Christmas After All Read online

  Clem is a mess. She broke down and told me tonight that Olive Winslow’s father has left their family. Just up and left. He had lost his job and the Hoosier Bank that closed had most of their savings in it. She hadn’t wanted to say anything but when she heard the news about Mr. Otis she just had to tell somebody. Gwen is out in the sunroom in the dark talking to Mama. They don’t even have a light on. It’s just all shadowy. On the wall of the sunroom Mama had a painting student from the John Herron Art School come and make a mural of Greek goddesses holding baskets of fruit. But you can’t see the goddesses or the fruit now. Just two hunched figures in the dark.

  7:30 P.M.

  Lady is not a mess. She is putting on her lipstick and powdering her nose and asked me to look in that tangle of an underwear drawer of hers for a garter. Nothing stops Lady from going out. “Where are you going?” I ask nastily. Lady suddenly tucks her lips in and looks a bit shamefaced. But then she perks right up. Lady cannot endure sadness or anything like it for more than a second or two.

  “Where are we going?” she says.

  “We?” I ask.

  “Yes, you, me, and Willie Faye and Ozzie are going to the movies.”

  “What are we going to see?”

  “Red Dust with Clark Gable and Jean Harlow.”

  I am just thankful that it is not Anna Christie with Greta Garbo. Lady has seen that movie eight times! I don’t think Ozzie will ever agree to see this Red Dust thing. Ozzie hates kissy-face movies, as he calls them. His tastes are strictly horror.

  Ozzie agrees to go, and so does Willie Faye.

  December 4, 1932

  Just after supper — and how could I have eaten knowing this!

  Willie Faye has seen a dead body! I’ve never known any kid who has seen an actual dead body, and the one Willie Faye saw was her own mother’s! So now I know why she froze up when Mr. Otis shot himself. Willie Faye not only saw her mother’s dead body but LIVED with it for two whole days before the neighbors came and got the coroner. Is that not the limit? I wanted to ask her all sorts of questions like, Did her mother’s body start to change color or begin to smell? Did she touch it? But I knew that would be, as Gwen says, “extremely insensitive.” I was very glad that Ozzie wasn’t around because he would have asked.

  Willie Faye said that finally after two days, the neigh­bors came by, the ones who went to California in the jalopy, and that they went back and got the coroner from Heart’s Bend, which was more than fifteen miles away. The coroner came in his special car for picking up dead bodies. Willie Faye said she would have buried the body herself but she couldn’t lift it, and she was afraid that she wouldn’t have the strength to dig deep enough and that the coyotes would get it, or that the dust storms would just blow it right out of the grave.

  Mama just poked her head in and said we should be doing our homework!

  After sort of doing our homework

  I can’t imagine living where Willie Faye did out there in Heart’s Bend, Texas. She told me some more about it. The town itself has only nine buildings: a jail, a saloon, a feed store, a dry goods store, the coroner’s house, the sheriff’s house, and three others that were empty. Oh, yes, there had been a train depot but then the train stopped going there. She said nobody ever wanted to get off in Heart’s Bend, and nobody from Heart’s Bend ever went anyplace.

  She told me the story about the first time the train, the Lone Star, just went on through and never stopped. It was kind of sad because before that she would always try to go down to the depot to watch the Lone Star on Saturdays when her parents went to town. She said she loved watching it pull into the depot. The train was silver and sleek. It reminded her of a shooting star, it was so fast looking. The conductor would get off the train. She said he was the only man in Texas who didn’t wear overalls or denim britches and a cowboy hat. No, he wore a black suit with a vest under the jacket and he had a gleaming gold chain that stretched across the vest with a big watch on it. On his head he wore a boxy little hat with a patent leather bill and there was gold braid on the hat.

  Willie Faye showed me a picture she had drawn of the conductor and the train. It was really good. Anyhow, one Saturday she was down there and the Lone Star just shot right through. Willie Faye said it didn’t even slow down. It just raced on, and the noise of its roar became dimmer and dimmer and finally vanished. She felt that it was as if Heart’s Bend didn’t even exist anymore. And she never saw the conductor again.

  Mama has come back in to check on us. She heard us talking. We have to go back to pretending to be doing homework. That’s why I am writing all this down now. It looks like I am doing homework. But I want to hear more about Heart’s Bend. Will do three math problems, then ask Willie Faye to tell me more.

  Three math problems later

  (I did them all wrong. I don’t even care. Willie Faye’s story is more interesting than common denominators.)

  When Willie Faye started talking again she told me the most curious thing. She said that about a month after the last time the train stopped in Heart’s Bend, a terrible dust storm came through and scoured off the B from the signpost for the town. She said it seemed kind of like the town had just given up on itself because now the sign read Heart’s end.

  We were really quiet for a while after she told me that. I didn’t know what to say. Then she began telling me a few other things. And I started to realize how really little we knew about Willie Faye. It was just like she and Tumbleweed blew in here a week ago and we never really found out about her. I mean it’s like she just got caught up in our own Swift family whirly wind. She said that she has never in her life been in a place like our house or met people like us. She said we were “a wonder.” She said she can’t imagine Martians, even if they are green, being any stranger than Lady.

  Willie Faye said she never knew people could have so many “gol-darned opinions about things.” She said that the other evening when we were talking about Kate Smith’s hairdo not looking good on Mama that we talked for more than ten minutes. And that after the movie we talked at least another ten about Clark Gable’s dimples and Jean Harlow’s hair. So I asked her if she was bored with all this talk. And she sat bolt upright in bed. “Bored!” she said. “You must be plumb nuts. You’re just as good as the movies.” And she had never seen a movie, either, before yesterday.

  I think it was very quiet in Willie Faye’s family. She was the only child. And it was very empty out there in Texas. She said there was nothing but sky and scrubland that used to be good for raising cotton and cattle but not anymore. Her father had died the year before her mother but she hadn’t seen his body. They had a little bit of land on which they raised cotton and had a few cows and chickens and pigs. I guess that’s why she’s good with our chickens. She said if Jackie were sick or something she could kill the chickens for us. It was easy and didn’t take much strength. She said what took strength was chopping cotton and butchering cattle. They had mostly milk cows but their cows had almost given up on making milk because it hadn’t rained in so long and cows need green grass for milk. She said there weren’t even any trees out there.

  Then she asked me something odd. She asked about the jars on the top pantry shelf. She said, “Are those peaches?” And I told her yes. And she said something that struck me so peculiar. She said, “I’ve heard of peaches.” Now, can you imagine that — “hearing” about peaches? It struck me as so queer — hearing about peaches. So then I asked her if she would like to try eating one instead of just hearing about it. And she thought a little bit and said, “Oh, you don’t have to go to that trouble.”

  I told her it was no trouble. But she seemed kind of shy about trying it. So I said, “Well, how would you like to go downstairs and just look at them, then make up your mind?” So right now we’re going to wait a few more minutes until we’re sure everyone is asleep. Then we’ll go downstairs and look at the peaches. Lady just stirred in her bed but she can sleep through anything.

  December 5, 1932 — Dawn!
>
  Willie Faye and I have stayed up all night! I have never done that in all my life. It’s sort of wonderful. You feel as if you have slipped in an extra day of life while the rest of the world was asleep. After we got downstairs in the pantry to look at the peaches we just weren’t tired, so we thought, Why go back to bed? Let’s just stay up. It’s been really fun, but first I have to tell you about the peaches and what we did. We got down there in the pantry and outside it had snowed, a lot more than we ever thought. The moon reflecting off all that snow lit up the pantry with a real nice wintry glow, and those peaches that Mama put up last summer just gleamed like dozens of little suns in their glass jars. I convinced Willie Faye that she should try one. So I climbed up on the counter and got a jar. Then I got this crazy idea. It was so beautiful outside. The night was all polka-dotty with falling snow. So I said, “How about we put our coats over our pajamas and get some galoshes out of the closet and eat our peaches on the back steps?” Sometimes it’s fun to do something just plain nutty. Willie Faye thought that was a terrific idea. So we did.

  I can’t describe how lovely it was out there in all this snowy silence. The neighborhood so very quiet and just the click of our spoons on our dishes and the peaches in their thick sweet syrup tasting better than ever. I told Willie Faye how every summer we would go to Brown County, south of Indianapolis, where friends of Mama and Papa’s have a farm. They let us pick the peaches in their orchard and we picnic. There is a pond nearby for swimming. Yes, I told her all this on the snowy back steps. And the snow was so clean and white that after we finished our peaches we scooped some snow up with our spoons and stirred it in with the leftover syrup in our bowls. It was the best!

  This has been a very strange weekend. I mean, it starts off with Mr. Otis blasting his head off with a shotgun and then Willie Faye gets to see her first movie and eat her first peach. And then I learn about her peculiar little town that lost the B out of its name and her poor dead mother. It seems as if Willie Faye and I have done a lifetime of living just in the last two days. Well, it’s back to school in three hours!

  After school

  I’ve graduated from being a sheep to a shepherd in the Christmas pageant. I’m supposed to be pleased. Ho! Ho! Ho! as Santa would say. Willie Faye, however, has a great part. She’s an angel. The littlest angel. They’re going to have to cut down the wings for her. She is so excited. Here is another thing that Willie Faye has never done: worn a costume! I said, “Didn’t you ever go trick-or-treating at Halloween?” Then I remembered that she lived fifteen miles out of town and that the nearest neighbors were eight miles away. So I guess Heart’s Bend would not be the best trick-or-treating territory.

  Lucy Meyers and Betty Hodges are shepherds, too, so that makes it more fun. We all walked partway home from school together. We passed the Otis’s house and saw cars lined up and people paying calls. The funeral is tomorrow. Bernadette won’t be back in school until after Christmas. Martine Vontill informed us of this in her usual stuck-up, snotty way and told us that she is in charge of getting Bernadette’s homework to her and helping her keep up.

  We took a real ziggy-zaggy way home so we could see what folks are putting up for Christmas decorations. The Tarkingtons always do it up grand, and sure enough, we saw two colored men outside stringing up lights and Mr. Booth Tarkington himself directing them in his galoshes and overcoat. I decided to stop and say hello. I had met him once and I thought, Wouldn’t this be just the tops if Willie Faye could meet him. So I called out, “Mr. Tarkington, it’s me, Minerva Swift, Sam and Belle’s daughter. Your house sure is going to look pretty.”

  Well, would you believe it, the greatest living author in America came right down across his lawn to say hello. I introduced Willie Faye. I told him her whole story — well, of course not her whole story, not about her mother’s dead body. But I did tell him about how she came here with her cat from Heart’s Bend and how she had never seen a city like Indianapolis before because Heart’s Bend had only nine buildings and was missing the B on its sign. He seemed genuinely taken by Willie Faye and then he said something kind of curious. He said, “You might be a writer someday, Miss Minerva.” And I said, “Why’s that, Mr. Tarkington?” And he said, “Only a writer would comment on a town missing a letter on its signpost, and what a letter to miss in this case!” Well, that just about made my day. But of course it means that Willie Faye could be a writer, too, because after all, she is the one who first told me about it.

  When we got home Ozzie was in an uproar about two things — one good, one bad. The good thing is that the famous German scientist Albert Einstein is going to be allowed to live in America. It was in the newspaper. Clem of course is an expert on all this. She says it’s because of this new fellow in Germany, Adolf Hitler, and his National Socialist German Workers’ party, which is gaining strength all the time in elections. They are against Jewish people. Ozzie says that Albert Einstein is the smartest man on earth. Then he’s off and running. “He invented the theory of special relativity and then he figured out that light exists and travels in little packets. . . .” I don’t really understand any of this but I’m used to Ozzie blathering on about particles and motion. However, I now see all this from Willie Faye’s point of view. Ozzie is talking a mile a minute about things that she had never even thought about, like the speed of light. So that’s the good thing that has Ozzie in an uproar. The bad thing is that while we were watching Red Dust, “that stupid old kissy-face movie,” Ozzie found out that Freaks was playing at another theater. In this movie a woman is transformed into a half-human, half-chicken creature, and then there is another creature called The Living Torso. Ozzie is determined to see it this weekend.

  December 6, 1932

  Holy smokes. Lady is in big trouble. She was over at Letty Cohen’s last night and she bleached her hair to look like Jean Harlow. Mama is furious and says Tudor Hall will kick her out. She looks pretty funny going off to school this morning in her uniform. Somehow platinum blond hair doesn’t go with a blue serge uniform and oxford shoes.

  After school

  Lady is even in bigger trouble — more than just the blond hair. First of all she got a D+ on her Latin test. Why do they even bother with a plus when it’s a D? Anyway, when Miss Crowe handed her the test, Lady said, supposedly under her breath, “Just gimme a viskey, ginger ale on the side, and don’t be stingy, baby.” That’s what Greta Garbo says in the movie Anna Christie. Lady has such a sassy mouth and she can’t resist being the class clown. She said everybody just fell to pieces laughing, except for Miss Crowe. Mama has to go in for a talk with the headmistress.

  Papa said that if Willie Faye and I finish our homework he will take us downtown to look at the Ayres department store Christmas angel and all the store decorations. But he said that Lady can’t go and that she has to stay home and take that “infernal color” out of her hair and put back in her regular color. I haven’t heard Papa so angry since the time I said that the hot dog au gratin made me sick to even look at.

  Later

  We had so much fun downtown. We took the trolley and it seemed as if everyone on it was going down to see the decorations. There were a lot of jokes about how it doesn’t cost anything to look. I guess everyone was feeling like us that there would not be much we could afford to buy. Papa seemed more like his old self. All the stores were bright and gay. And I think the Christmas angel on top of the Ayres clock looks exactly like Willie Faye. Even Papa thought so. We saw the prettiest things in the store. Papa saw a dress I know he would have loved to buy for Mama. It was in the window at Strauss’s. He said, “Now, doesn’t that dress have a lot of the go-to-the-dickens about it.” “Go­to-the-dickens” is one of Papa’s favorite expressions. I haven’t heard him say it in a long time.

  I saw a snappy plaid tie that I would have loved to buy for Papa. But it was two dollars! And the dress that Papa liked was twelve!! “I wish you could buy that for Mama,” I said.

  “I wish I could, too, sweetheart, but you kn
ow what your mama would say. She’d say, ‘Sam, there are better ways to spend that money than hanging a pretty dress on me.’”

  The best part of the trip was the Chocolate Girls. Yes, there were these pretty young ladies dressed up in dainty white ruffled caps and aprons, and they were passing out a new chocolate treat, for free, that is being made by the Walter Baker Chocolate Company. We each had two. They were scrumptious.

  The only not so good parts of the trip were when we passed the Hoosier Bank and Trust. All closed up. Papa shook his head. I think Greenhandle’s did a lot of banking business through the Hoosier Bank and Trust and Papa knows a lot of the bank officers. So he was probably thinking about them being out of work. Mr. Mertz was the bank president and a very important man in Indianapolis. Mama always said his suits were beautifully tailored. And he always wore a handsome watch chain across his vest. Now, what happens to a really important man with fine suits and a gold watch chain when he can’t go to work anymore? He might not even want to get out of his pajamas in the morning. I started thinking about this, and well, it made me very sad.

  The other thing that made me sad was when we went by that corner of New York and Meridian. I couldn’t help but think of Mr. Otis selling apples. But I don’t think Papa thought of him.

  I just don’t know what I am going to do for Christmas presents. Mama always says it’s the thought that counts. But it really is hard to have thoughts with no money.

  December 7, 1932

  Ozzie tried to help Lady with her hair while we were downtown last night. The problem was that in order for Lady’s dark hair to turn blond all her natural color had to be stripped out. So Lady couldn’t exactly do what Papa asked. There was no reg-ular color left to put back in. But Ozzie went into his lab — a fatal trip, if you ask me. You should see what Lady looks like this morning. Clem calls the color orangutan red. Mama is beside herself. Jackie screamed when Lady came downstairs. They say that chickens aren’t smart, but it was Lady’s turn to feed them this morning and one of them just stared at her kind of dumbfounded. Can you beat that!