Thirty Christmas Eves in the Poor Box

He was standing there in his tweed coat with his hat in his hands, and he was looking at the envelope, and he was not smiling. He is not a fool, my uncle. He had been in the room at the funeral lunch. He had watched Father Ted take me aside after the meal, and he had seen me come back gray.

“You knew?” I said.

“I knew he went out to the truck,” Herb said. “Seven minutes, regular as church bells. Your mother used to say he had a girl in the parking lot.” He almost smiled. “I never did figure out what for.”

I thought about it for what was probably three seconds, and felt like an hour.

Dad had not said to tell Herb. He had not said not to. He had said do what’s right. I took the slip out of my coat and held it out.

“Read it,” I said. “And then I want to tell you the rest. And I want you to stay standing near the wall, Uncle Herb, because I almost fell down myself.”

He took it. He put on his glasses. He read the line, and I watched his lips move over the date.

“Fifty-two,” he said.

“Yes.”

“Fifty-two is the winter I had the pneumonia.”

“Yes.”

He looked at me over his glasses, and his face did something I’ll not forget. It went through every possible expression at once, confusion and then a flicker of the old joking reflex and then nothing, nothing at all, the face of a boy listening for a sound in another room.

I told him quickly, in the narthex under the Saint Anthony statue, with the last families filing out around us and nodding Merry Christmas as they passed. Father Ted came out of the sacristy in his black and stood a little way off, hands folded, and let me tell it. I told it badly. I stumbled over the doctor and the chains. But I got to the end.

Herb did not say anything for a long time.

Then he said, “I remember a man in a fur collar.”

“Doc Vandiver.”

“Smelled like pipe tobacco. He told me to breathe in and out like I was blowing out a birthday candle. He gave me a peppermint stick.” He turned the slip over in his fingers, as though there might be something on the back. “I thought I dreamed that. Mother said I’d been out of my head with it. I remember Bert on the kitchen floor in the morning, asleep sitting up, with his boots still wet.”

“Yes.”

“I remember Christmas that year. We had an orange. One orange, between us. Mother split it.” He stopped and started again. “And in the spring, Bert gave me his sled. His good one, with the steel runners, the one he’d had since Dad made it. He said he was too big for it.” Herb shut his eyes. “He was ten years old. He was never too big for it.”

Nobody said anything. In the hall below us, the Altar Society ladies were laughing over the kolaches.

When Herb opened his eyes, he did what I least expected. He folded the slip along its old creases, carefully, the way you fold a flag. He held it a moment. Then he held it out to me, and he put his other hand on the back of my neck, the way my father did, the way I hadn’t felt in a month, and he said, “Dale. I’d like to put one in.”