“I heard tell of him,” said Aunt Emma. “Folks said he was a little off.”
“My father?” Joan gasped.
“Nothing but his age and all, I reckon,” said Aunt Emma placatingly, and Joan saw this woman did not mean to be unkind. But still she was stabbed. So people had spoken of her father!
There was the dark parlor, where they never went, not even on Christmas Day. … But then, what was Christmas in this house of silence? There was a tree at the Sunday school in Chipping Corners on Christmas Eve. Christmas fell that year on a Sunday and the horses must take them, Bart’s father said, to what was no better than a merrymaking on the Sabbath. But it was not so very merry. The tree was a slightly crooked pine, sparsely scattered with tinsel from a ten-cent store. But there was a star, a white paper star, stitched around the edges with tinsel, and Bart’s father read the story of the star, and the children came forward, the pinched frightened-looking farm children who worked early and late at chores, and the smug little children of small village storekeepers, with here and there among them the angelic face of a child who would never belong anywhere. Looking at one of these, a little brown-haired girl, staring at the few candles upon the tree, dreaming them into hundreds, Joan saw herself. She watched the little girl, smiling, catching from the child’s eyes a solitary gleam of Christmas. She made her way to the little girl’s side and said, “Merry Christmas!” But the words were strange to the child. She did not know the greeting. She pointed a thin little finger at the tree and cried out, “That there one is a-fallin’!” She drew close while Joan straightened the candle, and stared on, lonely and entranced.
So they came back to the farmhouse. They sat down to a better dinner than usual — roast pork and baked apples, and for dessert a bread pudding with raisins. She had made little gifts. She took some of her money and spent it, not for them, but for Christmas — wool for a pair of slippers she crocheted for the father, silk for a knitted green tie for Sam, and a brown one for Bart, and for the mother a handkerchief with a bit of lace at the edge.
She had wrapped the gifts in bright paper and put them on the table. They shone gaily red on the white cotton cloth, but no one spoke or seemed to see them, and at last she could not keep from saying, “Aren’t you going to look at your presents?” Then, one by one, clumsily, shyly, almost unwillingly, they took the packages and opened them, all except the father, who left his unopened. The mother said, “I don’t know how to thank you, I’m sure.”
Sam said, grinning at her intimately, “Green’s my girl’s favorite color. If it had been blue now, I’d have given it back to you.”
Bart said, “Is that what you’ve been doing every night on the sly, sitting up when you ought to have been in bed!”
The father, because the unopened package was so large upon the table, put it on the floor under his chair. After he had eaten he took it with him and went upstairs and when he came down he wore the slippers.
“Do they fit you?” she asked, wistfully.
“A mite short, but I can wear them,” he answered.
Without speaking she went upstairs to the cold bedroom and shut the door and sat by the window and looked over the gray hills. A year ago today they had gathered in the pine-scented church where her mother lay dead under the Christmas star. It was very long ago. Her mother was locked away into the earth, into all that was gone forever.
That little girl, dreaming the few candles into hundreds upon the scanty Christmas tree this morning in the bare little church!
She could not keep down her heart, after all. It would come up like a bubble in a breeze whenever she forgot. And she forgot very often. She forgot in the joy of snow. There was the old childish rush of pleasure over snow, the soft wide whiteness of the new earth. She put on her boots and her old red leather coat and plowed through the woods in an ecstasy. Then the universe shrank small and warm about her and she was not lonely, not for this moment. And the snow melted and underneath were small green plants, leafing and sprouting and ready. In the afternoons, when the work was over, there were waiting for her the hidden rosy buds of arbutus and the pearly whiteness of bloodroot. She could bear the loneliness in the house, thinking of all that was waiting for her in the intimacy of the earth over which she wandered alone and was not lonely. She took pleasure in small things, small flowers and small curious stones and in little dells. She discovered valleys, named them to herself: “My dell where I found the dogtooth violets”; “My pool—” But she avoided the pale tremendous largeness of earth and sky at dawn, and twilight, and at night she drew the shades because the sky was so wide and glittering with the cold far stars.
So the year passed, and another Christmas, and she gathered to herself all she could possess to fill her emptiness.
And she still had something of her own to put into her emptiness. Rose and Francis were alive. They were some where in the world and so they belonged to her. Early in the new year Rose wrote from across the seas that she was soon to have a baby. When the letter came, Joan put her hand to her lips to press them shut. She must have her part in this. She wanted Rose’s baby, too. And Rose must come home now. She could come here — this was her home and Rose could come to it and have her baby.
She planned quickly. It was a good place to have a baby, quiet and clean; and there were the hills. It would be spring when the baby was born and she could set a basket out under the trees. She curved her arms, feeling Rose’s baby in them. Rose wouldn’t know how to take care of a baby. She laughed aloud — Rose with a baby! Someone must be told. She ran to find Bart. He was in the field, building a stone wall.
“Rose is going to have a baby,” she cried, waving the thin foreign sheets at him. “I must write to her to come home—”
He went on lifting the stones. There was this stretch of wall and another before sundown. “You know how Ma is,” he said.
“You mean — she wouldn’t want Rose?”
He laid a stone in silence before he spoke. “She always took kids hard,” he said heavily. There were some women who came out into the fields and helped, but Joan didn’t seem to think of it. Well, no one should say he wasn’t good to her. “We never could have the other kids home after school much,” he went on. “She always took them as work. She was always afraid of the muss they might make in the house.”
Something in his voice made her suddenly see Bart, a small overworked boy with no chance to play. She looked at him for the first time, instantly moved by the little child she saw.
“Didn’t she ever invite any children over — to a party or something?”
“We never had a party,” he said slowly, striking a rough stone into pieces. “She was afraid of the trouble, and he was afraid of our learning something sinful.”
“Didn’t anyone ever invite you?” she asked, troubled. When she had been a child a party was nothing — her mother would cry in gaiety. “Let’s have a party!” And almost at once there was a party, the house full of noisy children, prancing about, dressed up, an orchestra blowing on combs and drumming on tin pans.
“You don’t keep getting asked if you never ask,” said Bart.
… In the kitchen she said to the stout pale woman sitting eternally by the kitchen stove, “My sister Rose is going to have a baby — I’m so happy!”
Bart’s mother sighed. “Children are a lot of trouble. They mess the house up.”
“Weren’t you glad when your children were born?” Joan asked, angry for that little boy.
“They’re good,” she answered. “They’ve always been good boys. But they’ve made work. I got so I just couldn’t make pie for them. It seemed too much to work for a long time and roll out the pie and see them eat it in a few minutes as quick as though they was drinking milk. I gave up making pie in their teens. Three men can eat up a whole pie at once and your work’s gone for nothing, seems like. It didn’t seem necessary.”