A Season of Gifts (15 page)

Last in the procession came Dad in his robe. And holding his hand, Ruth Ann, who looked like the littlest angel, at least for this evening.

Dad ascended the pulpit, though he did very little preaching from up there. Ruth Ann hiked her robe and took giant steps up into the choir loft, between Mother and Phyllis.

Dad spoke out:

“Let us go to Bethlehem and see this thing that has happened.”

An old, cracked voice called out from the back pew, “Luke. 2:15!”

It was Aunt Madge Burdick.

“Ring Out Wild Bells,” the choir sang, under Mother’s direction. And then “O Holy Night!” Phyllis kept losing her place from glancing up for a glimpse of Brad Dowdel, out here in the dark.

Dad followed up by reading the Christmas story, the one that begins: “Now there were in the same country shepherds living out in the fields, keeping watch over their flocks by night . . . ”

“Luke,” Aunt Madge crackled out from the back, “every bit of it!”

The choir sang all the carols in the hymnal, and then it was time for Ruth Ann. Mother gave her a little boost forward, and Ruth Ann raised her candle.

“Sing out, honey,” Mother was heard to murmur, and Ruth Ann began,

Everybody in the flickering room listened with both ears as Ruth Ann worked through the stanzas to

She had it down pat.

Then it was nearly over, or so we thought. Dad stood to give us a benediction:

Aunt Madge’s old crooked finger came up in the dark, but she drew it back. This may not have been Scripture. It may have come straight from Dad.

The choir rustled their robes, getting ready to proceed out. They shuffled their sheet music to “As with Gladness Men of Old.”

Then everything changed. Brad and I were at the back, flanking the door when it banged open. Wind blew in. Candles blew out. People jumped. Brad and I fell back. An enormous figure filled the door—bear big. “Hit the lights,” it said.

So I did. The church flooded with electric light, and it was Mrs. Dowdel there in the door. Her hunting jacket was over an arm, but she was dressed as I’d never seen her.
It must have been her good dress. Maroon with a lot of tucks or whatever across her massive front. Big black shiny shoes too. The bun on the back of her head rode high, with combs. She was . . . all dolled up.

The choir hung in the loft. Mother had put up a hand to hold them there. Why did I have the sudden suspicion that she and Mrs. Dowdel were working as a team again?

I had a vague vision of Mother with that Winchester broken open over her arm. But the front pew people were on their feet, looking back. Mrs. Dowdel’s name swept the room.

“Hold it right there, Preacher!” she hollered out to Dad. “We’ve got us another item of business in the presence of these witnesses.”

People gawked at each other. Who did she think she was, busting up a choir concert? She wasn’t even a church woman. And what business?

But Dad didn’t look too surprised. In fact he looked glad to see her. Delighted even. He beamed. “And what is that business, Mrs. Dowdel?” he called back to her.

“A wedding,” she said. The room buzzed like a hive. “A Christmas wedding.”

“Marriage is a sacrament, Mrs. Dowdel, as you know,” Dad remarked. “But it is also a legal contract, and we’ll need to see—”

“The marriage license,” she boomed. “I got it right here.”
She reached down the front of her dress and drew out the marriage license. She could have kept the entire Bill of Rights down there.

“The bride’s not of age,” she called out, “but her mother’s signed off on her. She don’t have much choice.”

“Without further explanation, Mrs. Dowdel,” Dad said, “let us have the happy couple come forth.”

Mrs. Dowdel lumbered aside and waved them in.

A couple stepped up. I was as close to them as I am to you, and it was the surprise of my young life. At first, I thought it was Elvis Presley come among us. I wasn’t the only one. The room gasped. But it wasn’t Elvis.

It was Roscoe Burdick with a GI haircut and a close shave in the dress uniform of a U.S. Army private: the full pinks and greens, and spit-shined shoes. Necktie and all. A necktie on a Burdick was a sight to behold, though Roscoe was swallowing hard. It was Roscoe home on special leave from Basic Training at Fort Leonard Wood.

Beside him, her hair ablaze in the night, was Waynetta Blalock in the same outfit she’d worn on the homecoming queen’s parade float. It didn’t fit her as well now. Her dress-up suit strained around her middle. But she had a good firm grip on Roscoe. She’d always said she could make something out of him, Burdick or not.

As the Sunday
Piatt County Call
newspaper reported, “The bride was attended by her bridesmaids, schoolmates
all, Miss Barbara Jean Jeeter, Miss Edna-Earl Stubbs, Miss Vanette Pankey, Miss Bonnie Burhoops, all of this village and each carrying a nosegay of flowers in seasonal colors.”

Waynetta was the first high school senior to be married, except for those who’d run off, so that was some satisfaction to her.

It was a satisfaction to Mother too. I happened to notice her up in the choir loft, and I think I read her lips:

they seemed to say. This was by far Mother’s best Christmas present: Roscoe Burdick not only in the army, but tied tight in the bonds of matrimony. The first Burdick ever married, in fact.

It was the best present Phyllis ever got too, whether she knew it or not. I couldn’t tell from back here. But she seemed to be above it all up there, lofty in the choir loft. If she was having any thoughts at all, they were bound to be about Brad Dowdel.

What Brad made of this sudden wedding I didn’t know.

But he was a Chicago guy, so he’d probably seen everything. Besides, he was staying with Mrs. Dowdel, where the whole business must have been cooked up.

*  *  *

Dad pointed to Roscoe and summoned him down to the front. Every eye followed. Roscoe—Private Burdick—turned and gazed back over us. His posture was improved,
but there was panic in his blue-and-green stare. Blind panic. Dad nodded to Waynetta.

We had no piano, let alone an organ, and the Wedding March isn’t a choral number. Mother had the choir go straight into “Joy to the World.”

Though afterward, long after, I overheard her tell Dad that “Lo! How a Rose E’er Blooming” might have been more appropriate. Or even “For Unto Us a Child is Born.”

Waynetta teetered down the aisle in her high heels, trailed by her Iota Nu Beta sorority sisters. Mrs. Dowdel herself came next. And behind her for some reason, Mrs. Wilcox in her Mackinaw and veiled hat and carpet slippers.

What her part in the plot was nobody knew. Except she was always all over Mrs. Dowdel like a rubber girdle in a heatwave. You’d have to chloroform her and tie her down to leave her behind.

Several members of the DAR made room for them on the front pew, as Dad began, “Dearly beloved, we are gathered here . . .”

When he came to “Who gives this woman to this man in holy matrimony?” Mrs. Dowdel waved a big hand and called out, “That’d be me, as her maw’s at home with a sick headache.”

By now the whole congregation was having a whale of a good time. People said later that it was the best Christmas choir concert ever held in Piatt County.

A terrible old cawing voice called out from the back, “And I give the groom!” It was his grandmother, Aunt Madge.

“So do I,” called out Miss Flora Shellabarger, waving from the third pew. By now the whole church was practically rolling in the aisles. Waynetta and Roscoe were united in matrimony on wave upon wave of laughter.

But as Dad said afterward, that’s not the worst beginning for a young couple embarking upon the choppy seas of the uncertain future.

I
t was nearly Christmas Day by the time we Barnharts left church. The bride and groom had long fled. What they drove I never knew. The rest of the Burdicks had hauled Aunt Madge back to the sticks. Brad went off between Mrs. Dowdel and Mrs. Wilcox. Miss Flora Shellabarger had fired up her Packard Clipper. But plenty of people wanted to linger on the church steps, replaying the evening and giving one another the greetings of the season.

Dad and I made a final check of all the windows before he locked up the church. It was long afterward before I learned where we came by these top-of-the-line windows stout enough to keep December’s fury out.

They’d been paid for with Mrs. Dowdel’s profits from her roadside stand back at the time of the Kickapoo
Princess. So she hadn’t buried her money in Joey’s room or out in the melon patch. She’d given it to the church, though she wasn’t a church woman. All her gifts were supposed to be secrets, of course. But it took the whole town to keep a secret.

Ruth Ann was half asleep in Dad’s arms as we turned toward home. The big tree still blazing in Mrs. Dowdel’s bay window showed us the way, though she’d put it there to show Brad his. Our own tree winked out of the front window across the porch.

As soon as we were inside, we saw we’d had a visitor. There on an end table was a plate of Christmas cookies, half eaten—sugar cookies in shapes and divinity fudge.

Ruth Ann was bolt awake now and sliding down Dad. She rolled her eyes at the cookies and stared at the tree. Actually, the Dempseys’ tree.

In front of it stood a doll buggy, and it hadn’t come from the Goodwill store. This was an old-timer, tall and wicker with wire wheels and a patent-leather seat. It looked a lot like one Mrs. Dowdel had me bring down from her attic. You could find anything up in that attic.

Now it was freshly sprayed a snowy white with ribbons worked through the wicker. Somehow Grachel had found her way downstairs and into it. She sat in the patent-leather seat, gazing one-eyed around the room, wondering what had kept us.

“Would you look at that,” Dad said. “Seems like we’ve had a visit from Saint Nick while we—”

“Daddy,” Ruth Ann said, small but sure, “there is no Santa. Word gets around.” But she couldn’t take her eyes off that grand, antique doll buggy. She was ready to take Grachel for a midnight airing this minute. She looked up at Phyllis and me like we ought to get ready to go.

“If it wasn’t Santa,” Dad said, “who was it?”

We waited. Mother’s hand slipped into Dad’s.

“Hoo-boy,” Ruth Ann said. “It was Mrs. Dowdel.”

“Was it?” Dad said. “Then I wonder what you could give her in return. Something she’d like. Seems like she’s always the one giving the gifts.”

Ruth Ann thought. She pulled on more chins than she had. She patted her back hair, braided with white bows to match her choir robe.

“I know what.” She raised a small finger. “I could tell her I thought Santa brought it.”

“Good girl,” Dad said.

Then we all hung up our stockings with care because we did that every year. I hadn’t expected much out of this particular Christmas since I was in kind of an in-between time: too old for toys and still forty-two months from a learner’s permit. But it was the Christmas we always remembered.

By the time I got up to my room, Mrs. Dowdel had
doused her Christmas tree lights. She’d lit our way home, and she had her great-grandson with her. I expect he was all the Christmas she needed. Her whole house seemed to be asleep, the last house in town. And the melon patch behind. The town slept now, nestled among the silvered fields.

Under a Christmas star.

I
t was to be our only Christmas in that town, the Christmas of 1958 all those Christmases ago. In another year we were in Quincy, and Dad had the pulpit of Grace Methodist there. By the time I graduated from high school, we were in Rockford. Phyllis was at Illinois Wesleyan University. And Ruth Ann was in junior high, with her own room and a Beatles poster on every wall. You think growing up takes forever, but it doesn’t.

Each of Dad’s churches was bigger, in a bigger town. From that time when Gypsy Piggott had to fold his revival tent after the first night, Dad’s star began to rise. He was especially praised for his funerals and weddings. Word gets around.

We did some growing up wherever we were, but we grew up the most in that little podunk town when we lived next door to Mrs. Dowdel.

She was no church woman, and she didn’t neighbor, and Christmas was just another day to her. But she didn’t wait for Christmas to give out her gifts. She gave too many. They wouldn’t have fit under the tree, not even the tallest blue spruce from the Dempseys’ backyard.