A Christmas Sonata Read online

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  OTHER BELLS FOR US TO RING, Robert Cormier

  THE CANADA GEESE QUILT, Natalie Kinsey-Warnock

  WHEN HITLER STOLE PINK RABBIT, Judith Kerr

  THE MORNING GLORY WAR, Judy Glassman

  LONE STAR, Barbara Barrie

  THE CASTLE IN THE ATTIC, Elizabeth Winthrop

  THE BATTLE FOR THE CASTLE, Elizabeth Winthrop

  YEARLING BOOKS/YOUNG YEARLINGS/YEARLING CLASSICS are designed especially to entertain and enlighten young people. Patricia Reilly Giff, consultant to this series, received her bachelor’s degree from Marymount College and a master’s degree in history from St. John’s University. She holds a Professional Diploma in Reading and a Doctorate of Human Letters from Hofstra University. She was a teacher and reading consultant for many years, and is the author of numerous books for young readers.

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  Published by

  Bantam Doubleday Dell Books for Young Readers

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  New York, New York 10036

  Text copyright © 1992 by Gary Paulsen

  Illustrations copyright © 1992 by Leslie Bowman

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the Publisher, except where permitted by law. For information address Delacorte Press, New York, New York 10036.

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  eISBN: 978-0-307-80427-3

  v3.1

  For my mother’s laughter

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  First Page

  It comes on everybody at a certain time in their life to not believe in Santa Claus.

  For me it came during the war, the Second World War, and my father was fighting in Europe. We lived in a large, poor apartment in Minneapolis for a time then, and my mother worked in a laundry during the day and could not always be with me.

  Different people on our floor took care of me at different times, or were supposed to, but often I just had the run of the floor. I was probably a nuisance and yet most people were more than nice to me. I would sometimes spend whole days in different apartments, eating cookies and listening to the radio or playing war with a small wooden gun that I had and everybody seemed to tolerate me.

  But there was one old man named Henderson, who lived with his wife at the end of our floor, who did not like children. He did not like me in particular, but I thought he must not like any children and a week before Christmas in 1943 I was playing in the hall, running back and forth, when I passed Henderson’s apartment and saw something that stopped me cold.

  Mr. Henderson was standing by the kitchen table with his wife. On the table was a glass jar of red wine. I knew about red wine because one of my baby-sitters was an old woman who drank red wine from a jar. Mr. Henderson had some wine in a jelly glass and just as I ran past he was taking a drink.

  He was dressed in a Santa Claus suit.

  There were too many things to take in, too many stunning things. I had complete, utter belief in Santa Claus. I had seen him in a store sitting on a raised platform, had been terrified by his power over me. I tried to be good; and when it didn’t work and I was bad I hoped that he would not hear of it, and when I sat in his lap to tell him what I wanted I nearly peed in fear. He meant Christmas and toys and more to me and I had seen his work. The year before I had asked for an army rifle with a wooden bullet that moved back and forth with the bolt and Santa did not find out that I had played with matches and I found the rifle beneath the tree on Christmas morning.

  And now I found that Santa Claus was Mr. Henderson. An old man who drank red wine and scratched and spit and swore at me, and who I had heard my mother say to a neighbor woman couldn’t hold a job—that was Santa Claus.

  I could not believe it and so I stood in his open door and looked up at him and asked him:

  “Are you Santa Claus?”

  He looked down at me and took a drink of wine and nodded. “Sure, kid. I’m Santa Claus.”

  I believed him. He had no reason to lie to me and he was standing there in the suit with the hat on and his wife was holding his beard. How could he not be Santa Claus?

  I ran back to our apartment and cried some. When mother came home from work she had a can of Spam, which we ate at dinner with fried potatoes, but even that was not good enough to cheer me and I told her.

  “Mr. Henderson is Santa Claus.”

  Mother stopped chewing. “What do you mean?”

  “I saw him today. He was dressed in his suit and I asked him if he was Santa Claus and he said he was.”

  She didn’t say anything.

  “I thought Santa Claus lived at the North Pole and had reindeer, and now Mr. Henderson says he’s him. Is that right?”

  “Not really, punkin. Sometimes stores will hire somebody at Christmas to pretend he is Santa Claus so that children can talk to him—”

  “But there is only supposed to be one Santa Claus, isn’t there?”

  “Yes, but …”

  And of course it didn’t matter after that, didn’t matter what she said. It was done. Santa Claus was ruined, was gone, and I knew he didn’t exist and that I had been lied to and there had never been a Santa Claus.

  I cried some and Mother sat with me for a time on the couch that felt like a carpet and had flowers on it, and she said some things about Mr. Henderson that weren’t very nice. But it didn’t change what I had seen or knew and I would probably have spent the rest of my childhood and perhaps my whole life not believing in Santa Claus.

  But the next day mother came home from work and sat at the kitchen table. She put me in her lap and opened an envelope.

  “We got a letter today from Marilyn. She wants us to come up and spend Christmas with them at the store in Winnipah. You’ll get to see Matthew and everything. Won’t that be fun?”

  I had mixed feelings about going north. My uncle Ben and aunt Marilyn owned a store in the town of Winnipah. The store was right on the lake, with a dock that went out over the water. I had only been there in the summer, when we lay on the dock and watched the large green fish swim down in the cool shadows.

  I had never seen it in the winter and didn’t think it would be as much fun as it had been in the summer.

  And Matthew was a problem as well. He had something wrong with him so that everybody said he was dying. I wasn’t supposed to know it, but I had heard the grown-ups talking about it more than once, sitting and crying and talking about it. Dying didn’t mean the things to me then that it did later. All I really knew was that Matthew had to stay in a bed in the back room of the store and was all puffy and yellow-looking. Dying to me meant what Mother worried about all the time—that Father would die in Europe and not come home. I did not think of it as an end so much as somebody just not coming home, and had not worked out how Matthew could die when he was already home.

  And then there was Santa Claus. When you are young it is necessary to be more practical than it
is when the years have you. I was convinced that there was not a Santa Claus, but what if I was wrong? Would he be able to find us if we were not home?

  This was, of course, a crucial issue, as well as the fact that if indeed Santa Claus was Mr. Henderson, I only had about a week to be nice to him and get him to like me. Judging by the way he treated me it would be a difficult job, and so when Mother said how much fun it would be to visit Uncle Ben for Christmas there were too many factors involved to give a quick answer.

  I thought about it and thought about it and was still thinking about it when Mother dressed me in my coat and snowsuit so I looked like a blue marshmallow, and we rode the bus down to the train station two days later.

  I loved trains. They were like huge, friendly monsters, and in the station Mother took me close to the engine so I could look at it. The wheels seemed to reach to the ceiling, and even though there was an engineer up in the little cabin, I did not think trains were run by people. I thought they were alive somehow and carried us because they liked us and were just resting in the station, letting out puffs of steam and rumbling, and that the engineers were just there to take care of things and feed the engine.

  It was morning when we left, and the car was warm and had soft seats. Mother took off all my winter clothes and put them in the racks over the seats and let me sit next to the window.

  The glass had frost all around but was clear in the middle, and it was like looking through a telescope at the world. People came and went, and on another platform I saw a soldier come off a train and run to meet a woman who almost jumped on him and hugged him. When I turned to Mother, she had seen it as well and was crying.

  “Aren’t they lucky to be together for Christmas?” She wiped her eyes and pushed my hair out of my face. “I miss your father, punkin. So much.”

  I was going to tell her that it wouldn’t be so bad because we were going to the store, and she liked to be with Aunt Marilyn because they laughed together all the time, but before I could speak the train jerked.

  And jerked again.

  And then it started to roll out of the station, and I had my eyes on the window and couldn’t think of speaking.

  It started slowly, but in a few minutes it was going so fast that the city seemed to stream past the window like running water. I would look ahead and try to see something, catch it as it went by and try to see what it was, but I couldn’t. There were backsides of buildings with signs on them, and warehouses with pictures on the side showing big smiling faces and letters as big as houses, but I couldn’t see any of them—everything moved so fast it was all a blur and then the city was gone.

  Gone. We were out in the country and everything slowed down into rolling hills covered with snow. There were trees, but no leaves, and I could not remember seeing anything so white and clean. Winter in the city was gray and the snow was dirty, but out here it was so bright it hurt my eyes and I had to turn away.

  “Isn’t it pretty, punkin?” Mother smiled, the tears gone. “Christmas in the country is always prettier.”

  We went faster and faster, the train wheels clacking. I did not know or understand time then, but I heard the conductor tell Mother it would take eight hours and I knew that Mother worked eight hours a day at the laundry, so I knew how long that was.

  All day.

  All day on the train. In a little time I turned away from the window. We sat in a seat in the middle of the car and the car was full of people. Each person had a different face and a different set of eyes and different clothes and I wanted to see them all, each and every one, so I ran up and down the car and tried to look at each one.

  Mother stamped her foot and made a face at me and I came back and sat down before I’d finished.

  “They’re all different,” I said to her. “I just wanted to see them—”

  “It’s rude to stare at people.”

  “They all smiled at me. And I smiled back.”

  “Still, it’s rude. Stay here now.”

  So I sat next to her and drew pictures with my fingers on the ice around the edges of the train window until she went to sleep. When her head was back and her eyes closed, I slipped away again and went up and down the car because it was impossible to sit still. I met different people and talked to them. One was a soldier and I asked him if he knew my dad and he got a sad look in his eye that I did not understand and shook his head. Before I could tell him that my dad was tall and had dark, curly hair and was in a place called Europe the conductor came into the car.

  He was a large black man who smiled at me and said: “Where are you supposed to be sitting?”

  I pointed to my sleeping mother and he shook his head.

  “I’ll bet she doesn’t know you’re running around, does she?”

  “No. She wouldn’t let me run in the car when she was awake. She said it was rude, but I don’t know if it is or not when people smile at you.”

  “If she doesn’t want you to run maybe you’d better sit next to her.”

  His smile was wider but I knew he was right and there was the thing with Santa Claus again. What if it was Mr. Henderson and he heard I had been bad on the train?

  I went back to the seat and sat next to Mother for what seemed like years until I couldn’t wait for her to wake up anymore and my eyes closed and I fell asleep.

  “Wake up, punkin, it’s time to eat.” Mother was shaking my shoulder and when I woke up I found I was stretched out on the seat across from her. I didn’t remember her moving me.

  “We have to go to the dining car.” She stood and led me to the bathrooms at the end of the car, where she let me go into the one the men used, and I felt good because she usually made me go into the other one. When I came out she looked at me.

  “Did you wash your hands?”

  “Twice.”

  And it was the truth, too, although it was partly because it was fun to use the little sink and hear the water whoosh out and not because I felt dirty.

  The dining car made me want to whisper.

  “Everything is so clean and white,” I said to Mother as we came in the end of the car. The tables each had a white tablecloth and smooth wooden chairs, and there was a water pitcher in the center of each table with beautiful silver knives and forks and spoons and a napkin so white that it seemed to take light from the snow outside the window and it hurt my eyes.

  A man with deep black skin, wearing a bright white coat, came to our table and looked down. He was smiling and had hair the same color as the silverware and he put a little glass vase with a flower in it on the table.

  “For good boys,” he said. “Are you a good boy?”

  His voice was deep and rolling and made me think of the church bells that rang in the Catholic church each Sunday at the end of the block and I nodded even if it wasn’t always true.

  “Then your table gets a flower.”

  He asked Mother what we wanted and she looked at the menu and made the face she makes when something costs too much. I did not understand much—or anything—about money then, but knew when something was too expensive from watching her face; but she smiled at me over the top of the menu.

  “We would like the special.”

  I picked up my menu, but, of course, it didn’t make any sense to me because along with money I didn’t understand words yet, although I knew all the letters.

  The man left and Mother leaned across the table. “The special is liver and onions with mashed potatoes, and before you make that face I’ll tell you that I had to do it because it’s the cheapest thing on the menu.”

  But I didn’t make a face. It was all so exciting that even liver and onions didn’t sound bad and the man brought them on plates with little silver domes on them that he took off with his finger in a hole at the top so the steam rolled out in a cloud and I didn’t care what it was—it looked good.

  I ate all of it, even the onions and the little roll made like a cross with the small squares of the white stuff that was supposed to be butter, but wasn�
�t, with the tiny pictures of a flower stamped in them, and thought it didn’t taste at all like the liver and onions we sometimes had at home. I decided that sometimes how it came changed the taste, and also decided to ask Mother to make train liver and onions instead of city liver and onions when we got back.

  After the liver and onions and little rolls and potatoes, Mother ordered me a small bowl of green ice cream that she called sherbet. The green taste stayed with me all the way back to the seats, where we sat for the rest of the day, except for going to the bathroom and running up and down the aisles when Mother took another nap.

  We went by many frozen lakes, and they all had little houses on them, and I asked Mother about the small huts out on the ice.

  “Those are fish houses. People sit in there with little stoves to keep them warm while they fish.”

  “All day?”

  She nodded. “And sometimes at night too. When it gets very cold and still at night the smoke from the chimneys goes straight up to the moon, and it looks so pretty. I used to love to go fishing with Papa.”

  Not all the lakes had the small houses, but most of them did. There were many, many lakes and each time I saw the houses, smoke was coming out of the chimneys, only it was blowing around. I couldn’t wait until night to see if it really went up to the moon, but by the time it was dark I had put my face against Mother’s arm and could not stay awake and missed it. Missed all of it. I spread out on the seat again and slept, the train rolling and clacking, and did not know anything until Mother shook me awake and the train was stopped.

  “We’re here, punkin,” she said, and dressed me in all the warm clothes she had taken off me, so I looked like a blue marsh-mallow again. She took our suitcase and my hand and we moved out the end of the car into the open place between the cars. Then we turned and stepped off the steps outside, where the conductor yelled:

  “Wedding Rapids!”

  It was very cold. So cold, my nose seemed to stop and not let me get air, and I had to breathe through my mouth as Mother took me by the hand down in front of the depot. I saw Uncle Ben and Aunt Marilyn standing by the door waiting for us.