The Chapter My Son Read on Christmas Eve

One line, then a page

Tomorrow it was two lines. By Tuesday it was a paragraph, and by the end of the week we had read the whole first page of Charlotte’s Web, on the hay bales, in the barn doorway, with the sun on the yard and the cows behind the fence.

I will tell you the rule I made, because it was the whole thing. I did not fix him fast.

When he got stuck on a word, I did not say it. I did not even say “sound it out.” I just waited. I looked at the heifers, or the silo, or my own hands. Some words took ten seconds. Some took a minute. One word, “intelligence,” took us most of an afternoon and a second cup of coffee.

I think a child feels that. The difference between somebody waiting for you and somebody waiting on you to be done.

We read every evening that we could, after the chores. In September and October the light held, and we sat in the doorway with our backs against the barn wall and our boots in the straw. When it got dark early we moved the bales into the aisle by the calf pens and hung a work light from a nail.

Nate started coming out. At first he only stood by the fence with a bucket, pretending to check a water line. Then one evening, I looked up and there was a wrapped peppermint sitting on the corner of the bale, right by Eli’s knee. No note. Nate was back at the fence, studying a water line that did not need studying.

One Saturday, Ed from next door and his wife stood a long while by the tractor with their backs to us, pretending to talk about a baler belt. Eli did not mind by then.

Eli saw the peppermint. He did not say a word. He read three more pages that night. After that there was a peppermint most nights. That is how my husband says the things he cannot say.

Christmas Eve at Helen’s

Nate’s mother, Helen, is seventy-four and has hosted Christmas Eve at the same farmhouse for forty-six years.

It is not dinner. It is thirty-some people, two tables pushed together in the front room and a third in the hall, folding chairs borrowed from the Lutheran church basement, three kinds of hotdish, a ham the size of a toddler, and a pie table that Helen guards like a bank vault.

The cousins come from Duluth and Fargo. The great-aunts come in a van. And every year, before the pies, somebody reads the Christmas story.

For forty-four years that somebody was Nate’s father, Arthur. Grandpa Art. He had a big voice for a small man.

He would stand by the sideboard in his good sweater with his own Bible open, the one with his name stamped in gold on the cover, and he would read Luke chapter two in the old words, slowly, not performing it, just saying it, the way you’d say a prayer over the table.

He died two winters ago, in March. The next Christmas, Nate’s brother Paul tried to read it. He mumbled through, and he skipped a verse, and nobody said a thing.

So when Helen called in the second week of November to ask about the Christmas Eve plans, I thought it was about the rolls.

“Nell,” she said, “I want to ask you something, and you can tell me no.”

“Ask.”

“Do you think Eli might want to read the Christmas story this year?” My stomach dropped and rose in the same second.

“Why?” I asked.

“Because Nate told me about the barn,” she said. “He told me about the ruler. He told me about all of it.” She paused. I could hear the pie-tin clatter in her kitchen. “I think his grandfather would want it.”

I put the phone against my shoulder and looked at the table where my son was eating his supper.

“Eli,” I said. “Grandma Helen wants to know if you would read the Christmas story this year. Out loud. At Christmas Eve. Luke chapter two.”

He put his fork down. The whole table went quiet. Even his little sister Rosalind stopped pushing peas.

“The whole thing?” he said.

“The whole thing. Every verse.”

“With everybody there?”

“Thirty-four people, if the Lutherans all come.” He thought about it for the longest time. I watched him do it, his face moving through the whole range, fear and then pride and then something I can only call determination, like a man looking at a stump he means to pull.

“Every verse,” he said.

“Every verse.”

“Okay.” He picked his fork back up. “But I want Grandpa’s Bible.”