A Shiloh Christmas

by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor

  “I’ll be back at nine,” Dad says when he drops us off. “If the party’s not over, I’ll wait.”

  There’s a pirate man at the door to make sure kids don’t sneak back out. They don’t want parents dropping their children off for a party, only to find out later they went somewhere else.

  I got to say, it’s a pretty good party. A clown comes over pulling this great big wagon, and it’s got the youngest kids in it. Becky climbs in, and the clown tells me and Dara Lynn to go have a good time with our friends.

  Takes Dara Lynn about five seconds to see some girls from third grade gathered around a fortune-teller. I’m about ready to pull Dad’s cap over my face when I see David Howard and Michael Sholt lined up for an eyeball contest. See Fred Niles over there too. We’d all said we weren’t coming, but we did.

  A zombie leans over this huge pot of intestine-looking stuff, and each contestant has ten seconds to plunge his arms in the guts, searching for eyeballs and pulling them out. We have to compete in groups of five, so we’re looking around for someone else to join us.

  Sarah Peters comes along, and we yell at her to come over.

  “What do I have to do?” she asks, looking down into those cooked noodles.

  “Stick your hands in there and look for eyeballs,” Michael tells her.

  “Eeeuuu!” she says, and backs away.

  But Laura Herndon comes over. “I’ll do it!” she says.

  So we got us a bum, a vampire, an alien, a Batman, and a cowgirl. David Howard goes first.

  I can see in the pot. Noodles are slippery-looking and gooey, and David pulls out a Ping-Pong ball with a black pupil in the middle, and little red veins painted on the white part. He finds two more.

  “Gahhhh!” Fred says, and we laugh.

  When it’s my turn, I roll up the sleeves of Dad’s old shirt and plunge my arms in the pot, fingers spread out, hands feeling around in every direction. Get two eyeballs . . . then four . . . and then the zombie presses the buzzer.

  I don’t get a prize for this contest, but David and Laura and Sarah and I are off to another one—we choose partners and see how fast we can wrap the other one up like a mummy in toilet paper.

  David says he’ll be the mummy, and when the whistle blows, I got my roll of paper in one hand and I’m wrapping David’s head up so fast you won’t believe.

  “I have to breathe, dude,” he says, so I leave a little slit for one eye and an open place for his nose and I’m down under his chin wrapping his neck and his left arm. Sure is a waste of toilet paper. On my third roll and then my fourth, and I don’t even bother to see what the competition is doing. I get his belly and his butt, his left leg, his right. . . . Then I see I missed his right arm, and I’m up there wrapping and Dara Lynn’s out there cheering, and finally the whistle blows and I done it.

  We win.

  Both David and me get these little pencil boxes that look like a mummy’s casket from Egypt, with a painted pharaoh on the front, his arms crossed over his chest, gold on his cheeks and forehead. Cool.

  Becky comes by in a little electric car driven by another clown, who toots the horn. They’re headed off to the ghost bubble dance, where a ghost blows bubbles and the little kids dance around, try not to let any land on them.

  The Lions Club throws a good party, I’ll say that, and I’m thinking maybe it’s one of the best. I’m over at the refreshment table, a chocolate doughnut in one hand, cider in the other, when Fred Niles says, “Hey, you know who started that fire?”

  “Somebody started it?” says David.

  “Judd Travers,” says Fred, his mouth full of doughnut.

  “What are you talking about?” I say. “He was at work! And his own trailer burned to the ground with all the rest.”

  “Just like he did to his pa’s house,” says Fred, as though he didn’t hear nothing I said.

  “How do you know that?” asks David.

  “Because somebody saw him fill up a jug of gasoline at the station a few hours before that fire started,” says Fred.

  The doughnut in my mouth feels like dirt.

  “That don’t mean anything,” I say.

  “He did it once, he can do it twice,” says Michael Sholt.

  And then the witch at the door announces the party’s over, telling us all good night, and winks at me with one scaly eye, like she’s in on it too.

  nine

  RAIN.

  Like the sky opens and lets loose everything it’s been saving for the last three months. Too late for people’s gardens, though. It runs down the windshield of the school bus, the wipers going whup . . . whup . . . and we have to make a run for it once we get to school. I drop my notebook and have to pick it off the rain-slick driveway, my hair soaking up water like Ma’s sponge.

  I shake my head hard inside the door, the drops flying every which way.

  “Sorry,” I say to Rachel as she goes by, and this time she smiles a little. Maybe she’s not so stuck-up. I realize she wasn’t at the Halloween party, though. Ruthie neither.

  Too bad the rain didn’t come one week earlier and put out the fire, I’m thinking as I walk to my locker. Paper says they’re still investigating the cause of it—won’t rule out arson yet.

  So now we got another kind of fire going—the rumor traveling around that it was Judd who started the blaze, and that moves faster than flames. Fred announcing it there at the party, and again on the bus the next morning, and every kid taking hold of it and carrying it home, means that most every family up where we live and down near Friendly has heard about Judd Travers buying that jug of gasoline. I make up my mind that I’m going to ask Judd about it myself.

  In English class, Mr. Kelly’s talking about the way authors start their stories. Especially the story of their own selves, and he’s sitting on the edge of his desk wearing jeans and the reddest shirt you ever saw, “fire-engine red” I guess you’d call it, which don’t help get my mind off the fire.

  But he’s talking about all the different ways you can start a story about yourself:

  “Tell me what you might guess about the person who wrote this,” he says, and reads, “‘My family is American, and has been for generations . . .’”

  He waits while we think about it, and Sarah holds up her hand.

  “Somebody who thinks this is really important?” she says. “Where your family is from and everything?”

  He nods. “All right. Now here’s another one: ‘I was born in a house my father built. . . .’ Thoughts?”

  “Like . . . he’s starting from the beginning?” I say.

  “Yes. A much simpler, closer focus. But both of these autobiographies were written by presidents of the United States: Ulysses Grant wrote the first one, Richard Nixon the second. Anybody want to read the first line of an autobiography you’ve chosen?”

  Laura reads the first line of Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl: “‘On Friday, June 12, I woke up at six o’clock and no wonder; it was my birthday.’”

  “Any thoughts about the way that begins, Laura?”

  “She began it not knowing what was going to happen to her family at the end.”

  “That’s right. Of course, none of us know what will happen in our future. But what makes Anne’s diary so absorbing is that most readers do know what happens—that her family will lose their lives to the Nazis after they’ve been hiding out for two years, and as we can see from the beginning, Anne used to live a very comfortable, happy life. Someone else?”

  Michael Sholt reads the first line of Tony Hawk’s Hawk: Occupation: Skateboarder: “‘I felt the cold wind that blew in from the San Francisco Bay whip across the top of the vert ramp and onto the deck as I walked around waiting my turn.’”

  “What’s happening here, Michael?” asks Mr. Kelly.

  “He’s competing in the best-trick contest at the 1999 Summer X Games,” says Michael.

  “So he chose to jump right into the action—a very different beginning from ‘I was born in a house my fathe
r built,’ but both are very effective. Adam?”

  A tall boy over by the window reads the first line of Jerry Spinelli’s autobiography, Knots in My Yo-Yo String :“‘Like much of my life until that sixteenth year, it was a sunny day.’”

  “What word does Spinelli use to tell us that something’s going to change?”

  “‘Until,’” says David Howard.

  “And does something happen right after that, Adam?” asks Mr. Kelly.

  “Yeah. His dog gets run over.”

  I know right then I’m not going to read that book for a while. I really like Jerry Spinelli’s books, especially Wringer, but I’ll wait to read this one until I’m feeling strong.

  I would have read the first line of the book I chose, but I forgot and left it home—Gary Paulsen’s My Life in Dog Years. Almost everything I do has a dog connected to it somehow.

  Every day, after Judd leaves work at Whelan’s, he stops off at one of the other men’s houses on the way home to shower and clean off all the grease, buys his dinner somewhere, then comes to our place and crawls into the tent. In between, he says, he drives around looking for his two dogs. Didn’t even name ’em. And now I’ll bet he wishes he had. How can you call a dog if you got nothing to call him? Soon as the weekend comes, I’m going out on my bike and look for them too.

  Ma invites Judd to eat dinner with us, but he don’t. She saves a little something for him anyway and puts it in an old tin milk box out on the porch. Tells Judd to check it before he goes to the tent. And tonight, there’s a light rain falling, and I’m sitting out there on the porch waiting for him, Shiloh beside me.

  “Why don’t you eat it out here where it’s dry?” I call as he closes the door of his truck and comes over to the porch. Shiloh don’t get up. Just gives Judd a sniff and stays close to me.

  “It’s dry in the tent,” Judd says, opening the lid of the milk box and taking out the little foil-wrapped package.

  “Yeah, but I’ll keep you company while you eat,” I tell him, so he sits down, collar turned up around his neck. It’s early November, but not too cold yet.

  “Your ma sure does make good cornbread,” he says, after he swallows a mouthful.

  “I know,” I answer. And then I come right out with it: “Hey, did you run out of gas the day of the fire?”

  “Now where’d that come from?” Judd asks, studying me as he takes another bite.

  “’Cause you were getting a gallon of gasoline at the Exxon, and I just wondered, did your tank go empty?”

  He smiles a little. “What you doing? Spying on me?”

  “No, but someone else saw you, so I was just asking,” I tell him.

  “Well, Sam Beringer called me to say his truck’s runnin’ on empty and he don’t figure he’s got enough to drive to a gas station—would I pick some up for him. So I drove over to the station on my lunch break and got it. But . . .” Judd shakes his head. “No use for it now. Lost his house and his truck in the fire.”

  Judd could be lying, of course. But I believe him.

  “So what’d you do with the gasoline?”

  “Put it in my truck, of course. Not going to throw it out.”

  Wonder if I should tell Judd about the rumor going around, but decide no. I’ll tell my folks, though, and after Judd says good night and goes to his tent, I do.

  Dad just shakes his head. “Some folks always have to have somebody to blame,” he says. “Last year they were saying it was Judd who killed that man down in Ben’s Run, remember? You’d think they’d learn a little about spreading rumors. Guess Judd’s got a reputation that just won’t quit.”

  But it was only last year that the newspaper ran a story about him rescuing Shiloh, too. Wouldn’t you think that would change some minds? Don’t take much to ruin a reputation, I guess, but a heck of a long time to build it back up again.

  County paper comes out on Thursday with pictures of all the charred burned-out houses and cars along Old Creek Road. Last week they had pictures of the flames high as the trees, and smoke rising up toward the hills. And the article says its been confirmed now—the fire started in old Mr. Weaver’s kitchen, where he’d left a pot of beans cooking on the stove; he was outside checking to see if there were any more green tomatoes left on the vines. Forgot the beans. Not a single word about arson.

  Grandma Preston used to say that some people wouldn’t recognize the truth if it sat at their table and ate off their plate. But I’m thinking that part of the problem is folks take Pastor Dawes’s sermons to heart about looking for sin in yourself and your neighbor, ’specially your neighbor. ’Cause after Dad picks me up at Dr. Collins’s clinic on Saturday, we stop at Wallace’s store again, and I run in to buy a candy bar for Dad and me to eat with our bag lunch. Got the JCPenney catalogs to deliver this afternoon along with the mail. Dad’s listening to a football game, so he stays in the Jeep.

  Judd’s there, third in line at the counter, buying a sandwich before he goes back to work at Whelan’s.

  “Hi, Judd,” I say, and go on over to the candy rack.

  “How ya’ doin’, Marty?” he says.

  The two women ahead of him have frown lines on their foreheads as Mr. Wallace bags their groceries. One of them turns to Judd and says, “I’m surprised you’d show your face around here.”

  Judd’s as surprised as I am.

  “Why not?” he says.

  “You’d best show your face in church before you go walking around the community,” says the other woman, picking up her grocery sack and hugging it to her chest. “Never saw you there once.”

  “What church is that?” says Judd, still puzzled. Mr. Wallace looks embarrassed, taps the woman on the arm, but she ignores him.

  “The new preacher at Church of the Everlasting Life has been preaching about people like you,” says the first lady. “Everyone knows you set that fire.”

  Judd’s had enough. “Church of Everlasting Lies!” he says. He reaches around her, plops his money on the counter, and without waiting for change, barges through the door and on outside.

  The women stare after him.

  “Did you hear what he said?” one of them gasps.

  “You accused the man unjustly,” Mr. Wallace tells them. “The inspection ruled out arson.”

  But just like Dad says, some people don’t want to hear the truth. “Everyone knows how he set his father’s house on fire when he was a teenager,” the shorter woman says.

  “That’s not true either,” I put in. “It was an accident.”

  The women turn and stare at me. “You weren’t even alive then. What a mouth on you!” the friend says.

  Mr. Wallace shakes his head. “That all you want, Marty?” he says, looking at the candy bar, and takes my money. Gives me the change as the women go out the door. “It’s an uphill battle for that man,” he says. “Fate never did smile down on him much.”

  What I really got on my mind, though, are Judd’s dogs.

  “You see any stray dogs around here?” I ask him. “One’s white, one’s brown. They were runnin’ loose after the fire, but nobody’s seen ’em since.”

  “Don’t believe so, Marty,” he says. “There was a collie loose for a time, but the owner got him back. Whose are they?”

  “Judd’s,” I tell him.

  Mr. Wallace gives a low whistle. “Trouble just can’t let that man be, can it?” he says. “I’ll keep my eyes open, let you know.”

  All afternoon, as I ride around with Dad dropping off those catalogs, my eyes are on the countryside, looking for Judd’s dogs. On Sunday I help Dad work on the new room. Then I take off on my bike, stopping every once in a while to whistle, see what happens.

  A crow answers back. That’s it.

  Rachel finds out I drew her name, so I can’t put it off any longer. As we’re leaving class, I say, “Got to get together sometime so I can interview you for that biography.”

  She shrugs and says, “Whatever,” so I guess that’s an okay.

  Mr. Kelly
says it would be a good thing to visit each other’s houses if we can, but it’s not required. Just give a bit more local color to our piece.

  “Would you come with me next Saturday?” I ask David. “I think maybe she’d be more comfortable if it wasn’t just her and me. I’ll even bring Shiloh, make things seem more easy.”

  “She knows we’re coming, doesn’t she?” David asks.

  “Not exactly,” I say, and I don’t tell him that all she said was “Whatever.” But I’m thinking if I call first, preacher’s going to say no. Don’t want any boy coming to see his daughter. But if we just show up together, David and me, maybe it’ll be different. And maybe Mrs. Dawes will answer the door, or even Rachel.

  I skip work at the animal clinic this time, head for Rachel’s house instead, Shiloh trotting along beside my bike. David rides his up from Friendly and meets me about eleven. We park our bikes against the front stoop and go up the steps together. David rings the bell—a good hard ring.

  We wait and wait, but nobody comes. Nobody at the window, that we can see. David gives me a look. “Told ya,” he says.

  We go back down the steps, and I’m wondering what do we do next. Shiloh’s been sniffing at the shrubbery, and now he’s disappeared around the corner of the house. I give a whistle, but he don’t come. I don’t want him doing his business where he shouldn’t, so David and me go after him.

  Nice yard in back. Flower beds all dried up, of course, but got little fences around them. Know just where you’re supposed to walk and where you shouldn’t. A shed, couple of trees, ash cans out by the alley.

  Shiloh’s loping all around the edge of the yard, and I’m just about to call out to him when I hear something. Someone. Somebody crying. At first I think it’s a cat, but then David nudges my arm and says, “Listen.”

  When it comes again, Shiloh makes a beeline for the shed. David and me look at each other. Shiloh’s standing there, ears alert, eyes fixed on the narrow door.

  Now a couple of sobs come from the shed. Sound like a girl—could be either Ruthie or Rachel, can’t tell. There’s a slide lock on the door.