buffalo nickel christmas · hour off from school — hardly worth the snowballs, as my brother tom...

Buffalo Nickel Christmas

Larry Enright

2 Larry Enright

Buffalo Nickel Christmas

© 2011 Larry Enright All rights reserved. This material may not be reproduced, displayed, modified or distributed without the express prior written permission of the copyright holder. For permission, contact [email protected]. This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Published by Lawrence P. Enright

November 2011

Visit the author’s website: http://www.larryenright.com

Buffalo Nickel Christmas 3

For anyone who has forgotten the magic of Christmas

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1 – Prologue

Harry Ryan wasn’t anyone special. He wasn’t a

hero or a knight in shining armor, and he wasn’t someone you would have heard on the news or seen on TV. He was just a kid away at college over Christmas, sitting at his desk, chewing his pencil, and staring at the crumpled up wads of paper overflowing his trashcan.

It had been snowing since yesterday, and the college closed a day early that year for Christmas. The weathermen said it was going to be a monster. Mostly everyone took their advice and left before the storm hit, except the students who couldn’t afford to go home for the holidays, or the few, like Harry, who decided to spend Christmas in Gambier, Ohio. Harry liked


Gambier, and on days in the fall when the campus was awash in color, or in the spring when the scents and sounds of life filled him with joy, he had a notion he’d like to live there someday. It was nice little town, and he’d met many wonderful people — Mrs. Hoople, for one. He had boarded with the kind old lady since freshman year in her quaint house on Wiggin Street, across the road from the main campus. She reminded him of his mom and family, and in thinking of her, he thought of them and how much he missed them.

He wished he could have gone home, but he had too much schoolwork. It was 3:00 a.m. and after a wastebasket full of attempts, he still hadn’t started his term paper for his creative writing class. He’d been up all night, and it was due a week ago. His professor had given him the break to finish it, but at the rate he was going, he would need sixteen breaks, and that was forever.

Harry read aloud what he had written, “I should have majored in Poli Sci. No one expects creativity there.”

He wanted a cup of tea, but he didn’t want to disturb Mrs. Hoople. She was a light sleeper, and the wooden stairs to the first floor had acquired a telltale creak over the years. He crushed his latest effort into a ball and bounced it off the wastebasket, where it fell to floor like a giant snowflake. Outside, the wind whistled, rattled the window, and howled in the chimney.

Kenyon College was stark and beautiful in winter:

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the icicles on the bushes along Middle Path, the snow pasted on the windward sides of trees, and the layers of vanilla icing covering world’s chocolate cake. Whenever a monster storm hit the place they called “The Hill,” it crafted a new landscape of mountains and valleys from drifted snow, and Kenyon became a different, magical place, reminiscent of a Christmas a very long time ago.


2 –The Monster

I remember Christmas 1956. It’s hard not to

remember Christmas when it’s your birthday, but that one was very special. It was snowy, like every other winter growing up in Pittsburgh. We loved snow. The stuff was magical —big thick piles of whipped cream everywhere, just waiting for our imaginations to use as the topping for a game or adventure. That year we got enough of it to make even the cars with chains on their tires skid on the steep Pittsburgh hills, enough to make sliding down Hastie Road to school an Olympic event, and enough to shut down Saint Catherine’s a day early for the holidays.

We’d had our first snow of the season in late November that year. That one didn’t even get us an

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hour off from school — hardly worth the snowballs, as my brother Tom said. Tom is the oldest of the Ryans. He was ten at the time, a sixth grader, and leader of The Caswells. That’s what we called ourselves. We were an honest-to-goodness gang with official Pirate baseball caps, a gang treasury, and a secret hideout in a valley in the woods next to our house. Tom made the rules, and he wrote them down in a composition notebook he called the Book of Tom. It was a journal he had to keep for Sister Jeanne Lorette in sixth grade, a punishment for misbehaving. The other members were Mary, Kate, and Sam, my other older siblings, and four of Tom’s fellow sixth graders: Wayne, Bobby Fey, Braithwaite, and Big Bob. I was only five and in first grade, but I’d be six soon, and Tom told me that I’d move up from diversion to cannon fodder on my next birthday. We weren’t much of a gang really, but we played together, we all went to Saint Catherine’s, and every day was a new adventure for us.

The second snowstorm came in early December, another six inches on top of what hadn’t melted from the first. The city was prepared for that one, and life went on without disruption, much to everyone’s disappointment. But the one that came the Thursday before Christmas 1956, the one we called the Monster, arrived in a wave of excitement, like a sequence of weekly previews of coming attractions at the movies. The first is always the teaser. That’s the one where they show you a few thrilling seconds from the movie, just enough to wet your whistle. Our teaser came when the


long-range forecast mentioned the vague possibility of a blizzard sometime around the holidays. That little inkling was enough to start the buzz among all the little school bees.

After the teaser come the trailers, each a little more detailed than the last, and each with a slightly different twist to keep everyone guessing what the upcoming movie is really about. The Monster trailers were the nightly weather updates that changed slightly from one day to the next. They always put the weather last on the news, and it was torture sitting through boring stories and listening to Dad complain about the Steelers during the sports and the politicians during the world news, but nothing could unglue us from that TV until we had the latest scoop on the weather to take to school the next day. It became the only thing we talked about, to the point where any secret note passed during class that was not about the Monster was crumpled up and tossed out.

As the week progressed and the forecast solidified into a fifty percent probability that we would get two feet of snow, there was just no stopping the excitement. This forecast also meant that there was an equal chance that the storm would pass to the west and miss us entirely, but to a kid, fifty percent is as good as gold. All meaningful schoolwork at Saint Catherine’s ground to a halt. Lessons were postponed, homework cancelled. Mrs. Baxter had us do a lot of coloring, singing, and listening to stories that week.

On the big day, the first flakes began to fall before

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noon. We watched from the classroom windows in disappointment all through lunch as they melted on the sidewalk. Suddenly, fifty percent didn’t look so good anymore. But the soundless snow shower continued through recess, and as the temperature dropped, the school’s furnace kicked in. The radiators began to warm, crackle, and pop, and the parking lot, the sidewalks, and the corner of Willow Avenue and Rockwood donned a thin coat of white. Noses to the glass, we watched the storm intensify. The snow became so thick we couldn’t see Saint Catherine’s Church across the street. An eighth grader delivered a note to Mrs. Baxter, and she left us with our heads down on our desks for after-lunch quiet time. One of the braver kids in the class retrieved the paper from the wastebasket and passed it around the room. It had only two words on it — teachers’ meeting.

They let us out early, and the first exuberant kids burst through the doors into the mounting storm at one o’clock with strict instructions to get home as quickly as possible. The busses were already loading when the Caswells assembled at our regular meeting place in the parking lot behind the new building. I was the last to arrive. Somehow I had gotten my coat on inside out, and Mrs. Baxter had to fix me before I could be dismissed.

Mary pulled the ears on my hat down farther and buttoned the last button on my coat. “You’ll surely turn into a Popsicle someday, Harry Ryan, if you don’t pay more attention to yourself.”

Buffalo Nickel Christmas 11 I caught a snowflake on my tongue, then another.

Each was different. Tom said that no two were ever the same, and so they all tasted differently, but a snowflake is like the attention of a child — the instant you try and catch it, it melts away and is gone.

Sam grabbed the next one before I could and popped it into his mouth. “You sound like Sister Beatrice, Mary.” He rubbed his stomach. “Mmmm, that one was chocolate.”

“There aren’t any chocolate snowflakes, you ding-dong,” Braithwaite said. “They’re all white.” Braithwaite’s first name was also Tom, but no one called him that.

“Oh yeah, Braithwaite? What about white chocolate? That’s white.”

“That isn’t chocolate. They just call it that so kids will eat it.”

Kate twirled around catching as many flakes as she could at once on her tongue. She smiled as they melted in her mouth. “I had a white chocolate rabbit last Easter.”

“And I’ll bet it didn’t taste like chocolate, did it?” She stopped and looked thoughtfully at

Braithwaite. “Well, it was different.” “That’s because it isn’t real chocolate. It’s made of

boogers.” “It wasn’t made of boogers. It was good.” “Good boogers then. And you ate them.” Tom looked down the tracks. “Are the streetcars

running?”

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Snow was beginning to pile up between the tracks. A storm didn’t usually stop the streetcars, but ice on the overhead lines could shut down the whole thing without warning. We all remembered what happened the last time Tom had talked us into walking the streetcar tracks.

Wayne said what we were all thinking. “I’m not taking the tracks again, Tom. We almost got killed.” Wayne’s full name was Wayne Brubacher. Looking back on it, I don’t remember much about Wayne, but I do remember how scared he was when we were almost run over by a streetcar because of Tom’s shortcut.

Tom packed a snowball and fired it at a stop sign. The snow was too powdery and it broke apart in midair. “I was just wondering if we should take the streetcar home, that’s all.”

“Tom, we’re saving the treasury money for the Christmas party.” Mary was our treasurer and kept a tight rein on gang spending. That was a good thing, especially when we went to Isaly’s for a Klondike bar or Skyscraper cone.

“Party!” I grabbed Tom’s hands and jumped up and down.

“Not yet, squirt,” said Tom. “Not till Christmas.” Bobby Fey picked up two handfuls of snow and

smashed them again his face. His cheeks turned as red as a clown’s nose. He was always trying to be funny. “Where are we going to have it, Tom?”

“I’m not sure, but there’s a place I know that might be good. We’ll have to scout it out tomorrow.”

Buffalo Nickel Christmas 13 “But we have school tomorrow, don’t we?” asked

Sam. “I doubt it,” Big Bob said. “I heard Sister Concepta

telling Robot Del Rey that they would be calling all the parents tonight. You know what that means.” Robot Del Rey was really Sister Del Rey, the school disciplinarian. According to Tom, she was the latest model in robot nuns.

“It means snow angels!” Monster or no monster, I fell backward into the snow and made my first snow angel of the storm.

Wayne joined me and soon two angels stood foot to foot by the streetcar tracks. He sat up. “So we have one extra day off, right?”

Braithwaite wiped out Wayne’s angel with a few kicks. “Did you figure that out all by yourself, Wayne?”

“Don’t be so nasty all the time, Braithwaite.” Kate was mad. She was never very good at hiding her feelings.

“Yeah? What are you going to do about it?” Tom just shook his head at them. Everyone knew

that Braithwaite’s older brother was serving in Korea in the army, and that they hadn’t heard from him in weeks. He was part of the U.N. peacekeeping force and was on some kind of secret mission. We thought that was pretty neat, but Braithwaite’s mom and dad were worried, and Braithwaite was, too. Tom had told us to lay off him for a while, but it was hard, especially when Braithwaite was being more of a jerk than usual.

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“Let’s get going,” Tom said, crossing the street. We walked to the corner where Frankie Marx

should have been. He was a patrol boy, and that was his station every morning and every day after school. He was also Tom’s archenemy. The street was deserted and the tracks of the kids who had already gone down Willow Avenue were filling up with new snow. The bushes in the yard of the house at the corner had become giant snowballs, and the bare limbs of the walnut tree near the front door looked like dark chocolate sticks coated with a topping of vanilla icing. A cat sat in the bay window of the house and blinked, more curious about the snow silently falling to earth than the group of kids outside his warm perch.

“Where’s Frankie? He should be here.” Mary didn’t like it when things were not the way they were supposed to be.

“I’m sure he’s fine, Mary,” Kate said. “Knowing him, his dad probably picked him up.”

“Yeah, him and his dumb shoes,” Braithwaite laughed.

Frankie Marx, notorious teacher’s pet and straight-A student, wore black leather penny loafers with a shiny new dime in each. When it rained or snowed, he had rubbers that fit over them to protect them. He never wore boots, and that made deep snow or deep puddles his Kryptonite.

“We’ll go by his house. It’s on the way.” Tom started down Willow leaving us looking at each other, wondering why our superhero would want to make


sure his archenemy was okay. “Who cares about Frankie Marx?” Braithwaite spat

between his teeth into the snow. His older brother had taught him that. All the soldiers did it.

Sam took my hand. “Even with all his powers and all the times he could have let Lex Luthor die, Superman never did, Braithwaite. That’s what makes him super.”

We caught up with Tom and fell in behind. The snow was no longer coming straight down. The wind had picked up and was pushing it in our faces. And it was getting colder, so cold my nose hurt. I bunched my fingers together inside my mittens to keep them warm. The asphalt street had turned from black to white, and the road and sidewalk had become indistinguishable from the yards. The neighborhood was one huge snowdrift. Cars parked in driveways were turning into mountains of snow. Nobody was out shoveling. There was no point in trying to clear a path until the snow stopped and the wind died down.

Tom stopped where Willow met Hastie Road. We had come this far on flat ground but now Mount Everest loomed before us. Hastie was the steepest hill on our route to and from school, and I often wished we would take a different way home. I didn’t mind so much going to school that way, but the uphill climb home was hard, even for a kid.

“A guy in the shoveling business could make a lot of money off this,” Tom speculated, kicking up powder by the street sign on which only the letters “asti”

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peeked through the snow pack. As if insulted, the storm blew its white presents right back in his face. It didn’t want them returned to the sky, not now, not until some day in January when the sun would melt the snow enough to see the grass again, and the only reminder that the Monster had been here would be the hard-packed mountains of ice and gravel plowed into the corners of grocery store parking lots.

“The driveways would fill in almost as fast as you could shovel them, Tom.” Kate was right, but sometimes being right wasn’t always the point with Tom.

“That’s what I mean,” Tom said. “I could make a fortune shoveling and reshoveling the same driveway.” With his foot, he traced a dollar sign in the snow. “You could, too, if you want in.”

It was tantalizing. It was money. Mary was interested. “We could have a nice party with that kind of money.”

“Count me out. I hate shoveling,” Braithwaite said. Tom gave him a sour look but said nothing.

Big Bob stared at the snow-covered hill where Hastie Road should have been and shook his head. He didn’t like this part of the walk home either. “I’m in, Tom, but Dad will make me shovel our drive first. Okay?”

“No sweat. Just tell him that the smart thing to do is wait until the storm is over. If that doesn’t work, we’ll do yours first.”

When all votes were counted, it was settled. Except


for Braithwaite, we were all in agreement with Tom’s plan. The Caswell coffers would soon be overflowing, and we would have the best Christmas party ever, thanks to the Monster.

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3 –Two Teams

It was a long, cold walk home. We stopped only

once more, at the top of the hill in front of Frankie Marx’s house; long enough to catch our breaths and wave to him standing at the window with his dad, watching the storm and drinking hot chocolate. We wondered if our dads had made it home okay. Tom reminded us that all dads had to take a special course in driving on ice and snow, and he knew for a fact that ours had aced the course while Frankie’s had gotten a “D.” So if Frankie’s dad could make it home okay, our dads had to be home already.

The thick snow-puffed clouds filling the sky were smeared with patches of pale blue as if someone had dipped a Popsicle in them and swirled it around.


Raspberry shadows stretching across the yards were too much to resist, and we took turns tasting the fresh snow as we left Frankie, his dad, and their hot chocolate behind. When we got to Conner Road, we passed an abandoned car in a ditch with a handkerchief wedged in the window. Two sets of nearly erased footprints led up the driveway beside it.

Crossing Conner Road was usually the trickiest part of our walk to and from school, but not today. It had been plowed, the snow packed down in a single lane, and the cars were moving so slowly up the hill that even I didn’t have to run to get across. Up and over the last hill, into the face of a biting wind, and we were at the corner looking at our house. It was just like the house in Kate’s snow globe after Tom had shaken it too hard — millions of snowflakes swirling around and none seeming to make it to the ground. Two deer grazing in the side yard caught our scent and bolted back into the woods.

“We should capture those deer,” Sam shouted over the wind. “We could make a one-horse open sleigh.”

“First of all, they’re not horses,” Tom said. “Second, there are two of them. And third, what are we going to use as a sleigh?”

“We can build one,” Bobby Fey said. “We still have all that wood we were going to use for the clubhouse. And my dad has skis we can borrow.”

Braithwaite pushed Bobby down hard. “The wood’s for a fort, stupid, not a clubhouse.”

Bobby got up and pushed him back.

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Big Bob stepped between them. We called him that for the simple fact that he was by far the biggest of us, as big as an eighth grader. “Listen, Braithwaite, everyone knows you’re worried about your brother, and my mom makes me pray for him every night, but that’s no reason to take it out on us. We’re your friends.”

“Yeah, sure, whatever,” Braithwaite shrugged. “See you around, okay?” With that, he headed home.

“Don’t leave,” Wayne called after him. “We’re a team.”

“Yeah, some team,” he called back to us. Another ten feet down Caswell Drive, and the Monster swallowed him up.

“We should do something nice for him,” Kate said. “Like what, leave him alone?” Tom packed a

snowball too tightly in his hands and it broke apart. I stuck out my hand to Bobby to help him up, but

he pulled me into the snow and pounced on me laughing. We rolled together into a bush.

“Get up, you goons,” said Tom. “We’re wasting time.”

We agreed to meet up again at the corner with our shovels and as much change as we could carry in case we ran into someone like Mr. Pennypincher. That wasn’t his real name, but that’s what we called him after we’d shoveled his driveway the previous winter. He gave us our dollar, and said he would tip us twenty-four cents, but only if we could change a quarter. Otherwise, all we got was an important


business lesson in being prepared but no tip. Lucky for us, Mary had the penny. She gave it to him and he pinched it to make sure it was real, and from that moment on, he was Mr. Pennypincher.

The plan was to let our folks know we were all right, get changed, and be back outside in ten minutes. The quickest way to accomplish that would have been to go in through the front door, drop everything in the hall, and go upstairs to get changed, but rules are rules, and the Ryan rule was to come in through the garage and take off our wet things in the laundry room before coming up the steps to the kitchen. Mom didn’t want us tracking any wet, dirty snow into her house.

Tom opened the garage door, and there was Dad’s 1954 green Nash Rambler four-door station wagon, parked right where it belonged. The wet chains glistened on the back tires. A thin sheet of ice that covered the rear window had slid halfway down toward the door latch, sending drops of water trickling over the license plate. I tapped the ice with my mitten and it shattered and fell in a million pieces. We headed toward the laundry room through a puddle of water spreading underneath the car. The smell of stale cigarette smoke clung to an overcoat draped over a sawhorse. Dad was home.

“Daddy, daddy, daddy!” I cried, running through the laundry room and up the steps before I had taken anything off. I didn’t get very far. Mom and Dad were in the kitchen talking when I burst through the door, and he picked me up and kissed my cold nose.

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“Harry, you slippery little mackerel, you know you’re supposed to get undressed in the laundry room.”

“I’m glad you’re home, Daddy. We saw a car off the road.” I hugged him and got him soaked, but things like that never bothered Dad.

“Is that a fact? I hope no one was hurt.” Tom came through the kitchen wrapped in nothing

but a sheet. “Nobody was in the car and there were tracks heading to a house. So it was okay.”

Mom stopped him. “Thomas Ryan, that was a clean bedsheet.”

“It’s just water, Mom. It’ll dry.” “I think your mother was emphasizing that it was

clean, Tom.” Dad put me down and sent me back towards the laundry room to get out of my wet things. Mary, Kate, and Sam scurried past and headed upstairs.

“Just make sure you throw it in the chute and not on the floor in your room,” Mom said, when he took off after the others.

From the laundry room, I could hear Mom whispering to Dad.

“I’m glad you’re home, too, Danny. I was worried about you. No one has any business out on the roads in weather like this. You should stay home tomorrow.”

Dad was sweeping the floor. The scratchy snare drum sound of our old straw broom, the one with the blue painted handle and the bristles worn to a sharp angle, crept under the laundry room door like a mouse


searching for food. We’d had that broom for as long as I could remember. It was one of the sounds I always associated with home. I heard water running in the sink. It stopped, and a dish clanked into the drainboard.

“Did the school call?” Dad asked. “Yes, they decided to close tomorrow. Can you stay

home, too?” Dad stopped sweeping. “We’ll see. I brought work home just in case.” Mom was hugging Dad with her eyes closed when

I came back into the kitchen and didn’t notice me shivering in my underpants next to her until I sneezed. She looked down at me and laughed, gave me a pat on the rear end and chased me upstairs and right to the tub for a hot bath. There’s nothing like a hot bath to take the chill off everything, even your toes.

I had forgotten all about shoveling, and it was long past the ten minutes everyone had agreed to when I got back downstairs. Everyone but Mom was at the kitchen table. They were all drinking hot Nestlé’s Quik. Tom was arguing with Dad.

“It’s not fair, Dad. We should be allowed to shovel. Everyone else is allowed.”

Mom was on the phone. She had her finger stuck in her ear so she could hear the person at the other end and not the arguing in the kitchen. “Yes, Karen, I agree. Thank you, stay safe, and please call if you need anything. Good-bye.”

She hung up the phone and set a hot chocolate with

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a mountain of marshmallows at my place at the table. We always sat in the same seats at the Formica-topped kitchen table. I was always in the corner with Sam. Mary and Kate sat against the wall, with Mom and Tom opposite them and Dad at the head.

I slid into my seat and licked sweet delicious chocolate off the side of the mug. “N-e-s-t-l-é-s, Nestlés makes the very best.”

Sam, Kate, and Mary joined me in the final drawn-out word to the jingle, “Chocolate.”

Tom just looked at us. Mom sat down. “That was Wayne’s mother. She

agrees with us, Tom. None of you should be out in this storm. It’s too dangerous.”

“Aw, Mom.” Tom had “the sulk” down to a science. It was a routine he’d practiced for hours in front of the bathroom mirror. I never knew anyone who could do it half as well as Tom. It began with “the hurt look,” which was his way of probing our parents for the slightest hint of feelings of guilt — just enough hurt to make them think twice about what they had done, but not too much — that would have blown the whole deal. Had he seen any sign of weakness, he would have immediately gone into “single tear” mode. He was pretty good at that, too, and he didn’t need Greg Finnerty to punch him in the stomach to cry, either. He explained to us once that if you held your breath and used your face muscles to push from the inside out, you could make a tear whether you felt like crying or not. Actors did it all the time.

Buffalo Nickel Christmas 25 But there was no guilt in either Mom’s or Dad’s

face; they were stone walls without a trace of crumbling. Tom shifted into the “deep sigh and arms folded over the chest” maneuver. That was his patented move designed to elicit a response, any response just to get the stalled argument going again.

He got his response all right — from Dad — but not the one he was looking for. “Tom, your mother’s right. No one should be out in this weather. It’s just not safe. The discussion is over. Find something to do inside today.”

I was busy sticking a marshmallow to my nose when Mom looked at Dad and added, “Which is why your father is also staying home tomorrow, kids. As he said, no one should be out in this weather, including him. And you know how serious it is if your father takes off work.”

Dad never stayed home when it snowed. “They’re not paying me to stay home. That’s why I have a car and chains for the tires,” he used to say. But this time, Dad didn’t say anything, and even though we knew he didn’t want to, he was staying home. Mom smiled and patted his hand.

One thing Mom and Dad never did in front of us was argue, even when they didn’t agree. They were a team, just like us, and a team worked together. Sam and I, who shared a room, were a team, too. We used to sneak into Tom’s room when he wasn’t around to read the Book of Tom by flashlight. That’s where we found the explanation.

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Parents are a team, like the Steelers, only they win more

often. They play a game called, “Parents versus kids,” and get points for winning arguments against their kids that they can cash in at the S&H Green Stamp Store for prizes. The bigger the argument, the more points they get. The more points they get, the bigger the prize. My Mom and Dad got a new washer and dryer that way.

But if they fight in front of the kids, they get penalized. That’s a major point deduction, and there goes the new washer and dryer. So the best parent teams, like my Mom and Dad, never fight or argue when their kids are around. They save that for when the kids are in bed. The thing about that is, though, it leads to something I call “jumping in.” It goes like this — because they both want those points, the first one to say something when the kids are around is the real winner because the other one knows that if they disagree, they both lose. That makes them both quick to jump in first to make sure they get their way. They fight it out later, but the first to jump in has already won.

buffalo nickel christmas · hour off from school — hardly worth the snowballs, as my brother tom...

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