Just a little story from the FRL

[Lon Frank]

As kids, we seldom had money for presents and my mother would say, as all mothers have said, that the best gifts are ones which you make yourself. With this excuse at hand, I lay this little story under our tree. My gift to you along with sincere affection, and wishes for a safe and happy holiday. Merry Christmas, yall!

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CHRISTMAS LIGHTNING


It was in the season of plenty that they would usually come. Some still had light wagons pulled by pairs of jingle-belled horses; some walked or rode the trains; some, perhaps more successful or daring, drove the newly invented automobiles. They swept through the farm lands like locusts, searching out the last of the harvest bounty left in fence rows or seeping from cracks in the bulging silos.

Like a natural antithesis to storm crows, they were instead, the harbingers of good fortune, the first evidence of prosperity. In their wake, rough wooden cabins fluttered with Irish lace curtains, farmhouses hummed with the rhythmic click-clack of treadle sewing machines, old garments sported new buttons and work-worn farm wives would pirouette privately in their kitchens, smiling down at new patent leather shoes. For some, the itinerate salesmen were reminders of a past they had left behind, physical ties to the paved streets of the East, lined with the shops of haberdashers or dressmakers or drygoods. They brought news of a world beyond the flat horizon along with catalogs of their most marvelous ?offerings?, or fancy-printed advertising cards with images of romantic women, wearing the latest fashions from Paris. For wide-eyed farm kids, penny candy and a picture card of the ?Home Office? which was invariably a multi-storied building of stately majesty beyond anything they could imagine on the endless windblown prairies that made up the landscape of their childhood.

Thomas Jefferson Greene was always welcome in the homes of his customers. He preferred to call them his ?families?, and returned year after year, calling the children by name and assuring the women they had not aged a single day since his last visit. News of his arrival would often travel ahead of his one horse buggy, and fresh baked pies would accompany the dinner he was always obliged to share. Men would stay in from the fields, or end their chores abruptly when they saw Tom Greene approach, and wash their hands carefully before slowly turning the pages of the catalog section illustrating new plows or anvils, or the ?mathematically advanced? Aeromotor windmills.

Tom Greene had grown to his job. His life story was written in catalog pages of dress patterns and plow harnesses. His ?families? were indeed his only family; the sweet-tooth memories of farm children, his enduring legacy. Some day soon he would pass away in the progress of chain stores and mail order, his buggy missing from the farm lanes on an autumn morning. He would be missed and remembered like childhood Christmases, blown away in the winds of a young century. But not this particular day. This day he would call at the house on the little hill, and he smiled in anticipation. This day he had a new line to show, and he knew Miss Lottie would be pleased.


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You can?t see it from the new highway. An impromptu forest of thickety sumac and sweetgum hide all but the roof peak from the casual traveler. But, if you know where, you can leave the pavement and walk along the leaf-filled ruts of the old road, and the little house will suddenly lift itself free of the woods and stand once again on the hill above you, graceful and decrepit as a Hollywood starlet of a generation past. As you get closer, the faded blue of the front porch gingerbread trim may glow again in a wayward sunbeam, or the flutter of ragged drapery will betray a missing windowpane.

The old man had built it with his own hands. He had raised the frame walls, sawed the shiplap siding, nailed the heart pine window frames into place. He laid the flooring, hung the ceilings, papered over the rough wall boards. He set the hearth and raised the chimney, split the shakes of the roof and bandsawed the fancy work for the porch, all with his own hands. He had worked alone, partly because it was all he knew, it was how he had lived his life. But partly because this was a labor of love, a turning point in his existence where he would no longer face the work of life by himself; a place of family. Here, he would bring the desire of his heart. Life and music and beauty would fill these rooms like the aroma of fresh bread, each and all created and embodied in his young bride. It was to this house he would bring Miss Lottie.

Her favorite chair is still there, moldering in the chill of the silent parlor. The kitchen table, hand planed and polished by the old man, still sits exactly where it did when Miss Lottie placed a piece of warm buttered bread before Tom Greene on that October morning, now eighty years past. Dusty shards of dried leaves stir in a sudden draft, scattering on the table top as if mimicking the crumbs of bread crust which fell there from his lips, so long ago. It was at this table that Tom watched her lips, noticed the slight blush at the corners of her mouth, anticipated the sparkle of her eyes as she looked at the catalog page he had opened before her. It was at this table that Tom Greene and Miss Lottie formed their conspiracy.

That morning, a winter and a summer had passed since the house had been finished. The old man had presented it to the young woman, and she in turn had married him as promised. And she had indeed, filled the rooms with life and light and beauty. But the old man found himself keeping to the fields and woods more as the days passed. He lingered at the chores, somehow uncomfortable in his slow climb up the kitchen steps after dusk. A lifetime of loneliness had left him ill prepared for the demands of companionship. He found himself bewildered by the very things he had so desired, a stranger to the language of laughter and love, to the sounds and smells and touch of a young woman.

Miss Lottie had done what she could in those first days to be the proper wife. The house had taken on the warmth of her generous and gentle nature, as the windows reflected the beauty of her summer flowers. She loved the little house, loved that the man had built it for her and only because of her. Yet she knew that she was still an outsider here, somehow not accepted by the very floor she scrubbed, by the bed she slept in, or by the windows where she watched for the old man in the evenings. Her emotional well was running dry, and she had begun to fall into the despair of the impending winter. Then the morning came when Tom Greene sat smiling at her kitchen table, and suddenly she knew what she had to do.

When Tom drove slowly away from the little house, he found that the old man had positioned himself near the end of the lane, needlessly tinkering with the fit of a rail in the end post. As the buggy drew up, they each nodded a silent greeting. Tom knew his personality, and waited quietly while the old man shuffled momentarily in the dust of the fencerow. Finally the old man wiped his hands on a rag and cleared his throat before inquiring if Miss Lottie had found anything to her liking in this year?s offerings. He knew that she wouldn?t order anything beyond her scant budget, but he was prepared to forego his own needs of harness and hardware if necessary to acquire anything she might want.

Tom replied that, no, she didn?t express a desire for anything above her budget, but she did order a simple bonnet and two new baking pans. The old man stared at the eyes of the salesman briefly, as if searching for something more that was unsaid, then silently nodded and returned to fence mending. Tom clucked once to his horse, and drove again down the lane, smiling to himself for the deception he had managed, and in his certainty of it?s success.

It was early afternoon on Christmas Eve that year when the old man saw the wagon from town coming along the road. He had been at the far end of the farm, cutting wood in the woodlot, like he had been most days since Tom?s visit, leaving the house at first light and returning past dusk. Each night Miss Lottie would have a hot supper waiting for him, and each morning she would pack a cold lunch for him to take to the fields. They spoke little and touched even less, but the house warmed each day as she found ways to decorate for the coming season, and often it seemed to him that she had a secret smile when she thought he wasn?t looking.

He paid little mind to the wagon, surmising that someone was just being neighborly and dropping off Miss Lottie?s baking pans and bonnet on their way back from town. However, his curiosity soon got the better of him, and he left his work early, perhaps in hopes of catching a glimpse through the window of her wearing a new spring bonnet. As he neared the house he heard the sound of hammer blows, and straining his eyes he could see someone on the roof, bundled in his red hunting coat, with blue calico skirts swirling in the the winter wind. Dropping his axe, he broke into a trot which brought him to the house just as Miss Lottie was climbing down from the ladder.

He stood in the yard, his mouth open and eyes fixed on the thing now nailed securely in the middle of the roof?s ridge. It was an iron spike or rod, pointing toward the empty sky, a translucent blue glass ball decorating its stark design. Miss Lottie came and stood beside him, looking up at her finished handiwork.

?It seems almost that it could be reaching into the sky, capturing its blue and holding it for us in the globe as a reminder on days when the sky is dark or troubled.?

The old man closed his mouth and swallowed dryly before he spoke.

?Sure don?t look like no Easter bonnet to me, I guess.?

?Tom Greene said that if lightning comes, it?ll just grab onto that thing, and go into the ground and the house will be saved. I love this house you built, and thought that maybe it needed this more than I needed a new bonnet.?

The man took a while to speak again, and the wind made her nose start to run. He was still looking intently at the lightning rod.

?Well, I did lay the foundation, and I did raise the walls and put on the roof, but I didn?t put that thing up on the peak. And I reckon that now, it?s a house that we built, you and me together.?

His hand opened slowly and blindly sought out hers, hanging by her side. As his fingers touched hers they intertwined, and without taking their eyes off the marvelous blue sky-globe, the old man and the young woman found the way to ward off the loneliness which had struck their lives, and send it into the ground below their feet.

Over the years storms came roaring across the farm, but the house was never struck by lightning. It was, however, struck by five children, growing strong and well at the kitchen table, filled with the love and life and music of the little house that the old man and Miss Lottie had built. The man learned that he wasn?t so old after all, and his laughter rolled over the fields and echoed under the eaves like thunder, sealing itself forever in the memories of the children. Tom Greene came for many more years, and of course, Miss Lottie had never aged a day; her face more beautiful with each year and each laugh line. The man, then truly old, finally went to rest at a tree shaded cemetery near town, and a few years later Miss Lottie went to join him. Visitors today often wonder at the iron spire that rises out of the ground between their feet, adorned with a glass ball, pointing toward the sky of the plains, a remembrance on dark days of its eternal blueness.

[the mule]

WONDERFUL STORY!!!

[JustPassingBy]

Salute... [img]graemlins/beer.gif[/img] ... Couldn't find a hand clapping icon so figured to say "Great story" with a tip of the brew.