Works and Days
Christmas
Concluded
John came into the library where Jackie was sitting in the bay window. She looked up at him leaning against the doorsill.
“Jackie, we need to talk.”
“I know,” she said, at last.
“Can I—” John gestured to the window seat. “Sit down?”
Jackie nodded and patted the seat. John sat down. They were quiet for a while. Finally John cried, “Jackie, what happened? Wasn’t it—I thought you liked it. I was happy last night. I’ve been waiting for that... for years. And then I wake up and you’re gone! You—you let me in. That was great. I let myself go. I haven’t been with anyone since Kim, and then I’m with you, and I wake up and you’re not there. You’re nowhere around. Every time I come near you run away. What did I do?”
He reached out to touch her, and she jerked a little back.
“What did I do?” he asked, bewildered. “I didn’t hurt you?”
“No.”
` “Was I... was I wrong about last night. Was it just me?”
“I was—” Jackie put her hand to her head. “I was just afraid, John.”
“Why—” he reached out again. “Why won’t you let me touch you? Are you afraid that if I touch you we’ll end up having sex again?” John sounded incredulous.
Jackie looked up at him, coming to a realization.
“Yes, a little bit. We’ve been friends for so long, John. And now... I look at your eyes and I can remember kissing them. I—I look at your hair and I think of how soft it is, or how soft your lips are or what your hands feel like on me. Or I look at you in jeans and a sweater and for years that’s all I’ve seen but now I know what’s under them, what it feels like. It… You woke me up, John, and that terrifies me a little, because I haven’t known you like that before.”
John dared to scoot a little closer. “Jaclyn, I thought you hated me.”
Jackie shook her head.
“I thought... I thought you... used me. I kind of thought how I let my guard down and look what happened.”
“It’s just,” Jackie told him, “that I miss when we were... friends.”
“Aren’t we still... friends?”
“Not the way we were before.”
“Jaclyn, what’s wrong with that? I want to be with you. If you’re brave enough to try to be with me.”
He put his hand out to Jackie.
“I don’t know if this will help you, but I’m afraid too. But I’m willing.”
John’s hand was still out, and Jackie looked at him for a moment before taking it.
“Thomas, would you like to ask the blessing?” Sara asked.
Thom Lewis nodded and cleared his throat. He would like to very much indeed, but he didn’t know how. How do you ask a blessing? How do you give thanks?
Thom was sitting at the head of the table, his wife beside him, the food laid out before them, family all around. For a brief moment his eyes settled on the very young man beside Kathleen, and the question of what Chase actually did with his mother, and just what his mother could possibly do for Chase flickered in his mind, and then he crushed it.
“Everybody...” Thom started, “hold hands.”
He put his hands out. Patti took one, Russell took the other. Thom bowed his head and closed his eyes. He could smell turkey, stuffing, the puddings, the macaroni, even the wine, warm enough to give off an odor. And he could feel, even on this winter day, the western sun coming through the large dining room window to warm his back.
“Thank you, Lord, for bringing us all together, and making us happy more or less. Forgive us for the times... when we... made it difficult. We blame you so much, but I think it’s us that tear us apart and do stupid things and hurt each other. And yet today, you bring us all back here again, around this table. Stay with us, Lord and... Keep us all together, and thank you for this Christmas Day. Amen.”
“Amen,” the family chorused back, and Patti was the last to release his hand, squeezing it and saying, “That was beautiful.”
Around the large table they all linked hands. Mickey, LaVelle, Shonda, Derrell. Nehru Alexander was there with his father Corey and his mother—whom Edmund Prince acknowledged as “white but accepted all the same”. Curtis Brown was present, though usually with his nose in a book. There was Pethane, Janna, Laura, Graham, Sharon, and Chayne. Sharon’s cousin Sharonda was there with her son, Gilead and Graham had said Gilead could be elevated from the children’s table this year, but the truth was Gilead had refused to come if he had to sit with ten years olds another damned year. Earlier, he had seen his school mate Russell, looking distressed and a mess, and thought better of troubling him. They all were at the table on the insulated enclosed west facing porch of the apartment where Graham and Sharon lived.
“Who will ask the blessing?” Mickey said and Sharon said, “Graham will, of course.”
“It’s no of course about it,” Mickey differed, but Graham began:
“Merciful Lord, we gather today on the birth of your son, and we thank you for bringing us all together as a family. Now, we have all had our differences, and some of us have made many mistakes, and through out the year we have known labors—”
“Amen!” cut in Pethane.
“Hardships.”
“Amen,”
“And set backs.”
“Preach.”
Edmund Prince raised an annoyed eyebrow and Chayne took in a deep breath.
“Now, Lord,” Graham continued, “as we sit here, looking at this feast, at macaroni, at ham, at goose and gravy. At mashed potatoes, and sweet potatoes, at cheesecake—”
Gilead, half opening his eyes, reached ahead of him, took a roll and began discreetly buttering it while his mother frowned.
“Watermelon, salad, delicious, delicious sweet potato casserole.”
Chayne had spaced out. White fairy lights were strung up all around. Nehru’s dark haired mother was Jewish. Like Ted… Well, Ted was half Jewish, like Nehru, then. He missed Ted. He longed for Ted, thought of how good it would be to get back to the house, back to bed where it was just the two of them, and a bottle of wine, chuckling over the day gone by…
Sharon cleared her throat and Graham grunted. Chayne was sure he’d heard his mother kick his father under the table.
“And we thank you for all this and—”
“AMEN!” Chayne said, “In Jesus’ name, Amen!”
And while Graham looked at him witheringly, Chayne smiled at his father, but everyone else had already declared “Amen” and was digging in.
“Russell,” said John, “could you pass the mashed potatoes? Russell?”
Russell, not looking at John, pushed them forward.
“Russell,” said John
His nephew looked up at him.
“We need to talk.”
“I thought we already did.”
Thom overheard his son and restrained the first thought to reprimand him. It was hard to be on the wrong side of Russell's tongue.
John was silent, dipped into the potatoes, passed them to the middle of the table and said, “Well, if you want to call it that.”
Tommy, beside Russell, nudged his cousin and said, “What's wrong, Kuzzin Russell?”
“Yeah, what's wrong, Kuzzim!” Russ chipped in solicitously, adding. “Have some beans. Mama says, ‘beans, beans, good for the heart—’”
“That’s enough of what Mama says,” John told his boys.
Patti looked around the table, not completely amazed that she had missed her until now. She turned to Thom.
“Honey,” she said. “Where's Denise?”
And everyone looked around the table, mystified.
“More ham?” Denise asked at the head of the table in the parish house, holding out the platter. “There’s lots more for firsts, seconds and thirds.”
Ann Ford, her boyfriend Diggs and her brother, Father Geoff, looked around the table at each other, mystified.
There was a tap on Russell's door, and then John gently pushed it open and came to sit by the boy.
“Russell, I’m sorry,” he told him.
“Is that the best you can do?”
“That's the best any of us can do,” John said.
“You hit me in the face.”
“And I called you things I didn’t mean. I was—”
“I know, you were hurting. Everyone’s hurting. Join the club, John.”
John put his hand gently over Russell’s. Russell removed it. A frown came over his uncle's face and the older man asked him. “Do you really have the strength to be angry today? Today?”
It was a question Russell hadn't expected to be asked.
“I am tired of…” Russell ran his hands over his short hair. “I’m tired of everyone-doing stuff to me,” he sounded, to himself, like a baby. “I’m tired of forgiving.
“No,” he said suddenly. “I’m tired of all the stuff that makes me have to forgive. But I want to forgive. I want to. I want all the wrong stuff to be right, to be finished. It’s Christmas. I want it all… I want it all to be peaceful.”
On the radio, a woman’s quavering voice was singing:
It came upon the midnight clear
That glorious sooo-ong of old
From angels bending near the earth
To touch their harps of gold
Peace on the earth
Good will to men
From hea-vens all gracious king
The world
In solemn still lay
To hear the aaaan-gells sing!
“Grandma Bridge used to say,” John said, “that whenever someone didn’t say the bad thing they could have said—which I didn’t, or whenever a wrong was forgiven, when people could love again, then the angels were bending and playing their harps of—”
But John Mc.Larchlahn had been so lost in the beginning of a profound thought, that he had never seen the look on his nephew’s face, or the reddening of Russell’s skin, and he had never saw the boy wind back, like a boxer, so he was completely unready when Russell’s fist smashed into his face and knocked him across the floor.
Thom had heard the crash of John’s body, but when he came up the stairs to find him on the floor, holding his face while Russell sat on his bed scowling, he did nothing. Rising, John only cupped his bleeding nose, looked at his nephew and declared:
“That’s fair.”