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Authors: David Adams Richards
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the vestry and Father and I both kneeled for the priest’s blessing. Porier gave as usual a rather tawdry and lackadaisical blessing, then, wiping his nose, set the church bells to ring automatically for Midnight Mass and told us to get our box.
We went to the basement. To the surprise of us both there was no box left. We searched the basement for a box marked Henderson, but there wasn’t one. So we trudged up to the vestry again, but Porier had left us to go to dinner with his brother Abby, without knowing of this omission.
We went out and up the old Church Lane. The snow was falling and the night was raw. In the distance, on land owned by McVicer and fronting the very back end of McVicer’s old sawmill, sat Porier’s house. It was a small wooden house with a peaked front roof, and pointed edges where the snow wisped. The oil barrel was covered in snow, and on the roof a Santa Claus was sitting in his sled waving in majesty at the world. I noticed the fir tree softly glowing in the window, all the lights alighting the eaves and the snow as it continued to drop lazily down. From their house came unusually noble music. But I shook with cold all the way home. My nose ran and my cough was continuous and harsh. I saw Penny Porier glide by the window in a white nightgown as my father and I walked by. It was almost as if, if I could ever touch her, just once, I’d be saved.
SEVEN
That night we walked to Midnight Mass. The stars were so brilliant, and little Autumn said she knew where Orion was. Since I didn’t I told her she was correct.
After mass, after all the singing, after communion where everyone praised baby Jesus, and a little child was baptised, after this we set out for home over the ice-chipped roadway. There was snow hanging from the trees, the road was pitch black, and we could hear a singing in the distance.
Mother was telling us how we someday would go to Saint John on the bus and how she had been planning this for my summer holiday. Of course she told us this every Christmas, and every year it would be a year later.
Everything was calm, and Mom walked with her arm in Dad’s as Autumn, her whiteness having a ruddy health, and I walked first ahead of them and then trailed behind. After a time I realized that some men had come out of the woods to walk behind us. Dad told me not to turn around. One of the men told my mother he had long wanted to haul her dress up and see if he could put something better than “a al-bino” up her pussy. My father simply said:
“Boys, go home.”
The men looked at him and burst out laughing. His suit was fifteen years old, shiny on the knees, and his old coat pockets torn. He wore an imitation red carnation that Autumn had won for him at the fish tank at the children’s Christmas party two days before. Behind us the sky was black. I could see my breath as I stared at my broken boots and I kept hoping someone would come up the lane to stop these men. They knocked my father down.
When he fell to the ground his carnation came off. He went to pick it up, and the third man stepped on it as the other two kicked him. I hated them, and I ran through snow swirling in the black wind to try and help, but my father held me back. In doing so he could not protect himself from being pummelled and cutting his hands on the ice.
I’m sure my father knew who they were, but he didn’t want me to know — for knowledge leads to sin. Even if they did not have their faces hidden, the road was pitch dark — not a light shone.
“I told you I’d get you back,” one of them kept saying. I can hear him today, a raspy singsong voice. “And now I’m getting you back.”
“Take the children home, Elly,” my father said, the damned barley toys he had bought for us, for an after-mass treat, falling from his pockets.
Autumn was hysterical and kept clutching my arm, and I was scared, especially when I looked at Autumn’s face.
Finally car lights turned onto the frozen lane, and the men
We went to the basement. To the surprise of us both there was no box left. We searched the basement for a box marked Henderson, but there wasn’t one. So we trudged up to the vestry again, but Porier had left us to go to dinner with his brother Abby, without knowing of this omission.
We went out and up the old Church Lane. The snow was falling and the night was raw. In the distance, on land owned by McVicer and fronting the very back end of McVicer’s old sawmill, sat Porier’s house. It was a small wooden house with a peaked front roof, and pointed edges where the snow wisped. The oil barrel was covered in snow, and on the roof a Santa Claus was sitting in his sled waving in majesty at the world. I noticed the fir tree softly glowing in the window, all the lights alighting the eaves and the snow as it continued to drop lazily down. From their house came unusually noble music. But I shook with cold all the way home. My nose ran and my cough was continuous and harsh. I saw Penny Porier glide by the window in a white nightgown as my father and I walked by. It was almost as if, if I could ever touch her, just once, I’d be saved.
SEVEN
That night we walked to Midnight Mass. The stars were so brilliant, and little Autumn said she knew where Orion was. Since I didn’t I told her she was correct.
After mass, after all the singing, after communion where everyone praised baby Jesus, and a little child was baptised, after this we set out for home over the ice-chipped roadway. There was snow hanging from the trees, the road was pitch black, and we could hear a singing in the distance.
Mother was telling us how we someday would go to Saint John on the bus and how she had been planning this for my summer holiday. Of course she told us this every Christmas, and every year it would be a year later.
Everything was calm, and Mom walked with her arm in Dad’s as Autumn, her whiteness having a ruddy health, and I walked first ahead of them and then trailed behind. After a time I realized that some men had come out of the woods to walk behind us. Dad told me not to turn around. One of the men told my mother he had long wanted to haul her dress up and see if he could put something better than “a al-bino” up her pussy. My father simply said:
“Boys, go home.”
The men looked at him and burst out laughing. His suit was fifteen years old, shiny on the knees, and his old coat pockets torn. He wore an imitation red carnation that Autumn had won for him at the fish tank at the children’s Christmas party two days before. Behind us the sky was black. I could see my breath as I stared at my broken boots and I kept hoping someone would come up the lane to stop these men. They knocked my father down.
When he fell to the ground his carnation came off. He went to pick it up, and the third man stepped on it as the other two kicked him. I hated them, and I ran through snow swirling in the black wind to try and help, but my father held me back. In doing so he could not protect himself from being pummelled and cutting his hands on the ice.
I’m sure my father knew who they were, but he didn’t want me to know — for knowledge leads to sin. Even if they did not have their faces hidden, the road was pitch dark — not a light shone.
“I told you I’d get you back,” one of them kept saying. I can hear him today, a raspy singsong voice. “And now I’m getting you back.”
“Take the children home, Elly,” my father said, the damned barley toys he had bought for us, for an after-mass treat, falling from his pockets.
Autumn was hysterical and kept clutching my arm, and I was scared, especially when I looked at Autumn’s face.
Finally car lights turned onto the frozen lane, and the men
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