Christmas Ghosts - Fiction River Read online

  The snow had begun in midafternoon, powdering the long lane connecting the ranch house to the road. It fell more heavily now. The wind sent sheets of it drifting across the yard in the gathering darkness. Madeleine picked up the hens’ empty feed bucket, and set off across the barnyard at an anxious trot.

  It was the hardest part of her day. She tried to pretend that crossing from the barn to the house was the same in the dark as in the light, but it wasn’t true. Every shadow looked like a predator slipping into the barnyard. She was afraid of a lot of them—coyotes who might tangle with Hildy, hungry bears wandering down out of the hills, and especially mountain lions. Big cats. Cougars got hungry in the wintertime, and chickens and goat kids made easy prey, as did solitary girls.

  Madeleine tried to be in the house before dark fell, but deep in December there were precious few daylight hours and a never-ending list of chores. Even when her animals were settled in and she was safely in the house with the oil lamps lit, curtains drawn, windows and doors locked, the vagaries of the wind and the creaking of the beams of the old house kept her wakeful in the long hours of darkness.

  Hildy seemed to understand. In the daytime, the shepherd ranged far from the house, keeping an eye on the goats when they went out to forage beneath the snow, barking an alarm if anyone rode up the lane, occasionally nabbing a jackrabbit and delivering it to the kitchen door. But at twilight, Hildy was always home.

  Madeleine asked Holland once if he had given Hildy orders to stay close when it got dark. “No need,” he whispered. “Dog knows her job.”

  “I couldn’t do it without her,” Madeleine had confessed.

  His voice, insubstantial as it was, sounded mournful. “I know, Maddie.”

  Tonight, with windblown snow in their faces, the trek to the house took five full minutes. By the time Madeleine laid her hand on the back door latch, there was no light left except the eerie glow cast by fresh snow. She pushed the door open, and fluffs of snow blew past her feet to scatter across the wood floor. The wind seemed to seize its chance, to flap the curtains so it looked as if someone was hiding behind them, to rattle the pots that hung above the wood stove, to push back at Madeleine when she tried to close the door. She did close it, grunting a little, and turned the lock from the inside.

  “Stove first, Maddie.”

  “Stop bossing me, Holland. The dark is making me nervous.” She took the box of safety matches from behind the stove, lit the oil lamp on the table, and trimmed the wick. She kept her coat on as she went around pulling the curtains closed. The house felt only slightly warmer than the outdoors, but she knew better than to leave the fire burning when she was away. She stirred the embers in the stove, threw in some fresh pitchy wood, and opened the flue so it would catch quickly. Warmth began to radiate from it, and soon she felt comfortable taking her coat off, hanging it on its hook beside the door, and turning to the cartons she had brought from town.

  There was a sack of flour, another of beans. Her budget had stretched to a modest side of bacon, and a single can of coffee. She had spent her last pennies on dried fruit and a pound of sugar, which she stored in her grandmother’s old lidded crock.

  “What’s it for?” he murmured.

  “Holland, go away.”

  A wispy laugh. “I will. But tell me.”

  “It’s Christmas,” she said, and felt a betraying lump swell in her throat. She coughed it away. “I’m going to make fruitcake.”

  “All for you?”

  “Maybe I’ll have visitors.”

  “Oh, Maddie. Too far. Too much snow.”

  Madeleine knew that was true. Even when their parents had been alive, few people wanted to drive their buggies or wagons or even their Ford trucks out to the Love place. The lane was narrow and rutted, almost impassible when it rained, icy and treacherous in the snow. Big Mike was good about it, setting his broad feet carefully, remembering where the holes were, but even Theo had trouble with it in bad weather.

  She didn’t know what she was going to do in the spring. Her father had always graded the lane after the winter snow melted. Sometimes as she lay awake at night, nerves jumping at the night sounds, she worried over that. She couldn’t afford a hired hand, but she wasn’t strong enough to handle the reins of both big horses, and it took both of them to pull the grader, to say nothing of the plow. The Torgersons might loan her their tractor, for planting at least, but that would mean refitting the plow. She didn’t know how to do it, and she didn’t want to admit that to the Torgersons or anyone else.

  Hildy nosed at her knees, reminding her it was time to eat. “Okay, Hildegard,” Madeleine said. “Give me a few minutes.” She had made a pot of soup the day before, and left it chilling in the frigid pantry. She brought it out, and set it to warm on the stove with a few biscuits from that morning’s breakfast. She and Hildy ate the same things, eggs and bacon, pancakes and butter, meat and vegetables. Mrs. Torgerson would scowl over that, but Madeleine couldn’t see that it made any difference.

  After supper, Madeleine brought down her mother’s recipe box from its shelf over the sink. She turned up the lamp, and riffled through the bits of paper and cards, sending flecks of dust drifting up into the light. Her nostrils quivered at the scents they carried. It was as if the recipes themselves—in her mother’s and grandmother’s handwriting, even two yellowed scraps written out by her great-grandmother—had captured the shades of long-ago meals.

  Her mother’s recipes were reasonably detailed, her grandmother’s considerably less so. Her great-grandmother’s, the ink so faded it was little more than a memory, were just suggestions—a handful of this, a pinch of that, a scoop or a ladle or a scoche. The fruitcake recipe had originated with her great-grandmother, but, fortunately for Madeleine, her mother had copied it, and added measurements and directions.

  “Yum,” Holland breathed.

  “I thought you were going to leave,” Madeleine said.

  “I’m back.”

  “Oh, Holland.” She rubbed her eyes with her fingers. “I don’t know what to do.”

  “Mother’s recipe. Perfectly clear.”

  “I don’t mean about the fruitcake. I mean about the ranch.”

  “Walk away.”

  Madeleine set the fruitcake recipe aside, and began to tuck the others back into the box. “And leave my animals? Our home?”

  “Sell up.”

  “Come on, Holland, who’s going to buy the Love place? We’re so far from town they won’t even run the electric out here. The road is a disaster.”

  “Yessss.” The word became a hiss, like the wind hissing around the corners of the house.

  “I can’t give up on the ranch, Holland, even though . . .” Her voice trailed off into a silence broken only by the rattle of frozen snowflakes against the windowpanes.

  “All alone,” he moaned. “Everyone gone. Mother, Pop.”

  “You.”

  A dry laugh. “Me. Yes, me.”

  Madeleine clicked her tongue. She had been arguing this for months, and it was tiring. “I’m going to bed. Come on, Hildegard.” As she put out the lamp, and started for the narrow, uneven staircase, she said, “Holland. Go away.”

  He answered in a reedy singsong, “Go-ing.”

  ***

  Madeleine burrowed deep under the pile of quilts on the four-poster bed. Her father had built the bed, turning the posts and sanding the crosspieces, lugging bits of it up the stairs. The bed reminded her of her father’s embrace, as if he still had his strong arms around her. Her mother, of course, wouldn’t have allowed Hildy to sleep here. The shepherd curled into the crook of her bent knees, and Madeleine put one hand out into the cold to stroke the dog’s head as she lay thinking. She worried the pipes leading from the well would freeze, or that the oil drum would be buried in snow. She worried the barn would get too cold for the hens, which would mean lighting the small stove near their coop, then sleeping in the barn to see it didn’t burn out of control. She worried that the road would be so co
vered in snow she couldn’t make her deliveries of hens’ eggs and goat’s milk, which brought in the only bit of cash she could get in the winter. And she worried about the plowing. She always worried about the plowing, because if she couldn’t seed the fields she wouldn’t have a thing to sell in the fall.

  She probably should sell the ranch. It would be the wise thing to do. She could do it in the spring, when the tamaracks on the hills turned green and the pastures looked so promising. The thought of grooming Big Mike and Theo for the stock sale in Missoula made her chest ache. She pictured adding her precious hens to Mrs. Torgerson’s nameless flock, and her throat closed. It wasn’t supposed to be this way.

  Of course, a girl wasn’t supposed to lose her whole family in the space of a month.

  When the Spanish flu came to Montana, the whole family caught it, except for Holland, who was in France. Lots of young people died, but Madeleine got well. She got out of bed to care for the animals, keep the house running, and nurse her parents. She expected her parents to get well, too. The doctor came from St. Ignatius and said she was doing all that could be done. She made soup, brought them water and toast, kept them warm.

  They didn’t get better. They got worse. Their skin grew sallow, their eyes yellow, their breathing rougher and rougher, until, first Pop and then Mother, they died.

  Madeleine rode Theo bareback across the fields to the Torgersons, sobbing all the way. Mrs. Torgerson came in her little pony cart to help her lay them out. The minister came the next day, though he wouldn’t come into the house. Mr. Torgerson helped Madeleine dig the graves on a knoll above the barn. They buried them there, while the minister, at what he deemed a safe distance, spoke the service.

  Madeleine made the wooden crosses herself. She painted them white, and carefully inked their names on the crosspieces. She left her two parents lying side by side on the hill while she went to write to her brother.

  Holland never got the news. After receiving the letter from Holland’s commanding officer, Madeleine found the dates of Belleau Wood in The Stars and Stripes. Holland was killed before he learned their parents were dead.

  Madeleine was nineteen, and alone in the world. She grieved. She was still grieving, but she had her back up, too. Everyone told her to give it up, to go to Missoula, to be a schoolteacher or work as a telephone operator. She wouldn’t do it. The odds were bad, and the score was against her. She was scared, pretty much all the time, but especially at night. Still, she meant to keep her home and her stock.

  She lay for a long time watching snowflakes tumble past her window, mirroring the way her worries tumbled through her mind. Eventually she decided sleep wasn’t going to come, and she was wasting time lying here, wide awake. She pushed Hildy out of her way, climbed out of bed, and shrugged into one of her brother’s shirts and a pair of pants, her usual work clothes. With thick socks on her feet, she made her way down the staircase and went to light the lamp and stir up the fire in the stove.

  When the wood was burning well, she fetched the crock of butter from the pantry, measured sugar and flour into the big pottery bowl, and set about making her fruitcake. As she creamed butter and sugar together, she glanced up at the Sessions wall clock behind the stovepipe.

  Midnight. It was Christmas Eve.

  ***

  The Model T, already seven years old when Peter went off to the war, gave out in the middle of nowhere. At least it might as well be the middle of nowhere, because he had no idea where he was. He should have stopped at Kalispell, or in that tiny town with its signpost blurred by snow. If it wasn’t wise to try to drive across the Montana plains in winter, it must be doubly foolish to attempt it in the dark, in a snowstorm. Peter was thinking just clearly enough to recognize that he hadn’t had a logical thought in days.

  Now here he was, in a broken-down Tin Lizzie, and though he had the skill to repair it, it was too dark to find what was wrong, and too cold to be working on a motor in any case. He was wearing his service greatcoat, and his Army boots, and he wrapped himself in a ragged wool blanket he found under the seat, but he soon knew it wasn’t going to be enough.

  It was as nasty a night as he’d seen, even in the trenches. The wind stung his nose and cheeks. The icy air burned in his lungs. His fingers and toes went numb, and soon his ankles and calves did, too. When he felt the temptation to lie down and sleep through the storm, he knew he was in real trouble. He’d seen it on the Somme, watched soldiers just go to sleep, never to wake again. They drowsed their way to death, frozen in icy mud.

  He had to kick the iced-over hinges of the Lizzie’s door before he could get it open. He slid stiffly out, swiveling his legs from under the steering wheel and out to the road, where his boots sank into snow to his knees.

  “Damn,” he muttered. “How am I going to move in all this?”

  He had to try. Had to get his toes thawed, his lungs working, raise some heat in his body.

  He left the door open, and waded around it toward the front of the Model T. Even in the few minutes since the motor had sputtered and died, an inch of snow had built up on the hood. The headlamps had expired with the motor, and he was left with only the ghostly light of the snowfields stretching around him. There was nothing else to see except a few snowcapped fenceposts off to his right.

  He pondered those. He was no farmer, but fences meant something, didn’t they? Animals. A barn. Maybe a ranch house, and people. He peered through the shifting curtains of snow, but there was no sign of any of those things.

  Of course, it was late, surely past midnight. Everyone—if there was anyone—would be in bed. Asleep. He wondered if it was already Christmas, or was it Christmas Eve? He’d lost track of the days, but it wouldn’t matter. There would be no Christmas for him this year, thanks to the bloody memory of Christmas 1917. Peace on Earth had proved to be an illusion. Even if he survived this night, he doubted he would ever celebrate Christmas again.

  He slogged through the swiftly accumulating snow toward the nearest fence post, just to have a goal of some kind. He felt warmer at once, plunging his feet into the white depths and pulling them up again. By the time he reached the post he was out of breath and perspiring. He brushed off the peak of snow that topped it, sending sparkles of dry snow into the darkness. He slid his hand down the post, searching for what kind of fence it was.

  Barbed wire. He withdrew his hand, repelled. There had been endless rolls of barbed wire on the Somme, half sunken into the mud and draped with bodies. Scraps of cloth fluttered from its points, most torn from soldiers’ uniforms.

  He blew out a breath, and made himself put his hand back on the wire. The war was over. It was time his nerves remembered that.

  This wire was straight and tight, in good repair. Though it snagged his gloves, he ran his hand along the strand, and waded through the snow to the next post. Again, another strand, taut and whole. A pasture. Cows, maybe.

  He tried to peer through the darkness. Did he dare follow the fence? It might lead to a house, and salvation.

  Or not, if he turned the wrong way. The fence could just as easily run away from the road, off into the wide, vacant plains. They wouldn’t find his frozen body for weeks. Better to wade back to the Lizzie, and try to stay alive until morning.

  He turned to go back. With one foot deep in snow, the other half-lifted, he stopped, staring.

  There was someone in the Lizzie.

  ***

  Peter Banister thought of himself as a practical man. Other men in his unit saw faces in the mist, or angels hovering amongst the stars, or they claimed their mothers appeared above the trenches before a battle. Peter dismissed all this as nonsense. Wishful thinking.

  Growing up with his father had made him tough. His old man scoffed at tenderness, and disdained any show of paternal affection. He had always said that a father’s duty ended on a child’s eighteenth birthday, and to Peter’s surprise, that decree was unaffected by his wartime service and subsequent lack of employment. Peter was granted one night in the fa
mily home after he mustered out, then given his new marching orders. The Hun had hardly been more implacable than his old man.

  Peter’s tearful mother pled for mercy, and when his father raised his fists to silence her, it was Peter’s turn to be implacable. He was no longer a boy, but a battle-hardened man. He left, just as he was ordered, but not until his old man lay battered and bleeding on the kitchen floor. Peter kissed his mother’s forehead, waved to his siblings, and skedaddled before the ruckus brought the neighbors. He helped himself to the Model T, the old Tin Lizzie, spent his last Army pay on gasoline, and set out in the chill of mid-December.

  Yep, he assured himself, Peter Banister was a tough guy. A war veteran, father-beater, car thief. But he was still seeing the misty outline of a person sitting in his Tin Lizzie, a person who couldn’t possibly be there.

  ***

  Madeleine had to step outside the kitchen door for more wood. She made Hildy come with her as she fought the rising drifts to fetch another armful of logs.

  The fruitcake was already baking, in a tube pan that was older than Madeleine. The kitchen smelled of butter and vanilla and sugar, an echo of a previous Christmas. A perfect Christmas, that Christmas of 1916.

  All of them had been here together. Holland and Pop cut a skinny fir tree and put it up in the front room. Madeleine and Mother strung popcorn and dried gooseberries to decorate it. The fruitcake of 1916 had been baked weeks in advance, put to rest in a tin in the pantry. When Madeleine lifted the cover of the tin on Christmas Eve, the smell of brandy stung her nose. She had no brandy for the fruitcake of 1918. She had forgotten all about it.

  She and Hildy made their way back into the kitchen, and Madeleine gratefully locked the door against the vast snowy blackness outside. She stamped snow off her boots onto the coir mat before she fed the stove another log. She curled up in an armchair near its warmth, with Hildy on the rug beside her. She would definitely be spending Christmas alone. No one with any sense would brave the lane now. In fact, it could be days—even weeks—before she spoke to another soul. Except for Holland.