Thirty Christmas Eves in the Poor Box

“Your grandmother Anna cleaned this church,” Father Ted said. “That was how the family ate that year. She scrubbed it on her knees every Saturday, and old Father Vlasak paid her a little more than the work was worth and called it a wage. Your father was ten. Herb was six. And on the twenty-fourth of December, Herb was lying in the back bedroom with a fever of a hundred and four and a sound in his chest like a man dragging a bucket across gravel.”

I heard myself say, “Pneumonia.”

“Pneumonia. They didn’t have a telephone. Your grandmother had been at the church since daybreak with a bucket, getting ready for Midnight Mass, because it was the one night she could not be late. She had walked the four miles in, since the family had no car in those years, and Mr. Novak was to bring her home after the Mass. She’d left Bert in charge of his brother. She left him with a wet rag and a glass of water, and Herb had only been sniffling when she went.

“What I can tell you for certain is what happened in this building at about four o’clock.”

“I was early for the altar boys. I came in the back, through the vestibule, and I saw somebody crouched by the poor box with a screwdriver. It was the old box, oak with an iron hasp screwed into soft wood. Your father had it off. He had the little door open and both hands in, and he was putting coins into his coat pocket as fast as he could, and he was crying. Not loud. Just running down.”

“He saw me,” said Father Ted. “He looked up and he saw me, Dale, and he did not say a word. And I did not say a word. I’m not proud of everything I have ever done, but I am proud of that. I looked at that boy’s face, and I turned around and went back out the door, and I stood in the snow for what felt like an hour. When I went back in he was gone and the screws were back in the hasp, crooked.

“What did he do with it?”

“He had walked the four miles in, too, in the snow, in a coat that was Warren’s cut down, looking for his mother. I think he meant to get her. But she was down in the rectory kitchen with the altar linens, and he stood there in the back of the church with the whole thing in front of him. He had heard her in October, Dale, with Warren’s doctor bill on the table, say that Doc Vandiver would come out when the account was square. Eleven dollars. I think he could not stand to make her go ask one more man.

“Three dollars and twenty cents was what the box had in it, nickels and dimes and a few quarters, what the parish had dropped in since the first of the month. He carried it three blocks to Dr. Vandiver’s house, and he knocked until the porch light came on, and when the doctor opened the door with a napkin still tucked in his collar, your father held out both hands full of coins and said, ‘My brother can’t breathe. Please come.'”

Father Ted stopped again. This time I did not need him to go on, because I knew. I knew who my father was. I knew exactly how he would have held out those hands.