Winterbound (9 page)

For days past the children had been busily concealing secrets from each other and from their elders. What Christmas shopping there was—for the younger ones only—had been done long ago through the mail-order catalogue and had duly arrived and been secreted. Yesterday's mail had been a heavy and exciting one; even the usually grumpy mailman had a smile for Caroline as she waited by the box. There were thick letters from father and mother among the rest, Christmas cards and several gayly tagged parcels, to be opened on Christmas morning.

One from mother and Peggy, with a slender silver-and-turquoise chain for Kay, an odd little Indian bowl
for Garry, a pocket folder of Indian leather work for Martin, and a tiny silver ring shaped like a snake with a turquoise in his head, that just fitted Caroline's middle finger.

“I wish we could have sent her something,” Kay said as they unpacked the box.

“Your cards were lovely, Kay; she and father would rather have had those than anything, and she'll have got Caroline's kettle holder by now, though goodness knows what she'll have to use it on, out there.”

“I guess they make tea in New Mexico,” said Caroline, studying the effect of the blue ring on her pink finger.

“There'll be tea made anywhere where Penny is,” Garry assured her, quick to make amends. “She can always find use for a kettle holder if it's only to pick things up outdoors when the sun is too hot, and if your penwiper doesn't reach father quite by Christmas he'll have it for New Year's anyway, and that's just as good. Now hurry up and open the rest!”

Candy from Aunt Margaret and another box of candy for Kay, with no name. Silk stockings, handkerchiefs for Caroline, and a tie for Martin. More stockings and socks, green ski pants for Caroline, an embroidered handkerchief case that must have come from one of Cousin Carrie's bazaars, a diary, three woolen mufflers and a pretty brown sweater—the relatives had gone in heavily
for clothing this year—a white china monkey with glass eyes and a hole in his back to put flowers in, a bottle of bath salts, and a rabbit made of green soap and clad in a pink washcloth.

“Someone must think we don't take enough baths,” Kay laughed.

“They're probably right, but just try it this weather, with a tin bathtub in a drafty kitchen! I wish we'd had the bath salts earlier; they might have impressed Mrs. Cummings, anyway,” said Garry. “Now let's see. One of these boxes of candy will go to the Rowes; that's fine. Don't collapse, Martin; we'll all be there to eat it just the same. We'll give Neal my diary. It's swell and useful, but I'd just as soon have one from the ten-cent store next time Edna goes there. Do we need three mufflers in the family?”

“One would be nice for Mary, but I'd rather give her this sweater,” Kay decided. “It's so pretty and my others are still perfectly good, and I know she'd use this more than she would a muffler.”

“Grand,” said Garry with an extra warmth of tone, for she knew that Kay's sweaters were far from perfectly good, having seen more than one season's wear already. “Then the extra muffler will do for Jimmie. Get me that roll of red paper in the table drawer, Caroline, and see if you can smooth some of this ribbon out.”

The room looked Christmas-like with green boughs above the mantelpiece and trailing ground pine in the Chinese bowl. Two days ago Neal had chosen and cut the two little trees, one for each family, taking the children with him on this annual excursion up the hillside, and Kay had trimmed their own from the box of Christmastree “orderments,” as Caroline used to call them, saved and put by from year to year and which they had remembered to bring with them even though the packing and moving took place in June. So all the familiar colored balls and dangles and shining gold and silver fruits hung there—or at least as many as the tree would hold—and the waxen Christmas angel, a bit smudgy from repeated handling, smiled from the top branch and the pink spun-glass bird chirped silently just below him, as they had done for so many Christmases before in different surroundings.

“The Christmas angel's got a regular grin on him,” Martin said, reaching to straighten the old friend, who having lost half a wing soared rather lopsidedly.

“I should think he would,” returned Garry. “There! I think those look all right.”

She surveyed the parcels. No one could really tell, unless they looked hard, that the holly-printed ribbon had been twice used. Christmas dinner was to be at the Rowes, but not till two o'clock, for every Christmas Day
Neal went out fox hunting; it was the one date in the year, he said, that he never failed to keep, so the family dinner was put off till his return.

The children spent the morning coasting, not on the road, which was steep and dangerous and forbidden except in the company of elder people, but on the pasture slope behind the Rowes' barn, where the occasional rocks and bumps were just enough to make the run exciting. Caroline had her new ski pants on, long, warm, and full around the ankles above her arctics, and Shirley had a pair, too, brown ones. Caroline's had come from a New York store and Shirley's from the faithful mail-order catalogue, but the children decided there was little to choose between them. Wading through the snow, dragging the sled behind them, the little girls looked like two long-legged gnomes, one brown, one green.

Kay and Garry were just setting out for the house when Neal returned, old black-and-tan Sam at his heels. He had his gun over one shoulder, something limp and soft and tawny slung across the other, which he dropped on the snow at their feet.

“Merry Christmas! How's that for a nice fox?”

“Merry Christmas! Not such a merry Christmas for the fox though,” returned Garry quickly, for she hated to see anything dead and that clean shining fur, the still slim paws and pointed nose gave her a pang of regret for
what had been only a little while ago a living flash of speed and pride and beauty. But Neal was so cheerful and pleased about it; a fox skin she knew was worth ten dollars and ten dollars meant a good deal to the Rowe family. “It's a beauty, Neal! Where did you get it?”

“Up over Crooked Hill. He cost me three hours tracking and a six-mile walk. Well, old Sam and me decided we wouldn't come home without we'd earned our dinner, and I guess we have.”

“What does he weigh?” Martin asked. The younger ones had gathered eagerly round.

“Not what you'd think. A bit more than a good-sized cat. Mostly all fur, you see; that's what makes them hard to hit. Lot's of times you think you've hit a fox, and all you hit is his fur.”

“It looks like a dog,” Caroline said. But as she drew nearer there was something not at all like a dog in the slant of the half-closed eyes, the warning lift of the lip above white shining teeth; that subtle difference which always sets apart the wild thing from the tame one, even in death. Not a nice thing to meet, Caroline thought, and remembered the gray fox that had howled behind the barn.

“Want to try a fine warm neckpiece, Caroline?”

But Caroline shrank back as Neal lifted the dead fox to his shoulder.

Mary was waiting for them in the doorway. There was a grand smell of roast goose and mince pie, apple sauce and baking sweet potatoes as they crowded into the kitchen where the big table was already set. A happy joking meal, with the box of candy to finish up with and a bottle of Mary's special three-year-old dandelion wine to drink a toast to the absent ones.

“What I call a dinner!” said Jimmie.

“Two Christmases ago,” Neal said, “I'd been out of work for quite a spell and we were sitting down round this table here to a nice dish of frankfurters and boiled potatoes. I don't know how come we happened to get the frankfurters, either, but anyway all at once there was a sort of crash outside, right against the woodshed door, and old Sam he started up and near knocked the table over. I went to open the door, and there outside was standing the prettiest two-year-old buck I ever saw, right there in the yard. Some dogs must have been chasing him and he'd come running down the hill, scared nearly to death, and turned right into the dooryard not knowing which way to go. I looked at him, and he looked at me, and then he got his breath and started off again down the pasture, and I said to Mary: ‘Can you beat that! Here comes our Christmas dinner knocking right at the door, and we can't touch it! '”

“You can't shoot a deer any time?” asked Martin.

“Not any time, not until they make an open season again, and there hasn't been that in years. Only if it's on your own land and you can prove to the game warden they've been doing damage. I kind of hate to shoot a deer any time, law or no law, but that was one time I did feel sore about it. There he stood, and there was my gun right in the corner, and just frankfurters for Christmas!”

There was a log fire burning in the parlor and when the dishes were stacked the four older ones gathered there, while the little girls played house with the doll's bed and tiny table that Jimmie and Martin had made and painted and the new china tea set and shining pots and pans, and the boys went out again to coast by themselves. Mary brought out a hooked rug she had just started and a boxful of rags ready cut and wound into balls for working, and the sight of the soft faded colors set Kay off immediately on suggestions for design. While their two heads were bent over the hooking frame Garry and Neal played checkers by the fire and Tommy, who had been too excited by Christmas to take his usual nap, rolled and unrolled the colored balls all over the floor with the help of the youngest cat.

It was nearly dusk when they started home, and as Mary stood in the door with them she said: “I'm certainly going to miss you people if you ever go away. I hope you never do!”

“If we do, we'll come back here every year for Christmas!”

Kay had been so fascinated watching the rug pattern grow under Mary's fingers that she wanted to start one for herself. Like everything that Kay began it was bound to be something ambitious and unusual. Trunks and closets were rummaged for old material that could be dyed, since very little of the Ellis's discarded wardrobe was of the colors she wanted. Mary had lent her an extra rugging hook, Neal made a frame, and she wrote off to Edna for dyes and burlap. Garry, who never minded staining her hands, mixed and boiled over the kitchen stove, and the insides of the family saucepans and kettles developed strange hues that refused to scour off. Things hung outdoors were frozen stiff this weather, so the woodshed was draped with lines of dripping color, and Garry's winter salad, if it ever sprouted at all, threatened to come up striped like Joseph's coat. Hooking was harder work than Kay realized; her fingertips grew sore tugging the rags through the stiff burlap, but she kept on at it doggedly, neglecting everything else.

Caroline had no part in these activities except to help in cutting up rags, of which she soon tired. The after-Christmas days began to weigh on her heavily. The boys were busy on their own affairs and Shirley was in bed
with a cold. She took to hanging aimlessly about and one morning when the girls wanted to discuss something in peace and quiet Garry turned on her.

“Can't you for heaven's sake find something to
do
, Caroline! With this whole house and the state of Connecticut to play in, you've got to stick right under foot every minute. Now go—scat and vamoose. Beat it!”

“I'm going,” Caroline ruffled like an angry chicken. “I was just going anyhow. And you needn't be so smart either and give yourself all those idiotic airs just because you think you look like Amelia Earhart with your hair that way, 'cause you don't, even if you do keep her picture stuck away in your bureau drawer to look at when you think nobody knows about it.”

Garry made a feint with the dishcloth, for that particular shaft went home.

“That child gets worse and worse. I don't know what's come over her these days,” declared Kay as the kitchen door slammed. “She doesn't get it from the Rowes, anyway.”

“Did you ever hear Shirley when she gets thoroughly mad?” asked Garry, smiling in spite of herself. “Caroline needs Penny's stern hand; she's the only one to keep her in order.”

“She'll get more than Penny's hand; she'll get mine, pretty quick, if she doesn't mend her ways. I do think
little girls when they get that age are absolutely detestable,” Kay seemed to forget that she had ever gone through that same detestable stage herself.

“Well, school begins Monday, praise be. Let's get back to this bill situation. How do we stand?”

“Nowhere.” Kay bent a worried look on the pile of close-written grocery slips in her hand. “They all come in a bunch. I've paid the telephone and I thought I'd paid up the meat market, but now half of last month's things seem to have come on this. And there's the grocery. Garry, do
you
remember that we had four dozen eggs last month? We couldn't possibly. We were getting eggs from Mary right along.”

“There was the time their hens stopped laying,” Garry remembered. “Mary didn't have enough to give us. It must have been then.”

“And butter. What we do with butter I don't know. Penny said to check our slips over every week and I always mean to, but I guess I haven't. We must have ordered an awful lot of stuff while the Cummings was here; she was forever telling me we were out of things and I just put them down without looking, I suppose. We did get some extra things over Christmas, and the meat bill's heavy because I feel with Martin and Caroline walking all that way to the bus every day they've got to have good meals when they come home. And then there's
their green vegetables, too. Caroline fusses over cabbage and I always thought spinach was cheap, but here it's been eighteen cents a pound all this time. And there were Martin's shoes. Those are extra, but that would only make three dollars off.”

Garry studied the slips spread on the table, whistling softly.