by Natale Ghent
“Ma! What’s going on?”
“Oh, those horrible people!”
“What horrible people, Ma?”
“The Hydro. They turned off the hydro because I’m late paying the bill. I told them, Friday at the latest, but they wouldn’t listen.”
This makes me more than just a little scared. We’ve been hungry before and we’ve had to make do with old clothes, but we’ve never had to face anything like this. And only four days before Christmas. Suddenly I hate my dad more than ever. How could he go and leave us to freeze with no hydro, while he and his new family eat steaks and things? I’m not sure about the steaks, but that’s the first thing that comes to my mind and it makes me furious.
“That can’t be legal, Ma, to shut off the hydro.” This is all I can think to say at this time. To my surprise, she doesn’t treat me like an idiot.
“No, it’s not legal. And I’m going to do something about it.”
I look over at Queenie and Cid, who haven’t said a word. I can tell they’re scared, too, because they’ve never seen Ma like this before either. Matears the phone book open to the government pages, flipping angrily through until she finds the number she wants. She dials the numbers so hard she has to redial twice just to get it right.
“May I speak with the mayor, please?”
I look at Cid and Queenie as though to say, do you believe Ma’s guts? Then I shrug because I have no idea what’s coming next.
“I have to speak to her. It’s very important….”
There’s a long pause.
“Then, I’d like to leave her a message. I’m a single mother struggling to survive with three children. I’ve always tried to pay my bills on time. I try to do my best but the Hydro won’t wait for one more day and decided to just cut us off. My children are here in the dark and we can’t even put the kettle on the stove for a cup of tea. This is a disgrace, and I want something done about it immediately.”
After bending the secretary’s ear, Ma leaves her name and number and hangs up. She folds her arms across her chest and disappears into her room, leaving us standing in the hallway by the phone with no explanation as to what’s going to happen.
“We can light the fire,” I tell Queenie and Cid to make them feel better. “It’s kind of excitingwith no electricity. Just like Little House on the Prairie.”
“Are we going to freeze to death?” Queenie asks.
I look at her in shock and then laugh to let her know that everything will be all right. But honestly, this whole thing has me really scared. I don’t know if the mayor will call us back, and even if she does, what good can she do? She won’t pay our bills or make Dad come home and take care of us. I feel sorry for Ma, having to call the mayor and embarrass herself like that. I feel sorry for the whole lot of us.
“Get some newspaper from the garbage,” I order Queenie, to keep her busy. “Go get the matches in the kitchen drawer,” I order Cid for the same reason.
They don’t argue, but just obediently get what I asked for, which means they’re depending on me to get them through this. I hate being in this position, but I do it all the same because somebody has to take charge.
I don’t even have a chance to light the newspaper in the fireplace when the lights snap on. The phone rings as this happens, and I shake out the match and rush to answer it. I can’t believe my ears when I hear it’s the mayor. I yell for Ma tocome to the phone, and she appears like summer lightning, snatching the phone from my outstretched hand.
“Hello …”
I think Ma is as surprised as the rest of us that the mayor actually called back. We all stand there listening. There’s a long pause, and I’m desperate to know what’s being said.
“Yes. Yes. Well, thank you very much. I appreciate this very much.” Ma returns the phone to its cradle, then leans her chin on one hand and just stares off into space.
“What’d she say, Ma?” the three of us ask together.
“She phoned the Hydro and told them to turn on the electricity and not to turn it off again, no matter how late we are paying the bill.”
Cid, Queenie and I exchange astonished looks. “That was nice of her,” I finally say.
“Yes, it was. She’s a woman with a family of her own. I knew she’d understand.” Ma suddenly looks at her watch in alarm. “Good lord, you kids are going to be late for school!”
I knew the time had been ticking away but I wasn’t going to get dressed and go to school and leave Ma alone in the dark. I open my mouth to explain this, but Ma cuts me short.
“You can stay home today. You won’t make it in time for the bell and none of you have had anything to eat yet. Just make sure you catch up on your homework tomorrow. And keep an eye on the fire if you light it.”
Ma gets ready for work faster than I’ve ever seen her do. She looks like Bob Cratchit from A Christmas Carol with her long hand-knitted scarf wound round and round her neck and her gloves with the fingertips cut out so she can wear them while she’s typing at the office. She needs them like that because her office is almost always cold. Her boss, Mr. McKinley, is a fossil from the Dark Ages with his dingy wallpaper and his junky old machinery that he refuses to replace. Luke Skywalker is flying all over the universe and Ma is still typing on a manual typewriter. All the other secretaries who work for other lawyers in town get to use those new IBM electric typewriters. Ma says they work with a little ball that whizzes around to type the letters, instead of individual arms like the old-style typewriters. She says the other secretaries write such nice neat letters because they have all the right equipment, but old bachelor McKinley doesn’t give a darn about things like that.
Still, despite the old-fashioned equipment andpeeling wallpaper, working for Mr. McKinley has its advantages. He’s so old he barely has any clients left and he does all the title-searching himself because he doesn’t trust Ma to do it, which means he’s out of the office a lot. There’s not enough work for Ma to do, so she occupies her time knitting mitts and things for us, or practising her recorder, or just putting her feet up against the beehive heater and singing Christmas carols if she wants to. I’ve seen her do that. It’s the best job for Ma, seeing as she doesn’t have a lot of work experience. She actually likes it, even though she has to be there at the crack of dawn and doesn’t come home until long after we’re home from school. And McKinley is as honest as the day is long, Ma says. She told us that he once got a quarter from a machine that he shouldn’t have, so he sealed it in an envelope and sent it back to the company with an explanation. I thought he was an idiot to do it, but Ma said it’s just because his conscience won’t let him keep so much as a quarter that isn’t his. We started calling him Abe Lincoln after that, because I heard once that Lincoln walked miles to return a penny to a man who had dropped it. This makes Ma laugh, but she made us promise we would never say it outside of the house.
Ma calls out a few last-minute instructions before shutting the door and tramping down the snowy stairs to the sidewalk. We wave from the window, watching her until she’s just a dark shape against the white snow at the top of the street, then shriek and jump around the living room like monkeys. It’s not that we’re glad Ma isn’t here. It’s just unusual for all three of us to be allowed to stay home on a school day with no one being sick or anything.
When we are finished acting wild, I work on getting the fire started. We haven’t got any kindling, so I pull strips of bark from the logs instead. While I’m doing this, Queenie and Cid make toast and coffee with the few heels of bread left in the bread drawer. We haven’t got a toaster. We put the bread under the grill of the stove.
“You watch those heels don’t burn!” I call out. This makes me laugh because more than once I’ve melted the soles of my shoes putting them too close to the fire.
We only have a bit of butter, so Cid carefully greases the toasted heels, then slices them into little cubes. She puts them in the bowls of coffee, the butter floating in hundreds of tiny circles on the surface. Then she
piles the toast cubes with spoonfuls of sugar until they sink like small square ships to the bottom of the bowl. This iswhat we eat when Ma isn’t around to cook, and it suits us just fine. The fire is crackling merrily and I couldn’t be happier, sitting there with my two sisters, indulging ourselves with a hot toast-and-coffee breakfast. We eat in silence for a bit, enjoying the warm comfort of the flames.
“Do you think the Hydro will listen to the mayor?” Queenie asks thoughtfully.
“Sure they will. They haven’t got a choice.” I slurp loudly at my coffee because Ma isn’t around to stop me.
“Will they go to jail if they do it again?”
“I don’t think so.” I answer seriously, but secretly I’m thrilled at the idea of all the Hydro people rotting in jail for turning off our electricity.
“Do you think Ma will let us get a tree?” Queenie asks, changing the subject abruptly, as only she can.
“A Christmas tree?”
“Yeah. A nice big one like we had in the stone house.”
This is the way we measure time in my family. Not in years, like most people, but by houses that we’ve lived in.
“We never even had a tree like that in the yellow house,” Cid pipes up. “We could never afford a tree like that again.”
“Who says?” I challenge her, just because I feel like it today.
“We can’t even pay our hydro bill, Nathaniel. How is Ma going to afford any tree at all, let alone one as big as that?”
I know she’s right but I hate to admit defeat. I would use my own money to buy a tree, but I haven’t more than a dollar in my cigar box right now. Besides, I want to save every cent to buy a harness strap for Smokey. I tell Queenie there’s no harm in asking Ma for a tree.
We sit in front of the fire talking like this all morning. It isn’t long before Ma returns for lunch. She bangs the snow from her boots as she unwinds her scarf.
“Fire looks nice,” she says cheerfully.
She’s in a much better mood than when she left, so I elbow Queenie as hard as I can to let her know she should ask about the Christmas tree. It’s best if Queenie asks, because Ma can’t deny her anything. Queenie looks confused, then understands. She puts on her most endearing expression.
“Can we get a Christmas tree, Ma?”
Ma doesn’t turn around. She picks some invisible lint off her coat for a while and doesn’t answer.
“Can we get a Christmas tree, Ma?” Queenie asks again.
“We can’t even pay the hydro,” Ma finally says in a sad voice. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to buy a tree with.”
Cid glares at me with that I-told-you-so! look on her face.
“You could write a cheque,” Queenie innocently persists, just as I groomed her to say.
“You can’t write cheques with no money in the bank. It’s fraudulent,” Ma says.
I jump in. “But you can put the money in when you get paid. The bank won’t know. How are we supposed to have Christmas without a tree?”
This last part hangs in the air like candle smoke. We sit dumbly staring at Ma’s back for what seems like the longest time, while the smoke expands and fills up the room. Ma stands with her hands in her pockets, saying nothing. Then she pulls out her chequebook, solemnly writes a cheque and tears it off from the pack. She hands it to me because she thinks I’m the most responsible, I guess, or because she knows that Queenie couldn’t possibly have planned this attack.
“It’s all I have.”
I look at the cheque and it’s for 5 dollars. I don’t know what kind of tree we can buy with 5 dollars, but I’m so happy we got anything that I fold thecheque and stuff it into my pocket. “Come on, guys. We’ll go get Smokey and hitch him to the sled to get the tree.”
The idea of Smokey pulling the tree on the sled is so exciting we can barely get dressed fast enough. On the way to the barn we practically burst with anticipation, suddenly running in short fits until the cold hurts our lungs and makes us stop. We don’t even practise our aim like we normally do, by throwing snowballs at traffic signs and trees, because we don’t want to slow down long enough to make the snowballs.
When we reach the barn we tumble in, stamping the snow from our boots. Smokey nickers from inside his stall, little bits of hay sticking out of his mouth. The other horses eye us curiously, picking up on our excitement.
“Put Smokey’s halter and lead on,” I tell Cid as I grab the pick to clean Smokey’s hooves. “Give him a quick brush, Queenie. We want him to look nice.”
“I brought some things,” Queenie says, pulling some bits of tinsel and a handful of thin red ribbons from her coat pocket. “I’ve been saving these since last year. I even brought some little pine cones. I thought we could put them in his mane and tail.”
“That’s stupid,” Cid says. “A horse should wear bells, not pine cones.”
“No, it’s not. It’s a good idea,” I tell Queenie. “Those pine cones are about the same size as bells. They just don’t ring as loud.” I give Queenie a wink. “You go ahead and try it out.”
I take the Gorilla’s noseband and work it onto the harness, while Queenie busies herself by carefully tying the little pine cones to the ends of the ribbons. When she’s done this, she braids them into Smokey’s mane and tail so that the cones hang down like bells. She tucks the bits of tinsel here and there through the braids, then gives Smokey’s tail one last brush for good measure. She steps back when she’s done and, to my surprise, it looks beautiful. Normally I shy away from this kind of thing, but Smokey looks so wonderful with Queenie’s ribbons and little pine cones that my heart just soars. I put my arm around Queenie and give her a hug as she beams at her handiwork.
“It looks really good,” Cid finally sniffs. “It looks like Christmas.”
* * *
Maybe it’s the snow on the ground or the chill in the air, but Smokey seems to know that today isspecial. He tosses his head and picks up his feet extra high as we parade down the street to town. The pine cones bounce and swing from his mane and tail, and everybody on the street either waves or stops to watch us go by. Even the cars slow down and little kids wave from the back seats, like we’re Santa Claus or something. Cid and I wave back sometimes, but Queenie is transfixed by Smokey and the tiny pine cones. Smokey’s eyes look mischievous and bright. His coat is frosty and white as though he sprang magically to life from a snowdrift. The steam from his muzzle curls around my hand, and I feel like the happiest person on earth.
“We oughta get him hoof black,” Queenie says all of a sudden.
“That would be good,” Cid agrees.
“They’ve got hoof paint in sparkling silver. I’ve seen it at the Co-op,” I say.
“Can we get some, Nat?” Queenie asks. “Wouldn’t he look pretty with silver hooves?”
“Don’t you think he’d look prettier if we painted his three black hooves black and his one white hoof silver?”
“Can we do that, Nat? That would be great.”
We’re so involved in this discussion that before we know it we’ve reached our destination: the
Towers Department Store parking lot. The trees are piled as high as a house and point every which way. There are trees leaning drunkenly against the snow fence and rejected trees scattered on the ground. The air is thick with the smell of pine. The man selling the trees looks surprised as he watches us pull up with our rig. We tie Smokey to the fence that holds the trees in, and I am happy to say that he stands nicely. Then we start the lengthy and very involved process of picking a tree that will satisfy us all with the little money that Ma gave us. It’s my job to hold up the trees for Queenie and Cid’s inspection. There’s no sign saying how much the trees cost, so I pick up one of the smaller ones and hold it out at arm’s length.
“What about this one?”
“Too skinny,” Queenie says.
“What about this one?”
“Too short.”
“Okay, how about this one?”
Queenie and
Cid shake their heads without offering an explanation. We go on like this for a few more trees, until the man walks over.
“Can I help you kids?”
I pull the cheque out of my pocket and hand it to him. “What can we get for this?”
The man unfolds the cheque and stares at it inconfusion. He looks up at us, then over at Smokey, who shakes his head impatiently. The man doesn’t say a word, but folds the cheque and pushes it into his pocket. He walks to the back of the lot and produces a tree, slamming the trunk on the ground to show the spread of its branches. The tree is full and fresh and tall—taller than me on my tiptoes! Its branches are thick and even, with perfect little pine cones on the tips. I can’t believe my eyes, because it’s the nicest tree I’ve ever seen. It’s even nicer than the one we had at the stone house. It must be worth at least 15 or 20 dollars but I’m not going to argue with the man. “We’ll take it.”
“How are you getting it home? The pony?” the man asks.
“Yes, sir. He’s trained to pull. We trained him ourselves.” I can’t help boasting just a little.
The man quickly saws the end off the trunk to make a fresh cut, then carries the tree over to the fence for us, placing it gingerly on the sled behind Smokey. Smokey eyes the tree with suspicion, then shakes his head again.
“It’s okay, mister, he won’t kick,” I reassure the man. “He’s just never hauled a Christmas tree before.”
We help the man lash the tree onto the sled
with binder twine. Queenie holds Smokey’s head while Cid and I check to make sure the tree is on tight.
“You kids have a merry Christmas,” the man says, as we lead Smokey from the lot, the tree on the sled sliding along easily.
Now we’re more excited than ever because we can’t believe our luck. Imagine, a tree this nice for only 5 dollars!
