NANCY’S SOUTHERN CHRISTMAS[15]

NANCY’S SOUTHERN CHRISTMAS[15]

Harriet Prescott Spofford

They had always kept Christmas at home, even if in no very expensive way. On the very last one, Johnny had had his skates, tied to his stocking, and inside it, an orange and nuts and raisins, and some little trick-joke, and a stick of candy; and Robby had had his sled, and Marnie her book, and Bessie her tea-set; and Mr. Murtrie, the father, had a pair of wristers that Nancy had crocheted, and a muffler that his wife had knit; and the mother had a needle-book that Marnie had made, and a bread-plate that Johnny had whittled out, and a piece of jig-saw work from Robby, and a muff from the father. And Marnie had written a poem to Father and Mother, which all the others criticized violently and ruthlessly, but which was privately regarded as a great achievement by every one of them.

But what was there to do here with sleds and skates! Great use for a muff out in the middle of the Texas prairie, to which they had come from the North. Why, yesterday the thermometer was just at summer heat, and roses were blossoming!

At home how gay it was with every one coming and going, with purchases and parcels and merry secrets, with the hanging of the green, with big snow-drifts, and coasting down Long Hill by starlight, with going to church in the forenoon, and coming home to turkey and cranberry sauce, and a pudding in blue flames! Here there was nothing, there was nobody. There wasn’t a shop within a hundred miles, and if there were, there was no money with which to buy anything. For Mr. Murtrie had come to grief in his business, losing, when all debts were paid, everything but this ranch, to which he had brought his family, and where it seemed like a new world.

At first, it had been so novel, no one thought of homesickness. Nancy herself had enjoyed as much as any one the singing of the mocking-birds at night, the flashing of the cardinal’s red wings in the radiant mornings and the bubbling of his song, the fragrance of the jasmines, the beauty of the innumerable flowers, the charm of the wide landscape, the giant trees draped in their veils of gray moss; she had enjoyed hearing the boys tell about the batcaves, with their streams of unnumbered wings going out by dark and coming in by dawn in myriads; she had enjoyed lying awake at night to hear the water gently pouring through the irrigation ditches from the madre ditch, and drowning all the land in its fertilizing flood to the sound of slow music; she had enjoyed watching the long flights of wild ducks; seeing a spot apparently covered with yellow flowers that suddenly turned into a flock of birds that rose and flew away. She had enjoyed the strange cactus growths that seemed to her like things enchanted in their weird shapes by old magicians; she had enjoyed the thickets of prickly pear, the green and feathery foliage of the mesquit bushes, many of them no higher than her head, but with mighty roots stretching far and wide underground, the Indians having burned the tops in their wild raids, year after year, long ago. But now Nancy was longing for the bare branches of her old apple-tree weaving their broidery on the sky, for the young oak by the brook which held its brown leaves till spring, for the wide snow-fields, the shadows of whose drifts were blue as sapphire. She was longing to hear the bells ring out their gladness on Christmas eve and Christmas morning, for the spicy green gloom of the church, for all the happy cheer of Christmas as she had known it. Bells? There wasn’t a bell within hearing; there wasn’t a church, except the ruins of an old Spanish mission three or four miles distant. How could there be Christmas green where there wasn’t a spruce or a fir! There was only this long, dreary prairie of the cattle-range under its burning blue sky. It was the very kingdom of loneliness. Christmas without snow, without an icicle, without whistling winds,—oh, it wasn’t Christmas at all!

And then suddenly, as the angry words resounded and echoed in her mind, she asked herself what made Christmas, anyway? Certainly it wasn’t the things people did. In some places they kept it with blowing of horns and burning of fire-crackers, as they did Fourth of July. Perhaps in that way they expressed as much gladness as others did with the pealing from belfries and the rolling of organ tones. For Christmas was a time to be glad that Christ came to make all Christendom good, and blessed, and happy.

And, just as suddenly, Nancy could not help asking herself what she was doing to express gladness or to make Christmas happy. North pole or south pole, Christmas was Christmas, and it wasn’t all in pleasure or all in gifts; and she got out of bed, and knelt down and said a prayer, and went to sleep in a better frame of mind.

But if it wasn’t all in pleasures or all in gifts, there must be some gifts; and next day, Nancy set herself to thinking out the problem. It was still some time before the great holiday, and every hour must be improved.

For the first thing, she betook herself to one of the men on the range who often came about the buildings; and he found for her several huge horns, and, with his help, and taking Johnny into her confidence, they took grease and brick-dust and scraped and polished these horns till they shone almost like silver. Then the three dug for a big mesquit root and secured one, at last, that grew from a great stock; and they scraped and polished that into a very handsome piece of wood; and, having a little knack of carpentry, they fitted the enormous horns into the mesquit root, and there was a chair for any palace. It was to be their father’s, and was to stand on the gallery, where, some night, the night-blooming cereus that laced the whole front would open its slow, delicious flowers, and shed the balm of heaven about him.

They found it a little difficult to keep this secret, because they began work upon it before Mr. Murtrie went off on his hunting-trip with some friends; but after he had gone, things were easier, as the mother was not inclined to prowl about and look into everything, as the head of a house sometimes thinks necessary.

And for the mother,—they knew where some tall flat grasses grew, near a stream that was brimming at this season, and Johnny waded in and got them. Nancy plaited them into a low work-basket, and lined it with a bit of silk that had been her doll’s skirt in her day of dolls. The doll, that had been religiously put away, was taken from her slumbers and furbished for Bessie’s Christmas. “Why, really, it’s going to be a Christmas, after all,” she said.

“Only it’s so queer to have it so warm,” grumbled Johnny. “Winter without snowballing isn’t winter!”

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Nancy, beginning to defend the thing she had adopted.

The man who had found the horns for her found also a little baby fox, and that was kept in great seclusion to become, on Christmas morning, a pet for Johnny; and Marnie and Nancy had great times together feeding it. He had the funniest little bark already. “Oh, we are coming along!” cried Nancy.

But there was more to be done. She remembered that once, when her father had taken her to see the ruins of the old mission, she had observed a number of Mexican “shacks,” or huts, near by. She saw the dinner of one family, which consisted of half a sweet-potato and a red pepper. But she had also seen a big cage full of canarios. And so Nancy and Johnny set out to walk over to the mission, losing their way several times, but finding it again all at once. There an Indian woman, who was about thirty years old and looked a hundred, flung her baby, which was the loveliest little harmony of brown and rose you ever saw, into her husband’s arms, and, after a great deal of pantomime and dumb show, sold, for the price of the last piece of silver in Nancy’s purse, a pair of the canarios in a cage made of reeds, each one an exquisite pinch of feathers, a lot of living gems, of all colors of the rainbow, blue, and yellow, and green, and purple, and red, and brown—iridescent little things, with a song like the faintest, prettiest echo of a Hartz canary’s song. And there was Marnie’s Christmas present settled.

But for Robby? Oh, there was the horned toad she had heard about. Robby had seen one in some show or other at home, and had longed for it. Here it was to his hand,—if she could find it. And with the help of the man who had helped her before, and who could not fancy what she wanted it for, find it she did. Robby would be delighted.

If Nancy had been born in the region, or was living in any town there, she would have found no difficulty in making Christmas presents like those she had hitherto given; but these gifts that she found possible were unique and unlike anything she could have obtained at her old home.

And now for sweetmeats. Well, they had dried some of the luscious grapes and there were the raisins in the pantry, just oozing and crusted with sugar; and there was the barrel of molasses from the sugar-mill down on the Brazos; no one could make more delicate candy than Nancy could and did; and there had been a great harvest of pecan-nuts; and thus, so far as the stockings were concerned, Christmas had no more to ask.

The expected day was close at hand, and Nancy pictured to herself how it would all go off—how the stockings would be hung up, how Johnny would help with the chair and then be in bed before his own gift appeared, and how she would be up at the peep of dawn to go out and bring in that baby fox—the delicate, delicious, dewy dawn—and make his bed under Johnny’s stocking, tying his leash to the toe, after fastening it securely to a hook in the chimney; and how she would untwist and unbind and unlace a great bunch of the roses outside that were having a late blossoming on their luxuriant growth, and bring it into the window and train it all around the room under the ceiling. It would be—well, as beautiful as the Christmas green; it couldn’t be more beautiful, she said in her thoughts.

It was at this time that Mrs. Murtrie began to be a little anxious about her husband. He should have returned from his hunting-trip some days before, and he was still absent, no one could say where. And, of course, she was conjuring up all sorts of frightful possibilities in the way of accidents, and Marnie was helping her; and Nancy herself, although ordinarily holding her father to be invulnerable, felt a degree of alarm as she thought what if he had fallen into some gulch, or lost his way, or drowned in one of the rivers that rose, after a rain in the hills, so swiftly that, in a town below, a man had been overtaken before he could get off the bridge. As for Johnny, he was for going out to find his father, if he only knew which way to go. As night fell, and it was Christmas eve, the house was full of a sort of electric tension; no one said just what every one was thinking, till suddenly Bessie broke out with a great sob, and cried: “I want my papa!” Then every one fell to comforting her, and all were furtively wiping away tears, when steps rang on the gallery, the door burst open, and the father, with his blue eyes shining out of his browned skin, and his great voice resonant, stood before them, holding an immense bird with wide-spreading wings.

“It’s a wild turkey,” he said, after the uproarious greetings, and as soon as they loosened their embraces. “I was resolved not to come back without a turkey for Christmas. And it’s a great deal richer and sweeter than any home-made bird, as you’ll see when it’s roasted.”

A turkey! And Nancy had but lately been bemoaning herself that the dinner would be without a turkey. She had gone to bed, and so did not see her mother seize the wings of the wild trophy, and trim them, and run out to the kitchen to the adjacent building and dry them well in a hot oven, and later trim them again, and bind them at the base with the palms of an old kid glove and so finish for Nancy’s Christmas as fine a feather fan as one could wish to wave on a hot summer afternoon.

But at last, when the house was quite still, Nancy crept out of her room and summoned Johnny to help her with the chair. Johnny was too sleepy not to be glad to be dismissed after that, and then she disposed of the presents exactly as she had planned, and wondered what the large parcel was, swinging by a string from her own stocking, and went to sleep to the tune of the song a mocking-bird sang, sweet, and strong, and joyous, in the pecan-tree outside, till a rising wind swept it away. And if you could have looked into the living-room of that bungalow next morning, you would have seen Johnny hugging his baby fox, and Bessie hugging her doll and Marnie chirping to her birds, and their mother putting spools, and needles, and scissors into her work-basket, and the father taking his ease in his big chair with its shining supports, and Nancy leisurely fanning herself, as if there were not a norther blowing outside, which, had the casements been open, would have blown the rain quite across the room. Rain? No, oh, no! For, see! look! For a wonder, the loveliest, silveriest, soft snow was falling, which, even if it melted to-morrow, made Nancy’s northern heart feel, in her southern home, the spirit of Christmas everywhere.