WINTER FIRE

The shadows of winter swallow the sun that adorned the bright head of June.

December’s demons dance their darkness and cape the harvest moon.

But you are with me even so; my hands in yours stay warm.

Alive in my soul burns the passionate hope of the Christmas Child who calmed the storm.

A sheet of ice looms ghostly ahead; the road is black with its danger,

Trying to hide its treacherous scheme to cloak our memory of the manger.

The winds keep howling their winter moan, then gust into a cry,

Hoping with their plaintive dirge to drown the lullaby.

But you are with me even so; my hands in yours stay warm.

Aglow in my heart burns the hot, constant spark of the Christmas Child who defies my storm.

Ice is forming on my windows; deadly crystals entice.

Sometimes the chill lures my tired will to be glazed by the hard, cold ice.

Then I remember Bethlehem’s manger and the infant Messiah’s first cries,

And the thaw that came over the world that night forms a warm-flowing joy in my eyes.

For, oh, you are with us even so! Immanuel strong and warm.

Born to be claimed, reborn to be named our undying peace through the storm.

Once long ago on some obscure calendar date Jesus Christ was born in Bethlehem, but He is reborn every day somewhere in hearts that were dark and afraid. Could He be waiting to return for us because some cold hearts we encounter each day are awaiting the spark of His Life that we carry but do not offer? Let’s hasten His return by telling them!

TIDINGS OF COMFORT AND JOY

It seemed like the closer it got to Christmas, the more Johnny Paul kept showing up at our door. He’d want me to come out and play football up the street with him and Bubba and Jeremiah or was wondering if I could come down to his house and work on drawing maps for geography, and once he wanted to know if we had some rope that he and his buddies could use to rig up a trolley from the top of a pine tree across the street in the woods. Everything he came peddling sounded like something worth buying, so I’d grab my carcoat and take off with him nearly every time.

It occurred to me that I’d get a glad feeling that he wanted me to go, and that caught me by surprise, since I had argued so with Mother about him not being my boyfriend and all that day she was working on the clowns. It also occurred to me that he had quit me last year right after Christmas for no good reason except what Mother interpreted as the loss of some sort of “mystery.”

This “mystery” was in a realm I clearly knew nothing about. It all seemed pretty ignorant to me. The whole point in every Nancy Drew book I had ever read and every Alfred Hitchcock movie I had ever seen was to get the mystery solved, not to hope it would go on and on making everybody wonder. But according to Mother, Johnny Paul liked mysteries better when he couldn’t solve them. So now I was in a hard spot: I was liking being pursued by a boy who would only keep liking me as long as he couldn’t catch up with me. Mother said the trick was to play “hard to get.” When you’re used to not having to think about what other people are thinking about you from one minute to the next, like when we were playing football or climbing trees and building trolleys, it’s hard to remember to think about pretending to like somebody less than you really do. It didn’t seem natural, and I thought I would probably make the mistake again of turning loose of any mystery I might have had because to tell you the truth, I didn’t really have any secrets I was keeping from Johnny Paul or anybody else. The biggest mystery to me about this whole thing was what on earth Johnny Paul thought was such a mystery about me anyway. It wasn’t like I was in the CIA or something. Of course I couldn’t tell him that or he wouldn’t have even been interested in popping firecrackers with me at Christmas anymore. This whole thing just gave me the thumps.

But he must have thought I had gotten ahold of some new secrets since last January because sure enough, just like last year, when Christmas Eve came around, there he was on my front porch again looking like Steve McQueen with his blue eyes and black eyelashes and a sack of Black Cats. When the sack was nearly empty, we had a contest to see who could hold onto a firecracker the longest before throwing it. One went off in my hand, so I guess I won. Johnny Paul led me crying into the house where Mother slathered butter all over it.

I knew Johnny Paul had a present for me in the bottom of the Black Cat sack because I had seen it, so even though my hand still throbbed and I would have liked to just go get under the covers, rock my hand, and bawl, I went on back outside and sat on the porch in the dark with Johnny Paul. There, with Johnny Paul’s comforting arm around me keeping me warm and the Christmas tree lights blinking joy through the window behind me, I lost the will to play the game my mother advised me to keep playing, and let myself be caught and kissed. I hoped that kiss wouldn’t cause all the mystery to leak out because I had bought Johnny Paul a silver identification bracelet for Christmas with my name on the back which I figured would become obsolete way too fast for the $7.95 Mother paid for it if things went south like they did last Christmas.

Lately at night after I’d finished my ritual of reading several pages in the dictionary, I would think about Mother’s mystery theory and work on coming up with ways to latch onto some kind of emergency mystery just in case Johnny Paul started acting like he had about figured me out again. I thought one good idea would be to gaze at him with serious eyes and solemnly pronounce “Yo escribo con lapiz.”

Daddy and I had begun a project of learning Spanish, and “I write with a pencil” was as far as either of us had gotten. I thought if worse came to worse this would suffice as a good mystery for him to chew on for a few days and might buy me a little time. But tonight there was no need; it was the magical season of Christmas, and I felt Johnny Paul securely resting in the palm of my hand.

I could tell by the size of the box in the Black Cat sack that he hadn’t bought me another comb and brush set this year, and I was right: in the tiny black velvet box wrapped in shiny green foil paper was a silver necklace with a disk engraved with my name on one side and his on the other. It was just the thing I needed to convince me once and for all that I could quit worrying about my mother’s ridiculous notions about mysteries.

Among other things under our tree the next morning, like sweaters and gloves and records and pajamas, was one of the things I had wanted most for two whole years: a b-b gun complete with a whole arsenal of b-b’s. And out in the back yard was the other: a blue 24” ten-speed English racer bicycle. On that happy Christmas morning with Johnny Paul’s disk hanging around my neck and my brand new bike and b-b gun waiting for me to take for a spin, Travis Wayne Harvey could have sat down at our dinner table and called me “Sunshine”— or for that matter, “Possum Breath”—for three hours straight without ever stopping to take a breath, and I would have just smiled and offered him more turnip greens. I thought there might be something to what Mr. Pete kept talking about; it looked like Jesus had finally found His way to Herald Street.

PICNIC WITH A VIEW

Azalea Heights is the county seat of Shelby County which means we have the courthouse right in the middle of our square. It was built in 1885 and looked like an Irish castle, but we weren’t all that impressed. People didn’t talk a lot about this or stand around it pointing and taking pictures. It was pretty commonplace to us. Folks went there to get their marriage licenses and birth certificates, and if you ran afowl of the law and the Sheriff got involved, they would put you on trial upstairs in the big courtroom. Old men who were hard of hearing would sit around outside on benches and smoke, chew, spit, and pitch washers. You half expected Atticus Finch to come walking out at quitting time and find Scout and Jem waiting for him outside in their overalls.

But Ruth Ann Patterson knew a lot of things about the courthouse that most people, even grown people, didn’t know — probably because her mother worked at the county clerk’s office which was a smaller building right there in the shadow of the courthouse. I think when Dixie Ruth would go there after school to wait for her mother to get off work, she’d be sent off to entertain herself in the same way that my parents dropped me off at the Rio two or three nights a week, even if the same picture show was showing all three nights.

This was handy for them but not as easy as you might think because I couldn’t understand about two quarters or even a dollar bill or any denomination of money that would cause me to have to wait for change. I don’t remember being stubborn about most things (except not wanting to get my hair brushed), but about this I was absolutely adamant. If they were going to get me to go to the show and give them two or three nights off, they had to give me the following: three nickels in one hand to give to Dotty, the ticket lady, and five nickels in the other hand for popcorn, a coke, and a pickle. (I could on a good day be persuaded to take two dimes and a nickel in that hand.) I’d be among the wealthy today if I had just let them give me my show money in the form they wanted to, but about this procedure, I was religiously dedicated, and there was room for neither variance nor negotiation.
In all of Ruth Ann’s courthouse meanderings, she had made some discoveries, so one day after school she took me upstairs to the courtroom behind where the judge sits and reached down and pulled open a little door right there in the floor. Underneath that door was a narrow stairway that led down to a door in the hallway that nobody would ever guess was a real door. There is no other explanation as to why it was located right there where it was except for the judge to use to make his escape after he had given his sentencing. I had this motion picture running in my head about the judge pronouncing to somebody that looked like Boo Radley, “That will be seventy-six years in Huntsville with no parole!” and then snatching that door open, jumping down through it, slamming it shut, and boogeying on down those stairs to freedom just as Boo wrangled free from the bailiff and ran at the judge with a bowie knife he had concealed up his pants leg.

Then Ruth Ann took me to the back of the courtroom and opened another door that hid another stairway that went up to the a little room that sat right on top of the courthouse. It was just like something out of Nancy Drew. It turns out that this room was something called the Civil Air Patrol tower. This is one of the features that made our courthouse look like an old-timey castle from outside. This little room had windows on all sides, and somebody told me that people used to sit up there and look for airplanes. I never understood why since we had a perfectly good airport out on the Logansport Highway with runways a bunch better for an airplane to land on than the streets downtown.

Now you need to know that there were three drugstores on our square in Azalea Heights, and every one of them had a soda fountain where you could sit on round stools that spun around, even though every time a kid tried this, their parents hollered at them to quit, so since the spinning feature never got fully taken advantage of, the drugstores might as well have saved their money and bought the still kind. If you wanted a tuna fish sandwich or an ice cream cone, you’d go to Green’s. Once or twice a year the folks over at Azalea Drug had a special promotion where you could throw a dart at a balloon over the fountain area, and you could get a banana split for the price that fell out of the balloon. This was a good deal, and you never wanted to miss these times, not only because you could get a twenty cent banana split for a nickel or a penny, but also because it was the only time you were ever allowed to throw sharp objects in an Azalea Heights business establishment.

But if you wanted the best hambuger in Shelby County, everybody knew you’d go to the Avery T. Roberts’ Rexall Drugstore. There you would find Billie cooking up burgers that so good that Judy Rutger’s daddy said once it would make you slap your momma. All the kids from the elementary school would race in there at lunchtime and start hollering their orders to Billie as soon as they’d hit the door. Billie was as good at remembering as she was at cooking hamburgers, and pretty soon she got to where she could keep up with what all the regulars liked all the way from third through eighth grade. When I’d come in, she’d shout, “Hey, Little Crocker (Julie was “Big Crocker” even though she was only four- and-a- half feet tall) you want your regular?” This meant mustard everything, which is what I always wanted. Somehow she would manage to get all those orders right, each one charged to the right daddy, and have us out of there and back to school in forty-five minutes. Billie knew how to make you feel like a queen — always remembering just how it was you liked your hamburger, even though you were only ten years old. The funny thing was that even though she was the only one doing any work, and lots of it — bustling around throwing meat on the grill, cheese on the meat at just the right time, slapping on mustard, then piling lettuce and onions on with one hand and pickles with the other, while all the rest of us were just sitting there doing nothing — somehow, maybe because she always looked the same in her white uniform with her hair always the same length and the same style year after year, she managed to make herself seem kinda invisible. I don’t think we ever saw her as a real person with a specific gender who blew her nose and swallowed and wore a nightgown and had people at home that she loved and talked to about things that didn’t involve ground meat or even cooking. Maybe she had a kid or a husband, and brushed her teeth and yawned and stretched when she first woke up, but you’d have thought her whole life consisted of the person she was when she tied on her apron every morning at the Rexall drugstore.

One day in November, Ruth Ann and I made a plan to get Billie to fix our hamburgers to go. We kept quiet about this because we were on an adventure that was not going to be able to accommodate more than two, and we were pretty sure it wasn’t even legal for that many. We got our lunches and snuck across the street to the courthouse where we were careful to run from one bush to another so her mother wouldn’t spot us from the county clerk’s office. We made our way up the stairs to the civil air patrol tower and were just getting our hamburgers unwrapped when we heard heavy footsteps coming up the stairs. There is not much you can do in a situation like this but just brace yourself and your friend for trouble because you are definitely trapped with only one door in the floor with a sliding bolt lock located on the other side.

Well, the person that was coming up those stairs and who pushed open that trap door and forced his way in with me and Ruth Ann was none other than the dreaded Jesse Pugh, Mrs. Gravitts’ most mature male pupil, who was about twenty and had no business being in fifth grade. What we did next was as smooth as butter. Both of us grabbed our lunches, jumped down through that hole in the floor, pulled the door behind us, and slid that bolt into the locked position. All that took about nine seconds. We could hear Jesse hollering and banging on the floor all the way down those stairs, and we never could figure out why nobody else heard him and let him out, but they didn’t. Now if he had been some deranged chainsaw-lugging, blowtorch-wielding somebody, we would have probably been heroes, but since he was just a fifth grader, albeit an over aged fifth grader, we figured we better not go to any authorities and try to collect a bounty on Jesse’s hide.

Mrs. Gravitts didn’t seem to think much about the fact the Jesse didn’t come back after lunch since just coming to school half a day was a red-letter day for him, and neither did his brother Arnie. The way these boys acted made you wonder what their parents were thinking or if maybe they didn’t even have any parents at all and slept in the cotton gin at night with the drunks.

I don’t know what would have happened to Jesse if we had kept quiet. Maybe he would have starved to death, and someone would have finally smelled him up there when he got all rotten, or maybe he would have gotten desperate and busted out a window and tried to grab hold of a sycamore branch to climb down but instead have fallen to his death like Kim Novak in Vertigo. But we never found out, because we got scared of one of these things happening and wrote Arnie a note saying he had better go up to the courthouse after school and rescue his brother.

We kept expecting Jesse to come after us and knock us off our bikes and steal them or slit the tires on our parents’ cars, but when he finally showed up back at school again, shoot- he acted like nothing ever even happened. This just goes to show you that what we knew about being hoodlums was small potatoes compared to what Jesse knew; or maybe it was just that he got to thinking about it and decided spending the afternoon locked up and smothering in a 3x5 box was better than breathing all the free air he wanted in Mrs. Gravitts’ room.

Sometimes I’d get to wondering what Jesus was doing. I thought about how every week Mr. Pete would tell our Sunday school class about how Jesus saves, but He sure didn’t seem to be doing much to save me or my sister or our mother and daddy or Jesse and Arnie Pugh.

Bathtubs Full of Blood

Halloween came, and I was going as a hobo. I had learned from channel six that you could make your very own beard, even if you were a girl, by putting some of your mother’s cold cream on your face and then rubbing some coffee grounds on top of that. I put on one of Daddy’s old shirts and some overalls, grabbed a stick and tied a dishtowel around the end of it, and, with the help of channel six’s beard idea, I was a hobo. In Azalea Heights you could just take off on Halloween and be safe because everybody in town knew you and your parents and were watching out for you. There were even some widow-ladies that would invite you in and give you popcorn balls or candy apples to eat in front of their fireplaces.

But somebody wasn’t watching the post office on Halloween night when I was in fifth grade. They should have been, too, because Carla Nations and I had been planning for a month the idea that we would pull up all the signs on the post office lawn. I don’t know why, but this seemed like a spectacular idea to us both, so we set out in the darkness to do it. The only trouble was that it was just so easy, and then we were finished. The thrill of it that we had anticipated for so many weeks hadn’t materialized, and the whole affair seemed pretty anticlimactic, so we picked up all the signs and climbed on top of the postal delivery trucks and stuck the signs up there. I sure am glad there was a heavy dew that night because if the signs had not fallen off before the men came in to drive the trucks the next morning, somebody could really have gotten hurt… and it would have all been just because me and Carla Nations, of Azalea Heights Elementary School, got bored.

It makes you wonder how many times terrible things have happened to people just out of somebody else’s misguided prescription for boredom. It also makes you wonder why our consciences didn’t kick in before we left the post office and even worse, what was making them malfunction for that whole year. I’ll bet God had to do a lot of intervening that He hadn’t planned on that year — like causing dew to fall heavily at the Azalea Heights post office on Halloween night.

Since before we made it to the post office, we had gone to the exhibit hall at the fairgrounds to bob for apples and do the cakewalk, it was getting pretty late by the time we finished our sign caper, so Carla and I had to part ways and hurry home. I was further away than I allowed for and realized I needed to run or be late, which would not have been a good thing for my future possibilities of playing football in the dark with Jeremiah, Bubba, and Johnny Paul, so I took a shortcut through a block full of neighbor’s backyard. I was running full speed in the blackness right behind Mr. and Mrs. Herbert Hughes’s house when suddenly a guide wire caught me by the mouth and turned me a complete back flip. I landed hard on my back, and for a minute, I thought I was a toothless, dead hobo until I felt the warm flow of blood running all down into my coffee-ground, cold cream beard. Bawling like a kindergartner, I limped the rest of the way home to find my parents with a den full of friends playing "42" and apparently not even thinking about whether I was going to come flying through the door at the last minute before my coach turned into a pumpkin.

Mother and Daddy washed off my beard, found the source of the cascading blood, and as always when I would get a gash somewhere that needed stitches, sent me to lie down in the bathtub until the bleeding stopped. They had learned quite a few years earlier, after I had jumped off the house onto my trampoline and busted it and my head on Christmas morning and later turned a back flip off the diving board while not standing close enough to the end of the board, that taking me for stitches was going to be entirely too expensive and that the we way we would handle these things from now on was just to let me bleed it out in the bathtub.

I thought that night on Halloween that maybe I had finally gotten banged up bad enough to deserve a trip to get stitches, but I was wrong.

FUMING GEYSERS AND GUARDIAN ANGELS

My little big sister, Judy (right) Thanksgiving 2010

That night, Mother and Daddy did have a loud fuss. (Julie and I never called them ”fights” because most of the time, except for that one plate and the kitchen chair, they didn’t throw anything at each other except words.) But these words were horrible, sharp-pointed weapons that boiled up and spewed out of their mouths like the fuming geysers at Yellowstone Park that I had seen on the newsreels at the Rio. Sometimes in the middle of the night if Julie and I went in to try to help negotiate in some infantile way or maybe just showed up by surprise and shame them by letting them know we had heard them, I would look at their mouths and be surprised that their lips and tongues weren’t singed or blistered by the white-hot eruptions that had issued forth from them. Surprisingly, they were always still all in one piece with never any blood or even blisters. Later I learned that there really was all kinds of damage — hemorrhaging, blistering, and scarring — but that it was all inside, mainly inside my mother.

It didn’t look like religion was doing much for them either, at least not late at night when Julie and I needed to sleep and they needed to explode. In the daytime, to look at them both, you would have sworn that everything Reverend Holder was saying behind the pulpit at First Methodist was soaking in. My mother was a pretty and upstanding person who spent her days either fashioning impressively detailed dresses for her two daughters with her Singer sewing machine or working in her high-heeled shoes at “Pep’s Finance Company,” and Daddy dealt with an adoring public, treated his staff and their families with kindness and generosity, and went regularly to Lion’s Club on Thursdays at the BK Café. They had plenty of friends and were patriotic, all of which seemed like God and Jesus, His Son, would have been proud of, but it didn’t seem like Jesus was much a part of anything that went on in their bedroom late most nights.

So that night when I woke up to the geysers spouting off, I just got up and went to Julie’s room, even though I had the privilege of having a room of my very own. She let me crawl into her bed under the afghans and snuggle up under her wing where the pointy words couldn’t penetrate, at least until we had to come out to get some air. It kinda seemed like, freshman or not, that she was glad I was back, and most nights from there on out, I would sleep with her and not the clowns in my room. It’s a good thing, too, because she went back to reading the Bible to me every night and saying my prayers with me.

From fifth-grade on, I began to get a little of what was going on in the Bible stories she would read to me, and some nights I would stay awake for the whole story. People like Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, Abraham and Isaac, and Peter began to seem like real folks with real problems that could have sat and visited together on one of the twirling stools at the soda fountain of Green’s Drugstore or come walking out of the dime store with a sack of roasted peanuts as I passed by on the sidewalk. When she would read to me right there lying under the covers, two feet away in her fourteen-year-old voice, all of those “thee’s” and “thou’s” and holy words seemed to carry more meaning than when Reverend Holder would say them forty feet away down front wearing his long black robe and standing behind the pulpit in front of the choir on Sunday mornings.

Yessir, even though she was just a kid, I think in the long run you’d have to give Julie most of the credit for keeping me out of the Shelby County jailhouse.