Charles blocked Jack with his boot and threw open the door. There stood Edwards. Edwards, fairly jingling with cold, the ends of his hair crackling with half-formed ice.
“Great fishhooks, Edwards!” Charles cried. “Come in, man! What’s happened?”
Edwards stepped gingerly, as though his boots were lined with frost. “Carried my clothes—on my head—when I waded the creek,” he gasped.
Caroline’s mouth fell open. That icy, raging creek. She shuddered at the thought of all that cold water rushing past her own bare skin and did not imagine any further.
“I’ll be all right, soon as I get some heat in me.”
“Oh!” said Caroline, and ran for the kettle and the stew pot.
Charles shook his head. He was still trying to picture it and having no better luck than she. “It was too big a risk, Edwards,” he said, heaping the fire with fresh wood. “We’re glad you’re here, but that was too big a risk for a Christmas dinner.”
“Your little ones had to have a Christmas,” Edwards replied with a cock of his head. “No creek could stop me, after I fetched them their gifts from Independence.”
Caroline’s heart stopped beating. If he were joking about such a thing, she would not know how to forgive him.
“Did you see Santa Claus?” Laura shouted. She was up on her knees in the bed, like a dog begging.
Caroline stilled every thought, trying to imagine how she might absorb the words from the air if Edwards’s answer was not what her children needed it to be.
“I sure did,” Edwards said, matter-of-factly. Mary and Laura erupted into a flurry of questions. “Wait, wait a minute,” Edwards laughed. He opened up his coat and brought an oilcloth sack from an inside pocket. Caroline took it dumbly. The stiff fabric was creased with cold. Then Edwards sat down cross-legged on the floor beside the girls’ bed, and leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, he spun Mary and Laura a tale tall enough to rival the likes of Mike Fink and Davy Crockett.
Caroline opened the mouth of the sack and everything else melted from her consciousness. Two gleaming tin cups. Two long sticks of peppermint candy as big around as her thumb. And winking up from the bottom of each cup, a new copper penny. Her throat burned and her eyes swam. How many months had it been since he’d seen Mary and Laura sharing their single tin cup, and he had remembered. The sudden burst of affection she felt toward Edwards was too big for her heart, too big for her chest. She filled the stockings with shaking fingers, then sat down on the edge of the big bed and scooped up Carrie. Carrie’s warm body filled her arms. Caroline held the baby close, pressing gently, gently, with each grateful thud of her heart.
“We shook hands,” Edwards told the girls, “then Santa Claus swung up onto his fine bay horse and called, ‘So long Edwards!’ And I watched him whistle his way down the Fort Dodge trail until he and his pack mule disappeared around a bend.” Edwards leaned back with a smart nod that said, There!
Mary and Laura regarded Edwards as though they were not sure he was fully real. A man who had spoken to Santa Claus—shaken his hand!—sitting near enough to touch. They had entirely forgotten their stockings.
Caroline waited a moment, savoring their awestruck faces before she prompted, “You may look now, girls.”
Half a second passed before they understood. Then they flew to the hearth in a tumble of bare feet and red flannel. There had never been such squealing and laughing. Right away Laura wanted to feel and taste everything about her gifts. She pretended to drink from her empty cup, licked her peppermint stick, nibbled the underside of her patty cake. Mary held each object with utter reverence, reluctant to touch their surfaces overmuch and mar their aura of newness. She only stood, utterly transfixed by the brilliance that now belonged to her: the cool polished tin, the twirling red stripes, the bright white sugar.
The way Edwards watched the both of them—smiling, yet subdued, his eyes far away as if he were envisioning faces other than the ones shining before him—made Caroline wonder. Were there little boys and girls somewhere in Tennessee, lonely for their Uncle Edwards this Christmas? Once her mind had invented them, Caroline could not think otherwise. Silently she thanked Edwards’s nieces and nephews, real or imagined, for the loan of him.
“Are you sure your stockings are empty?” Caroline asked just when the girls’ giddiness had begun to dwindle.
They blinked at her—all of them but Edwards, even Charles. Caroline nodded toward the stockings, and Mary and Laura obediently snaked their hands down to the toes. Caroline watched the puzzlement drop from the girls’ faces as their fingertips brushed smooth, cold copper. They froze, wide-eyed, and looked at each other. Both of them knew what it must be, yet could not believe it. Even as the coins emerged pinched between thumb and forefinger, they could not fathom possessing such a thing. They held their pennies wonderingly in the palms of their hands, as if the coins might melt like snowflakes if they dared turn away.
Caroline smiled so broadly, her temples ached. Who but a bachelor would think to give two little girls a penny apiece? Only a man without children would think so broadly, unhampered by any limits as to what kinds of things could come out of Santa Claus’s sack. At the Richards brothers’ dry-goods store in Pepin, those cups could not have cost less than four cents each. What he had paid for them in Independence, and the candy besides, Caroline did not want to suppose. And yet it was the pennies that dazzled them. After all that she and Charles had fretted, believing they had nothing worthy of their daughters’ Christmas. It was like a parable, acted out before her own hearth.
Laura plunked her penny into her cup and jingled it round and round. Mary studied hers, making out the numbers stamped on its face. “One. Eight. Seven. Zero,” she read, triumphant. Caroline nodded her praise, happy beyond speech.
They would never, never forget this Christmas. None of them. Already Caroline could feel the morning embedding itself in her own memory. Her mind was bottling it whole, so that it would remain fresh and glistening as a jar of preserves.
Charles gave a little cough that was not a cough at all. He pumped Edwards’s hand up and down, broke loose to give his nose a quick swipe with his cuff, and took Edwards’s hand again, holding it so firm and steady that Caroline could feel the gratitude passing between them. She stood to offer her own thanks, and Edwards’s hand disappeared into his coat pocket. Out came a sweet potato. Then another, and another, each one a full handful. Caroline did not have arms enough to hold them. Edwards piled them into her apron until the knotted ties at her back strained with the weight. Nine fat, knobby sweet potatoes.