Holiday Heat: Heartwarming and Bottomwarming Stories for the Festive Season

by April Hill

  Our house has been in Jed’s family for more than two hundred years, and we took it over after his parents retired to Florida. It’s a mid-nineteenth century gray clapboard, with two gabled stories, eighteen-inch oak plank floors, and a live-in ghost who has a peculiar obsession with curtains. She spends most of her time in an upstairs bedroom, opening and closing them—apparently to annoy the current lady of the house. I close the curtains at night, and in the morning they’re open. I open them in the afternoon, and when I come back into the room, they’re closed, again. I can’t explain it, and neither Jed nor I believe in ghosts, any more than his parents did when they lived here, but the ghost doesn’t appear to care whether we believe in her or not. She does her thing, and minds her own business, so we all get along quite nicely. As Jed’s mother once told me, “Miranda (the ghost) doesn’t have a lot of company, and she doesn’t eat much, so what the hell?”

  Jed’s father is a great guy. Great guys apparently run in the family, and we get along wonderfully, but Jed’s mother… Well, not so much. She tends to refer to me as “her”, or “he child.” As in, “Poor Jed. The child means well, but I doubt that she’ll ever learn how to keep house properly.” She uses that phrase, “poor Jed,” a lot—usually accompanied by a heartfelt sigh. Jed always agrees with me when I refer to his mother as a giant pain in the ass, but I’ve still had more spankings on her account than any other single reason. I don’t have to like her, Jed explains, but I do have to be respectful and polite to her when she’s around—or else. The “or else” usually brings on what I’ve come to think of as the Honor Thy Mother spankings. These are always applied traditionally, with me squirming over Jed’s knee, while he smacks my bared bottom with an antique wooden hairbrush we bought at a quaint little shop in New Hampshire. I get spanked until I agree to call her and apologize for… whatever. Jed’s dad promises me that she’ll warm up to me after I produce their first grandchild, an event that is currently in the works.

  Jed’s dad recently confided to me that Jed was conceived in the house, on top of a Kenmore automatic washing machine—during the spin cycle. There is an elderly Kenmore in our basement that still works beautifully, and over the years, it’s provided us with countless steaming loads of clean laundry. I have no idea whether the machine is the same one responsible for Jed’s being here, but since we’ve already attempted conception on just about every bed, couch, chair, or table in the house, and even the bathtub, why not give the old Kenmore a try, right? Tradition may be what our adorable heir or heiress has been waiting for.

  Okay, now, back to the lovely falling leaves, and how they got me spanked. It’s been twenty years since my childish epiphany about God’s rationale for creating autumn, but I still get an incredible high from the turning leaves each fall. I also still have asthma. Where we live, it’s no longer legal to burn your leaves, though, so I’m spared that annual disappointment, at least. The problem is, I learned right after we moved in here that burning leaves is the only fun part of disposing of the fallen ones—that and jumping into the raked piles, of course. My brother used to whack me over the head with a bamboo rake whenever I did it. “Now I gotta do it again, moron!” he always explained.

  This year, all the leaves seemed to come down at once, and the annual raking and stuffing into gigantic brown paper sacks was simply no fun at all. Jed has approximately the same attitude about jumping in the piles of raked leaves as my brother, but he enforces the no jumping rule not by whacking me on the head with a rake, but by smacking my rear end with whatever is close at hand. Anything solid enough to make me yelp and rethink my next jump. This year, though, after the third smack, and before I walked off in a huff, rubbing my injured behind, I took a moment to dump an entire sack of leaves over his head.

  “And where do you think you’re going?” He asked, grinning as he brushed leaves and twigs from his head and shoulders. “We’re not done, here, you know.”

  “I’m going inside,” I replied coolly. “For a Band-Aid.”

  “A Band-Aid?” he repeated. “For what?”

  “You know perfectly well for what, “ I said smugly. “And for where. You’re the one who struck and injured me with a stupid tree branch.”

  Jed leaned down and picked up the offending “branch,” which did look a lot tinier than I remembered.

  “This?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I said. “I think I got a really bad scratch. I can feel it.”

  He leaned on his rake, and smiled. “Prove it. Drop your pants far enough to show me this horrendous scratch, and I’ll apologize and let you beg off for today, which is what you’ve been angling for all day, anyway. If there’s no scratch, I get to swat your butt again, twice—for real this time—and you get to stuff two more bags, in addition to the one you just dumped on me.”

  “In your dreams,” I growled.

  Jed smiled again. “Okay, now it’s three swats, and all four bags. There were a couple of pretty good-sized rocks in that bag. I’d take the deal if I were you. It’s my final offer.”

  “Or what?”

  “Or I finish the yard all by myself, then come inside and blister your adorable butt ‘til it’s the color of a Red Maple in October. How’s that sound?”

  “It sounds like something Fred Flintstone would suggest,” I said.

  Jed shook his head. “Wrong. At heart, Fred was a gentleman. Fred would never have spanked Wilma.”

  “And you’re not a gentleman?” I asked sweetly.

  “Nope. I’m not. Now Ricky, on the other hand, did spank Lucy, as I remember it.”

  “So Ricky wasn’t a gentleman?”

  “Sure he was, but he was also married to Lucy, which changes a guy’s attitude. She was lucky he didn’t paddle her behind every week. Funny, but in some ways, you’ve always reminded me of Lucy.”

  “That is not a compliment, Jed,” I snapped. I was getting tired of the game, and my feet were cold, just standing there. “I’m going in the house.”

  And I did.

  Jed didn’t come in for more than an hour, and when he did, he went directly upstairs to shower. I had dinner on the table when he came back down, and I assumed that the silly argument about leaves, Fred Flintstone, etc. was over. I couldn’t have been more wrong.

  “I’ll take the bags to the dump on Saturday,” Jed explained over dinner. “I’m not going to able to get to it before then. Too many papers to grade”

  “You know what’s funny?” I asked sullenly. “That’s the part I always liked when I was a kid—burning the leaves. I hated raking them up.”

  “No kidding,” Jed said, reaching for the carrots.

  “I have an idea,” I said brightly. “Why can’t we just let them stay where they fall? Aren’t leaves good for the lawn?”

  “Sure, if you turn them into mulch, and maybe we’ll start doing that, next year. Meanwhile, though, you’re the one who hates all the wet leaves when the snow starts to thaw.”

  I made a face. “They’re slippery, and all stuck together. Like old newspapers. Really yucky.”

  “I rest my case.”

  “Why does everything have to be so complicated?”

  Jed grinned. “Face it, kiddo, it’s not the complications you don’t like, it’s the hard work.”

  “Maybe, but I still wish we could just burn all the leaves, the way my dad did when I was little. It smells so wonderful, and it’s much easier than stuffing a lot of stupid bags and dragging them down to a public dump. Those were the good old days. “

  “The good old days are what got us into this mess,” Jed reminded me, “where the air gets so bad kids can’t play outside.”

  “That’s caused by too many cars, and too many big industries polluting the atmosphere,” I insisted. “Not a few people burning some silly leaves in their front yards. Besides, it’s not like we do it all year.”

  “Millions of people, in millions of yards, burning millions of leaves,” Jed said. “It adds up pretty fast, and before long, the planet starts w
arming up. And people like you, my love, have trouble breathing.”

  “Burning leaves don’t cause asthma,” I said stubbornly.

  “No, but they don’t help it, either. What’s for dessert?” Jed was trying to change the subject, but I was on a mission.

  “What if I just burned one bag, in the back yard, maybe, when there was no one around to see it?”

  “I understand the city has a new civic ordinance about that,” Jed said. “A fine of a hundred bucks for the first offense, along with a bare-bottomed walloping. Administered by a police officer, in the perpetrator’s front yard—as an example to other scofflaws. I think Frank Murphy would be the perfect man for the job. You know Frank, right? Mean son-of-a-bitch, around six-five, maybe two hundred fifty pounds, biceps like coconuts?”

  “That’s the second time you’ve made sly hints about spanking,” I observed sweetly. “Should I read some secret meaning into that?”

  He grinned. “Nothing secret about it, kiddo. If I come home and find a pile of ashes in the yard, something else around here besides leaves is going to get set on fire.”

  * * * *

  It’s a funny thing about rules. Jed tends to get cranky when I don’t follow the absolute letter of the law—or the rules. Yet, at other times, he can get just as cranky when I’ve offended what he calls the spirit of whatever rule I broke. But to me, that sort of reasoning isn’t the least bit logical. So, since the spirit of a law is more or less subjective, I generally try to adhere (whenever possible) to the letter of the law, instead. Thus, while Jed had made it abundantly clear that I wasn’t to burn leaves in the yard, he hadn’t said a single word about burning them in the house, now, had he?

  It was simple, really. I would spend the chill autumn afternoon reading, curled up cozily in the big leather wing chair by the fireplace. And while I read, (Nathaniel Hawthorne, of course,) a bag of leaves would burn merrily, giving off a cheerful warmth and the heady fragrance of a New England autumn as it flickered and cracked behind the old iron grate. Later, when Jed came home to this enchanting tableau, he would join me before the fire, expressing amazement at what a clever and thrifty girl I had been to think of such a lovely way to heat our home and still preserve the endangered Pandas and the Polar Ice Cap. He would kiss me as he put the second bag of leaves on the fire, and later, after a simple supper of Champagne and cold chicken, he would pull me down onto the bear-skin rug (okay, nylon shag) and make slow, passionate love to me by the glow of the dying embers.

  Getting the bags inside wasn’t as easy as I expected, though. Jed had stacked at least fifteen of them at the side of the house, by the back door, and each of the damned things must have weighed fifty or sixty pounds, dead weight. Buy the time I dragged the two bags through the kitchen and down the hallway to the den, I was exhausted, and the idea wasn’t sounding as terrific as it once had. Leaves weigh absolutely nothing, right? So, how the hell could a bag of absolutely nothing feel like three or four iron anvils? Right away, I could see the error in my thinking. Opening the bags and dumping the contents on the fire a few handfuls at a time was going to be impossible. Not only were the bags almost as tall as I was, they were so stuffed that when I tried to slit the first bag open, the rip just kept going, like the run in a pair of pantyhose. Last night’s rain had apparently made the bags swell, and now, it was going to have to be all or nothing.

  My reasoning was that since the leaves inside were damp, the flames would sort of light the bag at one corner, then smolder for a few minutes, like one of those composite fire logs you buy wrapped in treated paper, you know?

  But it didn’t happen that way.

  At first, not much happened, at all. The bag began to singe, turning black all over, but then, the bag started to smell, sort of like mildew. Clots of matted leaves began oozing from the rip in the bag, and the bag itself began to swell, as if it couldn’t vomit out what was inside fast enough. I was about to give up on the idea and drag the scorched bag out of the flames when there was this gigantic hiss—like a punctured air mattress. A second later, the bag exploded.

  My first thought was that there was no way in hell our five acre lot could have produced the sheer volume of slimy, decomposing foliage that was spewing from the fireplace, covering me and everything else within eight feet with what looked and smelled not like autumn leaves, but like swamp slime. The fire was almost smothered by the weight of it, and for a few minutes, the mass simply smoldered, filling the room with dense gray smoke and an acrid odor. Meanwhile, the rug had begun to melt. Yeah, not burn, but melt. Maybe bearskin burns, but nylon shag melts—into little hard, frizzy little balls.

  That was the good news. Moments later, the sodden mass of crap still in the fireplace burst into flames—flames that immediately leaped up to blacken the antique white brick of the fireplace and hearth, and creep over the wooden mantelpiece. To say that I panicked at this juncture would be something of an understatement. I fucking freaked! Which was why I threw three sofa pillows, the melting nylon shag rug, and an afghan crocheted by my mother-in-law onto the fire—hoping to smother the flames, I guess. It was only dumb providence that prevented me from adding the brand new den curtains to the heap. I couldn’t get them off the rods, thank you, Jesus!

  It didn’t take long to die down—the fire, anyway. The smoke and fumes (Nylon shag with rubber backing, polyurethane foam-filled sofa cushions, forty square feet of woolen yarn, my tennis shoes— you name it) just kept pouring from the fireplace.

  Jed arrived home a little earlier than usual, naturally. Not that the extra half hour would have made much difference. I had already cleaned up what I could without professional help, and hauled the burnt and unburnt leaves from the den to the trash. Which meant that when Jed came through the front door, there was no evidence of the disaster immediately visible. The smell was something else. The whole house reeked. Not the pleasant fragrance of burning leaves, mind you, but the putrid, nauseating odor of a fire at the garbage dump, or maybe a bordello. (I had tried to mask the smell a little by spraying everything in sight with two hastily purchased cans of spray room deodorant— “Floral Fantasy” and “Jasmine Dreams,” along with the full bottle of rancid “White Shoulders” his mother had given me several Christmases ago.) When I heard the front door open, I dashed into the hallway, and found Jed removing his jacket, sniffing the air, and wrinkling his nose at the stench.

  “You’re going to tell me what that is, right?” he asked wearily. I knew he was already putting two and two together, but there was no way on earth he could have imagined what was waiting for him just steps away, in his beautifully restored nineteenth century den.

  I took a deep breath, and began to explain. It came out hopelessly garbled, but oddly, Jed seemed to pretty much get the picture after the first few words. He walked past me into the den, with me right behind him. I was still babbling frantically, but Jed was ominously silent. For a minute, he just stood in the middle of the room, on the charred planks where the shag rug had once lain. I could see him taking in the missing sofa cushions, the grimy soot on the walls, and the crumbling wads of charred leaves the vacuum cleaner was still trying to ingest before it choked to death.

  “You did all this since I left this morning?” he asked quietly, his hands on his hips. “All by yourself?” The note of resigned sarcasm was not reassuring.

  “Yeah, so, you like what I’ve done with the place?” I asked, idiotically. Normally, Jed is a wonderfully mild and forbearing guy, with a terrific sense of humor, traits that have lightened the mood and saved my ass from a well-deserved spanking more than once. This time, though, there was no answering chuckle, and no reprieve. I was in for a spanking that would make the history books.

  He walked over to the fireplace and ran his hand over the scorched brickwork. The mantel was thick with soot, and would need refinishing, but it was still basically sound. Fortunately for me, the two antique paintings above the fireplace—a likeness of Thomas Jefferson and another, of John Adams, had suffered no v
isible damage. Jefferson’s nose was on the large side, and John Adams’ bug-eyed expression made him look mildly insane, but both gentlemen had come down to us that way, from Jed’s forbears, who apparently had not had the funds to afford the work of a competent artist.

  “I wanted to burn a few leaves,” I said helplessly.

  Jed nodded. “Well, it looks like you did,” he said. With that, he walked out of the den, into the kitchen. I stood there miserably, trying to come up with something—anything—intelligent to say in my defense. The problem was that there wasn’t anything intelligent to say, and there was no defense for what I’d done.

  Moments later, Jed was back. “I’ve got a call in to Ben Peters,” he said. (Ben Peters is our insurance agent.)

  I breathed a sigh of relief. Maybe Jed was going to let this one go. Another episode of Lucy and Ricky. And that’s when I noticed the big wooden spoon in his hand. Shit! Even Ricky never used a wooden spoon.

  He tossed a throw pillow onto his desk, and then sat down on the edge of the desk, with his knees slightly apart. “Take your pants off,” he said flatly. I gulped, but didn’t move. I couldn’t move. I was frozen. I don’t know why, exactly. I already knew I was going to get a hell of a spanking, but I think it was the coolness in Jed’s voice that was making me nervous. Finally, he just took my hand, pulled me between his legs and undid the top button on my jeans while I stood there with my eyes tightly shut. He unzipped the jeans and pushed them down, then peeled my panties down, as well—all the way to my ankles. When I had stepped out of the jeans and panties, Jed raised his left arm so that I could lie down across his left knee. This placed my upper body close against him, my short legs between his long ones, and my head and shoulders resting on the pillow. I’d been here before, so it wasn’t a big surprise, but I knew what being in this particular position meant. It meant that he wanted me firmly under control, and that was not good news.