A Shiloh Christmas

by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor

  Even though the drought’s still on, Dad lets me use the outside pump for a couple seconds to cool down and clean up before Ma and the girls get home. I stick my whole head under—hold my mouth open and gulp the cold water while Dad works the pump handle. Then I pump for him a second or two.

  We sit down to Sunday dinner—Ma had a ham in the oven—and we dig in. All but Becky.

  “What’s the matter?” Dad asks her, as he shovels in the scalloped potatoes.

  Becky just turns her fork over and over, but I see her bottom lip tremble.

  “She’s worried about hell,” says Dara Lynn.

  We’re not allowed to say that word unless we’re talking about religion, which I guess we are.

  “Hell?” says Dad. “Is that what the pastor was preaching today?”

  “Everlasting torment,” says Dara Lynn, the drama queen, and there’s something bright and snappy about her eyes. She lowers her voice and imitates the preacher: “It’s real, brothers and sisters. You reject God, God rejects you. Think of eternal fire, eternal pain. . . .”

  “Dara Lynn,” says Ma in her stern voice.

  Becky suddenly bursts into tears and Ma says, “Oh, sweetheart, come here. . . .” And Becky slides down off her chair and buries her head in Ma’s lap.

  Ma gives Dara Lynn a look to hush her up, then glances over at Dad. “I miss Pastor Evans,” she says.

  “Why did he leave?” I ask, only vaguely remembering him. I weren’t that much older than Dara Lynn when he left.

  “He retired,” says Ma. “But he was so wise.”

  “I don’t want to burn up,” Becky whimpers.

  “You’re not going to burn up, sweetheart,” says Dad.

  “The way Pastor Dawes told it, the drought’s all our fault, and he made it sound like half of us were heading straight to hell,” says Dara Lynn.

  “Would you stop?” says Ma.

  But I want to get in my two cents before we change the subject. “Here’s what I don’t understand,” I say. “How are we supposed to forgive our enemies if God can’t forgive his? I wouldn’t want even my worst enemy to burn.”

  “Good point,” says Dad.

  “Pastor Evans only talked about God’s love,” says Ma. “You left his sermons wanting to be a kinder, better person.”

  “All Pastor Dawes talks about is sin,” says Dara Lynn. “I don’t know how Ruthie and her sister can stand him.”

  “Well, he’s not your daddy, so don’t worry about it,” Dad tells her, and then, to Ma, “Maybe we should think about leaving Becky home on Sundays.”

  But Becky raises up so fast her head bumps the table. Hell don’t seem to bother her as much as being left behind; she hates that worse than anything. “No! I want to go,” she says.

  “Maybe he’ll be preaching about something else next Sunday,” says Ma. “We’ll see.”

  I do my job of shoveling out the floor of the chicken coop. Then I ride over to Judd Travers’s place late that afternoon. Shiloh sees me get on my bike, he jumps up, ready to run along. But when I turn toward the bridge, he stops and watches while I cross. And when I reach the other side, he lopes back to the house.

  ’Bout a half mile more, I pull up to Judd’s yard. It don’t look as bad as people say his dad’s place looked, but Judd’s not too good about taking things to the junkyard either. There’s still the old Chevy he had before he bought his pickup—car hasn’t run for a couple years—a shed with a broken door, old tires. But I try not to judge people by their housekeeping.

  Judd’s sitting on the step to his trailer with a boot in his hand, putting a new lace in it. He sees me coming through the trees and grins.

  “Well, look who showed up,” he says. “Come to see me or my dogs?”

  “Both,” I tell him, grinning back, and I get off my bike. Already I can hear his two dogs yipping for me out back, jumping against the fence.

  “You better go play with ’em, and then I’ll give ’em some supper,” says Judd, picking up the second boot and poking a new lace in that.

  I go round to the gate and ease in careful so the dogs don’t get out. They leap up against me, nipping at each other in their excitement. Dara Lynn’s not the only one acts a little nuts just to get some attention.

  I pick up two sticks, throw them both at the same time so each of the dogs has something to fetch, and once they come running back, I play at trying to grab the sticks in their mouths. They run circles around me, while I chase them. Keep at it till I’m as sweaty as I was this morning helping Dad.

  The new metal awning is up over the back stoop and I sit in the shade, catching my breath. The dogs come nuzzling up to me, wanting to be stroked and petted. The spotted coon dog even rolls over on his back a bit and lets me rub his belly, and the white one—a terrier mix—sits and pants for a while, then cocks his head to one side so I can scratch behind his ear, then cocks his head the other way. Judd had ’em chained up for so long they got to acting fierce just to protect themselves, but now that we put a fence around the yard and they can run, they’ve settled down some.

  After a while Judd comes out with a bag of dry food and pours some in each of the dogs’ bowls. I’m glad to see he puts a good amount in each one, not starvation rations like it used to be, and got their water dishes full too. All Judd knew of taking care of a living creature was how his dad had cared for him, but he’s learning different.

  We sit on that back stoop together watching the dogs push their bowls around with their muzzles until they’ve finished. Finally they lay down on the ground next to us, nudging our legs from time to time in case we feel like chasing ’em around the yard some more.

  “How long you had this place, Judd?” I ask.

  “Don’t know how many years exactly. Used to belong to my pa—had a house and trailer on it. Lost ’em both in a fire, and he died the next week of a heart attack. My ma died the year before.”

  “Wow,” I say, and scratch the terrier behind his ears. “That’s a lot to happen all so close together. How old were you then?”

  “Fifteen . . . sixteen . . . thereabouts,” he says.

  “So how’d the fire start?” I ask.

  “Well . . . I was supposed to be burning some trash, but I was working on an old rowboat at the same time, trying to fix it up. Not paying good enough attention to the fire, and let it get away from me. My fault, but I didn’t mean it to happen. Not that I hadn’t imagined doing my dad that way a couple of times.”

  For a few seconds Judd just sits, slowly shaking his head back and forth. “He was the meanest cuss on the face of this earth, and he probably thought the same of me,” he says.

  It’s sure different now, sitting here talking like this, from when Judd used to run me off, I ever got near his place. Couldn’t tell back then if he was acting mean like his dogs, or if the dogs were copying him. Now the both of us sit here in the shade, looking out over the piece of yard as the sun’s ready to set.

  “Saw your ma in the Jeep this morning. Going to church with the girls, I suppose?” Judd says.

  “Yeah.” I’m watching the big ball of orange get swallowed up, bit by bit, by the woods around Judd’s property, and when there’s not even a sliver of sun left, the whole of the land stands out clear just before dusk sets in. “Preacher got Becky all scared about hell.”

  Judd grunts.

  “Do you believe in hell, Judd?” I ask.

  He don’t answer for a while. Then he leans forward and rests his arms on his knees. Spits. “If there’s a hell,” he says, “I think it’s what people make for themselves while they’re living. Don’t have to die to find that out.”

  That’s about the wisest thing I ever heard coming out of Judd’s mouth. Everything coming from Pastor Dawes, it seems, does a good job of stirring folks up. But maybe that’s what a preacher’s supposed to do, I don’t know.

  By October, it rains only once for about fifteen minutes, a warm Saturday afternoon. The second that sky clouds up, Ma has us three kids runn
ing outside with pots and buckets to catch what water we can. And when the rain begins in earnest, Ma and me and the girls all give a loud holler, and we stand right out there in the yard, faces up to the sky, just drinking it in.

  Ma’s reaching up with her arms, whirling herself slowly around and around like a dancer, her hair all wet down to her shoulders. I just plain lie down in the grass and let the rain pepper my whole body.

  Shiloh don’t like it much—runs up on the back porch—but when he sees Dara Lynn and Becky whooping it up, stomping in every little place the water’s collecting, mud squishing up between their bare toes, he comes back out and runs around too. Comes over and tries to nudge me to get up. Just what we need—a wet dog smell in the house—but we don’t care.

  But then Ma makes Dara Lynn and Becky and me strip down to our underwear and soap up. Now if that isn’t the most embarrassingly pitiful thing we ever done.

  “Marty, the only one to see you besides us is God,” Ma says, but I step behind the shed anyways. The girls are already squealin’ about bein’ outside in their underpants. We shampoo our hair while we’re at it, but then the rain quits and I don’t know if I got all the soap out or not. Ma checks the rain barrel under the downspout, and it’s got only an inch of water in it. Still, there’s a quarter inch in the pots and pans, and we’ll save every little bit.

  At school on Monday, I’m not the only one looks scruffy. Easy to tell who has city water and which of us depends on a well, tryin’ hard to preserve it.

  In English class, we draw names to see who we’re going to write a biography about. I wish I could get David’s and he could get mine. We’d write some really crazy things about each other. I know the one name I don’t want to get, and when I reach in the box that Mr. Kelly passes round and pull out a slip of paper, that’s exactly the name I get: Rachel Dawes.

  I complain to David at lunchtime.

  “She rides our bus and hasn’t said one single solitary word to me since school started,” I say.

  “You ever said one single solitary word to her?” he asks.

  “No, because I’ve never not once seen her smile.”

  “Maybe she’s got bad teeth,” says David.

  “You even try to get near her here at school, she turns away.”

  “Go to her house, then!” David says. “Some people are a lot more friendly at home than they are at school. She probably just doesn’t want a boy talking to her.”

  If she didn’t want a boy talking to her at school, she probably don’t want him coming by at home neither. Still, it was an assignment. Someone had to do it.

  I put it off for a whole week. Adam Frisk drew my name, and he’s already started writing about me. What I really want to do is start work on a straw man to sit in that Frankenstein chair, get him all fixed up for Halloween. Finally I tell myself I can’t do that till I’ve interviewed Rachel and get enough for five hundred words. So on Friday after school, I look up the Dawes on our church address list and head out on my bike. I find the road where they live, make the turn, and start looking for their name on the mailboxes.

  Finally, around a bend, there it is—an old two-story farmhouse, appears to be—field on both sides of it, a stand of trees on the northwest border to shield it from wind in the winter. No porch, just a small stoop, and every blind in every window is pulled exactly halfway down. Bet I could measure with a yardstick, and they’d all be exactly the same.

  I been rehearsing what I’m going to say when she opens the door: Hi, Rachel. I drew your name in English class and . . . No. Never said one word to her up until now, so I got to start out with something more polite. Hi, Rachel. Sorry I didn’t get around to this before, but . . .

  No. That makes me look weak. Even saw her a couple times in church on Sunday and never said hi then, and neither did she.

  Nobody comes at my first knock. Maybe it wasn’t loud enough. So I bang real hard. And suddenly the door opens and there’s the preacher looking down at me, his glasses on the end of his nose. He’s got a pen in one hand, a sheet of paper in the other, and I can tell by his face he don’t remember me from church—haven’t been there enough, I guess.

  “Yes?” he says.

  “Is . . . Rachel home?” I bleat out. Sound like a sheep.

  “Why do you want to see her?” he says.

  “Uh . . . I come to interview her for school,” I tell him.

  “Why is that?” the preacher asks, and I can tell right off he don’t want any boys talking to his daughter.

  Why is what? I wonder, and I shrug. “To write about her for English,” I say, and then I see that Rachel don’t tell him much about school.

  “I’m afraid Rachel’s busy now. Excuse me,” the preacher says, and closes the door. Softly. But in my face.

  six

  RIDING TO SCHOOL ON MONDAY, I notice signs Popping up on people’s lawns—red and blue, red and white, some of them red, white, and blue. Must be another election coming up, I figure. I don’t pay much mind to elections unless it’s national; then, if we elect a new president and vice president, I got two more names to memorize for history.

  This time it’s a local election, Ma says, and one of the things people will be voting for is whether the county should invest in new, up-to-date science books. If you read some of the signs, though, you’d think God was on the ballot. One sign says THE BIBLE’S NEVER OUT OF DATE. VOTE NO! And sure enough, five days later, there’s a billboard down on Route 2 saying IT’S RIGHT TO WANT THE BEST FOR OUR CHILDREN! VOTE YES ON QUESTION 4.

  And then, coming home from school, going the other way, I see a sign along the sidewalk, A VOTE FOR GRIDLEY IS A VOTE FOR GOD.

  Sure would like to know if God takes sides. Grandma Slater, Ma’s mom, when she was alive, stayed out of politics completely and put it all in God’s hands. On judgment day, she told us, God divides the sheep from the goats, that’s all we should be worrying about. But that got me to thinking that if all the people in the world were lined up to be judged, it was going to be a mighty long time before lunch. Guess I was just hungry.

  Dad strained his back working on the new addition, so this Sunday he takes a break and comes to church with us. Says it’s time he met the preacher, anyway.

  Find out they’ve started a little Sunday school in the basement for children under seven, so I figure it wasn’t just Becky got upset over Pastor Dawes’s sermon the week before. Becky don’t want to go to it, though—wants to sit with us, but since they’re giving out Jesus sticker books, she finally goes downstairs. So it’s Dara Lynn sitting between our dad and mama, and she has the smile of a saint on her face.

  To the preacher’s credit, he don’t preach politics neither. First off, he’s new around here, so he don’t know Gridley or any of the other people on the ballot. But he sure knows about sin, and this morning he’s on his favorite topic. I tell you, that man has 150 ways you can sin without even thinkin’ about it.

  “Make no mistake,” he says, leaning forward, hands holding tight to both sides of the pulpit, “God knows all your excuses. He knows how you can slide right into sin while telling yourself you’re only human. . . .”

  Then he looks square down at our faces, and his eyes travel from one row to the next. “How many of us ever looked at a neighbor’s new car and wished it was ours? How many of us spend some time with the sick or dying and make sure our neighbors hear about it? How many of us have let our eyes wander over to someone else’s paper for an answer on a test?”

  Now his voice gets louder: “You may love God like you should, but do you fear him like you should? Do you imagine for one moment he can’t read the most private thoughts that ever passed through your head?

  “Brothers and sisters, we may already be worshipping the wrong god, the god of money”—and he brings his fist down hard on the pulpit, BANG!—“the god of power”—another bang—“the god of self-conceit”—BANG!

  Dara Lynn likes all the noise, I can tell. I see her slide a small smile up toward Dad, but h
e don’t take his eyes off the preacher.

  When he ends his sermon, Pastor Dawes says we’ve got to be the Lord’s soldiers. We’ve got to be his army, fighting sin wherever we see it—in ourselves, our families, our neighbors, and our community. . . .

  We sing “Stand Up, Stand Up for Jesus,” Mrs. Maxwell playing the piano, and the service is over.

  Ma’s already made friends with the preacher’s wife, and as people make their way up the aisle, she and Mrs. Dawes are talking about the weather. Everyone’s praying for rain again. That one short rain we had was the only one we’ve had in months.

  Mrs. Dawes is a thin woman, and probably a whole foot shorter than her husband. A whole lot quieter, too; not pretty, not plain—tired-looking, is how I’d describe her. And the little purple flowers on her gray dress don’t do a whole lot to brighten her up.

  “Judith, this is my husband, Ray,” Ma tells her. Mrs. Dawes puts out her hand, and Dad shakes it.

  “Good to meet you,” he says. “Your family beginning to feel settled here?”

  “Oh, yes. We’re used to moving,” Mrs. Dawes says. “Always hard on the girls, though,” and she makes this little gesture toward Rachel, who’s standing four feet away, head turned toward the windows. Dara Lynn and Ruthie are already whispering little secrets to each other as they inch up the aisle with the rest of us.

  “Our younger daughters ride the bus together,” Ma says. “We hear a lot about your Ruthie.”

  “Well”—Mrs. Dawes moves two steps forward, stops again—“she’s a regular little chatterbox. . . .”

  I’m thinking this would be a good time to tell Rachel I got her name for a biography, but she’s workin’ so hard to keep her distance that I sort of wimp out. Not due till Christmas anyhow.

  In the hallway, Becky comes scrambling up the stairs from below, waving her sticker book, and Ma grabs her hand so she won’t push her way out through the door.