Christmas Short Stories

Amy’s Carol

Amy Penrose was engaging in an irrational act. She knew that it made no sense and yet she pursued it with great care and deliberateness. She was baking bread, that was what she was doing. In the gathering dusk on Christmas eve in the little fishing village along the Oregon coastline, she had gotten her sourdough starter out of her freezer where it had rested for more than a year. That was the day before yesterday so she couldn’t deny that there was some deliberateness in her doing it. The starter had thawed and come to life, making bubbles in a crock she had inherited from her mother. She’d inherited the sourdough starter, too, so there was a sense of history in what she was doing. She had four loaves of bread now tucked into the baking pans, the tops moistened with a little butter to keep them from cracking as they raised.

“Keep in a warm spot,” she said, as she slid them into a small cupboard above the water heater. “Keep in a warm spot,” she sang to the tune of the “Toreador Song” from Carmen. “Double up the size.” Her voice was not large but pure and sweet with just a little vibrato to help it carry through the big old house she had lived in for much of her adult life.

She counted the loaves again, “One, two, three, four.” She wondered if she’d ever bake them. “I really should,” she said. “After all, I brought them along this far. It’d be like birthing a baby and then just leaving it somewhere.” She’d read about someone doing that. “Some people have no respect for life,” she said. She laughed then, a little musical sound that had an uncharacteristic hard sound to it. “I’m just a crazy little old fisherman’s wife without a fisherman, baking bread that no one is going to eat.”

She snapped her mouth closed and turned sharply away from the bread pans nesting under flour sack dish towels. As she turned away, her eye fell on the shotgun, leaning against the round oak dining table where she and her husband Charley and their three children had eaten so many meals together. The twenty gauge had been Charley’s before he died two years ago November past. She hadn’t cooked Thanksgiving dinner that year, and she hadn’t cooked one this year either, and she definitely was not going to cook one next year.

“I’m never going to cook another turkey you can bet,” she sang to the tune of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” “I must have cooked a couple hundred and that’s all that you’re gonna get.” She ran her hand along the barrel of the old shotgun that Charley had loved so. It was better for the job than the 30-06.

She went to the living room window and pushed aside the drapes to see the snow. They seldom had snow in this part of Oregon, but this was a real pretty one. Six or seven inches were on the ground and clinging to the firs and shore pines. It was so much like a Christmas card and still snowing. She looked for a good long while, enjoying the quiet of it. She remembered the Christmas Julie was six; it had snowed that year, too, just like it was now. Things didn’t look too different now than they had back then. Forty years ago. She looked at the stockings then, laid out on the coffee table. She remembered knitting them, one for Charley that said “Papa” across the top, hers read “Mama,” and one for each of the girls, Julie and Kathy. And there had been one for Kenny, too. Kenny, the only male child, wonderful Kenny who had grown into a wonderful man. Barely a man, just past boyhood when..... Well.

“Forty years ago, “ she said out loud, and then again, “Forty years ago.”

“When Julie was six,” she sang to “When Sonny Is Blue.” “When Julie was six, and Kathy was a baby.” It was a song she had played on the upright when she used to play. Those days are gone, she thought. But she had played and done it rather well. Even played with a little dance band once in awhile. She went to the piano and played a few chords. Even after Charley had died, and Kenny had been taken away in a terrible war in Asia. Even after that, she had played sometimes in the big old house clinging to the rocks above the sea. Even after the girls had moved to the East Coast and she was alone. But then the loneliness had come, the terrible loneliness that took her in its grasp and sucked out any life juices she had left until she was just a shell who sang phrases of songs and made up the words to others. But she could end that and would just after that last phone call.

There really was no reason to hang the stockings. She couldn’t imagine why she had gotten them out. Julie had called earlier to wish her Merry Christmas and she was waiting still for the call from Kathy, the youngest. Kathy and her children were spending Christmas with her husband Bill’s parents in Vermont. They were driving up from New York where Bill was working in the stock market, doing something that made him a lot of money. She should have had the call by now; it was dark there. She looked out the window again as if she was waiting for someone to arrive; but knowing, of course, that no one would. There was white snow covering the ground and white ghostly figures which she knew were her lilac bushes barren of leaves but covered with the wet clinging snow.

She walked to the front door and opened it a crack to look out at the field on that side of the house. Under the spruce that stood there she knew there were seven graves--graves where over the years the family pets had been laid to rest. She had put down the last one, a big orange tabby named Bruster. Someone who had rubbed against her leg and purred until she lifted him up onto her lap. The last living thing to occupy the creaking old house she prowled through now. She noticed a yard light going on at Floyd Potts’ place down the hill. Floyd was a crab fisherman who drank. “Probably getting in an armload of wood to build a fire and get drunk by,” she said. “Drink, drink, drink, two hearts that are. . .” She couldn’t remember the rest of the lyric. “It’s from The Student Prince. There’s a girl named Kathy in that operetta.”

She walked by the phone but turned away, rejected by its hard, cold, impersonal look. “I could play that record,” she thought. “I have lots of records and tapes. I could put on Christmas music. But I’ll cry if I do, and I just refuse to sit here, an old, weak, impotent woman alone and crying on Christmas eve.” If only Bruster hadn’t died like that. She had found him, already cold and stiff, in his bed one morning. She turned to the dining room and looked at the shotgun. There would be no more lonely ache after tonight. A troubling thought struck her. Two things really. She had cleaned house most of the day. No decent woman would go leaving a dusty house. And now it struck her that Charley’s old shotgun was going to leave an awful mess. She hadn’t thought about just how and where. Another problem occurred to her. She was not a big woman, standing barely five feet tall. Her arm would simply not reach the trigger in the way she would have to hold the gun. She could press it with her toe perhaps, but that was unthinkable. Her feet were not her best feature. She had a bunion and some toes that were slightly crooked. She thought of Charley’s pistol then. It was in the bedside table.

She would worry about it later after the phone call from Kathy. She wanted that call. She went back to the piano to look at the picture of her two girls. They were young and laughing there, not worn down with children and careers. They had all gone caroling on Christmas eve in those days. She picked up the lid to the piano bench and found a caroling book .

“Joy to the world,” she said it aloud and then sang it softly. Well, there had been lots of joy in her life. It just wasn’t there now. She sang it again full voice, “Joy to the world, the Lord has come.” The sound of it rattled down the halls and through the rooms of the big old house sitting beside the ocean in the fresh snow.

Floyd Potts was the crab fisherman who drank. He was on this Christmas setting out to pursue the drinking part. He was laying a fire in his fireplace where he intended to have a drink or six to celebrate not just the Christmas eve but his advanced age and cantankerous nature. “To hell with them all” was his credo and he preached it often although there wasn’t anyone in the village who really believed him. Floyd fished the Martha K., named for his wife as an attempt to make up for the long days he was on the seas and she was left alone to tend the house and raise their children. Martha had worn out and died four years ago at seventy-two, but Floyd was still fishing even though he had a couple of years on Martha.

He stretched his stringy body to reach the cedar kindling in the wood box beside the fireplace. Building a fire the “right way” took skill and experience. Most people didn’t know how to do it, especially the “damned Californians.” He placed a madrone backlog about 12 inches through the center and split in half in the back of the fireplace, put cedar kindling on the grate, a forelog six or eight inches in diameter in front, and piled split pine on top of the cedar, then myrtle, maple or madrone on top of that. Wadded paper went under the grate, and he had a “proper fire that would last awhile.” He preferred pitch wood instead of cedar but he’d run out of that. He’d seen a pitch log when he’d been in the woods, but he was dragging a nice yearling doe at the time and couldn’t drag the log as well. He had taken his brother a hind quarter as a Christmas present this afternoon and had delivered a load of firewood to his daughter. He had at one time given his brother a fifth of Wild Turkey but the drinking had gotten out of hand for him and he joined AA. The venison was a better idea anyway although he had to be a little bit careful about it because he’d gotten a reputation as a poacher and the Fish and Game boys were keeping an eye on him. He felt that the meat was a part of his rightful heritage, and Fish and Game felt he should obey the law just like the “damned Californians” that were moving in everywhere.

He finished laying the fire and went to mix himself a drink before lighting it and settling down to watch the flames flicker when his black Lab, by name Boomer, began to growl. Floyd took the cue and went to the door to see what was making the dog growl. He took in a strange sight. There in the falling snow, bundled up in boots and coat and a long scarf over her head and around her throat, stood the diminutive figure of Amy Penrose, and she was singing.

“Silent night, holy night. Shepherds quake at the sight.”

“Amy! what in the hell are you doing ?”

“Doing? Well, I’m caroling is what I’m doing. I’d think you could tell that.”

“You can’t carol all alone. You need more people to carol.”

“Oh, yes, you can. I was just doin’ it, and you would have known if you had been listening. You’re probably too drunk to know a carol if you heard it.”

“I ain’t drunk--yet, and I hear enough to know you’re singing the wrong words.”

“I’m singing the second verse. ‘Glory beam from Thy holy face with the dawn of redeeming grace.’”

“Oh, stop that,” Floyd scolded. “I’m gettin’ snow in my Romeos. Come on in by the fire.”

“Jesus Lord at Thy birth, Jesus Lord at Thy birth,” she finished. “ You know, Floyd,” she said, looking intently out into the space over the ocean, “it was forty years ago when we had a snow like this and Charley and the girls and you and Martha went out to carol. I’m doin’ it because of them and because it was so much fun then. It just seems right to carol tonight.” Then with some dignity she went inside and stood in the dripping, melting snow made by her boots on the tile floor.

“Come on in and sit down, Amy. I’ll light the fire and you can warm yerself.”

“No, Floyd, thank you. I’m going over to the Carter sisters. They used to love it when we came to carol, remember that?”

“Maybe they did, but that was when there was you and Charley and your three kids and Martha and me and our two. Besides, the Carter sisters are so damned deaf now they couldn’t hear a carol if you were a whole choir.”

“Could too! Especially if they were wearing their hearing aids. I’m going to call and say that I’m coming over.”

“Call away,” Floyd said. “I’m gonna put on some dry socks. That damned snow got in my Romeos.”

Amy crossed to the telephone and dialed from memory. She’d been friends with the Carter sisters for fifty years, even if she hadn’t seen them in she couldn’t remember how long. The phone rang six times; finally, on the seventh ring there was an answer. One of them--she couldn’t tell which one-- said, “Hello?”

“Hello,” Amy paused and made a guess. “Bertha?” She could hear the TV blaring in the background. “Bertha! Can you hear me?”

“Wait a minute till I turn down the TV.” Then she shouted to her sister, “Hester, turn down the TV.” There was a muffled response Amy couldn’t make out but the TV didn’t change. Bertha--for it was Bertha--shouted again, “Hester--turn--down--the--TV.” There was a muffled reply but this time the television volume dropped several decibels. Bertha’s voice came again, “Who is it, please?”

“Bertha, it’s Amy Penrose.”

“No, there’s no Amy here.”

“No, I’m Amy, you’re Bertha. I live just over the hill from you.”

“Amy? Amy Penrose?”

“Yes.”

“Well, my gracious, Amy. How are you? We haven’t seen you in I don’t know how long!”

“Yes, it’s been quite awhile, Bertha. I was just rattling around my big old house feeling sorry for myself and finally decided to go out and sing carols.”

“Carols?”

“Yes, it’s Christmas eve, you know.”

“Well, I know it’s Christmas eve! I may be a little hard of hearing, but I know that it’s Christmas eve.”

“Of course you do, Bertha. May I come by?”

“Do what?”

“Come--by--for--carols?”

“That might be nice.”

“Wear your hearing aid.”

“Lemonade? Isn’t it cold for that?”

“No, no, hearing. You and Hester should wear your hearing aids.”

“Oh, yes, of course we will, dear.”

As Amy hung up the phone wondering if Floyd had been right about singing to the Carter sisters, he came back in the room wearing not only his boots but also a sheepskin coat and his old red hunting hat.

“Well, Floyd,” Amy said, “are you going some place?”

“Going with you. I figure if you are going over the hill to the Carters, you probably need somebody to pull you out of a snow bank. Besides, I ain’t got nothing planned.”

Amy thought of the old song about going to Grandma’s house. “Over the meadow and through the snow to the Carter girls’ house we go.”

Amy glanced at the bottle of Wild Turkey sitting on the hearth where Floyd had put it when she had interrupted him. “Nothing planned but to get drunk,” she said.

“Well, now,” he replied, “that’s the nice thing about getting drunk. You can do it anytime. Later will be fine.”

Amy, realizing that she had been off base with her old neighbor, covered her embarrassment by chattering. “Yes, of course. Later will be fine. That’s the way I feel, too, Floyd. Later. Later will be fine. Now, I tell you what! Let’s go by my place on the way over to the Carters. We go right by anyway and I can check and see if I have a phone message on my machine.”

She found him looking at her, a bit startled to have her suddenly gushing words. “Something wrong?”

“Oh, no, not at all, but it’s Kathy, you see. I expected that she would call, what with Christmas and all, but she hasn’t, and I wonder. . .”

“Well, you probably got a message, like you say.”

She gathered up her song book and he jammed his red hat down on his head and they headed for her house. She slipped on a steep bank and he took her elbow to steady her, being careful not to touch her body or seem too familiar. “Damned snow!” he said.

“Oh, Floyd,” she chided. “We haven’t had any snow for at least five years and then it was only a skiff. I just love it. It’s clean and new. It’s a renewal. Everything old looks new again.”

The world did indeed look different. The shore pines had gathered great armloads of snow on their limbs, sculpting them into the size and shapes of prehistoric creatures. They made their way through the world to her house. Amy entered and went straight to her answering machine on the big old roll top desk. The red light was steady. There was no message. She slumped down in the chair. Floyd, still stomping the snow off his boots, finally noticed the little figure sitting in front of the big desk, looking smaller and frailer by its contrast.

“What is it, Amy? What’s the matter?”

“Oh, it’s nothing, really, Floyd. I had just thought Kathy would have called by now, but they’ve gone to Bill’s folks in Vermont and I suppose that they’ve gotten busy.”

“I expect that they’ll call later.”

“I expect.”

He felt useless, didn’t know what to do, how to help. He could see her shrinking in her own eyes and in his, a wounded bird, anguished, standing on the brink of something, something bad, but he didn’t know what it was.

She lifted her head and turned to him, eyes brimming but not giving in to it. “I just wish. . .” she said, “I just wish. . .Oh, never mind.”

“You want to give up on the caroling?” he asked.

“No, no, it seems like the right thing to be doing. Sort of completes the circle. That’s why I came out, to complete the circle. I’m going to see if I can find you a song book. We might as well do it right.” She went to the piano and dug into the storage space in the piano bench. Floyd caught a glimpse of a familiar shape on the dining room table and walked to it.

“What the hell is this?” he said.

“Why, that Charley’s old shotgun. I was just looking at it.”

“I remember this gun. We hunted ducks together. An over and under twenty gauge, made in Argentina. He was real proud of this gun.” With a hunter’s reflex he broke open the breech to find both barrels carrying an unfired shell.

“Why,” he said, startled, “the damn thing is loaded.”

“Yes,” Amy said, “it looks that way.”

“You shouldn’t have a loaded shotgun laying around like that! You could blow your head off doin’ that.”

“Could you, Floyd? Just how would you do that?”

“Well, just pull the trigger!”

“Yes, you could fire the gun but how could you blow your head off--unless, of course, you had arms like an ape.”

Floyd considered the question for a moment, understood it, and then considered it again. “Well, Amy,” he said, “maybe that’s why they make the barrel so long.”

Amy answered with a sound somewhat north of a snort and south of a grunt. Floyd wasn’t sure what it meant. He watched as she took the gun out of the room and realized that she was locking it away in Charley’s gun cabinet along with a 30-06, a twenty-two, and a Ruger 243 Charley had bought in his later years because it was lighter to carry in the woods.

“We had better get going,” she said as she handed him a book of carols. “The Carter girls will think we’re not coming.”

“I’m gonna sing ‘God Bless Ye Merry Gentlemen,’” Charley confided as they waded into the deepening snow.

“Why, no, you’re not. There haven’t been any men in the Carter house for 15 years, ever since their dad died.”

“Yes, I am. I like that song.”

“You’ll hurt their feelings, Floyd.”

“No, I won’t. Besides I know almost all the words. I’m gonna sing it. ‘God bless ye Merry Gentlemen,’” he sang as they approached the front porch of the Carter house, only to be greeted by both sisters bundled up for the weather and joining in.

“‘Let nothing you dismay,’” they sang along with Floyd and came down the walk to join them. There was nothing to do but for Amy to join in; and the four of them stood together on the walk singing to the sky, to the sculptured trees, to the rhododendrons looking like over-weight sheep in their blankets of snow.

“I’m so glad you asked us to come along,” Hester said, even though Amy hadn’t asked them to come along at all. Still she was glad to have them. It made it seem more like a real caroling. “Let’s go to the Nelsons,” Hester continued. “She used to sing in the Presbyterian choir years ago.”

“Yes,” Martha said, “before he got mad at the preacher--for preaching a hot temperance sermon on the day after the fourth of July.”

“I remember that,” said Floyd. “Old Bert Nelson always could put it away, and he figured a man had a right to get a little drunk on the Fourth of July.”

“Besides that,” Hester added, “he was suffering from a pretty remarkable hangover at the time.”

They chatted and laughed and even sang a little as they tromped through the snow to the Nelson’s house where they sang two songs before they could make themselves heard above the television set. By the time they had finished the second one, which was “It Came Upon a Midnight Clear”, the Nelsons had donned coats and scarves and joined them along with their two teen-age daughters. The whole troupe went next to the Lockwood place where old Mir Lockwood couldn’t join them because she had had a hip replacement and was confined to a wheel chair for awhile, but she beat time with her half glasses and scowled at Floyd when he tried to make up a bass line and sang out of the chord.

They stopped at the Jennings place and picked up Maury Jennings, who was a tenor, his wife Linda, who was an alto, and their son Mike, who was a junior basketball player and made the Nelson girls giggle and wiggle a little inside their coats. They sang at four or five more houses, some of whom were newcomers to the community, meaning they hadn’t lived there for more than ten or twelve years, who thought that this was a tradition and they were being invited to join the group. Eventually they all traipsed down the hill to the retirement home where they were a great hit and Floyd got to sing “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen” again. They finished up with “Silent Night,” and Amy sang the first several lines as a solo at Floyd’s insistence.

“You’ve got to hear her sing it,” he told the group. “I thought it was truly an angel of the Lord.”

Afterwards, they stood around looking at each other, not wanting the good time to end but not knowing what to do to continue. Finally, Amy said, “You know what? I’ve got four loaves of sourdough bread ready to go into the oven. Let’s go back to my house and bake them.”

“I bet I could get Shorty Peters to open up the Oyster Barn long enough to get some oysters. Remember how we used to have oyster stew on Christmas Eve, Amy?”

“We’ll need milk and butter,” Amy said.

“I’ll crank up the truck and four-wheel to Albertson’s,” Floyd offered. “And we’ll build a fire in your fireplace.”

“I don’t have any wood, Floyd. I haven’t had for two years.”

“Well, that’s a hell of a thing. I’ll throw some in the truck and bring it over.”

And so they did. Later at Amy’s house the bread was just coming out of the oven, the loaves golden brown; the oyster stew was steaming in Amy’s biggest jelly cooker, two quarts of prime extra-small oysters peeking through the melted butter. The men were gathered in front of the fire drinking egg nog that someone had brought. There were cookies that just appeared and a fruit cake. The house was alive with laughter and voices excited with the holiday feeling. Amy had found some games that belonged to her children when they were at home and the young people were playing at those. Amy was startled when the phone rang. She went into the bedroom to answer so that she could hear. It was Kathy’s voice, tense and tired.

“Hello, Momma?”

“Oh, Kathy, thank goodness.”

“I was afraid you’d be worried, Momma.”

“Well, I was a little, but I knew that you must have been occupied with Bill’s folks and all.”

“No, it’s not that at all. That’s where I am now but we just got here.”

“Where on earth have you been. It must be the wee small hours of the morning there.”

“Yes, it is, Momma. We got caught in a snow storm and had to wait hours for the plows to dig us out. I was afraid you’d think that we had forgotten you.”

“Oh, no, Kathy. I just thought that you were busy. I’m glad you’re all right.”

“Yes, we are. I love you, Momma. Merry Christmas. I love you.”

“I love you, too, dear.”

“Are you all right, Momma? All alone on Christmas Eve.”

“All right? Why I’m just fine--wonderful! I’m having a few people over for oyster stew and sour dough bread. Don’t worry about me. I’m fine,” and she wiped a tear away as she realized that she was.

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