And he’ll find no fancy food and no idleness.
Nor neither more work than will be good for him.
I make no doubt that with us he will grow up to fear God and abhor idleness and vanity despite his origin.”
Thus the promissory note which he had signed with a tube of toothpaste on that afternoon two months ago was recalled, the yet oblivious executor of it sitting wrapped in a clean horse blanket, small, shapeless, immobile, on the seat of a light buggy jolting through the December twilight up a frozen and rutted lane.
They had driven all that day.
At noon the man had fed him, taking from beneath the seat a cardboard box containing country food cooked three days ago.
But only now did the man speak to him.
He spoke a single word, pointing up the lane with a mittened fist which clutched the whip, toward a single light which shown in the dusk.
“Home,” he said.
The child said nothing.
The man looked down at him.
The man was bundled too against the cold, squat, big, shapeless, somehow rocklike, indomitable, not so much ungentle as ruthless.
“I said, there is your home.”
Still the child didn’t answer.
He had never seen a home, so there was nothing for him to say about it.
And he was not old enough to talk and say nothing at the same time.
“You will find food and shelter and the care of Christian people,” the man said. “And the work within your strength that will keep you out of mischief.
For I will have you learn soon that the two abominations are sloth and idle thinking, the two virtues are work and the fear of God.”
Still the child said nothing.
He had neither ever worked nor feared God.
He knew less about God than about work.
He had seen work going on in the person of men with rakes and shovels about the playground six days each week, but God had only occurred on Sunday.
And then—save for the concomitant ordeal of cleanliness—it was music that pleased the ear and words that did not trouble the ear at all—on the whole, pleasant, even if a little tiresome.
He said nothing at all.
The buggy jolted on, the stout, wellkept team eagering, homing, barning.
There was one other thing which he was not to remember until later, when memory no longer accepted his face, accepted the surface of remembering.
They were in the matron’s office; he standing motionless, not looking at the stranger’s eyes which he could feel upon him, waiting for the stranger to say what his eyes were thinking.
Then it came:
“Christmas.
A heathenish name.
Sacrilege.
I will change that.”
“That will be your legal right,” the matron said. “We are not interested in what they are called, but in how they are treated.”
But the stranger was not listening to anyone anymore than he was talking to anyone.
“From now on his name will be McEachern.”
“That will be suitable,” the matron said. “To give him your name.”
“He will eat my bread and he will observe my religion,” the stranger said. “Why should he not bear my name?”
The child was not listening.
He was not bothered.
He did not especially care, anymore than if the man had said the day was hot when it was not hot.
He didn’t even bother to say to himself, My name ain’t McEachern.
My name is Christmas.
There was no need to bother about that yet.
There was plenty of time.
“Why not, indeed?” the matron said. Chapter 7
AND memory knows this; twenty years later memory is still to believe, On this day I became a man.
The clean, Spartan room was redolent of Sunday.
In the windows the clean, darned curtains stirred faintly in a breeze smelling of turned earth and crabapple.
Upon the yellow imitation oak melodeon with its pedals padded with pieces of frayed and outworn carpet sat a fruitjar filled with larkspur.
The boy sat in a straight chair beside the table on which was a nickel lamp and an enormous Bible with brass clasps and hinges and a brass lock.