinking a little Christmas cheer, too. By that time Pa had found a smoldering cigarette between the stuffed horsehide seat and the back of one of our new booths and doused it with a pail of water.

  “Sorry about the fuss, boys,” he said to the volunteers in their big coats, pointed hats, and rubber boots. “How about a couple beers for your trouble?” They weren’t about to turn down a free beer on Christmas Eve, so they headed for the bar. Ma said I should stay downstairs with the men while she opened the windows upstairs to clear out the smoke smell.

  The party lasted about an hour, and when I got upstairs, Santa Claus had come, and all my presents were under the tree. Ma swore she didn’t see him, but for the life of me I couldn’t figure out how Santa got by Ma and did his work without her seeing him. Even Grandpa pleaded ignorance on that one.

  Well, that’s about the end of the Christmas memory, except for one more thing. On a Friday afternoon that spring, I was peeling potatoes on the back porch when Cat decided to take a stroll down the street. She came home a week later with a “belly full of kittens.”

  I was glad I hadn’t changed her name when I had the chance, because I probably would have named her Tommy or some other boy name.

  Sent To School

  THIS NEXT STORY picks up just about where the last one left off.

  When Cat came home “with a bellyful of kittens,” Pa said Cat could stay, but the kittens had to go, even though they came out of a good mouser.

  “One cat in the place is enough,” Pa declared; and although Ma took my part about keeping one with the markings of Cat, Pa stood his ground. “We got us a business here,” he said, “servin’ food Friday nights. All it takes is one hair in a fish fry to send our customers to Norman’s Bar. Be dammed if I’ll lose business over a cat, especially to a Lutheran.”

  Now, to understand Pa’s argument, you have to know that Pa could not tolerate a hair of any kind in his food. You also have to know that our small town was pretty much divided between Catholics and Lutherans in just about everything. They bickered in matters of which religion was the only true path to salvation to matters as small as who gave bigger portions at their ice cream socials, even though neither had ever been to the other’s to know for sure.

  Given a choice, Lutherans did business with Lutherans and Catholics with Catholics. Since most of the politicians, businessmen, and farmers who patronized Smitty’s Bar were Irish Catholic, Pa traded on the fact that Norman’s Bar at the other end of Main Street was owned and operated by a Lutheran.

  But Pa never revealed that he was not a Catholic. He wasn’t a Lutheran either; so, as Ma liked to point out to him, he was a “nothing” when it came to religious preference. Most people thought Pa was a Catholic because he was married to Ma, and “mixed marriages in northeastern Wisconsin in the 1930’s were rare birds.” Customers who went to early mass and didn’t see Pa there assumed he went to late mass and vice versa. Ma blamed Pa for being a hypocrite when he hid behind her religion for business reasons and, on more than one occasion, told him, “If you’re going to talk like a Catholic, join the Church.”

  You should probably have another little piece of history here. Pa was baptized a Lutheran, but the water must have run off his head too fast, because he never put much stock in Lutheranism or any other “ism.” He used to say, “You can’t trust a man with religion any more than you can trust one without it.” He loved Ma, but not enough to join her church; and Ma loved the Catholic church, but not enough to give up Pa for it. So Pa took some instructions from the parish priest and promised “to raise any children issuing from the marriage in the Catholic faith.” And when I issued from the marriage, there I was, half-Catholic, half-nothing and already promised to Our Lady of Lourdes Elementary School.

  So when it was time for me to get more education than I was getting from Grandpa and from eavesdropping on the men sitting at the bar, I was, at a very early age, handed over to the School Sisters of Notre Dame. Nothing at Smitty’s Bar had prepared me for my first encounter with women who had taken vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience so they could boss around little kids. After the first day, I told Pa I had made up my mind I wasn’t going back to that school. But the promise he made to Ma’s priest was still stuck in his head, and he un-made my mind before I could say, “Hail Mary.”

  One vow my teachers had not taken was tolerance. There was no slipping between the cracks with the School Sisters of Notre Dame. They added an eleventh commandment to God’s ten: “Obey the School Sisters of Notre Dame, for God and your parents have put them in charge.” But they and I were a good match. They had a lot to teach, and I had a lot to learn.

  One thing I learned was how to memorize. The Baltimore Catechism was central to my early religious instruction, and we were required to recite from memory answers to questions beginning with, “Who made me?” That was the easiest one, but I’m not sure Pa would have agreed with the answer. Anyway, the practice in memorizing the Baltimore Catechism in English proved to be good training for memorizing the Prayers at the Foot of the Altar in Latin when I was in the fourth grade. And that’s where this story goes next.

  Charles Dickens begins A Tale of Two Cities with the lines, “It was the best of times and the worst of times.” Well, that’s the way it was with me in the fourth grade, but the other way around. First of all, Grandpa had a stroke. When he got home from the hospital, he had some paralysis, and he started calling me by Pa’s name and forgetting to go to the toilet when he needed to. Ma said he was getting “funny in the head” and too much for her to handle. So he went off to the nursing home in Peshtigo, the one near his old farm.

  And then Cat died. Actually, she was killed by a family of raccoons that were hanging out in an old shack down by the river. She got out one night through a broken basement window and came home the next morning all bit up and smelling like raccoon. Pa felt her all over with soft hands and said, “She’s pretty banged up, son. You go off to school now, and I’ll take care of things here.” I never saw Cat again, never asked Pa just how he took care of �
��things,” and he never told me. Some things are better left unsaid, I guess.

  So there I was, a half-Catholic, half-nothing boy in an all Catholic school without Grandpa and Cat and no brothers or sisters. But that lonely-orphan feeling was soon to change. And what happened next made my year in fourth grade “the best of times.”

  Sister Mary Rose selected, trained and supervised the altar boys at Our Lady of Lourdes. She had been informed by my classroom teacher, Sister Lewis, that I was a good oral reader and dependable. “Richard,” Sister Rose asked, “would you like to join the Society of Acolytes in the Service of the Lord?” Now, who could turn down an invitation like that? Ma lit up with pride when I told her, and Pa just snorted, “Getting’ awful deep into that religion stuff.”

  I suppose learning to be an altar boy from Sister Mary Rose was a lot like boot camp in the military. In addition to memorizing the mass prayers in Latin, I had to learn how to light the altar candles, how to pour water and wine from cruets into the priest’s chalice, which priest preferred more wine than water, how to ring the bells at Consecration, how to hold a paten under the chin of a communicant without lacerating the larynx, how to fire up an incense briquette without burning the church down, and that the altar wine in the cupboard of the sacristy was for the priest only and was never without the eye of God upon it.

  Near the middle of November I was pronounced “ready to serve” by Sister Rose and was assigned a weekday low mass with an experienced partner, Timmy McNary, whose father was a good customer of Pa’s. My surplice wasn’t on straight, I rang the Consecration bells too long, nearly tripped on my cassock moving the priest’s missal from the right to the left side of the altar, and banged Gus Gustafson in the throat with the paten at the communion rail. Other than that, Sister said I did fine; and after Father left the sacristy, Timmy opened the wine cupboard, took a tiny sip out of one of the bottles, and poured in several drops of water to replace it. I declined his offer to “take one for yourself” on the grounds that I wouldn’t want to confess it on Saturday. Timmy said it was only a venial sin and therefore not worthy of taking Father’s time in the confessional, what with all the mortal sins he’d be dealing with. Timmy grew up to be a lawyer.