A Christmas Blizzard (14 page)

James had forgotten that and now it came back: their little apartment in Ravenswood, the kitchen with the yellow table, the Monet water lilies poster on the wall, a late night, the two of them sitting with two glasses of Rioja and a block of cheddar and some chips, and the soon-to-be-Mrs.-Sparrow telling him that 4xPrime was the next new thing and he should hang onto it for dear life and ride it for all it was worth.

The old man had found his voice now and he leaned across the table and spoke to James with quiet conviction.

“You are the benefactor of great kindness. And you have no idea how much goodness is lavished on the world by invisible hands. Small selfless deeds engender tremendous force against the darker powers. Great kindness pervades this world, struggling against pernicious selfishness and vulgar narcissism and the vicious streak that is smeared across each human heart—great bounding goodness is rampant and none of it is wasted. No, these small gifts of goodness—this is what saves the soul of man from despair, and that is what preserves humanity from the long fall from the precipice into the abyss.”

So his dream—his habitual nightmare of being hunted in tall grass and attempting to escape and only edging closer to the precipice overlooking the dark abyss, the sharks, the big black birds, etc.

“Yes,” said the old Chinese man. “This is not a prophetic dream, it is a revelation of how you have been brought safely over dangerous shoals and through narrow passages unawares. And now your trip to Looseleaf has resulted in much good. You have cheered up your uncle who was descending toward death and is now having a last encore of pleasure before he leaves.”

“When will he die?” said James.

“Tuesday. And you made peace with your cousin whom you dislike, and you fought your other cousin to a draw and that was good for her soul, to be withstood. She’s had it all her way for most of her life and now there’s a little hole in her roof and she can view the sky. Any way you can offer a fellow being a new prospect is a kindness.

“But the loveliest was your twenty-dollar tip for Myrt, who was embarrassed by the generosity and meant to run after you and give it back but the truth is, she is short on cash and there is nothing shameful about need nor about what satisfies it. We give and we take. She takes your money which she needs to buy a Frank Sinatra CD,
Songs for Lovers
, and a pack of Camels and a bottle of beer for her old aunt Lois who needs to feel twenty-six again and dancing at the Spanish Gardens ballroom in Santa Barbara with Jack McCloskey the textile salesman and her first true love the night they necked in his pink convertible with the night breeze rich with eucalyptus and palm and though she knew he was not long for her arms, still he was gentle and sweet to her and told her he loved her over and over as he made love to her, which, at twenty-six, she had never experienced before, and so this was a revelation that despite the sarcasm of her sisters and the harsh remarks of her mother, Lois could be loved, and now, years later, listening to Mr. Sinatra and smoking a cigarette in her upstairs bedroom, she will call up Jack who is seventy-eight years old and in poor health in a care center in Provo, Utah, which Myrt located via the Internet, and Aunt Lois will tell Jack McCloskey that the memory of that January night remains a lamp in her heart, and this kind word, after years of sodden despair, will illuminate his night and move him to finally and absolutely sign over his wealth to the Jeremiah Program for single mothers, and thereby vast goodness will be achieved.”

The old Chinese man smiled for the first time in his monologue. “So you see what you’ve done, Mr. Sparrow. More than you know.”

“What about Christmas?”

“What about it? It’s a nice day. Take a long walk. Sing more and talk less. Try putting ginger in the cranberry. It helps.”

 

 

H
e walked out of Coyote Coffee and onto the ice, San Francisco gone, but it had stopped snowing. He could hear distant snowplows scraping the pavement. Maybe the airport would get cleared today but he wasn’t ready to go. It was noon in North Dakota and he was bone tired and lay down and slept in the fish house for a few hours and awoke in the cold and pulled on his boots and walked toward town. It was perfectly quiet, the countryside covered with snowdrifts, and he could hear everything that was happening and nothing was happening. No doors slammed, no car started, nobody yelling. He passed the Bon Ton Café and Myrt waved to him gaily. Rosana let him in to Uncle Earl’s and shushed him—the old man was napping—and James lay down on the couch and fell asleep to the fish tank bubbler, and then suddenly it was Christmas Eve and everyone was there and the room was full of candles, bay-berry, cranberry—“You’d think we were Catholic!” said Liz—and the old man was decked out in red pants and a white shirt with light-up bowtie and a red clown nose and a red headband with a small spring arm that held a sprig of mistletoe over his old white head. He was holding the bag with his liver and pancreas in a plastic flowerpot that played “In The Mood,” a gift from a grandchild. He said, “Boy. Time sure flies, doesn’t it. Got this flowerpot in 1997. Seems like only yesterday.”

Faye wore a long white gown and sequins in her hair and a crown of holly and electric candles and served saffron buns and coffee. She had brought a centerpiece made from an egg carton and green garbage bag twists, very glittery, pictures of shepherds and angels and Democrats, FDR and JFK and MLK and BHO. Liz glanced at it without comment. Oscar arrived with a great fury of stamping and shaking snow off his pants and walked in, the prodigal brother who wasn’t speaking to anybody, and all was forgiven—Liz hugged him and said the cologne he was wearing smelled more like disinfectant and if he had an infection she wanted to know about it. “That’s the cologne you gave me three years ago, called Christmas Charisma. First time I put some on,” he said and he took a cup of coffee and poured cream and sugar in it and sat on a hassock and told James he was looking good. Rosana appeared with a big red stocking for James with a dozen multi-colored pens and Post-its and candy and a giant navel orange.

Faye had bought Christmas gifts for everyone, porcelain trivets from Peru and hand-knitted tea cosies from Costa Rica. “These are made by peasants who were paid a fair wage for them,” she said. Everyone examined their trivet, which had paintings of stick people doing things with animals. Liz had brought copies of a book called
Alien Reptiles
by Ann Coulter, arguing that life-forms from outer space had taken over Washington.

The gifts were wrapped in a big hurry, you could see that—paper scrunched, tape slapped on, no ribbons, no bows—par for the course in these busy times—but he remembered Joyce and how she believed in beautiful wrapping. What’s important is not the cash value of the gift but the loving intention of the giver—and you show this by how the gift—even the $1.69 bottle of Swank cologne—is wrapped. The recipient holds this work of art in his hands and notices how perfectly the ribbon is placed and the bow is handmade, and the paper is precisely folded into thin trapezoids at the ends, no creases, no wrinkles, and the perfection of the package serves to delay the opening of the gift, which prolongs anticipation, which heightens pleasure.

Joyce had elegance in her soul. She grew up nerdy, tom-boyish, awkward, and she learned elegance from the inside out, which is the only way. She spoke elegantly. She carried herself with grace even back when she had little disposable income, there was a rightness about her that he meant to cherish now that his eyes had been opened by the dive into freezing water.

“What are these little crisp round things?” said Liz, pawing through the appetizers.

“Fried pig brains,” said Oscar. “They’re good. Try one.”

“I requested them,” said Uncle Earl. “The condemned man gets to choose. I’ve loved pig brains since I was just a little squirt.”

And just then, Leo, who never did this sort of thing, spread his arms and sang, “Hail hail the gang’s all here” in his quavery tenor and flung a handful of sparkle dust over them. He gave James a big hug and whispered, “I’m planning to make my move and I may need your help.”
What a Judas.
James brushed him away. “Not now,” he said. “I’ve got enough on my plate as it is.”

Oscar said, “I remember the time that busload of psychoanalysts got stranded here in December. What year was that? They were going to a convention in Vancouver and took the bus because they were afraid to fly. It was a snowy night and the bus rolled into town and stopped to use the men’s room at the Bon Ton and that took a couple hours because there was just one stall and they all had to do Number 2 and each of them had his little ceremonies and reading material and so forth, and by the time they were done, the roads were drifted over and we had to put them up for the night. Actually, for three days. Forty-five short bald men with beards. I remember they loved macaroni noodles in mushroom soup sauce and canned tuna and peas. We took them ice fishing, and they loved that. It was a great novelty to them, sitting in a dark house and looking at a hole in the ice with a fish-line hanging down and a bobber floating in the water. They sat for hours, watching the bobber, writing in their little notebooks. They were sad to leave, I remember. Got on the bus and put their faces to the windows and waved their hankies and away they went. ”

“That was in fifty-eight,” said Uncle Earl. “I remember. It was the year I went to Rapid City for the Rural Electrification convention.”

“Nope. Eighty-five,” said Oscar. “I remember it because eighty-five was when Sandy ran away with the extension agent.”

“She didn’t exactly run away,” said Liz. “She only went as far as Fargo.”

“She went far enough,” said Oscar, “but anyway, that’s all water under the bridge. Eighty-five. That was a hard winter. We had to eat the cat that year. You ever eat cat? They are not as meaty as they look. It was like pork except tough. I don’t think it’s anything that is going to catch on, if you know what I mean. That winter we had to bust up the dining room table for firewood and you know something? Mahogany does not burn well. Mostly it just smoldered. We got a bad case of head lice that winter and Aunt Cooter went berserk. Remember that? She was running from room to room, crying out about seeing Jesus up on high and trying to take her clothes off—she was yelling, ‘I want to put on the
new
raiment! Put away this old raiment, put on the
new
raiment! ’ Boy, that got tiresome real fast. We kept wrapping her up in sheets and she kept ripping them off. She’d been weak and puny for years but suddenly she had strength in her arms. It happens when people go berserk. I read that somewhere. We just ran out of patience. We threatened to put her in the loony bin but she was seeing Jesus so it didn’t matter to her. Finally we had to give her a tranquilizer and I guess we overtranquilized her because she died. But she went quietly in her sleep, which was how she always wanted to go. And she saw Jesus, so that must have been a comfort. It was too cold to bury her right away, the ground was frozen so hard. They were going to use dynamite but the families of other dead people objected to that, so we just put her in the tool shed until spring. Stood her up and leaned her against the lumber pile.”

“I was in Arizona that winter,” said Faye and started to launch into a story about the Hopi, but Oscar went on.

“That was the winter I went out to check my wolf traps and I slipped and fell on a patch of ice in the driveway. I’d plugged in the car to keep it thawed out and it was too cold and the radiator burst and the antifreeze froze. That’s how cold it was. Anyway, I fell wrong and broke my leg and the bone poked right out through my pantleg. Luckily it was so cold I couldn’t feel a thing. Well, I picked up some ice chunks and tossed them at the kitchen window and finally Rocky came and saw me. He was eight. I motioned for him to come help me and pointed to the protruding bone and finally he came out and stood on the back step. I said, ‘Honey, I need you to go in the house and call the ambulance. If you don’t, Daddy will freeze to death. Okay?’”

“He said, ‘Why did you call me “Honey”? You never called me “Honey” before.’”

“I said, ‘I called you Honey because I love you. You’re my son and I love you dearly.’ ”

“He said, ‘Why didn’t you ever say so before?’ ”

“I said, ‘Because I didn’t want you to get the big head.’ ”

“He said, ‘Before I call the ambulance, is it okay if I watch TV for an hour?’ ”

“I said, ‘If you do that, Daddy will freeze to death and you’ll feel just awful.’ ”

“He said, ‘Oh.’ And then he asked how much money I’d give him to call the ambulance. I offered him candy. He said he’d prefer money. He went to get the checkbook and he brought it out to me. I was going to grab his leg and get him down on the ground and wallop him but he tossed me the checkbook and a pen and told me to write it out for six thousand dollars. And I would’ve done it but just then, the wolf came around the garage and sat down and looked at me. I told Rocky to go in the house and get the gun. And then I thought better of it. I told him to go get the package of sirloins out of the freezer. So he did. He tossed it to the wolf. The wolf tried to chew his way into it but it was hard as a board. And there I lay, all fresh and meaty. Luckily, Sandy came home right at that moment. She ran the wolf off with a rake and then she told me that four thousand dollars would be enough for her, so I wrote out the check and the ambulance came and I was in the hospital for three weeks, and the leg’s been fine, except it throbs whenever a storm is on the way.”

James asked why Oscar was trapping for wolves and he said there had been a wolf who frightened some children and was coming too close to town and Faye and James glanced at each other.

They sat chewing their food thoughtfully and Liz said, “I never heard that story before.”

Oscar said, “That’s because I never told it before.”

“Where is Rocky now?” said Faye.