A Shiloh Christmas

  When Ma says she needs to call Judith and tell her we’ve found Rachel, Rachel turns to her and says, “I don’t want to go home!” And her voice trembles.

  “It’s because of Daddy,” Ruthie puts in, watching her sister.

  “And Christmas and everything !” Rachel says, with a catch in her throat. And then, after being like a soldier all this time, she sits down and starts to cry.

  Dad slowly hangs up his jacket, like if he makes the slightest noise we’re all going to explode. Since he came in after the show begun, he don’t have any idea what’s going on, but he don’t want to be the one to light the match.

  “Yesterday was Dad’s birthday,” Rachel says through her tears. She’s wiping her eyes with the back of one hand and trying to keep her voice steady. “Ruthie and I . . . have been saving up our money . . . for a present . . . and Christmas too . . . and last night we gave him . . .” Her voice wavers.

  “A box of handkerchiefs,” says Ruthie, trying to help out. “And he told Rachel to take them back.”

  “What?” says Ma, can’t believe what she’s hearing.

  Rachel’s in control of herself again, and I can hear the anger coming through. “He said he’d been watching us in church . . . and how . . . for the past two Sundays we hadn’t put anything in the offering plate . . . and how Jesus had to come before anything else. So he wanted me to get a refund and—”

  “And give it to Jesus for his birthday,” Ruthie finishes.

  Dad gives a low whistle.

  Ma says, “Girls, I’m so sorry. I think he means well, really. . . .”

  “He means just what he says, that he doesn’t want the stupid old handkerchiefs,” says Rachel.

  “What did you do with them?” Ruthie asks her.

  Rachel looks around, almost afraid to tell us. “I threw them in the creek.”

  I get the box of tissues from the kitchen counter and put it between the girls on the couch. Dara Lynn’s got this grim look on her face, like we got to let them stay for dinner, while Becky’s crying just ’cause Ruthie and Rachel are crying again, and Shiloh’s gone over to sit next to her.

  Dad looks completely confused. Ma turns to him. “Ray, Ruthie came home from school with Dara Lynn without her mom’s permission, and Rachel ran away . . . as far as the church. Judd saw her go in, so he and Marty went after her and brought her here. Judith’s frantic about Rachel. I told her Ruthie was here.”

  Dad’s had a hard day delivering all the Christmas cards and packages—five times as much mail as usual this time every year, he tells us, and I know he wants to sit down and get his shoes off more than anything, but he says, “I’d be angry too, Rachel; indeed I would. But we still have to let your parents know where you are.”

  Rachel don’t fight it. She knows she’s got to go home. Got Ruthie to think about now, and at least she had the chance to dump those handkerchiefs in the creek. Creek sure getting a lot of business from her, I’m thinking.

  Ma picks up the phone and calls Mrs. Dawes. “Judith, we’ve got Rachel,” she says. “Yes . . . she’s fine. Upset, but okay. Judd Travers saw her go into the church, so he and Marty brought her back in Judd’s pickup.” That must have been some surprise to Mrs. Dawes, ’cause Ma’s saying, “Yes . . . Judd Travers . . . That’s right. He’s been so helpful.”

  But when she hangs up, she says, “I’m afraid you can’t stay for dinner, girls. Your dad just got home, and he was already on his way to pick up Ruthie. He’ll be here in a few minutes. We’d love to have you another time.”

  Rachel stiffens, and Ruthie bends over again, arms over her stomach. We sit around waiting. Dara Lynn brings out Tangerine and tries to amuse the girls by dragging a piece of crinkle ribbon across the rug to watch the cat pounce. But it don’t seem as funny as it usually does.

  I hear a car coming up the lane and look out the side window.

  “Preacher’s here,” I say.

  Ma brings out Ruthie’s jacket, and Ruthie suddenly throws her arms around Ma’s waist, won’t let go, and Becky’s started sucking her thumb. Haven’t seen her do that in a long time.

  Shiloh’s barking out on the porch. He don’t recognize the preacher.

  Dad opens the door before the girls’ daddy has a chance to knock.

  “Would you like to come in, Pastor Dawes?” he says. “Guess there was a little mix-up. It happens.”

  But the preacher just stands at the doorway, looking in. “Rachel’s here too?”

  “Yes, they’re both safe and sound,” Ma says, trying to be cheerful, nudging Ruthie toward the door.

  Rachel won’t even look at her father. Stares straight ahead.

  “Come on, Ruthie,” the preacher says.

  Ma has to loosen Ruthie’s fingers on her shirt, and the girl takes her dad’s hand, sniveling.

  “That’s enough,” Preacher says to Ruthie. And then to Ma, “Thank you for taking care of her.”

  “Don’t be too hard on her,” Ma pleads, and I squeeze by them onto the porch to hold Shiloh back.

  Preacher turns to leave, but he don’t know what all his girls have told us, and he’s got something to say: “I go by the Bible: ‘Children, obey your parents in all things, for this is well pleasing unto the Lord.’”

  Dad walks down the steps beside him. “Yes, I know the verse and the one after: ‘Fathers, provoke not your children to anger, lest they be discouraged.’” And as they reach the car, Dad says real gentle, “Pastor, you’ve got two daughters who want to love their father. Don’t make it so hard for ’em.”

  Preacher don’t answer. He opens the back door for Ruthie, throws her pink backpack in beside her, then opens the front passenger-side door for Rachel. But she slams it and crawls in the back beside Ruthie. Preacher goes around to the driver’s side. “Good night,” he says. And they drive off into the dark.

  sixteen

  EVERYBODY’S CRYING ALL OVER AGAIN when we come back in.

  “That was the hardest thing I ever had to do, Ray,” Ma says. “Ruthie’s such a little thing, and she was shaking like a leaf.”

  “We had no choice, Lou,” says Dad, and guides her over to the couch. The rest of us find places to sit. Not a one of us leaving this room, ’cause we all had some part in the situation.

  We talk it out a little more, and then Ma says, “You can cripple a child without ever laying a hand on her. But he’s crippled himself more. While we were workin’ on that Thanksgiving dinner, Judith told me that Jacob’s bringing up those girls the same way he was raised. Takes the half of the Bible talking about sin and guilt and punishment, and forgets the verses about love and forgiveness.”

  Dad nods. “Doesn’t know a better way,” he says.

  “I keep hoping I can reach him through Judith, but I think she’s a little afraid of him too.” Ma wipes her eyes. “She said she’d been trying for a half hour to reach us when Ruthie didn’t get off the bus, but our line was always busy.” She glances over at Dara Lynn.

  Dara Lynn don’t even try to sound sorry. “And you lied!”

  “Yes . . .”

  Dad looks at Ma.

  “I told Judith that the girls just got talking on the bus and missed Ruthie’s stop, and that’s not the way it happened,” Ma explains.

  “You said I could talk a chicken out of an egg!” Dara Lynn corrects her.

  “She what?” says Dad, a trace of a smile on his face.

  “I’m sorry, Dara Lynn. I guess I didn’t want to pile any more trouble on Ruthie. But I forgive you for bringing her home and lying to me about it.”

  “Then I forgive you for lying to Ruthie’s ma,” says Dara Lynn, satisfied she won her case. Boy, anybody take Dara Lynn to court, I sure pity the judge.

  “Sometimes,” Dad says, “we hardly know what we’re going to do about a situation till we’re in it.”

  Is he remembering how he made me give Shiloh back to Judd Travers that first time Shiloh ran away? Remembering how Shiloh was shaking and trembly, and as soon as he got his f
eet on the ground, Judd gave him a kick? Think he is, ’cause later, when we sit down to eat, just the way he squeezes my shoulder . . .

  Next day Dara Lynn comes home and says Ruthie’s dad didn’t punish them this time. He told Rachel perhaps he was a little hasty in telling her to get a refund on those handkerchiefs, that they were a gift from the girls and he should have thanked them. And Rachel tells him if he wants his handkerchiefs back, he can go look in the creek. Nothing the preacher can do about that.

  Next morning Dad’s taking the day off at the post office, and he’s got the ax and the sled ready. Time to go chop us down a Christmas tree.

  Our property’s loaded with fir trees. Everybody’s got a different idea of where to look, and Becky is all bundled up with scarves and mittens. She don’t care how far we go, long as she’s the one on the sled.

  “Let’s don’t get any tree taller than my head,” Dad tells us. “Once it’s on the stand with an angel on top, we don’t want it scratching the ceiling.”

  We decide on a balsam pine and stand to one side while Dad chops it down.

  Shiloh goes with us. I’m wishing there was a way I could teach him to stay on our property. Most of our seventy acres are hilly and rocky—can’t do much of anything with them, but Dad likes the idea of space on all sides. Plenty of land for a dog to explore.

  If I could just tell Shiloh never to cross the road, and that the highway the other side of our woods is off-limits. Tell him that when you get as high as the overlook, you’re on somebody else’s land. You can teach a dog a lot, but he don’t understand everything.

  Once we get the pine tree chopped down, we load it onto the sled and head back.

  Dara Lynn starts singing “Jingle Bells,” and the rest of us join in. That’s one thing everybody in our family can do—sing.

  It’s taking longer to get that Christmas tree through the woods than it took us to get up there. First off, the sled’s too small, and the tree keeps falling off. Little blue sled I had since I was five years old. Becky’s getting cold, now that she has to walk in the snow, and she and Ma and Dara Lynn go on ahead. Dad and I finally reach the open stretch back of our house—all downhill from here.

  And as we’re pulling at that rope, Dad says, “Marty, have you ever been afraid of me?”

  I can tell that the preacher and his daughters are still on his mind.

  “No,” I say, “but . . . sometimes . . . I been afraid of what you might say.”

  “Well, that’s the same thing, isn’t it? I just don’t like the thought of you or the girls ever being scared of their pa.”

  “I was afraid you wouldn’t let me keep Shiloh last year,” I tell him. “Guess that’s the one time I can think of.”

  I glance over at him and he nods, so I keep talking.

  “That night . . . the night the German shepherd come and broke into that pen I’d built for Shiloh—and you found him and put him in the car—that’s the most scared I’ve ever been. Of what you might do. If you had driven Shiloh over to Judd’s that night, his leg all torn up, and left him there, I . . . I don’t know what I would have done.”

  “Guess I couldn’t stand to see a dog in pain any more than you could,” Dad says.

  “Well . . . I’ve finally worked off my bill to Doc Murphy,” I tell him.

  Dad looks over. “Really? Good job, Marty! You’ve worked for him a whole year. He ever tell you what he charged for all that stitching up and those antibiotics?”

  “No. I just took his word for it. But he says we’re fair and square.”

  “I’m glad to hear it. A person who keeps to his side of a bargain is a man you can trust.”

  “And I’ve never lied to you since then, neither.”

  Dad’s big arm reaches over and gives me a hug. “I believe that, Marty,” he says. “You’ve grown up a whole lot this past year. And I hope there’s never anything you feel you can’t talk to me about.”

  “Well . . . I got a lot of whys,” I tell him.

  “Questions? About . . . ?” He waits.

  “Just stuff,” I tell him. “About people . . . dogs . . . God . . .”

  “Don’t ever stop asking questions in this life,” he says. “I won’t have all the answers, but we’ll have us some good conversations.” He looks over at me. “Something on your mind right now?”

  “Naw,” I say, and smile back. “But when I get a good one, I’ll let you know.”

  Mr. Kelly says if we don’t want anybody but him to read our autobiographical essay, to write Private in the upper right-hand corner. Fred Hilt asks, if we don’t want anybody to read it, can we just turn in two blank sheets of paper? Everyone laughs.

  “Just try it,” says Mr. Kelly, and we laugh some more.

  I’ve been writing mine slowly, a little at a time, and I turn it in a few days before Christmas vacation.

  The Friend I Used to Hate (private)

  by Marty Preston

  There were a dozen reasons I hated Judd Travers, but the biggest was the way he treated his dogs. Some folks take pleasure in being cruel, and he was one of them.

  But the time he bought himself a new beagle hunting dog, and that dog run away, come to me, it changed my life, and changed Judd too. Because neither Judd or me either one knew that someday Shiloh was going to save Judd’s life, and later on, Judd was going to save his.

  What I learned in the meantime is that there’s a whole lot to think about between right, on one side, and wrong, on the other. . . .

  Mr. Kelly asks if anybody wants to read his paper to the class before we turn them in, and David Howard reads his. He writes how his family was visiting relatives in Wisconsin once when he was six years old—all the cousins splashing around in the lake—and he steps in this hole and goes under. Don’t know how to swim. He remembers green bubbles floating up from his nose and mouth, and finally he’s rescued by a cousin. And because of that he takes swim lessons, and gets up to Shark, and even gets a diving certificate.

  Laura Herndon writes a really funny essay. She titles it “My First Rodeo,” and says when she was four, her dad took the kids to a carnival. Only thing she was big enough to go on was the pony ride. A teenage boy lifts her onto a pony and starts around the ring, but he gets to flirting with one of the girls leading another pony, and somehow Laura starts sliding to one side of the saddle, a little at a time. When the boy finally looks around, he sees just a foot up there on the saddle, Laura dangling down the other side of the horse, hanging on to the mane.

  We really laugh about that one. We spend the rest of the class period talking about perspective. Mr. Kelly tells us to imagine how our essays would have been written different if we could have wrote them back when they happened. David Howard said he would have still been so scared his hand would be shaking. But his essay was about how his fear got him to learn to do something important he might not have done if it hadn’t happened.

  Laura says if she had written her essay back then, it would have been almost too embarrassing to write about. But now it’s funny.

  I know that if I had written an essay about Judd Travers when I had to return Shiloh to him that first time, it would have been pure hate. H-A-T-E. Can’t say it’s love now—more like . . . understanding? Respect, maybe, for how a man can change.

  Christmas falls on a Tuesday this year, so Friday’s our last day of school till after New Year’s. Our house sure has the holiday spirit. First off, coming up the lane from the school bus, I can smell the wood smoke coming out of our potbellied stove in the living room. It’s snowed again, just enough to cover the ugly brown that was beginning to show up on old drifts along the road. Then, when I open the door, I smell the last batch of cookies Ma’s baked to give away. And finally, if I go into the living room and get up close to the tree, I can smell the fresh scent of a balsam pine. A whole lot better than the fake spray they’re selling at the dollar store, with a recording that every ten seconds says, “Balsam pine—it smells so fine.”

  Saturday, Dara Lyn
n and Becky spend the morning wrapping up their presents for the family, telling Ma and me not to look. Guess a person can’t have too many macaroni necklaces or red-and-green pot holders made out of loops. That afternoon they go off to a birthday party at a neighbor’s down the road, and I take Shiloh for a hike, using the long leash Dr. Collins give me for helping out so much during the year. This way Shiloh can trot off into the bushes and sniff to his heart’s content, but can’t never go far enough I can’t rein him back to me when it’s time to move on.

  Now he’s plumb tuckered out, stretched out there on the rag rug in front of the stove, so when Ma asks me to go along with her and deliver all the Christmas cookies she’s baked, I’m glad to do it. She’s made trays out of the lids of boxes, each one covered every inch with Christmas wrapping paper to look all fancy, with a card on top. Every tray’s filled with the same cookies she makes each year: chocolate drops, almond crescents, butterscotch swirls, pecan bars. . . . Just saying the names make my tongue ache.

  One tray goes to the preacher’s; one to Mrs. Sweeney, who comes over sometimes to take care of Becky when Ma gets a ride to town; Mr. and Mrs. Wallace at the store for putting our groceries on charge, they get one; another goes to Doc Murphy; and Ma always has a few more trays for any folks need cheering up.

  Mrs. Sweeney, in fact, is so eager for those cookies that she tells Ma we can use their car to make deliveries. Then we don’t have to wait till Dad’s off on Sunday to use the Jeep. She drives her car over, and we make our first stop at her place.

  “I can taste these cookies just by looking at them,” she says as she gets out, holding the tray Ma made for her. “You folks take your time. I’m glad to help.”

  I slide back into the Sweeneys’ car while Ma checks her list, and we’re off to the Daweses’ house next. Preacher’s car is gone, so Ma steers the car right up the driveway. I take a tray from the backseat, go up the steps, and ring the bell.