(5)

Mrs. Stumway’s house had a coal furnace down the basement, but she liked to economize on all but the coldest winter days by using the tall, ornate iron and nickel stove in the dining room. That and the cooking heat from the kitchen kept the two rooms comfortable, and the big parlor had been curtained off with a double thickness of patchwork quilts and bedspreads hung in the archway from hooks that her late husband had installed many years ago. This kept the upstairs bedrooms in a condition of arctic frigidity relieved minutely by opening the floor registers an hour before bed time. Consequently, Charles and the old lady in her aviator’s helmet sat in the dining room each night after supper like some oddly assorted characters out of a fairy tale, the tall, blond boy hunched over the table at his homework, the old gaunt woman in her rocking chair, head tilted to one side as she read in her dusty books or leafed through magazines neighbors would sometimes send over as a kindness. She never read newspapers and had little interest in what the rest of the world was doing, so that Charles depended on school and Miss Wrigley for his contact with life, thinking of his home with Mrs. Stumway as a sort of deep freeze in which he was preserved between the times when he could escape to live in the real world.

It came as a shock, then, when Mrs. Stumway said casually one evening, “Christmas is coming, Charles, and we’re to have some company.”

“Oh?” Charles said, preoccupied with the history of the Civil War and hardly hearing what had been said.

“My daughter Claire will be staying a few days.”

Charles stopped reading and looked up, the words sinking in. “Your daughter?” he said stupidly, looking at the old lady.

“Oh, I have family, young man,” she said, putting down a piece of sewing she had been working on. “I don’t often see them anymore. No, not even when there’s trouble,” she said in a thoughtful voice. “But they write, and I think about them. C1aire’s my youngest, though she’s not so young anymore either, and she’s had her share of trouble.”

Charles sat attentive and dutiful, listening to the old lady’s voice that he seldom heard unless it was giving him directions or assigning tasks about the house. There was something in the back of his mind about the name of Mrs. Stumway’s daughter that bothered him. He could not possibly know her, but he thought of a picture of a young girl in a long black bathing suit. He listened.

“I know you’ll be on your best behavior, Charles, for you are a thoughtful boy. She’s a widow like I am. Poor Bernard, her husband, taken in the prime of his life by that terrible World War and no reason nor rhyme to it.”

She paused and removed her little elliptical glasses and wiped her eyes. “Oh the men in our family, what happens to them? And I said, Claire, you must marry again, for you can still have children - she was only twenty-seven and a lovely girl, but she wouldn’t have any of those men came courting her. Said they were all after Bernard’s estate money or they were mean, or they drank too much, or were restless. None of them good enough, and I guess she knows. She’s been over most of the world on ships and airplanes now. She’s done well with the money and the land he left, hardly lost a cent in the crash. Well, and here she is going on forty-four, no, forty-five next February, middle aged, though she don’t look it.”

Charles sat and wondered why the old woman was saying all these things until he realized she was in a reverie and hardly remembered he was there. Her voice trailed off into a mumbling and then silence, so that the boy was startled by the sudden reemergence of it.

“Oh, but she’s a good girl, a fine person. And Catherine, oh my Catherine, whatever will become of you now? All of us left alone, lonely old women. It’s so hard, so hard to be alone, and my poor dear Catherine with her tragedy so fresh and her wild letters full of nonsense.” Mrs. Stumway stopped rocking and bent double to lever herself up out of the chair, pausing on her way to the kitchen to look at Charles as if he had suddenly materialized at the dining room table.

“And you, an orphan, alone like all of us. Do you know what she sent me?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Here now, Charles, I shouldn’t be talking to you about my family, giving out all our private matters, but you’re not one of us, and sometimes I talk on like you can’t understand; like you was a dog or something for an old lady to talk to. There now, Charles, I’m sorry, and I do feel you need to be in a family, for you’re a lone one too, after all.” She leaned over and patted his head, making Charles feel even more like a dumb animal.

Mrs. Stumway moved over to the old secretary with its tall bookshelf encased in curved glass and pulled down the desk part. She rummaged in the papers, looked in the little drawers and found something heavy that she brought back and plunked down on the table. It was a carved piece of stone about four or five inches high that might have been the figure of a bear with a hole bored through the neck for a thong or light chain. It was smooth as if it had been handled by many generations. Charles looked at it for a moment without interest, but something about the shape of the figure was compelling. He reached to pick it up, and as his fingers touched it he felt a tingling as if a static discharge were tickling his skin. He drew back and looked at it again. It had some lightly incised figures or letters all down both sides.

“It’s all right, you can handle it,” the old lady said, pushing it toward him so that it toppled face down with a clunk. “Piece of junk some medicine show fake sold my poor Catherine. Poor woman.” The old lady hobbled out to the kitchen for a drink of water, muttering that the talk about relatives had made her arthritis worse.

Charles reached out to the stone figure again. There was the tingling again, not painful, but as if the stone were in rapid and invisible vibration so that it shook his flesh and bones like waves of sound. He picked it up, holding it tightly. It was cool, a stone, gray and smooth with white lines, and it looked like a standing bear with its muzzle lifted as if howling. The paws seemed held to the sides by a band or belt pulled tight around the whole figure. In all, it looked like any primitive carving, blurred with age and handling, but Charles held it near the lamp and saw a line of very fine markings on the band around the paws, and he felt increasingly uncomfortable. He was aware that Mrs. Stumway did not feel the tingling that he felt, and that there was more to the stone than she imagined. The markings along the sides of the figure resembled crude drawings of clouds, lightning, birds, and stick men, but the intricately curled and flowing figures on the band were of a different sort, like the graceful letters of some unknown language.

He put the stone down on the table. The tingling stopped. He picked it up and held it to his ear, but could hear no sound. On his cheek it was cool, and it made the skin tingle with a buzzing like the dry ice they had played with that night at the PTA party. He put it down, puzzled and a bit afraid. It made him unable to think clearly. What was he doing holding it to his cheek? Why was he picking it up and laying it down so many times? The old woman would think it strange. He picked it up again, unable not to. It tingled.

Mrs. Stumway was standing in the kitchen door looking at him. “You like it?” she said, sipping at the jelly glass of water. “I’d say that you could have it, but just suppose poor Catherine comes for a visit and wants to know where her, what did she call it? her ‘Mawky Stone,’ is. Something like that. Some such trash. Suppose she does, I have to have it here to show her.” She reached down and picked it up.

Charles watched her face to see if she noticed anything. He felt stunned, as if he had been struck on the head with something hard, and for a moment while Mrs. Stumway put the stone figure back in the desk, he could not think. He felt after a moment that for the past few minutes he had been alone for the first time in his life, and it was not for some time that he was able to grasp the implication of that feeling.

***

In the final week before Christmas, Charles outdid himself and passed some exams Miss Wrigley had prepared for the fifth grade in the next semester, so that she kept Charles after school on the last day and looked at him with a barely perceptible smile. He was standing before her desk at the front of the room which was getting cold now that the fire had been allowed to die down in the stoves, and he was wondering what had happened with the exam. He had tried as hard as he possibly could, pushing himself every night to study so that the other kids in the school hardly talked to him, or he to them, in those last weeks.

Miss Wrigley looked up at him with her hands folded in front of her as she did when she had something good to tell the kids. She smiled with such affection that it made Charles’s stomach suddenly drop away.

“Charles, I have a Christmas present for you,” she said.

“But you already ...”

“No, I don’t mean the presents I give all the children, I mean something less tangible, but more important.”

“The exam?”

“You did nearly perfectly, Charles. I’m going to register you in grade six for the beginning of school in January.”

“My gosh,” was all that Charles could think to say. The same grade as Paul Holton and Runt Borsold, a grade of Doug Bent. He felt as if he had been left stranded on a height.

“Gosh,” he said again as Miss Wrigley got up and came around the desk and took both his hands in hers.

“You are a truly remarkable young man, Charles,” she said, looking up now into his flushed face. “Oh, Charles, you are going to be a great scholar someday, a brilliant person.” And she threw her arms around him, hugging him hard.

Charles put his arms around Miss Wrigley very delicately, lightly touching her wool jacket. He smelled her hair and felt intensely happy as she pulled back and held him by the shoulders. “I'm so proud of you, Charles,” she said, her eyes looking as if she would cry. “Do you know that teaching in a school like this ...” she began, but then she stopped and turned back to the desk, catching her breath.

When she turned back to Charles, she had become his teacher again, and he realized with amazement that there was not really all that much difference in their feelings, even though he was immeasurably beneath Miss Wrigley in learning and experience. He felt that in that moment he had grown toward adult understanding almost enough to match his rapid physical growth in the past few months.

Then she told him goodbye. She was leaving for the Christmas vacation to be with her family in Joliet and would not be back until the fourth of January when school began again. Charles walked out of the schoolhouse and down the steps in the twilight, feeling the cold hit his teeth, and realized he was still grinning widely. He began a long legged dash through the drifts along the side of the highway, headed for Douglas Bent’s house to tell him the news.

The exciting winter vacation days before Christmas were a round of snowy games, sledding, chases, rabbit hunting with the older men, the cutting of Christmas trees on the Peaussier farm for just about everyone in the farm community, riding the Bents’ horses when they could get permission, jumping from the highway bridge into the snow drifts on the creek bottom. Bashful Kenny Grattan took a dare and grabbed the back bumper of a milk truck and went zipping along on his sled until he hit a patch of bare cinders near the highway turn and came off the sled on his face. Rudy Bent fell through the river ice and had to be rescued with a ladder and was in danger of pneumonia for a few days they said, but he got over it. And Charles got two Christmas presents stuffed in the old widow’s mailbox: a jackknife from a secret admirer (Douglas said it was Brenda Gustafson) and a handkerchief from Flossie Portola with his initials embroidered on it. And he was hard at work making presents too: a carved wooden pistol that was an exact replica of an Army .45 automatic for Douglas, a butterfly carved out of a piece of walnut and a wooden pin to go through the carved hole so it would hold a girl’s hair, and that was for Betty Bailey who would not get it until after Christmas since she was away with her parents visiting relatives in Chicago. And a hand-drawn calendar for 1936 with all the holidays marked with red designs and pictures for Mrs. Stumway was almost finished, since she had said she was always forgetting what week it was. He had already given Miss Wrigley her present, a handsome gilt brooch with a setting of petrified wood which was the only store bought present he had money for and which she had received with much delight.

And then the day before Christmas, Claire Stumway Lanphier arrived, pulling off the highway into the short drive that Charles had shoveled the snow out of and roaring the engine of her new cream-colored Auburn convertible before turning it off. Douglas Bent spotted the car as he and Charles were coming back from the sledding hill across from the schoolhouse. He let out a cry and dropped his sled rope to go hopping in his ungainly, stiff-legged run until he stood panting beside the car. It was different, Charles saw, from the cars he had seen. It had a pointed rear and large shining tubes coming out of the sides of the hood and disappearing under the fenders. In front was a single V-shaped front bumper and a stylized naked woman hood ornament with her head thrown back and her chromium breasts thrust forward to cut the wind.

“Wow, it’s an Auburn Speedster,” Douglas said, touching the cream-colored metal as if it were living skin. “I’ve never seen a real one. I bet it’s the only one in this part of the country.”

Charles watched the smaller boy move minutely around the car, touching it gingerly here and there. He laid a hand on one of the shiny pipes, found it warm and decided the visitor had arrived only a few minutes before.

“I guess it belongs to Mrs. Stumway’s daughter,” Charles said, not overly interested. He could not understand Douglas’s infatuation with machinery and found his patience tried on many occasions when Douglas would have to stop and examine some entirely uninteresting piece of industrial craftsmanship.

“Guaranteed to go one hundred miles an hour,” Douglas was saying. “She must be really rich.”

“I guess she is,” Charles said. “Mrs. Stumway said -” but he stopped rather than talk about what the old lady had rambled on about the other evening. “She’s going to visit for a couple days.” He watched Douglas kneeling in the snow to look under the car, peeking into the interior, and finally became irritated. His feet were freezing. “I got to go in and meet her, Doug.” And then he recalled he had not given Doug his present, and he made that his pretext. He ran into the house, dashed up the stairs to his bedroom without taking off his boots, and rushed back out with the present wrapped in brown paper with Douglas’s name on the home-made tag. He sailed off the top step into the snow, finding Doug still admiring the car.

“Here, Doug. I made it myself, and it’s really authentic.” He laid the package in Doug’s outstretched hands. “What’s the matter?” Charles said, noticing the other hoy’s face turning sad or angry.

“I ain’t got anything for you.” Douglas stood straight with his braced leg at an angle. “Pa said we didn’t need to get things for people outside the family, ’cause ...” He stopped, looking down at the package.

“Geeze, Doug, you’ve already given me so much I can’t ever pay it all back,” Charles said, putting his arm over the other boy’s shoulders. “Merry Christmas, Doug,” he said, patting the boy’s shoulder.

“Merry Christmas, Charles,” Douglas said. He looked up with a smile. “I got something for you after all, and you’re really going to like it. Okay if I bring it down tomorrow?”

“Sure, but you don’t have to if your Pa said not to.”

“Oh, this is okay. It’s already mine, I mean mine to give.”

With that, Douglas hobbled off to the highway, gathered up the sled rope and headed for home with a backward wave. Charles felt sorry for Douglas for a minute, and then he thought, who was he to feel sorry for a guy with all that family and probably a really great Christmas coming up tomorrow. Charles was not overly concerned about presents for himself, as he expected very little, but he did want to give things to people he liked, and he felt that he had pretty well covered the field. Not until this moment did it occur to him that he would have a very slender holiday himself. He thought of it for the time it took to pull his boots off in the porch and then shrugged it away. It just didn’t seem important.

Standing next to the stove in the kitchen, Charles became aware of the new presence in the house by several subtle aromas that he began to perceive as a difference in the environment. There was perfume, of course. Every woman just about had some sort of stuff she put on to smell good, and this perfume was beautifully delicate, not the usual lavender or lilac or rose oil stuff, but something warm, like putting a clean fur up to your nose, a scent that might have been a very exotic flower, perhaps a night flower; and there was an overlay of acrid scent like burned wood. Charles wondered what that could be, since it was new to the house, not like the smell of wood or coal burning in the stove.

“Charles, boy, will you come in the living room?” Mrs. Stumway’s voice came, high and strained, from the newly opened living room.

Charles ran his hand through his hair, but it was sticking up in all directions from wearing his stocking cap. He shrugged again and walked somewhat selfconsciously through the dining room and stood in the wide doorway of the living room.

“Charles, this is my youngest daughter, Claire Lanphier,” the old lady said.

A woman in dark green with some sort of fur around her neck rose from the sofa and offered Charles her hand. As he shook it, he noticed she was holding a glass of light brown liquid in the other hand, and knew it was from her drink that the odor of burned wood came. He looked into Mrs. Lanphier’s eyes, seeing her for the first time as she smiled at him and settled herself back on the sofa. Standing, she had been a bit taller than Charles, her hair pulled back from her face and done in some soft kind of roll behind her neck, around which was a white silk scarf knotted like an ascot, and tucked into the front of the dark green dress which Charles thought must be expensive by the heavy, smooth look of the material. Mrs. Lanphier had a familiar look, he thought, sitting down in the other living room chair and smiling. Her mouth was wide with a full underlip and it turned up at the comers, making a rather pretty and complex curve, even though there were fine wrinkles in her throat and around her eyes. Her nose was long and straight and a shade too large for prettiness, but her eyes made up for that by being wide and blue and very expressive. He noticed that as she talked they acted an accompaniment to her words. Actress’s eyes, Charles thought, taken with the woman’s face as he tried to recall who she looked like.

“So you are the local hero and prodigy, Charles,” Mrs. Lanphier said, and her eyes twinkled to assure the boy she was lightly teasing.

“Now Charles, don’t let her embarrass you ” Mrs. Stumway said. “She’s just a terrible tease.”

Charles could see the old lady was pleased with her daughter, that there was nothing the daughter could do or perhaps had ever done that would not please the mother. He smiled again.

“That hero stuff came in pretty handy for buying clothes and things. I thought about going into the rescuing business, but I guess the Elks wouldn’t pay regular for that sort of thing.”

“He got twenty-five dollars in prize money from the B.P.O.E. in Beecher,” Mrs. Stumway said. “He rescued one of his playmates from the river,” she went on, imitating the newspaper account without thinking.

Charles could see that old Mrs. Stumway’s mind was almost paralyzed with the pleasure of her daughter’s visit. He watched Mrs. Lanphier’s eyes, taking more enjoyment from their changing expressions than from the conversation they accompanied. The talk was of school and local news for a few moments, Charles working up some social enthusiasm as he seemed able to do on any occasion, talking from the top of his mind while he studied the interesting new person in his world. Mrs. Lanphier sipped at the drink in her hand until it was almost gone, and then she opened a flat cigarette case and took out a thin, long cigarette.

“Do you mind, Mother? Charles?”

“I don’t like it, but I guess everyone’s doing it now, even the women,” Mrs. Stumway said, but she didn’t really mind, Charles could tell.

“Charles, would you help a lady trapped in the wilds of the Corn Belt to another Scotch and water?” Mrs. Lanphier held up her almost empty glass plaintively.

“Sure,” Charles said, almost leaping from his chair. “Uh, well, I don’t know how to do it though.” He laughed, holding the glass in his hand as if it were an obscure artifact.

“Two fingers of Scotch,” Mrs. Lanphier said, one eye squinted over the illustrative two fingers, “and the same of water, and some ice.” She looked sad momentarily. “Oh, you have no ice, and with all this winter around too.”

“I’ll get you some,” Charles said. He leaped out of the room, set the glass on the sink and slipped out the back door, reached high up to the right and broke off a long icicle from the porch roof. He looked through it to make sure it was clean, but this time of the year it would be, since the roof had been ice covered for weeks. At the sink again, he unstoppered the bottle of brown fluid, poured two fingers and almost dropped the bottle with the strength of the odor rising from the whiskey. He put water from the pitcher pump into the glass and stirred it with the icicle, broke off a length of the ice that stood up in the glass, took it out and broke it again, getting some of the drink on his fingers. He licked them and shuddered. How could people drink that stuff? He rushed back into the living room with the drink.

“Charles, you are a sweetheart,” Mrs. Lanphier said, taking the dr1nk and admiring the icicle. She said “sweetheart” as if it had capital EE’s in it, making Charles squirm with pleasure. “Will you be my official Scotch and Water and Icicle maker for the term of my visit? Say you will?”

“It’ll be my pleasure, ma’am.” Charles felt as if he had just been knighted. He watched as she took the first sip, waiting for her eyes to approve. She looked up at him over the edge of the glass, and her eyes twinkled again while he felt his heart thump a couple of times.

“Chivalry in the most unusual places,” she murmured. She took a delicate sip from the cigarette, taping its edge on the saucer that served as an ashtray. “Won’t you have a drink, Mother?” she said. “It is Christmas Eve, after all, and we are together for the first time in, how many years?”

“Oh, Claire, I don’t know. I think it must be five or six. I don’t like to drink that stuff, but I will have some of that wine you sent last year.”

“You still have that wine?” Claire began to laugh and leaned back on the sofa. “Oh, Mother, that was last year’s present.”

“I know, I know, but I don’t drink it very often. Charles, will you go down cellar and get that bottle, the one with the dent in the bottom. It’s layin’ on the ledge to the right of the stairway. Now be careful you don’t drop it.”

“Yes, please,” Claire said in a very low voice that Charles was sure her mother couldn’t hear.

And so it turned into a very pleasant evening, although Charles had not had anything to eat since noon. He had a glass of the wine with the old woman, and then he made Claire another drink as it became quite dark in the house and Mrs. Stumway lit lamps and made some little sandwiches with bread and some gray paste out of a can that Claire had brought with her. The wine was beautiful deep red with a soft, smooth tang that made Charles feel that he could taste it in several places rather than just with his palate, and the sandwiches were sharply spiced and liverish tasting, but delicious with the wine. They sat in the dim living room speaking quietly of Christmases past, looking at the little tree Charles had got from the Peaussiers as a gift for doing all the cutting, and the presents under the tree which looked like quite a respectable pile when Claire added the half dozen she had brought.

“Oh, yes, Charles,” she said. “Some for you too,” as he looked puzzled at all the packages.

It got later, and Charles noted it was snowing again as he fixed Claire another Scotch and Icicle. He had drunk two glasses of the wine and wondered if he should pour himself another one. The old lady had fallen asleep in her chair as she sometimes did, so that he and Claire were alone. He poured himself another sip, feeling very manly and tall. In the dim living room, Claire and Charles toasted Christmas and sang “Silent Night” very softly, Claire leading, although Charles knew the words from singing at school. When they finished, it was silent. They could hear the fire muttering to itself in the stove.

I feel the wine as Charles becomes more comfortable and sleepy, but I am waiting in these times, for he takes the powerful stone with him when he leaves the house. It is in his coat pocket now, and when it is in the house I find it difficult to rise to consciousness, as if I were in hibernation. The voices I hear and the dim senses that come to me are lost in a dream, soft, yielding, unimportant. I feel that it would take much to wake me now. It is not important. I sleep again.

Together they helped the old lady up to her musty smelling bedroom, and Charles staggered off to bed while Clair helped her mother. There were soft goodnights, Merry Christmases whispered, and he got into bed not minding the cold, even admiring the foggy clouds of his own breath in the candlelight before he pinched it out and fell into a deep sleep almost at the same moment.

It was a wonderful Christmas, Charles thought, remembering with a sense of strangeness that it was also his first Christmas. Presents were unexpected and perfect, the way they always should be, and even though he had not been able to get Claire a present, how gracious she was and how knowing of what he might want. The soft wool sweater in dark blue cable stitch was the most sumptuous thing he had ever seen, and it fit. She had brought her mother half a dozen beautiful long candles to go in a crystal candle holder that she whisked out of a soft felt bag like a magician producing a glass bird of paradise. It stood on the dining table of the old farmhouse gleaming like a huge irregular diamond, its facets throwing rainbow glints that made Charles long to see the big cities and far countries that Mrs. Lanphier must know. There were tiny bottles of what she called cordials for sipping on winter nights, and a long shawl in delicate green and gold that Claire said was Cashmere wool, and a tooled leather belt for Charles, and an ivory comb for Mrs. Stumway, and it did seem that the miraculous flood of gifts would never stop. The last package Charles opened proved to be a flashlight, with batteries included and a clip on it to hook to his belt. It was all so great that he went in the kitchen on a pretext of making a pot of coffee and wept with his head against the wall while he felt the figures in the belt that he had put on over his pajamas.

The afternoon was colder than it had been any time that winter, with the windows Jack Frosted solid so that it seemed the house had sunk beneath a glacier, and they were all closed in for the winter. Charles had to keep the small furnace full of coal and the upstairs stove full too, and still a cold draft would sneak in under a door or around a window, stretching a white finger of frost along floor or window casing as if the winter were pointing with derision at the poor beings trying to keep warm. Douglas came over with a box wrapped in tissue for Charles and said Merry Christmas to everyone and admired Mrs. Lanphier’s car again, although it was almost unrecognizable under the new cover of snow. Charles opened the box while Douglas had some hot tea to warm up in the kitchen. Inside the flat box were several rows of white and gray stones, flat and chipped looking. He looked at Douglas with a smile but not really understanding.

“Indian arrowheads,” Douglas said, grinning. “It’s an arrowhead collection I got from my uncle in Wisconsin. They’re all genuine too.”

Charles was at a loss, but he recognized Doug’s need and exclaimed over the collection until the smaller boy glowed with pleasure. Doug pulled the carved Army .45 from the pocket of his coat.

“Look, Mrs. Stumway, what Charles made for me.” He waved it around and the old lady ducked involuntarily. “It’s really swell, exactly like a real one. You can really carve, Charles.”

And after Doug had left again into the blue white cold and the door was slammed against the winter, Claire asked for a drink, and they retired to the living room again. The afternoon got darker and later somehow without Charles knowing that time had passed, that they had eaten again, the turkey sliced for sandwiches with dressing on the side and milk, and now it was late again, and he was in the kitchen fixing another drink for Claire. He poured the last drop of wine into his glass. He seemed to wake up at that moment, looked around him at the dim kitchen, the lamp on the table, the two empty bottles in front of him. He wouldn’t be able to make her another drink, the bottles were empty, and who had drunk the rest of the wine? Surely not Mrs. Stumway, for she had been sitting smiling with her shawl around her shoulders and was now asleep again. He had drunk it. How had that happened? He walked back into the living room holding two empty glasses.

“Looks like the end of Christmas,” he said, holding up the glasses.

“Oh, dear boy, not at this point,” Claire said. She looked genuinely pained. “Where is that other bottle I bought?” She sat hack thinking, and Charles watched her face get old for a moment, her expressive eyes falling shut. “I left it,” she said sadly. “I left it on the hall table, and I’d told myself I was going to leave it if I didn’t put it in the whiskey box of the car, and I left it.” She looked so sad that for a moment Charles thought she was going to cry. He felt helpless and awkward.

“Well,” she said, brightening, “there’s always more whiskey in the world, at least this year there is. The year before last was a horse of a different shade.” She stood up, raised her arms over her head and stretched like a cat, yawning and patting her lips with one hand. “Are you game, old fellow?”

Charles was not sure what she meant, but he nodded, grinning.

Claire staggered slightly as she stepped forward, and Charles caught her elbow. “Quite all right, old fellow,” she said, putting her arm on his shoulder for support. “Short dash to the Caledonian Isles and the Scottish succession is assured.”

They dressed warmly, Claire making obscure jokes that Charles laughed at the whole time. As she opened the door and looked out into the blue black and whirl of snow, Charles felt the reassuring weight of the carved stone in his mackinaw pocket, pulled his stocking cap down over his ears and dashed out first into the snow. They dropped off the porch into snow up to their knees, Charles getting the powdery stuff up both sleeves and into his shoes as he worked to clear the car windshield and headlights. He realized he had forgotten his boots but let it go. They would be in the warm car.

“This thing is guaranteed, to go a hundred per,” Claire said as the starter whined, groaned and then turned the engine over with a horrible grunting sound. “If you can get it going.” But at that moment the engine caught and roared. “Ah, the marvels of the Indiana natives,” she said, spinning the wheels as they slewed back out of the driveway and bounced backwards onto the half cleared highway. Charles felt warm inside with the wine and the excitement of going away like this with a beautiful woman, even it the woman was old enough to be his mother. That didn’t seem to matter.

The car roared in first gear, its rear end skidding across the highway until Claire realized the road was packed hard with snow and slippery as glass. “There now, sweetie,” she said, apparently to the car. “Mama will take care of you, you big brute. Jus’ control yourself.” And when they started again, it was with less fishtailing until eventually they were straight on the roadway, headed for Beecher. In the dark interior of the coupe, the wind spitting tiny needles at them through invisible cracks, the dashboard dials glowing across in front of them, the speedometer needle wavering and holding at fifty as they raced into the turn at the city limits, Charles felt exalted and rare with the potent thrill. The car began to slide as it lost hold on the curve, but Claire pulled it expertly back into line, although it was lucky the road was deserted, since the maneuver took up the whole highway. They passed the first tavern at the railroad bridge because its lights were out, and then the big Beecher Saloon beside the DX Diner was also closed and a horrible feeling began to dawn that maybe all the liquor stores and taverns were closed. Charles said as much, and Claire pulled to the curb in front of the Diner.

She put her arm on the back of the seat. “Charles, I used to live in this dogforsaken place, and the liquor people do not close except on Sunday, and it is,” she paused, “ah, Wednesday.”

“It’s Christmas Day,” Charles said, feeling that he was responsible for it.

“Ach, the Prince of Peace,” she said. She struck her forehead with the heel of her hand and tipped back the little green hat with its perky feather so that she looked like Maid Marian in Sherwood Forest, Charles thought.

“All right, Scrooge,” Claire said, snapping the car into gear and roaring in a wide fishtailing turn into the middle of the street, across the old streetcar tracks and back again, straightening out for the turn at the bridge. Somehow the slewing of the car and the roar of the engine made Charles feel better, and he laughed.

“You don’t really mind anyway, do you?” He held on to the dash as they took the corner at the end of the bridge where cinders had fortunately been sprinkled for just such drivers.

“It’s not my mind, old fellow,” Claire said, shifting into high at the city limits again. “It’s the old spirit that needs the support of fellow spirits. Scotch ones, to be precise.”

“But everything’s closed.”

“Now you’re a smart lad,” Claire said as they roared into a turn at the route 17 junction and headed east. “What does water do when it gets too hot to be water?”

“What?” said Charles, confused by the sudden change. “Oh, I guess it turns to steam.”

“Precisely, Dr. Einstein. And what is that clever move on the part of our friendly H2O called?”

“Gee, I don’t know what you mean,” Charles said. He was trying to follow the woman’s joke and not succeeding.

“For shame, old fellow. It’s called what we are doing right now, a change of state!” And Claire laughed briefly.

“Oh, I see,” Charles said. “You mean that across the state line in Indiana?”

“The State Line Tavern. There’s always a state line tavern. There’s one in Texas, across from blue nose Oklahoma, and one in California across from blue nose Arizona.”

“Blue Nose?”

“My boy, there are two kinds of people in the world, disregarding the unimportant details of sex, race, age, and place on the Social Register. There are Blue Noses and there are Red Noses, and that’s the world for you.”

Charles began to laugh, finding the woman’s tone irresistible. He looked past the laboring windshield wipers at the long white road that raced beneath their wheels, the streaks of snow that lanced at them, curving curiously downward to fly directly at them in the headlights that punched a broad bright swath in the darkness. This was the whole world, right here in this racing automobile that now went faster even though he heard the engine roaring less loudly. They seemed not to be touching the road at all now, whispering over the snowy surface and the black lines of tar that he would glimpse where the snowplows had scraped the concrete bare, the black lines whipping past under them, and the snow bursting its arrows impotently against the small hard panes of the windshield as they raced toward the line.

“Oh, Sweet Charles,” Claire said, reaching over and squeezing his knee just behind the joint so that it almost hurt. “You are so gloriously young and innocent and perfectly at home in the world.” Then she stopped and concentrated as an approaching car beamed intensely bright lights into their eyes. “The bastard,” she muttered. “You know, young man,” and she glanced at his eager face, “I might well get into trouble with the law for taking you to another state for immoral purposes.” She paused as if considering that for a minute, making Charles almost think she was serious.

“I thought I was too young to be immoral,” he said, not knowing quite what she meant and not caring.

“Dear old fellow, you must have heard of White Slavery and the Mann Act? In a sense that some of my lawyer friends could prove in court, I am transporting a minor interstate for the purpose of violating the law,” she said, but in a lower voice as if she were thinking of something else. “The hell with that,” she muttered. “What we need is a breath of the Auld Orkneys, and I believe they are not far ahead.”

Charles barely saw the sign announcing their entry to Indiana before he felt the car slowing and saw the red and green blinking lights of a tavern far ahead on the left. It was terribly cold, he realized as they got out of the car’s heated interior and ran for the tavern door, and his feet were colder than they should be already. He felt the carved stone in his pocket. He had forgotten his gloves too.

All might have been well if Mrs. Lanphier had not decided to see if there were any old buddies in the bar section. Once she had installed herself on a stool and ordered a double Scotch and a glass of red wine for Charles, time began to pass behind their backs as they drank and laughed at the drunk next to Charles who kept dipping nose in his beer, and talking to the bartender whom, it seemed, Claire had known a long time ago in some different context. There were more doubles, more wine, which the bartender said he shouldn’t serve to Charles, but that he thought it was okay since he was with his mother. And that stopped Claire’s glass as it was rising with smooth precision to her lovely curved lips once more.

“His mother!” she said in mock horror.

“He was kidding,” Charles began, but he saw that he was not really in the conversation at all and sat back somewhat hurt as the banter went on.

“Larry, you mean to say,” Claire began, grabbing up the bartender’s hand, wet with wash water. “And I was going to take him to Crown Point and marry him.”

“Claire, you’re the same as ever,” the bartender said, slipping his wet hand back into the wash water.

“Well you’re not, you old muskrat,” she said, finishing her drink. “You’re getting bald and experienced looking. And if you don’t chase that one with a new one,” she said, sliding the glass off the bar so that he caught it as it fell, “I’ll burn the hide from this lad’s innocence by telling him about your own youth.”

The bartender was indeed bald and fat, and not at all handsome, Charles thought, but he glowed under Claire’s jokes and allusions to his lurid past. So there was that drink and another one, and Charles didn’t know if he’d had one glass of wine or three because he couldn’t keep track of his own thoughts, and he kept feeling the stone in his pocket because it was his one charm in an unsafe world, and he didn’t even notice when he could no longer feel the buzzing in the stone, or rather the buzzing seemed to have taken over his whole body while the stone fell still and cold. And then he was being pulled off the stool, and he cracked his eyes open to see a shape in a green hat with a feather like an Indian maiden, or was it Maid Marian with an arrow in her head, taking him by the sleeve and lunging toward the door while confused noises burst around him like multicolored thunder and lights swung double and back to single and then double again, and so did the bartender’s face, and then the cold hit him like a hard slap.

“C’mon Charlie old fellow, got to get back to the old fireside,” Claire was stuffing him into the car. She left his right leg hanging out in the snow and staggered over to her own side. “H’ve to do the rest yourself, old feller. I can’t bloody well lift yer leg fer ye.”

He stared down at his leg resting its shoe in the snow and thought of Douglas. How Doug would like to ride in this car, but it mattered so little to Charles, if it was Charles who was mattering at the moment. The car engine roared and something grabbed his neck and pulled on him.

“Get it in here, now.”

He pulled the leg up and put it in the car, reaching out over a precarious abyss to get the door handle and pull it shut. The car was lurching backwards and forwards strangely. Charles made a great effort to come awake and saw the red and green sign blinking “State Line Tavern” going to the right and left wildly. At his side, Claire was cursing steadily while she shifted back and forth, and then with a final lunge and spinning and fishtailing, the car shot out and away to the left, leaving the sign flashing red and green on the snow behind them. The motor roared for awhile, Claire shifted down with another curse, and they saw the straight highway stretching away in front of them again.

It seemed a long time that he was asleep, no sight, no sound, just gone, and then he awoke to a lurch of the car that threw his shoulder against the door.

“Would you believe what demon rum has made me do, old fellow,” Claire was saying thickly. “We’re heading wrong, going to New York, b’God.” She began singing a song about Broadway and muttering between verses that there was no goddam place to turn around without getting stuck, and then the engine roared as she downshifted and the back end of the car seemed to leave the road, and Charles’s breath went out of him as he saw the lights picking up trees, road, trees, bridge, trees, and realized they were spinning around and around in the road, and now not on the road at all but down, too steep a place, down too fast through drifts, the engine roaring and then suddenly stopping in a terrible silence as the lights seemed to be making the world turn over, and something hit his head so hard he lggan to see sparks and stars, and then saw nothing at all.

***

“Charles! Charles!”

Someone calling his name. What voice was that? It was too cold to wake up. Go back to sleep. I hurt my head, Mommy.

“Charles!”

“Shut up,” Charles said savagely. He tried to raise up and couldn’t move. His body was all folded up with knees by his head, neck bent over so he could hardly breathe, and only his right arm free. There was a great weight on his neck and head. How was that possible? He was upside down!

“Charles!” The voice was not audible. It was in his mind. It was coming from inside of him. Was he dead?

“You will be in a short time, Charles, unless you let me help. We will both be frozen to death.”

"Where’s Claire?” Charles tried to feel around, but his left arm was pinned tightly under something, and his neck was beginning to hurt like hell along with the side of his head. He could not even move his feet or feel them. and he thought with sudden fear that they might be frozen.

“Not yet, Charles, but they will soon be gone,” the voice said, softly, coolly, as if commenting on someone else’s death. “The woman is alive, I believe, but she is also helpless. She is wedged against your left side.”

He tried to turn his head and could not. He struggled again, trying to move one leg, but he could only move his right knee slightly up and down, or down and up, since he was on his head and apparently the car was on top of them. He moved his right arm experimentally.

“It’s in your pocket, Charles, and I believe you can reach it,” the voice said.

Charles found the pocket with its burden still there, almost against his right cheek. He could touch the stone through the cloth, but he was having trouble finding the entrance to the pocket. If he could just get some room, he thought desperately. To give up the stone now meant he might not get it back. He would be without its protection, subject to the whims of ... His body slumped downward slightly, putting its whole weight on his bent neck, and an excruciating agony lanced from his shoulder blade through his neck and up into his already throbbing head.

“Don’t be a dead hero,” the voice said quietly.

His eyes spurted tears in the cold silent darkness. “Can’t you help?” he said finally aloud, his whole body beginning to feel far away and numb except for the arrow of pain in his neck and head.

“Not while you have the stone. You must simply remove it from your person. It need not be far, just out of your possession, I believe.”

He touched the stone. That was the way in. He grappled with the pocket until it came inside out, and the stone fell into his face, bounced off his chin and was gone somewhere above, or rather below, his head.

Now I rise and shift.

It is the most difficult position I have ever been in to use strength. There is no leverage, but the difference in body configuration makes it possible for me to push up hard with my hind feet while I hold the weight on my shoulders instead of neck. The woman’s body is delicate, and I must try not to break any of her bones. I push hard, taking the whole weight on my hind legs and shoulders. The car begins to move with a creaking, tearing noise of metal and ice. I push harder, straining with all my strength, and the weight lifts slowly. I put one forepaw under the side nearest me and try moving the weight sideways as I push up. It is moving up more easily now, more tearing sounds, and I hope some of them are not part of the woman’s body, but we must get out of this, and the only way is to lift it straight off. At last I heave with hind legs and right arm as hard as I can, and the car slides away to the left as something rips apart across my shoulders. The car goes onto its side with a goan and crash of glass, and I hope the woman’s arm or perhaps her head is not beneath the left side. The cloth top of the car is ripped, and I finish the job with my claws, tearing wide strips until I can see the stars and feel the icy wind.

The top torn away, I wriggle out and feel around for the woman’s arms and head. They are all right so far. I pull her out of the car carefully. It is like sliding some creature from its shell. She is long and soft like a creature taken from its shell. There is blood on her face, but I sniff her and feel about with my senses, and she seems not seriously injured. Her shoes have come off, but strangely, her hat is still on, the feather sticking up defiantly. It is amusing, and in spite of the cold and my own throbbing head, I laugh, standing in the flat of a frozen pond, the car on its side, the woman in my arms, and that feather sticking up on her head. I laugh as I carry her through the deep snow. It is funny because of the wine. I am still drunk, and that is funny too, so that I am a strange sight on this Christmas night, as I trudge up the snowy bank to the road, a huge, laughing, furry creature carrying a woman with a feather on her head. In the cold wind that does not yet bother me much, I think about walking away with this woman, digging a burrow for her and myself, making her a mate for me. But it is all the wine in my head, and I hear somewhere far back the voice of the boy Charles crying, crying for something. The stone, Charles? I cannot bring it now, Charles. It is nothing to me, but you must see to that. I carry the woman to the road, looking about for a house, but can see none in the whirling snow that is more fierce on the highway than it was down in the ditch. I extend my senses through the bitter cold dark feeling for life, for a house, for warmth. Nothing. I must walk, and now I must keep the woman warm, for she is lightly clothed and already very cold. With nothing to cover her, I can only try to keep her warm with my own body as I trot up the road in the direction from which the car came. What if a car comes along and sees me? I care little enough for that now, having been broken out of my enforced sleep by the whims of this drunken woman. Let them see me. I trot on into the dark, my senses feeling out ahead of us for some house or sign of life, but it is as if the planet has been swept clean of humans. The few bits of life I sense are the wild creatures dying of the cold or curled so deep in sleep that they are almost inorganic. Then I feel a small building ahead and speed up my pace.

But there is no life there. It is only an abandoned shed, empty but for some wooden flats for fruit and some old sacks in one corner. I lay the woman on the sacks inside and step back into the wind. Feeling to the limit of my senses, I can find no human life or other shelter. I wonder if I should run as far as I can, but no, the woman is very cold already, and she will surely freeze. I must warm her first. I go back into the shed where she is lying as I left her. I close the door and wedge it shut against the wind with some of the boxes. I lie down and take the woman in my arms, wrapping her body in my fur. I put her feet between my hind legs, her hands under my arms, willing more heat from my body. As I feel her icy feet and hands begin to warm, she stirs in my arms, moves her face against the fur of my shoulder. I feel that she is almost conscious, but her mind is not awake, and what she says makes no sense.

“Roger, you mus’n now, sweetie. What will the hostess think?”

I find myself rocking the woman in my arms as if she were a young one. Can I feel such emotions for a human being, a woman? I feel very gentle toward this aging woman. It is pleasant to hold her body with mine, and for a time I drift into sleep, erecting my fur to keep the cold away, pulling some of the sacks across our bodies as I drift into a light dream and the wind outside moans in the dark snow.

When the light begins, I hear Charles crying again, far back where I have pushed him. The woman is warm and breathes easily but is not awake. I allow Charles to come closer.

“That’s not fair, now,” he says. “You can’t step in like that. I am glad you saved us, I’m really grateful, but it’s my life.”

“Our life, Charles.”

“You can’t stay here. There’s going to be people out and find the car, and there’s your tracks coming here.”

“The wind has blurred them.”

“Get up now, and let me out!”

“I am comfortable. I like the woman’s body. She is comfortable. You cannot keep her warm.”

“If she wakes up and sees you, she’ll die of fright.”

I enjoy talking with Charles, and while he talks I am holding the woman and feeling how pleasant is her warm body against me. “What of the story, Charles?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Beauty and the Beast.”

“You’re crazy. That’s just a fairy tale. That never happened.”

“Perhaps it did. But then the woman was the hero in that story.”

“She’s not your friend. She’s mine. She doesn’t even know you exist.”

“I could be her Beast, and she could learn to love me.” I gently slide one paw against the front of her dress below the waist, feeling her sleeping body respond.

“Stop that,” Charles screams. “That’s awful. Stop it!”

The woman grunts a tiny little sound of pleasure and puts one arm around my neck.

“You see, she could like me.”

“She’s asleep! You’re rotten, doing things to her when she’s asleep.”

The boy is in a frothing rage. I stop stroking the woman and put my arm back around her. She snuggles closer against me, breathing more quickly.

“Maybe we are not so different, Charles.”

“We are,” he says. “You’re not ...” Then he screams again, “You’re just keeping me talking while you lie there hugging her.”

“Now, Charles, I saved your life - again.”

Silence.

“I like talking with you, Charles.”

Silence.

But unfortunately the boy is right. I am sensing movement outside. There is car noise now, and it stops down the road. Humans get out, three of them. I can almost hear them talking. Well, it has been nice, Mrs. Lanphier, I murmur in her ear. But now we must part. I give you Charles Cahill, boy hero.

I concentrate and shift.

Charles sat up, took Claire’s head in his lap and shook her, patting her cheeks and watching her eyelids. “Claire, Claire, wake up. There’s people out there. I’ve got to go out and holler to them.” She hunched her body up with the cold. He shook her again and then rushed to the door where he had some difticulty getting the boxes away and the door open. The cold wind hit his face, and he realized as it made his eyes feel stiff that they would indeed have frozen to death. It must be twenty degrees below zero. He stepped out into the knee-deep snow, noticing the tracks were blurred as the Beast had said. The Beast? He pushed the strange idea out of his mind. His feet and hands already prickled with cold as he took a few steps out into the snow, hearing it snap and creak under his shoes. Down the road a pickup truck had stopped where the Auburn had gone over the embankment. Men were moving up and down the ditch and around the pickup. One of them suddenly noticed the tracks and pointed to Charles. He waved wildly and motioned them to come to the shed. Behind him he heard Claire stirring, and then she appeared in the doorway of the shed, hugging herself with cold.

“Oh, Charles, my head,” she said thickly. “What did you do with your fur coat?”