The Christmas Chronicles (6 page)

But this night Anna could not help but notice that Klaus ate his last bit of bread and sucked every drop of
gravy from his fingers in a distracted, worried manner. “Are you concerned about delivering to the new village, Klaus?” Anna asked.

“Not at all,” he said. “With Dasher, we’ll make short work of the trip.” He sighed.

“Is it the toys? Are there not enough?”

“More than enough.” Another sigh, somewhat deeper.

“You’re unhappy with their design this year. Not sufficiently ingenious.”

“The cleverest I’ve ever made,” Klaus replied miserably, and sighed deeper still.

“Then what is wrong, husband? All this sighing is doleful music.”

“Nothing,” Klaus said, and sighed so profoundly that in his stable Dasher looked up from his evening mash.

Anna put down her needle. She had just come to the part in the battle where a Centaur was smashing a well-aimed hoof into the eye of a Lapith, all purple and red and black threads, and it was hard to leave off there, but she did. She looked at Klaus. “Husband,” she said, “you are the least skilled liar in the known world. Now tell me what is wrong.”

And then with a cry of distress Klaus threw back the covers, scattering Anna’s stitching to the four posters, and
paced the floor. He told her everything: how last Christmas half the toys he had delivered had been stolen from the village doorsteps and burned in a fire behind the Guild Hall, how it had wrung his heart to see the disappointed looks on children’s faces, and how the doer of the evil deed had given him a stare of such naked malevolence at their wedding that he knew he would try to repeat his misdeed this Christmas Eve. He stopped his pacing and looked at Anna in anguish. “And how am I to prevent it?” he concluded. “How can I stop Rolf Eckhof? I cannot think of a way!”

Nor could Anna, at first.

But then her eye lighted on the scattered skeins of thread, and she clapped her clever hands together because suddenly she knew the answer. “You have married me in the very nick of time,” she announced.

And so it was that on that year’s Christmas Eve, clad in his splendid new red coat and breeches, Klaus found himself shuffling cautiously along the roof of the first house on his delivery rounds. He looked down at Anna standing in the sleigh.

“You’re doing very well,” Anna hissed up to him encouragingly.

Klaus found that he did not have quite the head for heights he had imagined, but in another few steps he was
at the chimney (and luckily in those days chimneys were very short). He peered down it and saw only darkness. Good. No fire burning down below. Then he let down the toy he was carrying—one of his signature bears—by one of Anna’s embroidery threads. When it was a few inches above the fireplace, he swung the thread wide and let it go—and heard the bear land satisfyingly on the floor beyond the hearth.
Thump!
He had just delivered, for the very first time, a Christmas toy down a chimney—and thus safe from the thievery of Rolf Eckhof. He turned around and grinned at Anna down below. “Thank you for thinking of this,” he mouthed. She helped him down from the roof and they were quickly off to the next house.

True, letting toys down chimneys—or simple smoke holes, as many of the village houses had instead—took extra time. And true also, Klaus landed a few toys in smoldering remnants of nighttime fires at first and had to try again with a second toy. But the novel deliveries only had to be made in his own village, where Rolf Eckhof was lurking. And with Dasher’s speed he and Anna easily made up the time on the rest of their appointed rounds, including the village on the other side of the mountain. They were home three hours before the matins bell chimed in the icy Christmas dawn. And amid the clamor and glee of the
children, which floated up to their house as they stood tired but satisfied, arm in arm, on their doorstep, they did not hear one wail or sob. All the blessed toys were safe.

Nor did they hear the muffled shrieks of rage and frustration from inside Rolf Eckhof’s house. He had indeed been out on Christmas Eve but had found no toys to steal. Now he tried to shut out all the happiness assaulting his ears by covering them with his two feather pillows, but found that he could not. His mind was poisoned now, almost beyond reason or reclaiming, and any success of Klaus’s or crossing of his own plans heated his blood so intolerably that to cool it he had to smash or rend whatever object his eye lit upon. This he did now, and I’m afraid his house suffered for it—starting with the feather pillows, which he tore so violently that for a whole minute there was a blizzard inside his house. But an hour afterwards he sat on the floor, for he had broken all his chairs, and brooded his revenge in cold, clear anger. He did not know what he would do. He did not know when he would think of it. But he knew that he would. And Rolf Eckhof was the sort of man who could wait.

And so the years flew by, and no man can stop their flight; nor should they try. Each Christmas Eve, Klaus and Anna and Dasher delivered toys to a wider and wider
realm of children. Each year, just before they set out, a tiny frown flickered across Anna’s face—unnoticed by Klaus—and something she longed to say came all the way to her lips, but then got no further when Klaus took her hand and with great delight escorted her into the sleigh. And each year, Klaus became more and more expert at letting toys down chimneys and smoke holes as a ward against Rolf Eckhof, until it became his preferred method of toy delivery—though in truth Rolf Eckhof never again tried to steal Christmas toys. People in all the villages learned to damp down their fires before they retired on Christmas Eve. It wasn’t long before Klaus devised a special knot that he could undo with a deft flick of his wrist just as a toy came to rest on a floor, leaving it standing upright and allowing him to whisk its thread back up the chimney. And in this way the legend grew that somehow Klaus was taking the toys down the chimney himself, an absurd notion which persists to this day despite Klaus having scattered physics textbooks amongst his Christmas deliveries in recent years.

For a jest some tucked the toys Klaus delivered into the freshly washed stockings they set on their hearths to dry, or placed them under the evergreen boughs they hung about
their houses as a reminder that though the world was frozen, spring would come again.

Anna and Klaus continued in their professions, for their need of extra means to purchase wood and carving tools grew greater and greater. Anna stitched. Klaus joined and worked wood. Each year was busier than the year before. Still, Anna found time to indulge her new passion for cooking ever more sumptuous meals, and Klaus found time to eat them. And since Anna’s dishes tended more—much more—toward the gravy and dumpling and goose variety—still and always Klaus’s favorite meal—than they did toward the celery and cottage cheese and one-single-radish-on-a-plate variety, Klaus’s girth improved wonderfully. And when, after years of selfless toil, Anna hit on the miraculous maple sugar cookie recipe for which she became so justly renowned, Klaus was finally able to fulfill the prophecy with which the villagers had teased him during that first year after the Black Death: “You’ll grow fat if you keep eating like that!”

“So be it,” he had said then, and “So be it,” he said now, as he kissed his talented wife. “So long as Dasher doesn’t mind the extra weight and the villagers’ roofs hold, so be it!”

But Anna’s culinary talents did not extend only to Klaus. No person in the village under Mount Feldberg ever went hungry if Anna could help it. So long as her larder held out, Anna fed all and sundry, and Heaven help anyone who tried to resist a second helping of anything. They got a tongue-lashing about keeping up their strength and were then watched over until they had eaten everything she had made for them. And so, when the harvests were good, all girths improved as the years rolled by.

But specially did Anna see to the retired widowers of the Worshipful Guild of Foresters, Carpenters, and Woodworkers. They had made of Klaus’s old house an ever-expanding warren as each took up his tools and added on his own room. But they took their meals in a splendid common dining hall they had labored together to construct. The joke went round the Guild that you had better retire hungry because Anna was going to fill you right up to the brim once she got you in that hall. In due course, Father Goswin, having heard the joke, moved in, even though he was not a member of the Guild and had not retired. “You all need spiritual guidance in your waning years,” he said. “Pass me the shepherd’s pie.” He was welcomed, and he soon wrote a moving epistle to the Bishop about how he
had founded this charitable institution for widowers—which was no more than he came to believe.

If the years were busy for Klaus and Anna, they were also jolly. Both knew the deep contentment of loving the useful work they did. They scarcely noticed the advancing streaks of white in their hair—and Klaus’s beard—and they certainly paid no attention to the lines that laughter brought to their faces. In their hearts and in the hardihood of their bodies, they seemed age-proof. If they had one sorrow, it was that no children of their own had come to them. But then, as Klaus often said, and Anna agreed, it tempts fate (“Heaven,” Father Goswin corrected them) for two happy people to have all they desire, and surely they felt a stake in the lives of hundreds of children throughout the villages of the Black Forest.

Life went on like this pleasantly for years and years and still more years.

And then something extraordinary happened.

One summer Rolf Eckhof turned up at the retirement home. Certainly he had reached retirement age, and he was not a widower only because he had never married. Some thirty-one years had passed since his mischief with the toys—which Klaus had never revealed to anyone but
Anna—and no sequel had followed. But no one expected to see him standing at the door with his possessions in a cart behind him.

“I have a right to be here,” he barked at the Guild member who answered the door. “I have worked hard all my life.”

Well, how could he be refused? As Father Goswin noted, even the uncharitable have a claim on charity. He had made his life a lonely, bitter one, but still his loneliness was real. “Rolf Eckhof may share my room,” said one of the kinder widowers, “until he builds his own.”

Which Rolf Eckhof soon did. And if it was not as skillfully made as some others in the winding old house, no one was tactless enough to comment on it. And certainly Rolf Eckhof seemed to be a new man in retirement. He did not actually smile, nor did he ever do much talking, but he did help. Having cooked and cleaned for himself all his life—which few in the house had done—he made himself useful all around the place, but specially around the cookstove. And anyone who cooks will always find some welcome wherever he goes.

Soon even Klaus and Anna reconciled with their old enemy. And though their doing so has been much criticized in the court of historical opinion, I have always
maintained that, despite what happened later, they did right to forgive him.

On the Christmas Eve after Rolf Eckhof came to the retirement house, Klaus readied himself for a long night of deliveries. The very last village in the Black Forest had been added to his rounds at the Saint Bartholomew’s Fair that summer, and so he would be traveling farther than ever. In his enormous toy bag—now a dozen flour sacks stitched together and embroidered all over by Anna with likenesses of Roman emperors and mythical beasts and constellations major and minor—were over six hundred toys. This year’s new item was a puzzle box made of white pine and ash that opened if one pushed and pulled sliding panels in just the right way. Inside each was a flower seed, so that the children could look forward through the winter to planting it in the spring and seeing what kind of vegetable or flower it would be.

Klaus heaved the huge sack into the sleigh. Dasher stamped the snow, eager to be off, as impatient as ever. For though the weight he pulled had grown steadily over the years due to the increase in the number of toys and the belt size of their maker, it was still a trifle to him. Klaus hesitated. A corner of his heart was heavy. Anna was not coming with him, and it was the first time this had happened.

“I’m just feeling under the weather, Klaus. It’s nothing to worry about,” she had said.

“I won’t go. It’s just one year.”

“Not go! What utter nonsense. You are responsible for our children. If you don’t bring them toys, their parents will make up any number of reasons why they don’t deserve them.”

“But, Anna, if you’re ill and need looking after—”

She had fixed him with her bright blue eyes. “Do not presume, carpenter, that because you are the handsomest man in the Black Forest, you know anything about leechcraft. I will be fine. I have made a broth. Master Eckhof has brought me the herbs.” Then she had laughed her silvery laugh that dispelled all gloom, and he had felt much better.

Except for that one small corner of his heart. And as the night wore on, the troubled feeling in that corner spread and spread.

Klaus and Dasher delivered the toys to the houses of his own village in good time as well as to the three villages east and west, but for the first time it brought Klaus no real pleasure. He was distracted.
Is Anna all right?
he kept wondering.
Should I have left her?
Dasher was racing up the steep track that went over a shoulder of Mount Feldberg and was just clearing the tree line when Klaus suddenly
signaled for him to stop. The sleigh slid to a halt. Dasher snorted once, and then all was silent. The winter stars and half a moon glimmered down on the two. Klaus got out of the sleigh and stood beside it.

He did not know why he had stopped. He had never done so before unless there was a runner that wanted fixing or a harness buckle to adjust. But now he felt a need to be still. Something was happening, he felt, though he did not know what.

He looked down into the valley at his village. Waves of frigid air rose up from there and made him shiver. He pulled his crimson coat close, but he could not get warm. The cold current made him feel exhausted to his very bones. He caught a glimpse of his beard, almost all white now, as it caught the icy breeze and danced before his eyes.
I’m old,
he thought,
too old to keep making these deliveries.
For it seemed to Klaus that the weight of the years he had ignored for so long now piled themselves upon him all at once. They made him stoop and stagger.