Sometimes in St. Louis a few of the gentlemen would stand outside singing, things that didn’t sound much like Christmas. Mrs. closed the house for the holiday, out of respect, she said, but also because she thought she might get shut down for good if she didn’t. She kept the shades drawn and the lights off so no one would come to the door. She made the girls live on cold beans and cheese sandwiches so no cooking smells could drift into the street. She took the radio into her own room and turned it so low they could barely hear it. Those men knew they could devil her half to death and she couldn’t even open the door to yell at them for it. So Christmas for the girls was just pinochle in the twilight of the drawn shades and then, when the sun went down, fighting and weeping and telling old stories everybody had heard and nobody believed except the ones who were just plain simple. Peg would be singing along with the dirty songs they could hear from the street sometimes, in that way she had of pretending she was in on the joke. Doane never said a word about Christmas, and Doll didn’t either. They were always just somewhere trying to get through the winter. It was better for Lila while she worked at the hotel, but she never really liked it. Now here she was with an old man dreaming about his baby and humming “Silent Night.” He was happier than he wanted to be. Someone knocked at the door with a plate of cookies, and when he brought it in, he said, “Gingerbread!” as if that was supposed to mean something to her. Somebody had put frosting buttons and collars and smiling mouths on them, as if they had the child there with them already.
She kept thinking, Wait. Don’t hope, just wait. She couldn’t help thinking how hard it would be for him to do these same things ever again if there happened to be no child. She had washed baptism off herself as well as she could. She had walked in the cold through those raggedy old cornfields that looked as though they had heard the first word of Judgment and couldn’t believe what they heard and couldn’t doubt it, either. She had thought a thousand times about the ferociousness of things so that it might not surprise her entirely when it showed itself again. She wished she could warn him, even though he knew about it, too, and dreamed about it. This child must know about it, because it lived there under her scared, wild heart. It might not want the world at all. She could show it things that might seem wonderful to her because it meant you could live so the world wouldn’t find you. Maybe heaven would be like that, with fields and fields of nettles and chicory, things anybody could take because nobody else would want them. Then if the thief on the cross went to heaven he could just thieve forever to his heart’s content, nobody the worse for it. She pictured him as the boy at the shack, nails through those big, dirty hands. Her heart felt like a weight that would burden the child. She thought to him, It won’t be that way for you. I promised your papa you’d know all the hymns.
The old man kept moving the lights around, trying to get them even. “My grandfather said this was paganism, bringing in greenery in the middle of winter, making fires. He said there were people in Maine when he was growing up who wouldn’t have a thing to do with it. It’s true, no one really knows anything about when Jesus was born, the time of year. But there’s just a certain amount of exuberance that people have to burn off now and then, Christians and pagans. I like the idea — Druids rejoicing just because they felt like it. We took up where they left off. That’s all the sense it has to make.” Even his hair was rosy in that light. “Spring would seem like a better time to celebrate a birth. But it’s even better for resurrection. Everything coming back to life. And Jesus did die sometime around the Passover,” talking away because she wasn’t talking at all. But if she just sat there watching, eating a cookie now and then, he was happy enough. He’d been alone for a long time.
He said, “A baby is born and the sky fills with angels. That seems about right. Calvin says every one of us has thousands of angels tending to us. There’s an old hymn about the human body—‘Strange that a harp of thousand strings should keep in tune so long.’ Because the body is so complicated. Lots of work for those angels. For Calvin, angels are the effective attention of God, not separate creatures.” And on he went.
Well, that’s all fine, she thought. But I know there’s more to it, and so do you. She just wished it was over and she had a child or no child and she could stop thinking how hard it would be for him to keep up all this talk if it came down to old Boughton again, struggling up those stairs to weep and pray and dampen a small brow, his bony self half a step from the grave and still without a sensible word to say about any of it. But then her husband smiled at her, and she could see in his face that he had had every one of these thoughts, that he knew everything about them. These thoughts were waiting and familiar, like a house where you knew you belonged though you just hated to go there and doubted once you were there you’d ever leave. He said, “You and I—” and shrugged.
