The Chapter My Son Read on Christmas Eve

The moment

At half past four, Helen clapped her hands twice. The room went quiet in the way a big family room does, a little at a time, from the edges inward. The cousins sat on the floor with their legs crossed. The great-aunts folded their hands.

Helen lifted Arthur’s Bible off the sideboard. It was a heavy black thing with a cracked spine and his name in faded gold on the front. She did not hand it to Paul.

She walked it across the room and put it in Eli’s hands.

“Your grandpa read this every year since before your father was born,” she said. “He would be so proud.”

Eli took the book in both arms, like a baby. He stood up. He walked to the middle of the room. Thirty-four people looked at him. I counted them without meaning to. It is a thing I do when I am frightened.

He found the page. He had marked it with a strip of red ribbon. He set the Bible on the arm of the old armchair, flat, at just the right slant, and he laid the wooden ruler under the first line.

Nobody laughed. Nobody said a word. I think everyone in that room understood in an instant exactly what the ruler was, and why it was there.

Across the room, by the kitchen door, Rhonda stood with her arms wrapped around herself. Her face was gray. I had known that woman for sixteen years and I had never seen her look so small.

Eli looked at her. I saw it. A nine-year-old boy, standing in a room full of his family, looked straight across at the one person in the world who had told him he couldn’t. He looked at her for what felt like a full minute.

Then he looked down at the page. He took a breath.

“And it came to pass in those days,” he read, “that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus, that all the world should be taxed.”

His voice was steady. A little high, a little careful. But steady.

“And this taxing was first made when Cyrenius was governor of Syria.” He tripped on Cyrenius. I saw the ruler shake. Nobody moved. Nobody helped him. He tried again. Sy-ren-ius. He got it wrong a second time. And the whole room waited, the way I had waited on the bales all autumn, without a sound.

On the third try he said, “Cyrenius,” clear as a bell, and the ruler slid down to the next line. Someone in the back let out a breath. I think it was one of the great-aunts.

He read on.

The shepherds

I have heard that chapter hundreds of times. I have heard it in the church I grew up in, and from the pulpit at my grandmother’s funeral, and in a high school gym with a hundred angels in bedsheets. I have never heard it like I heard it that night.

When he got to the part about Joseph going up from Galilee, his voice dropped a little, and he slowed. Not because the words were hard. He had decided to slow down.

“To be taxed with Mary his espoused wife, being great with child.” Espoused. He got it on the first try.

“And so it was, that, while they were there, the days were accomplished that she should be delivered.” Rosalind, in the front, was lying on the rug with her head on a cousin’s lap. She was asleep.

“And she brought forth her firstborn son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes.” I held my breath. The word was coming. I had spent six weeks of my life on that word. He stopped. The ruler hung there.

“Swad,” he said. Nate had come in from the kitchen. He was standing by the doorframe with his arms crossed, and I could see his jaw working.

“Swad-dling,” Eli said. Slow. Careful.