Bread—a Christmas story

Christmas 1965 will always stand out in my mind as the best and saddest yet somehow closest to perfect Christmas of my life.

My father died in April that year and I started to hate everyone and everything, in no particular order.
Ma and I were never close, and we both decided to, at best, survive our relationship, not unlike, I’m sure, people brace seconds before the impact of a train wreck.

In many regards that was a perfect picture of who were were, a dysfunctional wreck. We both did the mechanical things a relationship requires to function, something like how a cam shaft and a crank shaft work together, performing different jobs independently but mechanically lashed to each other. It was always, at best a functional relationship.

It snowed heavily that Christmas Eve day, and that made me feel all the more isolated and angry and alone in the little stone house down by the swamp my dad insisted was a lake. It was not, not a lake by any stretch, except in his mind, I suppose. I don’t think it qualified as a lake by any definition, except, perhaps, it involved a relatively large ponding of water.

I watched out the front window as the snow worked to pile up on his lake until it disappeared from view. I watched a big buck deer plod through the thick white frozen drifts until it got too close to the stream that drained the swamp, where the ice was soft and thin. With great thrashing and sprays of icy water I watched the helpless animal break through and fight to free itself from the entanglement of the weeds and grasses and sharp and thicker ice, wailing at times that hollow bellow a stag will make in a fight. I watched it’s last fight and heard it’s final howl as It finally went under the water, dead.

I put on my red and black plaid coat and rubber boots and walked the quarter mile through the snow and ice. At times the dead and brittle grasses that poked up through the frozen water line would trip me and I’d land face first in the white and wet frozen mess. I came to the spot where the buck went under and down a foot or two below the surface, I saw the violence of his final bout. The water churned muddy and red. Bloody hoof prints covered the snow and the sharp shards of ice that cut him where he tried to free himself from the swamps death grip. I figured he bled out and drowned.

I felt strangely envious of the deer. I looked down past the man-made wood and stone dam that made this mudhole something more than a wide stream, and dreamed of building a boat, or stealing one, to one day sail away from that dead man’s house and his goddamned lake.

The night began to fall and the cold rushed in even quicker. As the gray day became the gray night, I could see Christmas trees in the windows of a couple of the few houses that surrounded this frozen pond. Including the front window of our closest neighbor, Mrs. McCabe, an old, widowed woman I’d been scamming for home-baked cookies since I was old enough to walk. I didn’t give a fuck about trees and lights and mythical men in red suits or mythical babies in mangers, I wanted no part of any of it that this night. I went back to my house, slipping in through the back door in silence, where my mother and me retreated to neutral corners to try and survive this cold and wet and wretched Christmas Eve.

I remember sitting in the dark, up in the attic, the safest place I knew to be alone, comforted and tormented by boxes of my fathers’ clothes, not yet ready to be thrown out or donated. My house was haunted. I wrapped my knees with my arms and rocked myself slowly, listening for and hoping for a word with the ghost, but none came, and I found myself just hoping the night would end.

Resenting the words of the of songs I heard on the small, staticky AM radio in the kitchen as they lifted up the small and dark stairwell to my safe place. Songs of peace and comfort and joy. Holly and pine wreathes and red bows and white Christmases, and silver bells.

I thought about the now dead deer and how I envied him and admired his thrashing fight. I thought about the stream and my escape. I was not sure where I’d sail, but I’d go anywhere to escape my father’s goddamned swamp.

I heard a knock on the front door. I ran into my sisters empty and darkened room. Ten years older than me, she’d left that year. Looking out her window, I saw it was snowing harder. The world an ugly collage of grays and whites. There were no streetlights on our dead-end road. We didn’t have an address; we were just RD#3. Middletown, NY. We might have had one of those new Zip Codes by then. If we did, I didn’t know what it was. I figured the mailman knew where we lived and that was be good enough for everyone, and I didn’t care because I knew I no longer lived there. I just survived there and suffered the nights like this one.
The noise at the door was Mrs. McCabe. I was summoned to join her and my mother. The old woman had walked down from her house up near the main road the thousand feet or so from her door to ours in this heavy snow. She stood in the small front room, wearing her deceased husbands’ heavy railroaders jacket, and big black wet boots and a thin cotton house dress.

She carried with her a heavy, woven wicker basket with a lid wrapped in a blanket that was covered with snow, now melting on the floor.

Mrs McCabe apologized almost meekly for not coming by since the death of my father and offered the basket to my mother, saying, “You both need this.”

She turned for the door and offered a shy “Merry Christmas.” She paused and looked around the house realizing perhaps she’d mis-spoken.

In the basket was a loaf of fresh baked bread and a small tub of butter.
Ma and me, we sat in the tiny dark kitchen and listened to the staticky radio, it carols making a mockery of this night. The wind had picked up and wet snow flakes slapped against the glass panes of the back door.
We drank black coffee and ate the good, warm bread in a silent communion and listened to the windswept storm.

I’m not saying the bread fixed anything, some shit is too broken to ever fix. But it was the first moment in almost a year I felt anything that didn’t feel like hate.

In all my life I’ve never known a greater kindness than old Mrs. McCabe and that loaf of bread.