30
She knows the world of the sleeping bag. The satiny inside that goes from cold to warm, the head hole string-drawn down to the size of a child’s fist, the humid, breathing lung of it, of one’s own self. Such pleasures long gone.
Kiddo, comes his voice, down through the hole. Comes again: Kiddo, and she stirs so he won’t put his hand on the bag—on her shoulder, her hip. She follows her own fingers, arms, head out into the cold morning, blinking. Bacon spitting in a skillet. The air smoky and pungent. His back is to her. He came in late, she remembers, and went straight to his cot, trying not to wake her.
She down-zips to the smaller opening at her feet where the chain feeds in, swings her legs over the edge of the cot and plants her bare feet into the slippers. She wears flannel pajamas but in the morning a girl needs to get out of bed without being watched, and he keeps his eyes down as he kneels at her feet and unlocks the cuff.
DO YOU KNOW WHAT today is? Handing her the plastic plate. A child’s juice box for her other hand. He has stopped offering coffee, knows she doesn’t like it. She sits on the cot and he pulls up his camping chair. Fresh cordwood is stacked near the stove in a tidy pyramid. The ax and the saw are outside somewhere. The pistol is on his hip.
She picks up the plastic fork and looks at the yellow clot of eggs, Eat it, Courtland, and forks up a bite and says, Monday.
No—
Thursday. Sunday.
No, not the day of the week, kiddo. Bigger than that. Think bigger.
She chews the egg and with her fingers breaks off a chip of bacon and slips it into her mouth and chews on that and shrugs.
What is the biggest day of the year? he says. The day everybody looks forward to most?
She looks at him. Then she turns and looks at the little fir tree at the foot of his cot. The necklaces of red berries and popcorn she’d sat there stringing while Johnny Mathis sang from the small speaker. Stabbing her fingers with the needle to keep her mind there, with her, in this place and not back in some candle-scented memory of home.
A large red box sits under the skirt of the tree. Oh, she says.
Oh ho ho, he says.
After they eat he gets Johnny Mathis going again and sits in his chair with his coffee, watching the snowfall in the small square of window. He tells her he likes it like this, Christmas morning: simple, quiet. When he was a kid you couldn’t get his old man out of bed before noon and still he’d be drunk. Look at all these goddam presents, he’d say. Jesus H. Christmas. Why didn’t somebody tell me we were rich?
He swings his chair and opens the iron gate and jabs his stick into the fire, setting off a brittle collapse. The stove is serious business. Deadly serious. If she doesn’t do it right while he’s away, if she gets careless . . . can she imagine a more terrible way to die than fire?
Um . . . to die by fire while chained like a dog?
He tosses in a length of wood and maneuvers it with the stick. One Christmas, he says, all I wanted was a Swiss Army knife. The big one with a hundred uses. A real survival knife. Didn’t ask for anything else. Dad worked for the forest service and he wasn’t home much but when he was he made sure his boys weren’t becoming a couple of pansies in his absence. If we cried when he whipped us he’d keep going till we stopped. I wanted the knife because I thought it was the last thing a pansy would want.
He stares into the fire. The new log hissing and whistling.
Did you get it? she says.
He looks up. What?
The knife.
No. He told me: I know you wanted that knife, boy, but what kind of father would I be giving a knife to a boy still wets the bed, what kind of message would that be? He had me confused with Bobby, of course, my little brother, but you couldn’t tell him that. Nor remind him that it was him, not Bobby, passing out and pissing himself on our couch.
His hand moves to his hip, where he hangs the big hunting knife, but finds nothing and moves back. He shuts the gate and swings back to her. The knife, in its sheath, waits in the locked footlocker by his cot. Or under his pillow.
He sips his coffee. She looks at the length of chain where it lies on the floor. She is free of it and yet her hands ache for it.
Two years later, he says, just a few months after Bobby hung himself with a power cord, he—Dad—was up in Oregon when a load of logs rolled off a rig and crushed him where he stood. He raises his coffee but doesn’t drink. Thirty-man crew coming and going all day and it’s my old man walking by when those logs decide to go. Some might see the hand of God in that.
She waits. Then says, Do you?
Do I? He laughs. When you have seen your little brother swinging from
a rusty pipe in the basement you pretty much know all you need to know
about God.
A tear runs down her cheek, surprising her. It’s the day. Her family. His voice. It’s Johnny Mathis singing to these walls, these cots, which in a glance betray every raw, unbelievable thing they’ve witnessed.
She wipes away the tear and he says, Hey, I’m sorry. What am I thinking? Who needs to hear that crap? It’s Christmas! The coffee cup rises and his head hinges back for the last of it—single hard convulsion of the throat knuckle under the skin—and when he looks at her again his eyes are bright with atonement.
I’ve got something to cheer you up.
He fetches the red box and places it on her lap, surprisingly light for its size, and her heart dives at the thought of the dress inside, before she remembers he wouldn’t do that, that he’s too careful.
I didn’t get you anything, she says.
He waves this off.
I couldn’t get away, she says.
He gestures impatiently at the gift.
She peels back the wings of paper and takes in the image on the box. For just a moment something opens in her chest, like excitement, like happiness, before she understands the cruelty of it.
She lifts the lid and crushes back tissue paper and her heart sets up a thick beating.
Is this some kind of joke?
Expensive joke, he says, taking one of the snowshoes from the tissue. I thought you might like to get out for a while. Have you ever used them before?