“Swaddling clothes.” He said it again, and then, with a note of surprise I will remember until I die: “Swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger. Because there was no room for them in the inn.”
Somebody started to cry. It was not me, not yet. It was Rhonda. She had slid down the wall by the kitchen door without anyone seeing and was sitting on the floor with her hand pressed over her mouth, her shoulders shaking. Her reading glasses had fallen out of her hair onto the rug and she did not pick them up.
Eli kept reading. He did not look at her. He did not stop. He read about the shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night. About the angel of the Lord, and the glory shining round about them, and how they were sore afraid.
“Fear not,” he read, and his voice cracked just a little, “for behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people.”
I looked at Helen. She was sitting in her good chair with both hands folded, and tears ran down her face and dripped from her chin, and she was smiling.
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Paul, who had mumbled through the chapter the year before, had his head down and was wiping his eyes with the back of his hand.
Even Nate’s cousin from Fargo, a big man who sells grain equipment and has not been to church since his own wedding, took off his cap.
Every verse
Fifty-two verses is a long time for a nine-year-old. His finger went white on the ruler. His voice thinned out near the end. He lost the line once, in the middle of the shepherds’ journey, and he stopped and set the ruler back where it belonged, and he went back to the start of the verse to find his place.
Nobody moved. Nobody breathed.
“And they came with haste,” he said, “and found Mary, and Joseph, and the babe lying in a manger.”
He read it all. The shepherds returning, glorifying and praising God. Old Simeon in the temple, and Anna, and the boy left behind in Jerusalem. He read the last verse slowly, and I think I knew then why Helen had asked him.
“And Jesus increased in wisdom and stature,” he read, “and in favour with God and man.” He put the ruler down.
“That’s the end,” he said. And then, because he was nine and somebody ought to say it, he added: “Merry Christmas.”
For a second, nobody did anything. Then Nate’s father’s brother, old Uncle Lars, who is eighty-two and mostly deaf, began to clap. And then the whole room did. Thirty-four people applauding a boy in a red knit cap, in a farmhouse front room, with a snowstorm starting up outside the windows.
Eli looked startled. He looked at me. I could not talk. I just nodded, over and over, like a woman with a loose spring in her neck.
He had read a whole chapter. Fifty-two verses. More than a thousand words, out loud, to the whole family. He had never read a single page in front of anyone before September.