Joseph’s Gift

by James Ross Kelly

about 1,030 words

I DON’T KNOW,” my father said from behind his newspaper. Then rustling the collage of columns of print down to his lap, he looked at me standing in the room. I was shocked. A wide-eyed, speechless child on Christmas morning in front of a decked-out conifer tree with no presents underneath. Even after over sixty years I remember how I had not said a thing. I stood there looking at the blinking lights on the tree, with tinsel and little peppermint candy canes--but without even one present under our family Christmas tree.

“It’s supposed to work,” he offered as he gestured towards the tree.

For a while, owing to my father’s job with a ball bearing manufacturing company, we lived in a several story tenement apartment building in Illinois. My father, a WWII veteran, had moved us all to Illinois from Kansas for this job--that my mother's brother helped him land. This morning, in 1952, at Christmas time it was so cold that the Mississippi River would freeze hard and thick enough to drive a brand new '52 Buick across the Mississippi between Rock Island, Illinois and Davenport, Iowa. I remember the place was dark, and the big walk up the stairs, I remember the stairway and the landing in front of our apartment, not the rest of the building, nor can I remember the urban environment, save for the adjacent building across an alley way with fire escapes and apartments that could well have been identical to the one I lived in. There was in memory a closed feeling about that time in my life that is very unlike the feeling of the rural environment I would grow up in later.

I was three years old, pushing four and it was the first Christmas that I was aware of the trappings, and it was the first time I can remember there being something about any coming day. I had gotten the standard Santa Claus story and had been taken in by everything I was told.

“You have to be good, or you won't get anything!” They had been at me for weeks. I was put to bed on the eve of the big day that became a premonition of something special with all the same stories small children get about Santa Claus in this culture. I went to bed with this form of expectation of promised goodness with the humid warmth of hissing radiators.

That morning came with me out of bed by myself and padding in pajama feet into the living room and the Christmas tree, where I fully expected to see presents strewn underneath, which is what I was told would happen.

That morning Joseph, my father, was sitting in his chair reading his morning paper. I ran into the room and to my horror I saw there was nothing under the tree. Nothing! There had up to that day in my young life not been such a thing as terror in my small heart other than when mother was mad at me, but terror from an outside unknown source had just arrived, along with the first serious premonition of the possibility guilt on a grand scale. What had I done?

“Well, I didn't think you’d been bad?” my father consoled, as he looked at me pitifully standing there.

No recollection of doing anything bad enough to warrant taking away the promised goodness seemed possible. My three-year-old speechless trauma was real, real enough for a wide-eyed stare of terror, the emptiest pit in the bottom of my small stomach I had ever experienced up to that time. It was my first experience of guilt. I had done something bad. Made a mess of some adult order—one too many times—I was sure of it.

This affirmation of the worst, from the mouth of the only man I trusted hit even harder than the first realization that there was indeed—nothing for me on this Christmas morning. Everything counted, said, and done I had been bad. There was no escaping it. Now my mother had entered the room and I was about to cry.

“You know,” my father said, “there was something out on the landing by the stairs when I came back from getting the paper, maybe you’d better go out there and look.”

I opened the front door and off to the right, leaning against the top of the stairway landing was an enormous red bag tied up with a rope and its bulk was bigger than myself. I managed no questions, nor did I require help to pull the huge bag into the living room.

“We don’t have a chimney!” my father said, with an incredulous gleam in his eyes as he got up to stand six foot tall and laugh at me as I struggled with this heavy load which was bulging with wrapped up presents that were spilling out the top already as I’d drug it by the rope across the threshold of the apartment.

“And there aren’t any children on the fifth floor, or the sixth,” my father said.

“I bet that old man in the red suit got tired coming up all those stairs, I know I get tired of it every day. I bet he got tired and left you his whole bag!” he said.

I have this in memory. And it is my first memory of my father's good humor. It is of course not word for word, and it is laced with imagination to fill in as a story. I do remember the bag outside the door, the apartment, my mother, and my father together in a room--it's the only memory I have of them together really, so this memory was a gift that has prevailed through the years.

My wife found some letters from my grandmother, describing these times. My father and uncle were friends then and talked of moving to Oregon with both families together--I ended up in Oregon with my aunt and uncle, but without my parents. The dysfunction had not yet broken everything up. What happened after that was not a Christmas tale like this one.