The next time I stir, it’s morning and my bedroom is filled with a strange white light. Outside, every bush and tree, every limb and twig is laced with snow, a fairy wonderland. I throw on my robe and run downstairs to build up the fire. There’s eight inches of powder on the fence rail, and the flakes are still falling.
“Snow for Christmas! Sasha and Emma!” I exclaim, dancing around and rousing them into a frenzy. I dress quickly, pull on my boots, and go out to feed Moonlight, then take the dogs for a walk up the back hill to cut a small pine tree. I even fall backward in the snow, creating snow angels.
Last Christmas I didn’t have a tree, didn’t celebrate at all. Mrs. Kelly was dead. Ruben was dead. Nothing to celebrate, really. It was bitter cold, and the frozen ground was as bleak as my soul.
Now back in the house, I prop my small pine in a bucket of spring water and craft paper chains from colorful ads in the Ladies’ Home Journals I found in the attic. For icicles, I cut foot-long pieces of thick white yarn, and, since I don’t have a star, I attach one of Mrs. Kelly’s wooden angels at the top. My project takes most of the day.
“Don’t you think the tree looks nice?” I ask Emma and Sasha as they sprawl on the braided rug next to the heater stove. They tilt their heads back, considering; then Emma stands up and licks my hand. Buster, my calico, snoozing on the back of the davenport, is unimpressed.
Last winter, I cried all the time, cried because I missed Mrs. Kelly and Ruben, cried for Lawrence and my mother and father and all the others long gone to me. The tears could have filled a washtub. Even the pregnant women stopped coming around, not that I was in any shape to help them.
The rest of the season was a long hibernation, but in spring I woke up. Sally Feder, who’d given birth to twins with Mrs. Kelly when we first moved here, was pregnant again and asked me to help her. Sally was a big, calm woman with nice hips and utter sureness in her body, so I picked up my bruised heart, stuffed it back into my chest, and went back to work as a midwife.
Calamity
William MacIntosh was right. For three days it snows, a real blizzard, and the only time I step outside is to milk Moonlight. Then at noon today the sun comes out and, like the Count of Monte Cristo, I’m released from the dungeon, given back my life.
“Let’s go sledding, dogs!” I dress hurriedly, pull on my boots, coat, scarf, and mittens. In the barn I find a sheet of old corrugated tin and struggle through two feet of powder up the back hill.
“Hi-ho, world!” I shout. “I’m raised from the dead!” I shout some more. “Hi-ho. Hi-ho!” There’s an echo, and I’m just happy to hear a human voice, even if it is my own. “Hi-hooohhhh! Hi-hooohhhh!” Over and over again. The dogs leap up on me and then wallow in the deep white.
The first trip down the slope is awfully slow as I pack the run.
The next jaunt is better.
The third ride is really fun. I stand grinning at the top of the rise, panting from the exertion, my cheeks flushed, my nose running, my knit tam half off.
The fourth excursion is slick as slime.
On the fifth trip I rip my left calf open on the corner of the rusted metal.
“Damn!” I say to the dogs, not yet aware of what’s happened, thinking at first that I’ve only torn my thick wool trousers. Then the blood comes and finally the pain.
“Damn! Damn! Damn!” I curse some more, and the swearing seems to help.
“Oh, Emma, look what I’ve done!” Emma bounds over and licks my hand, then noses the blood, but I shoo her away. The barn is an eighth of a mile away, and beyond that is the house. Already I’m chilling and my damp clothes begin to freeze. If I could find a stick for a crutch it would help, but I’m out in a field without trees or bushes. I try first to move my knee, and though the pain brings tears to my eyes and I swear like a sailor, it still bends.
For the next hour I scoot, hobble, and limp toward the house. The dogs follow, and when I look back, they are licking at a trail of red in the pure white snow.
“ ’Twas the night before Christmas and all through the house” . . . blood and tears. The gash on my leg is as long as my thumb, with a flap of skin a quarter inch deep. A tight pressure bandage, made from a dish towel, stops the bleeding, and I consider sewing myself back together with the suture from my birth kit. But my satchel is upstairs and anyway, I don’t have the courage to stick a needle though my own flesh.
Since the sides of the wound come together, I pour a little soap and water into the tear, rinse it out, place a goldenseal compress across it to help prevent infection, and tie on a new bandage, hoping it will heal. Eventually I make myself a splint and hobble into the pantry to find some Bayer Aspirin. The bottle says to take two, but I take three, hoping it won’t kill me.
It is never fun to spend Christmas alone, despite what I told Bitsy, even if you’re a nonbeliever. Last year, the holiday passed in a fog. This year I have a tree, but with my injury I’m in no mood to celebrate.
I light the kerosene lamps, build up the fire, and, after I hobble out to feed the cow and chickens, lie back on the couch. The little pine in the corner looks so forlorn, all decked out like a streetwalker with nowhere to go. Emma and Sasha stare at me with big eyes. “Okay, guys, we can at least sing.” My mother’s old hymnal is in on the bookshelf with her Bible, just within reach.
“Any requests for your favorite carol?” I ask Emma. Sasha raises his eyebrows, but neither makes a comment. “Okay, then, we’ll sing them all.”
“O, come, all ye faithful,” I begin, “joyful and triumphant.” I’m not very joyful; in fact, I almost choke on my tears, remembering times my family stood around the piano, my mother playing and my father singing in his bright baritone with his head thrown back. “O, come ye, o, come ye to Beth-le-hem!” He wasn’t a gambler yet or much of a drinker. That came later.
Then there was the year with Lawrence when we strolled along the Lake Michigan docks on Christmas Eve caroling to anyone who would listen. “Come and behold Him, born the king of angels . . .”
Even in Pittsburgh, in the good years, when Mrs. Kelly and Nora and I lived together and half our friends were Jewish or agnostics, we sang the old carols, celebrating not so much the birth of Jesus as our collective hope for light in a dark world.
“It’s a pagan festival!” Ruben would laugh, but he knew all the words and sang louder than the lapsed Christians.