The Boy Who Found Christmas (eBook)

THE QUESTION

Table of Contents

It was coming to the gray of the morning. The sky was beginning to show through the trees, and the mountains was turning black in the middle of the night, when we heard a rooster crowing on the inside rim of the skyline, and then other roosters answering the way they do.

“Do something for your country,” says Slim. “Here I am, a poor, weak, old man”—he wasn’t a year more than forty—“and you stand around and wait for me to starve. Ain’t you got no shame in you, Lew?”

I left the jungle after I’d boiled a cup of coffee and ate a chunk of stale punk. Then I cut across to the town. I come out of the woods in the rose of the morning, and there was a neat little town with a white roof of snow on every house.

A mighty comfortable-looking town, I thought it was, as pretty as I ever seen. It sat down in the arms of the mountains with evergreen forests walking up away from it and a creek talking and shining through the middle of it. I seen a boy about my own age delivering milk, driving his wagon down the street, jumping off every minute to leave a bottle, coming back slapping his hands together to keep ‘em warm. But there he was all wrapped up so thick with clothes that he could hardly move, and here I was with not even an overcoat.

You see, when you’re laid out on the rods and let a winter wind comb through you for three or four hours at a stretch, there ain’t anything else in the world that can really make you feel cold. I felt all snug and comfortable when I looked down at the town. I listened to the bells on the milk wagon go out, then I started for breakfast. The hobos I seen in the jungle had a lot of punk and other fixings; all we needed was meat, and there was meat asking to be taken.

I slid into a chicken yard and watched ‘em prance around. I’ll tell you how to catch chickens. Just go and sit down in their yard and wait. A chicken is the most fool of anything in the world. Pretty soon they come to have a look at you and a peck at you. Then nab one in each hand. You can always tell the fat ones. They’re the busiest. The reason they’re fat is because they work harder for bugs and worms and seeds, and the harder they work, the fatter they get.

If you’re in doubt, don’t feel the breast of a chicken to see if it’s fat because the last place where they put on fat is the back. When a chicken is nice and round and soft in the back, you know that you got a good bird; if she’s full of bones and ridges under the wings, you know you got little to chew. I grabbed a couple of beauties and went back into the trees, where I wrung their necks and then snagged ‘em on a branch.

While I waited there, I heard a door open and a screen slam. Then I seen a woman come out on the back porch and call across to the next house: “Hello, Missus Treat! Oh, hello!”

Mrs. Treat shoved up a window and tried to lean out, but she was too fat to get her shoulders through. “Are you up so early, Fannie?” says she.

Evidently Fannie was.

“Was there ever a time,” says Fannie, “when I wasn’t up as early as you? Besides, this is the day before Christmas, and I guess womenfolk can’t afford to sleep on such days.”

“Not on days of festivity and merrymaking like Christmas,” says Mrs. Treat. “We got to work while the menfolks sit by and fill up fat.”

“We got happy lives,” says Fannie. “We watch the sick, we hear the babies, we take care of the houses, and, when the big softies are blue, we got to smile and cheer ‘em up. I can stand everything but the having to smile!”

She looked like smiling was a real trial, too. But Mrs. Treat, she just kept smiling and chuckling and bubbling all the time.

“Men are silly dears,” she says. “You take everything hard, Fannie!”

I picked up the chickens and went off toward the jungle, because I knew that when a pair of womenfolk begin to get sorry for each other, they talk foolish for a long time. In the jungle, I found everybody up and awake. The three ‘bos was still yawning and rubbing the sleep out of their faces while they fed up the fire, but Slim was real neat. He’s gone to the creek and washed. His hands was reasonable white up to the wrists, and the front of his face was clean, but his neck and ears was never bothered by being wet except it rained on ‘em.

As for baths, Missouri Slim never troubled much about ‘em. He used to say that they was bad, because they took all the protection away from the skin. “Look at a dog or a horse,” Slim would say. “Ain’t they got something on over the skin? Same way with a man. He needs protection.” There was no use arguing with Slim about a thing like that. He’d made up his mind for good and ever. Baths were not for him.

The hobos took the chickens and began to work on ‘em, while Slim sat by and told ‘em what to do. He’d brought in the meat supply, through me, and so he didn’t have to work with his hands. They started a mulligan, while I rustled more wood, but when the stew was simmering, I asked my question, because it had been riding me for a long while back, ever since hearing the two women talking.

I says to Missouri Slim: “What’s Christmas, Slim?”

Slim stopped stirring the mulligan, took another drink of his moonshine, and then corked the bottle, and put it up—all before he started answering me. Then he called to the other hobos.

“Look here,” says Slim. “Here’s ignorance, for you. Here’s what the kids are growin’ up to these days. Smart lookin’, but they don’t know nothing. No eddication. No refinement. No manners, by gosh! Here’s a sample of ‘em. Would you guess it? He wants to know what Christmas is!”

They all sat around and laughed at me. I could have knifed ‘em all and enjoyed it, but I rolled me another cigarette and cussed ‘em good and hearty. There is ways and ways of swearing. I knew a ‘bo that had been a longshoreman. He could talk a bit. I knew another that used to be a muleskinner, and he could talk a lot more. But for taking a gent’s hide off with cuss words, there was never anybody like Missouri Slim, because he sat back and thought things over and picked out words that meant something. With a knife or with his tongue he was a champeen, but he wasn’t much good in any other kind of a fight. I’d laid by and studied the way he done it, and after a while, practicing to myself, I learned how to out-cuss even Missouri Slim himself. I’d got so’s I could make the toughest ‘bo that ever done a stretch foam and tear and rage when I cussed him. I’ve had a ‘bo sit under a tree for thirty-six hours waiting to get me. Well, I talked right back to these three until I had ‘em ready to fight. They stopped laughin’ and showed their yellow teeth.

“Christmas,” Missouri Slim says finally “is the day when folks get things without having to pay for ‘em.”

“Why,” says I, “every day must be Christmas for you, then.”

Missouri shied a rock at my head. He could throw a stone like a snake strikes—that quick. But I’d learned to dodge even quicker. The stone sailed by.

“What is Christmas?” I asks them all.

“Go and find out!” all four tells me.

They wouldn’t say any more. Through breakfast, Slim kept saying how hard he took it that, after all the hard work he’d put in teaching me, I didn’t even know what Christmas was. He said that I was a trial and a shame to him.

I didn’t listen. I just ate my share of the chuck, smoked my cigarette, and then curled up near the fire to have a snooze. The last thing I heard was Slim telling the other ‘bos to keep shut of me while I was sleeping, because if I was waked up quick, I got my knife out before my eyes was open. Slim had taught me that, if he hadn’t taught me about Christmas.

When I slept, I had a dream that I had a fine black horse brought to me, all saddled and bridled, and that when I whistled, he came up and nuzzled my hand. I’d always wanted a horse. I used to beg Slim to get me one, but he used to point to the steel rails of the track and say: “There’s our horse, kid, and it’ll step faster than any four-legged horse in the world!” This dream made me so happy that I called out: “What’s the name of this horse?” And a voice sang out in the air over me: “Christmas!”

I woke up. The four tramps was sitting around, grinning at me. So I knew that I’d shouted that last word out loud. I told Slim I was going for a walk and started off through the woods, but what I was really doing was hunting for Christmas. It made me feel like a fool to be laughed at by four ‘bos. Aunt Maria had never taken a holiday or given me one or had any festivity at this time of the year, and with Dad and then with Missouri Slim, every day was a holiday. That was how I happened to miss knowing. I went back to the edge of the town and laid low.

Pretty soon a couple of boys came out into the back yard of a big house. I climbed up and sat on the edge of the fence.

“Hello,” says one of them, “what are you doing up there?”

“Sitting on the fence,” says I.

They frowned and looked at each other. They were a shade older than me, and heavier. I could see them sizing me up.

“That’s our fence,” says the biggest of the two. “You got no right to it.”

“I’m just borrowing it,” I tells ‘em.

They begun...