Such Sweet Thunder (35 page)

“An’ in Thy deeeeep an’ en’less sleep … the si-i — lunt staaaaars go by.”

“Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!” cried Miss Chapman.

“MERRY CHRIS’MAS!” rang around the room, mingling with the excited crinkle of red and green tissue paper filled with red and green candies wrapped in cellophane!

Rrrrrrrrr-ing!
rang the bell. And all the doors of all the rooms burst open, and the smiling laughing hilarious ring of MERRY CHRIS’MAS AN’ A HAPPY NEW YEAR! poured into the halls and echoed throughout every corner of the building. All under the stern glance of the thin-lipped white man with the writing underneath his picture that said:
George Washington!

“Don’t slam it!” cried Viola good-naturedly, as he burst up the stairs.

Boom!
slammed the door.

The cheerful atmosphere of the house flashed warm and rosy against his face. He laid his cap and coat on the chair and looked around with satisfaction. Fresh clean curtains stood out from the windows, and the Christmas wreaths shone through the curtains. The bright red and orange flowers in the front room rug caught his eye. He sniffed for the faint odor of ammonia water, remembering the foam it made when Rutherford had scrubbed it the way he did at the hotel. And now he saw the bed in the middle room. Actually, he had seen it the first thing, but had purposely saved it till last. It was covered with a pink silk spread, and a beautiful doll in a dress of ruffled
silk sat between the two pillows. And in the middle lay the tantalizing pile of Christmas packages!

“Don’t touch a thing!” Viola cried from the kitchen, and so he had to be contented with merely looking at them. At the same time he wondered:

“How did she
know?
”

The packages were wrapped in beautiful Christmas paper with cords and ribbons of gold and silver. Two were wrapped in plain brown paper and tied with stout cord string.

“Them’s for Gran’ma an’ Aunt Florence an’ Uncle Pope in California.”

“Unh,” cried Rutherford as he entered the kitchen a little while later. The wind had whipped the color into his face and his eyes flashed with pleasurable excitement. “The house looks pur-d-a-y!”

“Does look nice, don’t it?” Viola replied. They flashed secret signals to one another when their eyes met, and the sound of frying pork chops and yellow corn rose up and animated their glances with laughter. Amerigo laughed, too, with a secret silver joy that no longer took notice of the sealed-up chimney hole in the wall behind the stove.

And then supper was over. Talk died down. A fresh windy calmness settled over the houses and over the streets. The sound of the streetcar clanging down the alley rose on the wind, accompanied by occasional shouts and intermittent bursts of music up and down the alley. Doors flashed open and banged shut. And then silence. And the wind. And then the wind died down. And then all was quiet.…

“Lookie! lookie! lookie!” he cried the following afternoon, waving a dollar bill in the air, as Viola entered the door burdened with two large brown paper sacks filled with groceries. “I
told
you! I
told
you!”

“Did you thank ’er?” she asked breathlessly.

“Yes’m!”

“Close the door. My hands are freezin’! An’ don’ slam it!”

Boom!

“What you say?”

“Nothin’.” She set one of the heavy sacks on the drainboard and laid the other on the table. “Look!” she said, emptying its contents: big red apples streaked with red and orange color, with “knuckles” on top of a big pile. Viola put them in the big cut-glass punch bowl. On top of the apples she arranged a tier of flaming oranges with “S-U-N-K-I-S-T”
written on their skins in purple letters. And then came the layer of tangerines:

“Close your eyes an’ open your mouth!” she said. He shut his eyes tight and opened his mouth wide:

Frog eyes! Frog eyes!
he heard Leroy and Etta yelling, and then his cap flew through the air. He opened his eyes.

“Aw, you cheatin’!” cried Viola, holding on to the stem of a huge bunch of grapes that were only halfway out of the sack. “Just for that you don’ git none! Here.” She gave him the sack. “Some fell off you kin have
them
.” Staring at the enormous bunch of grapes, he let the sack fall, and grapes ran all over the floor.

“Muckle-head!” Viola laughed at him. “Serves you right!”

“Them’s the biggest grapes in the w-h-o-l-e w-o-r-l-d!”

“Them’s the biggest grapes in the w-h-o-l-e w-o-r-l-d!” she cried, mimicking him. “You forgot to say: A million of ’um!”

“Do I always say that?”

She laughed harder, threw her head back.

From California! he thought, as the laughter died down, hearing Rutherford exclaim:

“Cucumbers as big as watermelons — almost!”

“Aw — Rutherford!”
Viola had protested.

“No kiddin’, Babe! I seen ’um in a magazine!”

She arranged the grapes on top of the apples and oranges. He thought of Mrs. Crippa’s grapes in boxes piled higher than Rutherford’s head every year in the backyard. That’s where wine comes from. Troost Hill swooped down across the avenue, across the streetcar tracks, under the slanting shade of spreading trees in front of neat little gardens with trellises filled with vines burdened with grapes, all the way to Garrison Square to the school where he would have to go until he was a man and became president.

Next year! Just then a pungent flicker of yellow color flashed before his eyes.

“I don’ know what I’m gonna do with these bananas!” Viola was saying.

Next year!

“Aw — it ain’ no …”

And suddenly there was the clacking sound of nuts rattling in a sack, followed by a
“ping”
as they crashed against the glass bowl, which was not as deep as the punch bowl: black and English walnuts!

“We usta go down in the country,” he heard Viola saying, “to Aunt
Rose’s cousin Car’line’s, an’ gather ’um in gunnysacks, an’ take ’um home an’ keep ’um in the dark till they got ripe. An’ black! My hands’d be all stained for days!”

Hazelnuts tumbled out of another little sack.

Toodle-lum nuts! he giggled. Then pecans fell, and almonds. Finally there were no more nuts. Viola took the bowl into the front room and put it on the table next to the comfortable chair, under the approving eye of the bird-of-paradise. Amerigo followed her back into the kitchen where she put the bananas into a straw basket with the dates and figs, and then she started taking things from the other sack, which she placed on the drainboard.

The rich flurry of succulent color made him dizzy as he oscillated between the front room and the kitchen. That evening when he had bought the tree all the lights were on the tree he had bought and chosen all by himself, and the bright fuzzy cords of gold and silver hung from it, with a star at the very top, and a mound of snowflake snow at the foot to put the presents on, he sat on the floor in the front room of
his
house with
his
mother and father and thought: I hope it never changes!

“Chris’mas is now, ain’ it?” he asked his mother.

“How can it be now when Santa Claus ain’ even come yet?”

He allowed his eyes to wander up the wall behind the gas stove. It was clean! The flowered pattern stood out bright and clear. He could see the round, well-defined imprint of the covered chimney hole better than ever before. His glance fell to the floor upon which the crisscross pattern of light from the grating of the stove was reflected.

Where’ll I hang my stockin’? he wondered with a weary yawn. His eyelids closed slowly. He breathed heavily. The rich savory aroma of all the wondrous colors that were Christmas filled his lungs. He felt himself rising into the air, coming to rest upon something cool and clean. Then a cool blue-blackness covered him. He shivered and half opened his eyes.

“G’night, baby,” Viola was saying.

“Night, son,” said Rutherford.

The light flashed out. The middle room door closed quietly. He lay wide awake in the dark. Gradually he perceived a thin crack of rosy light, as wide as a coarse hair, cutting the door into two unequal parts. And now a faint, very faint silver light, filtering through the window, through the hole in the middle of the wreath. His eyes closed heavily upon it. A noise! The click of the bed lamp behind the closed door:

Zenobia, you may …

Christmas Eve morning was cold and frosty and everything that breathed made steam. The air tingled with the sound of bells, even the bell on John Henry’s bicycle. They filtered through the music, organ music, and the music of choirs singing because it was Jesus’ birthday a long time ago when people rode camels.

And he continued to think of Jesus who was born in an old barn with the mules and the chickens and the cows and things, and of Joseph who was His father, like Rutherford, and of Mary who was His mother, like Viola. They’re playing and singing about that because tomorrow it will be Christmas after Santa Claus comes, and then everybody will get a lot of presents and Dad will have to work half a day, and then we’ll eat the dinner with a reeeeeal big turkey like the Puritans and everything. At Sunday school they’ll have a big tree with baskets for the poor people and a present for everybody in the church on it. And then I’ll come home. And then Dad’ll come home with a lot a money that the people at the hotel give him.… And then we’ll eat, after T. C. and Miss Mabel come. And I’ll get the drumstick!

In the afternoon the turkey came in a big package, its long dead neck dangling down, its forked feet hanging limply, toenails dirty.

The afternoon was quiet, but he couldn’t go out and play because Viola said it was too cold, in spite of the fact that the sun shone brightly and hard, until the air, when he tried to look straight up from the porch, looked as though it were burning.

Toward evening Viola let him take the dime store star off the tree and put the one Old Jake had given him on the top branch.

It was dark when Rutherford came home, and they all ate, real quiet-like. After supper everybody put presents under the tree with a little card with a Santa Claus or a bunch of holly leaves with red berries on it and the name of the one it was for.

Then they watched the tree. Like it was the show. But it was prettier than the show. They played church music and classical music on the radio, and the
real
music when Louis Armstrong came on!

It got late. He laid his longest stockings — he had tried to borrow a pair of Viola’s, but she had said that it wasn’t the right thing to do — on the floor in front of the stove. He did not look at the chimney hole. Aunt Rose said it wouldn’t make no difference to Santa Claus.

“You kin wait till he comes,” Viola had said, “sit up close to the fire so you kin hear ’im when he comes through the hole — see the rain deer an’ the sled when they land on the roof.”

He sat by the stove and waited, and listened. He stared fixedly into the fire. Thoughts sprang pell-mell into his mind, melted like wax and ran down upon his heavy eyelids and forced his head to bend toward his chest. His chin crashed against his knee, and a sharp pain shot through his bottom lip. The leg nearest the fire began to burn. He rubbed it and scooted farther away from the stove. He stretched out his legs and braced himself against the wall and gritted his teeth. His eyes fell shut and his head again slumped over. A noise! His eyes sprang open. He looked up at the hole in the wall, at the Christmas tree in the front window. Viola was knitting quietly in the middle room. Rutherford was making his bed. He moved his lips weakly in protest, but they emitted no sound.

A wave of fear shot through him in the dark. He bolted upright in bed, threw off the covers, and stumbled over something hard — it made a rattling sound — stubbing his toe, as he scrambled out of bed. He could just discern a thin splinter of hoary blue light filtering through the window along the edge of the thing he had stumbled over. His heart pounded wildly. Maybe he came while I was asleep! Tears filled his eyes, as he clicked on the bird-of-paradise lamp. Tears coursed down his face: “LOOK! I TOLD YOU! I TOLD YOU!” He dashed into the middle room and climbed into the bed between Viola and Rutherford. “LOOK! LOOK!” he cried ecstatically until they stirred, yawned, and stretched themselves. An instant later they all stood admiring the bright crimson sheen on the Western Flyer.

“He came! He came!”

Meanwhile the Christmas tree burst into flame, and they fell upon their knees and ravaged the contents of the bright pretty packages. Merry Chris’mas! rang throughout the cold blue room. Rutherford tried on his new bathrobe and slippers, while Amerigo strapped his new roller skates to his bare feet and began scooting over the floor until he slipped and fell, drowning his pain in laughter. Viola tried on her new shoes, admired her new dress, and asked if Rutherford liked his tie and was satisfied with the cut of the collar of his shirt.

The stove flushed hot, and soon after that the warmth of the room
melted the hoar-blue light that advanced steadily through the window. And coffee bubbled in the coffeepot!

“Come on an’ git it!” Viola cried, and they sat down to Rutherford’s favorite breakfast: waffles and eggs and pig sausages and coffee.