Stories Told at Christmas
by
Tom Finnian O’Cianain
Copyright 2011 Tom Finnian O’Cianain
Smashwords Edition
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The Toymaker
When I was a boy of ten, my parents took in a boarder. It was a sparest time, in between Korea and Rock ‘n Roll. We lived in a large old house and, there being only Mama, Papa, and I in the house, and needing the extra money as we did, we rented a room to Mr. Johannsen. Mr. Johannsen was a toymaker.
I remember a very tall man, with a voice like wind, who kept mostly to himself, rarely saying much. He did occasionally tell me jokes and sometimes posed me riddles. He smiled whenever I saw him.
He had a nice smile. His mouth appeared small, lips quite red, and shiny, like wet fruit. I saw him lick them often as he worked at his bench, or when he seemed to be thinking. Maybe his mouth was not that small. I just remember how it appeared so, sunken between his wild mustache and that long black beard.
His eyes. Though I tried, he never let me look straight into his eyes. I’d guessed he was shy, rather than embarrassed or sinister, for he didn’t gaze directly, or speak much, with Mama nor Papa one or the other. I did get to see his eyes, though, when I would peek through the crack in his door while he sat at his workbench. Sometimes, too, I watched his eyes when he rested in the parlour in the green wingback chair reading the day-old news, or when he stood at the window watching the snow fall. They were genial eyes, night blue, not blue like summer morning sky, nor robin eggs, but deeper blue, like ice under the moon. As I watched his eyes, I always thought he was staring off to some faraway place, or as if at an apparition in a crystal. He had no visitors, to speak of, except for a few times I will speak of shortly. I thought he saw things we couldn’t see.
In his room, Mr. Johannsen had his bed, its head and foot brass and with white enameled spindles. There was a simple chest of drawers, its wood burnished with pipe smoke and age. And his workbench. Though he usually kept his door closed, on occasion I saw into his bedroom when the door was left ajar. The bedclothes were typically rumpled, though I wondered when he slept.
For most of his room, Mr. Johannsen had set up a little shop to design his toys. He told us he didn't actually make any toys there. He told us they were made in China and Mexico, England and other far-away places. Several times each year, Mr. Johannsen would travel to those places around the world, he told us, to arrange for the toys to be made. All of this fascinated me, instilling a sense of much mystery about him. A quiet, bearded man who thought up toys and travelled the world.
All about his room there were toys, parts of dolls and puppets mostly, sitting about on the bench and on the shelves. Miniature shoes and glass eyes. A few marionettes dressed as clowns and Cossacks and cowboys and such hung on pegs along the walls. There were big, rolled newsprint paper drawings, too. There was wooden wagon and a shiny chrome bicycle, a red scooter and a blue sled.
Once, Mr. Johanssen caught me in his room. My parents had told me to keep out. But I was there. The toys were too much to only be squinted at from the doorway. He came in that doorway, and startled me. I dropped the little blue sled. It broke. In too many pieces it broke.
Mr. Johannsen brushed up the pieces and held them before me. He didn’t say anything; he just held the pieces there and looked at me in his funny way. He never once mentioned the incident to Mama and Papa.
I tried to forget about him, his room, and the sled. It was hard to do, especially at night.
Late at night, I would sometimes have to go to the bathroom. I’d hear him working. The toymaker was rarely enterprising in the day, but he worked with abandon once the sun had gone down. On my way to the bathroom, the glow of light from his room stole out under the door and across the floor, shining on my bare feet. I’d tiptoe past along the wide pine boards. I don't think he heard me. If he did, it didn’t seem to distract him from his work.
One particular night, well past midnight and early in winter, I had been lying awake, unable to sleep. This was due, in part, to the blowing of icy leaves against the window glass. In part it was the sound of our dog, Black Spot, barking in the cold outside his doghouse door. More than all these, it was because Christmas was near. I always grew more anxious at bedtime in those magical weeks preceding. On this particular night I climbed from my bed to get a glass of warmed milk downstairs. I crossed the hall, and started down the steps. After descending only three or four steps, from the top of the stairs I heard voices from Mr. Johannsen's room. I stopped and sat on the step and listened more closely, though I knew it was not proper to snoop. What I heard both frightened and amazed.
The voices inside were like children’s, but like old men’s, too, sounding like wind in leaves, like the toymaker’s own voice. I didn't know for sure how many voices there were. They all laughed together as they talked. I could tell they were trying not to laugh too loudly, lest they might be found out. I could not, unfortunately, understand a single word of what they were saying; they spoke a language I’d never heard.
I must have sat there for some time. I was sleepy. Enough to no longer have need of warmed milk. My bare feet grew cold in the draft that blew up from the bottom of the stairs. I lifted myself to leave, to return to my bed. The step creaked, as loud it seemed as a daybreak rooster, and I knew I could not run, nor hide, nor even pretend I hadn’t been there outside the door. Mr. Johanssen’s room went distressingly quiet. I tried to stand as still as I might. The door cracked slowly, the room's light cutting across my shaking embarrassment.
Then, one at a time, little faces appeared, each over the other, in the narrow opening of the door. I think I saw six or seven. They looked like small men, faces dominated by long bumpy noses, faces with tiny deep-laid eyes, night-blue like Mr. Johannsen's, and with bushy eyebrows and beards, red, black, gray, and white. Near the top of the door, Mr. Johannsen peered out above his beard.
I didn’t wait to explain myself. I stuttered something and scudded back to my room. I stopped only to close and block the door with a chair, then jumped in my bed, pulling the covers up over my head. I don't think I slept thereafter all that night.
At breakfast, I ate my oatmeal in careful bites, wondering if Mama or Papa would ask about the noises the night before, or that Mr. Johannsen would come in and tell them that I had been spying at his door. The tiny balls of porridge were sticking in my throat, lumps of fear and guilt.
"That was some wind last night," Papa said to no one in particular.
I was certainly not going to be the one to respond, hoping as I did to avoid any discussion of noises in the night, even about the wind.
"Yes," Mama answered. "I suspect we're in for a hard winter. Just as hard, or harder, than last year. Farmer's Almanac is calling for some doozy storms this year.”
"Good Lord, I hope not," Papa answered, shaking his head, mouth full of toast, his chin in the newspaper. "Last night was scary enough. Sounded like some sort of hobgoblins, that wind, huh, son?"
"Uh, I dunno, Papa.” I wiped the cereal and sweat from my upper lip. “May I be excused?” I asked. “I think I'll go and take Black Spot for a walk, okay?”
I left my unfinished oatmeal cold, and put on my too-small black and white checkered wool coat, the long red scarf Mama had knitted, the stocking cap that matched, and the brown leather mittens that used to be Papa's.
I opened the door to cold bright sunlight on a patchwork of new snow over the leaf-strewn lawn. It would soon be sledding time again.
Any dark dread of night things, or of Mr. Johannsen's reprisal, faded in the kind beauty of that winter morning. It was tickles on my insides. I remember thinking, inhaling these days though they now grew bleakest, knowing the singular excitement they promised. Black Spot felt it, too. As I approached, his tail wagged out approval and he tugged at his chain, puffs of chilly vapors chugging in his lively panting.
I ran with him down the hill into the orchard, but couldn’t keep up with his bounding leaps over the drifted snow. My cheeks tingled where the wind buffeted my headlong charges. I stopped to rest, sitting in the cradle of a low limb of one of the apple trees, and watched as Black Spot weaved and sniffed between the long rows of cousin trees. I looked longingly up to Moose Hill, looking for the first sledders, to know if it was time. There was no one yet.
The sky was leaden blue, like Shaker paint, not even a wisp of cloud in any corner. Beneath that sky, the gray trunks and branches of the fruit trees stood regimented like old and tired soldiers who had marched there to surrender.
A murder of crows strutted and pecked in the snow. Black Spot skulked a few steps, and then pounced at them, though he was hardly a match for their sense of alarm. As the crows scattered against the Shaker sky, and Black Spot sat and cussed at them, I turned. I looked up to the house. Mr. Johannsen leaned in silhouette, gazing from his bedroom window. I suspected he had been watching me. I looked around to see where Black Spot had run off. When I turned back, Mr. Johannsen was gone from the window.
I saw the toymaker step down from the front porch. He wore his heavy cloak, the kind that no one wore anymore, and its green nap shown in the sun, giving the impression of a great fir tree as it swirled round him. He made a few steps in my direction, and then stopped to watch as the crows alighted in the apple branches. It was a restive quiet. Even the wind moved in starts.
The toymaker put his right hand into a deep inside pocket of the cloak. He pulled out a white block. He raised it up, in both hands, toward the sky. The block began to unfold like cloth. Then, though I had to rub my eyes and look twice, I saw that block of wood become a snow white goose. The bird lifted away, giving a small cry. It circled in the cold blue air, before it soon flew away to the west. Mr. Johannsen smiled down my way. He wanted me to see this.
I ran toward where he’d been standing. The snow swirled up and, when it had cleared, he was nowhere to be seen. I looked again to the house. Mr. Johannsen stood at his window as before. He wore no cloak. I was perplexed as to whether to dread the Devil in him or be in sublime awe of what I’d witnessed, this peculiar man.
Black Spot barked.
The dog had conceded to the crows, so took off on the search for new prey. I called to him and we headed back to the house. As we neared, I noticed he picked up a scent. He headed over to the side of the house. I followed. I figured he was sniffing a squirrel or a rabbit, or possibly the foxes that had a den in the thicket. Black Spot stopped at the house's eastern wall, just below Mr. Johannsen's window and circled about in the snow.
There, leading away from the house, though somewhat obscured by Black Spot's own tracks, were the tracks of what could only be the boot prints of little people. I felt the eyes of the toymaker watching us from above, but I did not look up to see. I edged instead against the house and moved along the siding away from where the prints made a trail into the woods. I whispered a futile call for Black Spot to come, though he had already run frenzied down the trail. I would not follow after him. I went inside alone.
As I entered the house, though, I was met by a curious comfort. The odd goings-on around the house were soon pushed aside by the smell of gingerbread and wood smoke from the kitchen and the splendor of the Christmas tree in the parlor. From the parlor, I heard Papa talking with Mama about how little money they had for Christmas presents and how sad that made him. I wanted to rush in and tell them that I understood, that it would be all right for me not to get presents, but I knew it would hurt Papa all the more. I had thought to tell them about the odd things I'd seen since Mr. Johannsen had arrived, but I feared now they might ask him to leave, for my sake, and yet knew that he was their only hope to make ends meet.
In that week before Christmas, I became preoccupied so with the coming holiday that I gave Mr. Johannsen little more thought. I do think I heard the little voices from his room some of those nights, but I would not get up to see. I would not tell Mama and Papa.
Three days before Christmas, Mr. Johannsen announced to Mama and Papa that he would be gone for two weeks, that he was traveling back to Sweden to be with relatives for the holidays. I didn't think much of this, though Mr. Johannsen hadn't spoken of relatives before. Instead of questioning, though, I was happily looking forward to it being just the three of us, Mama, Papa, and myself, here for Christmas Day.
The following morning, Papa took Mr. Johannsen down to Boston to the airport to catch his flight to Stockholm. The sky was fat and heavy with gray and there was no wind, not even the slightest breeze. It was as if the world had stopped at this bewitching edge of Christmas.
I helped Mama around the house that day. I brought in firewood to stack near the hearth so we would have it there ready for storm and to allow us to relax on Christmas Day. Black Spot helped me. I hooked his harness up so that he could pull the big birch log in, the one Papa and I had chosen to be our Yule Log. Mama showed me how to roll out the dough for the sugar cookies, and together we cut out the shapes using the cardboard patterns she had made of a wreath, a tree, and a candy cane. Later in the afternoon she let me help with her special Christmas pudding, having me cut and sugar the fruits and crack and chop the walnuts and hazelnuts. It was a long and happy day.
Papa returned when it had already grown dark, but in time for supper. After, I was so tired I grew sleepy sitting in the parlor while Mama played carols on the upright piano. Not even the striking of the out-of-tune keys could stop me from drifting off. I remember Papa carrying me up to bed.
I had a dream that night. It was snowing hard, but I could see the stars. The snowflakes were themselves like stars swirling in the wind in circles playing around me. Though the snow continued to fall, a space opened before me where no snow fell. In the opening was the most beautiful Christmas tree I had ever seen.
On the top of the tree was the largest and brightest of the stars. Before my eyes, the bright star seemed to melt and flow down the uppermost branches of the tree, becoming the white hair and beard around the kind face of a man, who looked not unlike Mr. Johannsen. His eyes were the color of that night sky. It was as if the whole of the heavens shown through them. He winked at me.
The spreading branches of the tree became his green cloak, rippling in the starry wind. He spread open his cloak. From under it came little men, like those I’d seen in the toymaker’s room, each holding a single candle, walking off into the four directions, lofting away in the snow and stars.
I didn't remember any more of the dream, only the feeling that Mr. Johannsen was not to be feared.
There had been new snowfall through the night, giving that Christmas Eve morning’s landscape a fanciful silvery cast. This would be the first day for sledding. I was sure of it.
Late in the morning I went with Papa up to the Browns' farm to pick up our Christmas bird. There was a white goose hanging in the cooler, a wonderful fat goose, but we had to settle for a chicken this year. On the way back, we stopped in at Renaud's Store and Post Office to get a few other things, some chestnuts and a few oranges. We picked up some Christmas cards that had arrived for us. Old Etienne Renaud gave Papa a cup of spiked eggnog and Papa let me have a few sips. Riding back home with Papa in the Chevy pick-up, with the warm sparkle of eggnog in my chest, I felt Christmas like I knew it should feel, like the big hug of everything.