A Christmas Hope

by Joseph Pittman

  She has been a dream, this child, and she speaks to my heart. She keeps me going.

  Which I hope keeps you going.

  There is a lot of talk about Christmas traditions around here, they embrace the holiday with a verve the jaded would sneer at; cynicism may rule the world, but in Linden Corners it is blown far away by the wind, and the cheery residents wouldn’t have it any other way. So, my dear, I have set this plan in motion, the Christmas that should be must be, and may well be. I am striving to bring my memories of yesterday into the cherished moment of today. Today it is another holiday that envelops us; it is a day I choose to spend in quiet but not alone. My heart could have soared, embraced by this new family who now live within the walls of my youth. This man and this girl, what a special, unlikely relationship they have formed, and they are not blood; they are a family as much as any. They are together first out of need, now out of want. The world found them, fate pushed their separate souls into one. Like me, like you. How I wonder, would we ever have met if circumstances had been different. Had I not left Linden Corners as a child, where would my years have taken me? Would I still call the farmhouse home, would the sails of that old windmill continue to turn for me, or would it have been destroyed by time, by the reckless disregard of progress? And if so, what of that little girl who breathes its swirling air now? What would her life have been?

  But again, I am getting ahead of myself.

  Yes, it is Thanksgiving Day, my dear, and I am here with my thoughts, and of course, with you. A plate of food sits beside me, turkey and stuffing, all the trimmings, and I will eat them as I always have. That is another lesson I learned long ago, from a patient mother who had only one son to care for. No matter the sorrow that stalks your heart, there is room for celebration, and it is this notion that I embrace, that I cling to. Provided the woman named Nora can find for me the second best gift I can ask for.

  You, my dear, are my first, always.

  That elusive book, it’s the key to it all, isn’t it? I have racked my mind, wondering where it could have gone to after these eighty years. But I know it must be out there, waiting for me; if I can return to Linden Corners and be welcomed into its big heart after all this time, then anything is possible. You just have to wish it, like young Janey would say, set it upon the wind and watch it fly. Sometimes the wind takes your dreams into the future, but mine . . . mine, how I wish to send them back in time. Back to an unsuspecting boy who suffered a great loss, a boy whose appreciation for all that had been given to him was stolen, both physical objects and the intangible, all gone, he thought, never to be found again.

  I remember that fateful day like one recalls a recurring nightmare, coming to you not just in the dark but whenever shadows crossed over your soul. The sun could be bright, daylight lasting long into the night, summer at its peak and all of sudden there come those images, unwanted and scary, reminding you of what you didn’t have. Tossing the ball in the backyard, bouncing it against the house because no one was there to catch it. Wanting to buy a treasured gift for an upcoming birthday, knowing the recipient was no longer around to enjoy it. Reading a poem on Christmas night to yourself, knowing a special memory had been lost to time.

  It was the day before Thanksgiving, nearly eleven months after my brave father, Lars Van Diver, went off to fight the war in Europe. We had heard from him periodically, letters that took too many weeks to arrive from overseas, always opening with the same salutation, “My dearest family,” and ending with the hopeful, “Yours, now, forever, and always.” It almost didn’t matter what the contents of the letter detailed, just that we knew he was safe and we knew that he loved us. Mama and I survived on written rations just as he dined on dry ones, but truthfully none were satisfying, and we could only hope for a quick end to the war to fulfill us.

  Life in Linden Corners was quieter back then, almost an antidote to the explosions that rocked the world across the expansive ocean. Mama and I, we kept the peace and we kept the farm running as best we could, hiring day laborers in the spring for the planting and the fall for the harvest, filling their coffers and our bellies. At night the two of us passed the time listening to the radio or reading by flickering candlelight. Before I slept, I would run my fingers over the photograph of the model train from the Sears catalog, the same train that I didn’t get for Christmas the year before. I would imagine my dad journeying across foreign lands hearing languages he didn’t understand, packed onto a train that swirled with smoke and whistled in the dark night. To me it all seemed very glamorous, a young boy who had not yet played with toy soldiers failing to understand the harsh reality of battle. Until one day he did.

  A light dusting of snow coated the ground that morning, and I was outside trying to form snowballs in my little fists, all to no avail. The powder would disintegrate the moment I tried to pack them, and at last I gave up and threw the puff of snow into the air, watching as it sprinkled down like sugar atop a cookie, sweet upon sweetness. That’s when I saw the car pulling up the driveway, its tires crunching against snow and gravel; it was plain, brown in color, what they would have called a sedan. As it came to a stop, a man in uniform emerged from behind the wheel, setting a stiff cap down upon his blond crew cut. He was older than Papa, with several stripes on his shoulders and colorful medals on his chest.

  “Hello, young boy, could you tell me, is this the Van Diver home?”

  “Yes sir,” I told him easily. It was a different time then, even during war, innocence still reigned over suspicion.

  “I’d like to speak with Mrs. Van Diver . . . would that be your mother?”

  By now Mama had appeared, dressed in a housecoat dotted with floral colors, her hair in rollers. I think that’s what I remember most, how tight she looked, how tense, as though she had been waiting for this very moment. This dutiful call from the United States Army. When she looked at the car, and saw the solemn expression on the officer’s face, when she noticed the sealed letter in his right hand, that’s when she knew, and when I knew. Her giant, almost stilted sob sealed it, sadness and regret and the hollow sound of loss enveloping her to the point that she dropped to the ground, her body oblivious to the fallen snow. She must have been numb to the cold, then and for days after.

  The officer did his duty, speaking with soft authority: “On behalf of a grateful nation . . .”

  But the other words he spoke floated into the invisible air, neither of us hearing them or remembering them, neither of us wanting to. As though by failing to acknowledge them, refusing to even open the letter, the truth could be rendered false, the past could be changed. But it couldn’t, and it wasn’t, and all I knew by day’s end was that life had forever shifted. The world might have been emptier by one body, but it was devoid of three souls. Him, her, me, once a family, now a fraction.

  Yes, it was the day before Thanksgiving, and the next day the turkey remained frozen and fresh grown peas went uncooked, and the bread for the stuffing grew stale. I don’t know what we ate, Mama just sat in Papa’s chair and I at her feet, and she stroked my hair for what seemed hours, her touch both embracing and tenuous at the same time, like our connection could be broken at any point. Life came with no guarantees, family could be split in a single second, a boy’s heart could be shattered like glass falling to the floor.

  Papa had taken a bullet, he hadn’t even needed to see a medic. He was gone that fast, in an instant. The incident had happened six days earlier, the word just getting to us now, in time to ruin the holiday and our lives. No matter what day, the latter would have been true, Mama was never the same, and as for me, what I most felt was anger.

  Even when I learned years later that we won the war, my young soul still ached for what it had lost.

  The next month passed in a blur, like I was living inside a blinding snowstorm.

  Christmas Eve came, and rather than being surrounded by a tree that glistened with tinsel, with colored lights and with brightly wrapped presents awaiting discovery underneath its branches, Ma
ma and I lived beside dozens of cardboard boxes, our lives packed up tightly; had they been alive they would have been screaming to be let out, desperate for air. The reality was setting in; we were leaving Linden Corners, headed to Virginia to my maternal grandparents, where we would live for the next two years.

  “Thomas, where are you?”

  Where was I hiding? Up in the attic of course, but instead of it being a storage room overflowing with our cherished memories, it was bare and empty, wooden beams exposed to me for what seemed the first time; I had never before noticed them. Sometimes you don’t see the frame when the picture inside is what draws your attention.

  Lying on the floor, not caring about the dust that swirled around me, I flipped through page after page of the book and tried to be engaged by the tale of Saint Nicholas and his flying reindeer who brought gifts to all those little boys and girls who were nice, not naughty. So where were my gifts? I asked myself, all year I had helped Mama with the house and chores. My reward was a holiday that didn’t exist, without a father and without a tree to remind us of the joys the season brought with it. Mama had explained that she had had no choice but to sell the house, we couldn’t afford to stay on; we had to be out by the end of the year. We put Christmas on hold, to celebrate once we arrived at my grandparents. Our tiny family’s traditions, which I had barely gotten to know, were suddenly gone; rather than hear my father’s deep baritone reading me this story, me on his lap and my mother smiling from her chair, I was lip-reading, silent, fighting back tears. As Donder and Blitzen and their furry cohorts took to the night sky, as jolly old Saint Nick in his green-colored suit slid down the chimney with a rosy-cheeked goodness, I continued to turn the pages without regard for the words, and when I finished I started over again, and again, but each time I read the story its impact lessened. I was staring at the last page, “And to all, a good night,” when I heard my mother’s voice penetrate my mind.

  “Thomas, dear . . . oh sweetie,” she said, coming up the stairs, sitting on the landing.

  I closed the book, leaving the cover facedown, not that it did any good. She knew what I was reading.

  “You want me to read it to you, tonight?”

  I shook my head. Definitely not.

  “Thomas, talk to me.”

  “It’s okay, Mama,” I remember saying. “It’s just a book.”

  She attempted a smile, knowing I didn’t mean those words.

  “Come on, it’s nearly time to go. The movers are here, they’re loading the boxes,” she said. “We can make good progress today, and more tomorrow; we should be celebrating not just Christmas late tomorrow afternoon but also your birthday. My precious boy, six years old, my goodness but where does the time go?”

  Time disappears into the air, like smoke, you think you see it and then it’s just gone, the smell of the past lingering only for as long as you’ll remember it. I put up no argument, not if I wanted Santa Claus to remember me for next year; he would know where to find me, didn’t he know everything? Santa, who now wore a red suit; everything had changed, that’s what my mind told me. Getting up from the floor, I left the book where I’d been reading it.

  “Aren’t you forgetting something?” she asked.

  “No,” I said. “This is Papa’s house, and this is Papa’s gift. His memory should stay.”

  “He wanted you to have that book,” she said.

  “Papa needs it more than I do, his soul will come back here and I don’t want him to find an empty house. Just like we leave Santa cookies, we need to leave Papa something, and this . . . it’s just what he would want.” I said all this with a wavering tone, and then I made my way down the stairs of the attic at the farmhouse in Linden Corners for the final time.

  We left at noon on a sunny Christmas Eve, saying nothing to each other. Mama had only lived in this house for seven years, me for five. It was Papa’s home, his family’s, and while we had attempted to keep the Van Diver traditions alive, fate somehow felt that change was in the air. It wasn’t the only thing in the air that day, because even though there was no snow on the ground or falling from the sky, the wind was strong and so the windmill’s sails spun, almost as though they were waving to us, good-bye, my friend, maybe for forever.

  Not forever, it turned out, but a lifetime, eighty years.

  And in all that passing of time, I never again laid eyes on that rare edition of The Night before Christmas. Only for that one year had I heard my papa recount to me the story of the visit from Saint Nicholas. Indeed, visit, not visits.

  And so another Thanksgiving comes to an end, my dear, different in some respects, strange in others. The turkey was dry and there was not enough chestnut-flavored stuffing, and the green beans were drowned in a mushroom sauce, the fried onions soggy. I ate what I could and then they took the tray away. As unsatisfying as the meal was, the company is what has filled my belly, my heart. Sitting beside you, holding your hand and telling you stories of Linden Corners past and present, it makes me feel achieving my dream is possible.

  My new friends have had their own holiday, different for them, too. Brian Duncan spent his first year not at his parents’ home, and Janey spent her first Thanksgiving at home without the woman who gave birth to her. And Nora, she so fiercely independent, journeyed with her mother, Gerta—you would like her, probably engage her in a pie-baking contest—and son, Travis, they went to visit other family, another sister who lives beyond Linden Corners. It can’t have been an easy holiday for any of them, and yet the strains of the upcoming season have only just begun.

  I watched the annual parade this morning, not far from where we are now, and of course it ended as it always does. A jolly Santa Claus waving to the masses gathered along the busy canyons of New York. He wore his red suit, he always does except in my memories. I have told you of that, and soon, I hope to show it to you, and you will hear the words as I heard them so long ago from my father. I have entrusted much to strangers, but that’s what’s so special about life within the world of Linden Corners, strangers somehow become friends faster than it takes that old windmill to turn a single revolution.

  Yes, my dear, something special indeed is coming, a Christmas for us all to remember.

  PART 2

  RETURNING HOPE

  CHAPTER 11

  NORA

  Saying snowfall was in the day’s forecast was an easy understatement. A nor’easter loomed over the darkening horizon and held the region in its anticipated grasp. Having already conquered the eastern provinces of Canada, strong winds and swirling flakes of snow were quickly sweeping all across Central New York State and making their way toward the low-lying Hudson River Valley. Panicked people were out in droves buying necessary provisions, food and water, batteries, and candles. The schools had been closed even before a single flake had fallen, officials fearing the storm could hit so fast the buses wouldn’t be able to handle slick, icy roads. Such hearty storms were frequent enough here that everyone knew the drill—stay home, stay off the roads, hunker down, and respect nature’s fury.

  It was December first and the holiday season was getting its first real blast of winter.

  For Nora Rainer, the storm couldn’t be coming at a better time, as the work in the storage room was piling up daily. She decided today was the perfect day in which to attack all that she’d been putting off; she accepted the storm as a gift of time. Back when she was a child, whenever a passing thunderstorm would assault Linden Corners, she would hole up in her room with her coterie of dolls, indulging in fantasies that took her away from the howling winds, the pelting rain, and deadly streaks of lightning. Where her mind journeyed to, the sky was calm and the women were beautiful and the pink house in which they lived was on a beach, white sands warm beneath their plastic feet. In her world, nothing melted and no one froze either, no one was in harm’s way. Now that she’d passed into adulthood, she had learned to respect the ferocity of such storms, knowing the damage they could inflict. Just two summers ago, an angry storm had nea
rly destroyed the windmill, and it had taken from the residents of Linden Corners one of their own, the beloved, gentle Annie Sullivan, only weeks after Nora’s father had passed away. With dire predictions of more than sixteen inches of snow and wind gusts of up to fifty miles per hour, Nora wanted to keep her loved ones as close to her as possible.

  Yet she also wanted to attend to business at A Doll’s Attic. What better time than when the world shut down and nature released some pent-up pressure, and the fact she was once again playing in her dollhouse didn’t go unnoticed by her; sometimes it was nice to have a place in which to hide. So that’s where she found herself at ten o’clock that Wednesday morning, Travis at her side, both of them dressed in ratty jeans and old sweaters, perfect for getting dirty amidst all the boxes they needed to look through. Gerta had preferred to say home, Nora telling her they would head back at the first sight of snowfall. She wouldn’t be left alone, not then.

  “You ready to get to work?” Nora asked.

  Travis tossed her a telling look that offered up only one answer: no. She volleyed her own look back that said, too bad, you don’t have a choice. “I don’t get it,” he said. “I get a snow day and what do you do? Put me to work in the store. What’s fair about that?”

  “Who said anything about life being fair, snow day or not?” she said, her tone playful but serious. “As opposed to spending some quality time with your tired old mum, what would you rather be doing? Playing your video games, that Wii thing?”

  “Sure, why not? It’s fun.”

  “Life isn’t always about having fun, Travis.”

  “Not if you’re a grown-up,” he said. “You’re always worrying about something.”

  “Yes, and right now my primary worry is the fact that you’re going to be a teenager next year and it’s only going to get worse.”