To wish for a sled for Christmas was to wish for two nearly impossible things to come true at once: an expensive gift at a time in our family’s life when my parents were barely holding their own, and snow. Where we lived, it almost never snowed. We studied pictures in our geography books of snow– drifts that buried automobiles in Buffalo, blizzards that swept across the Great Plains, heaping snow against fences and barns, New England snows that turned farm lanes into postcard trails for horse-drawn sleighs. But in Delaware, our home, we never got real snow. A dozen flurries a year. Once or twice, a couple of inches that would turn to slush or get sluiced away when the weather turned warm and rainy the following day. My little brother Nick wanted a sled. He’d found a picture of one in Boy’s Life magazine– two happy scouts screaming down a snow-covered hill on a gleaming sled with shiny steel runners. The logo streaming across the bottom of the advertisement read: Flexible Flyer Racer. “That’s the ticket,” Nick said. We were sitting side by side on the couch in the basement rec room watching Sergeant Preston of the Yukon on TV. Sergeant Preston’s giant malamute Yukon King was chasing some bad guys through the snow, breasting through the drifts with his powerful chest, spraying surfy clouds of spindrift.
“You’re too young for a sled,” I told him. “You’re only six.” I was ten. Between us we had a sister, Molly, who was eight. “Seven, almost,” he said. And he was right. His birthday fell on the day after Christmas, a really lousy time for a kid to have a birthday. I mean, you were practically sharing it with Jesus. And no matter what our parents did, even Molly and I had to agree that Nick always got cheated out of a real birthday with a party and cake and amazing presents. “There aren’t any hills around here, Nick,” I said. “Where you going to ride it?” “On the church hill,” he said. Again, he was right. St. Stephen’s, our Catholic church, stood at the pinnacle of a long, gentle slope outside of town in what was still considered the country. The road ran several miles up the hill past cornfields and pastures to a cleared lot tucked into the side of the woods where the old church had been built of pasture oak and fieldstone half a century earlier. “Okay, so there’s one hill, Nick. But there’s no snow.” On TV, Yukon King had captured the bad guys and dunked them headfirst into a snowbank and stood grinning for his master. Every episode ended the same way, and Sergeant Preston always got his man. “It might snow.” “What makes you think it’s going to snow?” “But it might. It has to snow sometime.” “Okay, okay. It might snow.” “So I want one. A Flexible Flyer.” He sat there with the magazine in his lap, his legs splayed, and stared at me, his pale freckled cheeks reddening, blinking his green eyes fast the way he always did when he was getting ready to cry. He took after our mother in looks and had her stubborn streak, too. “Okay, Nick,” I said. I didn’t have the heart to say anything else. I grabbed his legs and squeezed them just above the braces and he giggled like he always did. He liked for me to rub his legs because they cramped up and went all spastic if he sat to long. My mother used to sit for hours every night and rub his legs while Nick bit his lip and grinned with the pain or with how good it felt, I could never tell which. That was the real reason it was crazy for Nick to want a sled: He was a cripple. My mother forbade us to use that word, “cripple,” but that’s what Nick called himself. One day last summer, Nick came back from the YMCA swimming pool and lay down for his nap and when he got up, he couldn’t walk. Polio, Doctor Everhart pronounced. This was the time of Polio, and that was the summer it came to our town. Doctor Everhart whispered the word, shaking his head, looking around to make sure it didn’t escape from the upstairs bedroom Nick and I shared. Polio was an evil spell—invisible and deadly. It could seep through walls and closed doors and strike without warning, and it always struck kids. Nobody seemed to know what caused it, or how to cure it. It came out of nowhere, struck at random, lurked in the shadows of kids’ bedrooms like the bogeyman. People treated it like the black plague---it was believed you caught it in crowds from bodily contact with other people. From breathing their bad poisoned air, or brushing against their clothes, or swimming in the same water. Some people claimed that it only struck down the bad kids, but that was crazy. Being good was no defense. When somebody in your family caught it, the neighbors’ kids stopped coming over to play. People avoided you at the supermarket. “Polio,” they said knowingly, and pointed, and the other person would nod and frown and duck down the produce aisle. We wanted to grow up fast, to outrun Polio. Doctor Everhart couldn’t predict if Nick would ever walk again. There was no miracle cure, no magic operation. At least Nick wasn’t forced to live in an iron lung, like the boy in our fifth-grade reader. Nick’s legs were strapped into metal braces– he called them his “Frankenstein legs”— and he propped himself up stiff-legged between little kid-sized crutches that made his shoulders hunch up and his red crew-cut head bob forward. He fell a lot, and we got used to the sound of his clattering braces and his crutches rattling against the slick linoleum floor of the kitchen and Nick hooting with pain and laughter. He was always bruised and sore, but he didn’t complain much. He just sort of banged his way through the world and hoped for the best. That summer, Nick wasn’t the only kid strapped into steel leg braces. In our small town that summer, people stopped going to the movies. The YMCA pool closed, as did all the public pools. Nobody gave birthday parties and the church day camps shut down for lack of attendance. Brides postponed their weddings indefinitely. When school started, half the kids stayed home and nobody got in trouble. People even stopped going to church. Not our family, though. My mother, who was second-generation immigrant Irish, said, “We won’t turn away from the Good Lord now, just because he’s given us a trial.”
But Sunday after Sunday, the pews were mostly empty, and Father Cruikshank’s ringing sermons echoed in the empty space. At the early Mass, there were always a few old crones in the back row, dressed in shapeless black smocks, their heads swathed in black veils so that they were indistinguishable from one another, faceless and bent, clicking on their Rosary beads and silent except for their mumbled chant of Latin responses to the priest. By now I was one of only a handful of altar boys who would still serve Mass. The Sunday after Nick told me he wanted a Flexible Flyer, two weeks before Christmas, I kneeled on the hard stone at the foot of the altar answering Father Cruikshank’s cues: He would say, Introibo ad altare Dei– I will go in to the altar of God– and I would respond, Ad Deum qui laetíficat juventutem meam– The God of my gladness and joy. But I didn’t feel very glad– I felt mad at God for what he had done to Nick and scared stiff it would happen to me. I shared a room with him, I rubbed his legs every day, I breathed his air. I rattled off the Latin by heart, thinking of Nick and his lousy braces and how he wanted a sled, the stupidest thing in the world for a cripple to want in a place without hills or snow. I didn’t have to turn around and look to see Nick in the front pew, where our family always sat because my father would have it no other way. “If I’m going to church, I want to see and hear everything that’s going on,” he always said. Nick’s red buzzcut would be shining like a lightbulb. His crutches would be stacked against the front rail of the pew and Molly would fidget beside him, her brown curls bouncing each time she wagged her head. On one side my mother, small and wiry, red hair pulled back tightly into a bun, a small dark green hat pinned to her head, my father in his charcoal suit, only a little taller, motionless, completely absorbed in the Liturgy, watching it transfixed the way he watched a baseball game or the six o’clock news—as if he were seeing it for the first time, and at any moment something wonderful might happen and he didn’t want to miss it. I was so distracted, I missed my first cue for ringing the bell and later almost dropped the wine cruet, and tall, heroic Father Cruickshank leaned down to me and squinted and said, “You all right, son?” Like I might have suddenly been stricken with Polio, too, and I wondered for a cold split second if I had, and that was why I was so clumsy, but I nodded yes. After Mass, Molly and I held a pow-wow and decided we would all ask for the sled together. “It’s what Nick wants,” she said blithely. “It’s a stupid idea,” I warned her. “It means you won’t get a bike.” “I don’t think I’m getting a bike anyway,” she said, flipping her curls. Molly was always blase about herself, like she would get along fine in the world and why did the rest of us worry so much about every little thing? We didn’t know much about money in those days– I have no idea even now what salary my father earned from the clothing store he and my mother ran. As bookkeeper, she took no salary, I do know that. And business had fallen off– people just weren’t going out anywhere, even shopping, unless they had to. They were hunkered down in their homes, doors and windows shut tight, trying to keep out Polio. Molly and I went to our parents together, as a kind of delegation, and told them: “We want a sled.”
My father said, “Do you have special information I don’t? Because, Buster, the last time it snowed enough for sledding, you weren’t even born yet.” “Just in case,” Molly said with an offhand logic. “Sooner or later, it’s got to snow, and when it does, we’ll be ready.” “I thought you wanted a new bike,” my mother said. “Something you can use every day.” “No, we want a sled,” she said, as if it had been so obviously true for years that only a moron would think different. “A Flexible Flyer.” She held out the picture, scissored out of Boy’s Life. That night, I could hear our parents downstairs in the kitchen. Sometimes they’d sit up after we had all gone to bed and sip coffee at the formica table and talk about the store, or the news, or things they remembered from when they were first married. I used to like listening to them talk like that, private and low, but sometimes too it reminded me that they had once lived in a world that didn’t include us, and I would lie awake scared of something I couldn’t even name. “I don’t know if we can even get one this late,” my father’s voice said. “I called Western Auto– they can have it by Christmas Eve.” “What in God’s name are they thinking? The radio is calling for rain all week. They’ll be so disappointed–” My mother’s voice said, “Oh, for the love of Jesus, just buy them the adjectival sled. It’s Nicky who wants the thing.” “Nicky? What use will it ever be to him.” On Christmas Eve, it was tradition that we all went to midnight Mass. We piled into the old green Buick and drove up the hill to St. Stephen’s in a cold drizzle. I don’t remember a gloomier ride than that Christmas Eve ride in the caravan of headlights and taillights crawling up the long hill in the rain, the fields on either side of us dark, nobody talking, not even the radio on to play Christmas carols. I was serving the mass with Tommy D’Onofrio, so as soon as we hit the parking lot I scooted out and scrambled into the sacristy by the back way and buttoned on my starched cassock and slipped the bleach-white surplice over my shoulders and Tommy let me light the candles, which I always enjoyed. I genuflected at the foot of the altar and lit the two golden candelabra and then the special candles next to the Nativity scene on the left side altar, under the statue of the Virgin Mary. In front of the Nativity scene burned a whole rack of votive candles, flickering red—one of them, I knew, my mother had kept burning for Nick ever since July. At special Masses, Father Cruickshank liked to enter from the front door rather than the sacristy and march up the aisle. So when he was all robed in his vestments, we slipped out the back and walked outdoors to the front of the church and I felt the rain turning to sleet on my cheeks and dabbing my hair, and my surplice was spotted with dark blotches in the floodlights. The lights reached down beyond the parking lot to the edge of the meadow that sloped down alongside the road toward town. As we entered the front door, the congregation turned to watch us process up the aisle. For the first time since summer, the church was full. And in every pew, it seemed, there were kids in steel leg braces. Crutches—dozens of pairs—leaned against the backs of the wooden benches in front. Other children were laid across the benches, swaddled in blankets and carcoats, unable even to sit up. As he passed each pew, parents stared at Father Cruikshank accusingly for some answer he didn’t have, their faces white and their eyes dark with fatigue. There was none of the usual shuffling and coughing and throat-clearing. There was something frozen about the way they looked, all those grown-ups with the damaged children they could not protect. We sang “O Come All Ye Faithful,” even the Latin verses, and Tommy and I served the Mass without a hitch. We sang the other carols, but there was no choir– they had stopped rehearsing in the summer for fear of Polio– and the singing was ragged and off-key with the organ. Father Cruikshank read the St. Luke gospel of the Bethlehem story and he did not read the Matthew gospel, which tells of Herod seeking out the young children of the region and putting them to the sword. I don’t even remember his sermon. Only about half the congregation dared take communion, and by the end of Mass everybody was itching to leave. I looked out across the congregation—they had all sat too long in a crowded place, a place of danger. Now they did shuffle and cough and clear their throats. They didn’t look at their neighbors. They huddled their own children between them. When Father Cruikshank pronounced the final blessing, they sprang up like pop-up dolls. We processed back down the aisle, feeling them crowd along behind us. And when Tommy D’Onofrio and I flung open the big double doors, outside was a howling blizzard. The air was wild with snow, blowing so thick you could hardly see the cars in the parking lot, all layered with white. Already the parking lot was covered with drifting snow. The earlier rain had frozen under the snow, which made it impossible to walk on the pavement without falling down. Men wearing street shoes with slick soles and women in high heels lost their footing and grabbed each other’s coatsleeves for support. The D’Onofrios herded their five kids into their new Ford and tried to make it down the hill ahead of the rush, but only a couple of hundred yards down, the big car slid sideways into a ditch and Mrs. D’Onofrio fell hard while getting out. Mr. D’Onofrio sent Tommy back for help– he ran through the corn-stubble drifts and reached us out of breath. My father said, “Come with me.” Slipping and sliding, somehow carrying Nick between us, we followed him to our Buick and he opened the trunk with a brass key. He reached in and pulled out a long flat package wrapped in red paper. “Go ahead and open it, Buster,” he said. “Let Nicky,” Molly said, and Nick hooted and clawed at the paper while we held him upright. In the floodlights, the banner was bright red against the varnished blond wood, the letters glossy black: Flexible Flyer. “I need it to help Mrs. D’Onofrio, all right?” my father said. Nick nodded, smiling big. “For now, everybody go back inside,” my father said. “Nobody’s going anywhere until the plow comes.” So it was that my father and a few of the other fathers trudged through the snow across the road to the D’Onofrios’ car and laid Mrs. D’Onofrio on the sled and hauled her up the hill and back into the church. Her ankle was broken clean, Doctor Everhart said. They laid her in a pew on a pile of coats and everybody else made themselves comfortable back in the church. They tried to call into town, but the phone line was already down. Soon after, the power went out, too, so we had only candlelight that played on rows of grim faces. A few people whispered– a muffled complaint, a quick biting hiss to hush a cranky child. Then Father Cruikshank announced it was all right to talk if we did it respectfully. Father Cruikshank sent me and Tommy O’Onofrio to get more candles, and we lit them all along the main aisle and by the front doors and around the sanctuary, and the dancing shadows they made were like a whole world of other people, not us, dark humped figures afraid to stand straight and face each other. The air smelled like wet wool and beeswax. A man I could not see said to his wife, “I told you we shouldn’t have come tonight.” She said, “Don’t even start.” Another man said, “Get over it, pal.” A woman started crying softly and her husband cursed and then tried to put his arms around her but she pulled away. Other voices complained now, murmuring in that low ugly way of people getting ready to do something stupid that they’ll regret. It was the first time I felt ashamed of being in church. Father Cruikshank stood at the foot of the altar and raised his hands. I stood close enough to touch him. He was lean and darkly handsome and his voice had an anger in it, just barely. “Stop it, please– it’s not the snow. You know what’s wrong.” He paused. “The thing we never dared speak about.” Somebody in the back called out, “Let it be, Father.” Father Cruikshank faltered—no one had ever dared talk back to him in church—then started again. “I know this is not the kind of Christmas you wished for. Prayed for.” He glanced toward the Nativity scene and then looked back at the sullen congregation. He waited for their murmuring to die down and it took a long time. “What has happened here, this has never happened before. Sometimes–- sometimes we’re at a loss.” He stopped talking and everybody waited now, quiet. Usually he could speak for an hour without stumbling but now he groped for the words. His voice went soft, but everybody was listening now and so it didn’t have to be loud. He looked at me, as if I could tell him what to say next, but I didn’t have a clue. All I had running through my head were those memorized Latin responses, so I said stupidly, “Ad Deum qui laetificat juventutem meam.” Father Cruikshank frowned, puzzled, then took a slow step toward them. “We are forgetting– we are forgetting the joy.” A man in the front pew put his face in his hands and his shoulders shook like something was wrong with him. “We’re not sure. Not sure if we still believe. How can I say this?” He scanned their faces, looking from one to the other and seeing just blank, unforgiving stares. His neck was crimson with anger above the pure-white alb. “Today we celebrate the birth of a child. When a child is born, that’s the miracle. Always. Then, later– it’s true-- the child suffers. That’s the world.” He lifted both of his big hands and ran them over his face, like he was washing it. “But the suffering is not all there is.” He shone his eyes over them like trying to light up a dark place with a small flashlight, like he wanted to find one face in which he recognized faith, and he settled on my mother. She stared back at him hard and I could not read whatwas in her heart.
“There is also– there is always the joy.”
There was utter silence then, like they were waiting for him to say more, but he had
no more to say. Some of the parents looked down at their laps. One man got up and clomped loudly down the aisle and out into the snow and I wondered if others would follow him, but nobody did. They hunkered down in the pews just as they had in their homes, not brave or burning with faith but just tired and wanting to go home, and maybe ashamed.
Father Cruikshank walked slowly back to the sacristy to change out of his vestments. He held his head up, as he always did, but I could tell it was a struggle, that this night had cost him something.
He did not have the power to fix what was wrong, but he had broken the spell. The silence lasted till he was out of sight and for a minute or so longer. Then my mother started whispering to another, asking what she had been doing since summer, and after a few minutes some of the other women gathered timidly in a little knot near the side confessionals and talked first in halting whispers and then in regular voices about what the doctor had told them or what they had read in a magazine or what they planned to resolve for the New Year. And somebody started crying and somebody else reached across and patted her arm and said, “There, there.”
A couple of men excused themselves to use the restroom in the sacristy and even with the heat off it was warm enough to take off our heavy coats.
To pass the time, Mr. D’Onofrio suggested we sing Christmas carols, and he started off the first verse of “It Came Upon a Midnight Clear” in a fine tenor voice. At first people sang softly and a little embarrassed, then a few started to sing loud and even smiled at the old familiar words. It was not very good singing—half-hearted and a little off-key—but I heard my mother’s soft, melodious trill and my father’s flat baritone. We sang only the one carol, as if that was all we had in us.
All the while the snow came down outside, thick and hard, and the wind rattled the windows and drafted in every crack in the old church, flickering the candles.
And soon enough people started sacking out on the pews, cuddling up with their kids and babies and loved ones and closing their eyes, snoring, breathing the deep peacefulness of sleeping in a blessed place.
Molly said, “It’s like pioneers, and we’re all gathered in the fort so the Apaches can’t get us.”
Nick giggled and said, “Or the Devil.”
Father Cruikshank in his long flowing cassock patrolled the aisles like a real father, watching over their sleep. The fluttering candles made shadows across the walls and lit up eerie slivers of blue and red and gold in the stained-glass windows.
Outside the snow came down like the blazes all night long. Father Cruikshank went out in back of the sacristy to smoke a cigarette, which he always did after Mass. When we were sure our parents were asleep, Molly and I gently nudged Nick awake and I rubbed his spastic legs for a few minutes and then between us we carried him outside, where our Flexible Flyer stood propped against the stone side of the church.
At the far end of the building, we could see Father Cruikshank standing in a corner out of the wind, smoking his cigarette. He looked our way and nodded and let us be.
I shook the snow off it, laid it down on its shiny runners, and set Nick aboard with his feet stuck out in front. Molly squeezed on in front of Nick so he could lean against her shoulders. Slipping and sliding, I hauled them across the parking lot to the edge of the meadow, where it sloped down along the road pure white, and the sky glowed from the snow light. I climbed on behind and tucked my feet into the steering paddles.
The rest of our lives opened out ahead of us full of trouble and heartbreak, we knew that, even as kids we knew that, and tomorrow and for years to come, Nick would wake up with legs iron-stiff with pain, and there would be no Christmas visits and my mother would cry herself to sleep again.
But this night, a field of unbroken snow spread out before us. Far below, we could see the bright headlights of the snowplow grinding up the hill to rescue everybody.
“How did you know, Nick?” I said and he just giggled and caught the falling snowflakes on his tongue. Then I pushed off with my hands, hugged Nick hard, and we went flying down the snowy hill.
Originally published in North Carolina Literary Review. East Carolina University. No. 14, 2005; later collected in Things We Do When No One Is Watching (short stories), University of Missouri Kansas City: BkMk Press, 2017 (Finalist for Foreword Prize for best book of the year); Cover and back page from chapbook produced by The Publishing Laboratory, Dept. of Creative Writing, UNC Wilmington; Flexible Flyer logo used by permission.