DURING THE WEEK before Christmas, Jake was the most important person of our
household, for he was to go to town and do all our Christmas shopping. But
on the twenty-first of December, the snow began to fall. The flakes came
down so thickly that from the sitting-room windows I could not see beyond
the windmill-- its frame looked dim and grey, unsubstantial like a shadow.
The snow did not stop falling all day, or during the night that followed.
The cold was not severe, but the storm was quiet and resistless. The men
could not go farther than the barns and corral. They sat about the house
most of the day as if it were Sunday; greasing their boots, mending their
suspenders, plaiting whiplashes.
On the morning of the twenty-second, grandfather announced at breakfast
that it would be impossible to go to Black Hawk for Christmas purchases.
Jake was sure he could get through on horseback, and bring home our things
in saddle-bags; but grandfather told him the roads would be obliterated,
and a newcomer in the country would be lost ten times over. Anyway, he
would never allow one of his horses to be put to such a strain.
We decided to have a country Christmas, without any help from town. I had
wanted to get some picture books for Yulka and Antonia; even Yulka was able
to read a little now. Grandmother took me into the ice-cold storeroom,
where she had some bolts of gingham and sheeting. She cut squares of
cotton cloth and we sewed them together into a book. We bound it between
pasteboards, which I covered with brilliant calico, representing scenes
from a circus. For two days I sat at the dining-room table, pasting this
book full of pictures for Yulka. We had files of those good old family
magazines which used to publish coloured lithographs of popular paintings,
and I was allowed to use some of these. I took `Napoleon Announcing the
Divorce to Josephine' for my frontispiece. On the white pages I grouped
Sunday-School cards and advertising cards which I had brought from my `old
country.' Fuchs got out the old candle-moulds and made tallow candles.
Grandmother hunted up her fancy cake-cutters and baked gingerbread men and
roosters, which we decorated with burnt sugar and red cinnamon drops.
On the day before Christmas, Jake packed the things we were sending to the
Shimerdas in his saddle-bags and set off on grandfather's grey gelding.
When he mounted his horse at the door, I saw that he had a hatchet slung to
his belt, and he gave grandmother a meaning look which told me he was
planning a surprise for me. That afternoon I watched long and eagerly from
the sitting-room window. At last I saw a dark spot moving on the west
hill, beside the half-buried cornfield, where the sky was taking on a
coppery flush from the sun that did not quite break through. I put on my
cap and ran out to meet Jake. When I got to the pond, I could see that he
was bringing in a little cedar tree across his pommel. He used to help my
father cut Christmas trees for me in Virginia, and he had not forgotten how
much I liked them.
By the time we had placed the cold, fresh-smelling little tree in a corner
of the sitting-room, it was already Christmas Eve. After supper we all
gathered there, and even grandfather, reading his paper by the table,
looked up with friendly interest now and then. The cedar was about five
feet high and very shapely. We hung it with the gingerbread animals,
strings of popcorn, and bits of candle which Fuchs had fitted into
pasteboard sockets. Its real splendours, however, came from the most
unlikely place in the world--from Otto's cowboy trunk. I had never seen
anything in that trunk but old boots and spurs and pistols, and a
fascinating mixture of yellow leather thongs, cartridges, and shoemaker's
wax. From under the lining he now produced a collection of brilliantly
coloured paper figures, several inches high and stiff enough to stand
alone. They had been sent to him year after year, by his old mother in
Austria. There was a bleeding heart, in tufts of paper lace; there were
the three kings, gorgeously apparelled, and the ox and the ass and the
shepherds; there was the Baby in the manger, and a group of angels,
singing; there were camels and leopards, held by the black slaves of the
three kings. Our tree became the talking tree of the fairy tale; legends
and stories nestled like birds in its branches. Grandmother said it
reminded her of the Tree of Knowledge. We put sheets of cotton wool under
it for a snow-field, and Jake's pocket-mirror for a frozen lake.
I can see them now, exactly as they looked, working about the table in the
lamplight: Jake with his heavy features, so rudely moulded that his face
seemed, somehow, unfinished; Otto with his half-ear and the savage scar
that made his upper lip curl so ferociously under his twisted moustache.
As I remember them, what unprotected faces they were; their very roughness
and violence made them defenceless. These boys had no practised manner
behind which they could retreat and hold people at a distance. They had
only their hard fists to batter at the world with. Otto was already one of
those drifting, case-hardened labourers who never marry or have children of
their own. Yet he was so fond of children!
Read next: BOOK I - The Shimerdas#Chapter 12
Read previous: BOOK I - The Shimerdas#Chapter 10
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