In the morning—Christmas morning—the sun is bright and cleansing. They exchange gifts. From Roger, Cheryl receives sheet music: “The Holly and the Ivy” and “My Days Have Been So Wondrous Free.” She sits at the keyboard and attempts to sing while sight-reading, but stumbles over the words and bursts out laughing. Roger and the children laugh with her, and the hearth fire glows warm in the kitchen.
Roger hollers over the zinc flask Cheryl presents to him and proceeds to fill it with rum. Amos hands a sloppily wrapped bundle to each of his parents, containing baseball hats and sweatshirts printed with the name of his college. From Rebekah, they receive a basket of flavored coffee and a book entitled An Alternative History of the United States.
“It’s really eye-opening,” Rebekah says. “It’s history as experienced from the perspective of the disenfranchised. Slaves, Native Americans, Mexicans.” She looks at her mother with the mischievous glint of a child throwing oatmeal on the floor.
“I look forward to reading it,” Cheryl responds equably.
The children open their gifts. Rebekah smiles at the chemise.
“It’s not exactly sexy,” she says, “but it does look comfortable.”
Amos stares at the pocket watch in his palm for a long moment with undisguised admiration.
“It’s battery operated so you don’t have to remember to wind it all the time,” Roger pipes in. “Other than that, it’s the same kind of watch the soldiers carried in the war.”
As Amos turns the watch over and runs a finger over the smooth casing, Cheryl feels a tug of sadness for him. Any true curiosity he may harbor will stand no chance against the brute crush of today’s culture, the pressure to plasticize, to comply. He would have made a handsome soldier, tall and straight in his tricorn hat, rifle strapped slantwise, the image of all that was new and good in this land.
Her son slides the watch into his jeans pocket and says, “Thanks.”
Later, Cheryl sits at the virginals and gets the new music right. She sings:
My days have been so wondrous free,
the little birds that fly
with careless ease from tree to tree,
were but as blest as I.
The harmonizing chords reverberate in the walls and ceiling beams. Cheryl closes her eyes. It is a love song to the house, to the people in it—then and now—and to everything that has been lost to make this moment real. How can we deign to know the pride of mothers whose sons’ lives were welded into the iron scaffold of liberty? How can we approach the glory of those who did the great work, the first work, that enabled the people of this nation to fly like little birds?
As she plays, she feels the strong presence of the Cook family in the room. She sends a silent prayer of thanks for the beauty of this day, this Christmastide—for the fortune of living in this house, in this way.
Amos and Rebekah are all but ghosts over the next two weeks. They haunt the kitchen for food, argue over the use of Roger’s car, then spirit away again. Cheryl sits with her buttons at the window, glancing periodically at the Slater house as at the face of a friend. In her mind, she converses with Edward Drayton, argues for swift intervention, hears his dull, bullfrog response. “How do you know they’re not home?” he croaks. “Have you even knocked on the door?”
She finishes threading a set of buttons, then puts on her cloak, awaits a break in traffic and goes across the street. She stands, as she imagines Comfort Cook once stood at the home of her friend Abigail Slater, and knocks. After she has waited ten full beats, she walks around to the back of the house, to the battered remains of Harriet’s garden.
When Lars died, a new desperation had come into Harriet’s hugs and shoulder touches. She and Harriet had begun to see each other every day. Harriet taught her to stitch by hand, weaning her from the machine. Sewing had once been an act of patriotic rebellion, Harriet told her, during the years that colonists shunned British imports, when the boldest women gathered in public with needles and thread and stitched clothing for their families.
“You look beautiful,” Harriet had told Cheryl when she stopped by in her first hand-sewn bedgown.
As Cheryl went deeper into the past, she brought back gifts for her friend, taught her to make candles, churn butter. She showed Harriet how to bake bread in the beehive oven of her hearth. Comfort and Abigail, she liked to think, might have baked together like this.
Now, Cheryl looks at the rear of Harriet’s house. The panes are still there, the wavy vintage glass that Lars had located somewhere upstate. Cheryl peers into a window, but the reflection is too strong in the winter light, and she can’t see anything in the dark kitchen.