How Mrs. Claus Saved Christmas (3 page)

I lived on one of the wheat farms with my Uncle Silas and Aunt Lodi. They took me in while I was still a baby. My mother was Aunt Lodi's only sister, so when she and my father died unexpectedly of some unnamed disease, it was natural for my aunt and uncle to bring me into their home and raise me as though I were their daughter. There was nothing unusual about this. There were many orphans in those days. People didn't live very long. Even if they were healthy, fifty or sixty was considered great old age. No one knew much about medicine, so if you did get sick the chances were good you would die rather than get better. When I was a child, Aunt Lodi sometimes called me “Layla the Miracle Girl,” because I didn't catch whatever disease it was that took my parents. “God must have special plans for you,” she would tell me, keeping her voice low so Uncle Silas wouldn't hear.

Aunt Lodi

Like most men of his time, Uncle Silas wouldn't have accepted the possibility that any girl could be special. He loved me, I knew. Childless themselves, he and Aunt Lodi never acted like I was a burden passed on to them because of my parents' bad luck. Uncle Silas often carried me on his shoulders as we passed through town. He told me funny folktales and bought fine soft blankets for my bed and even let me have real leather sandals, a rare treat for a child. But, when I asked, he never let me come into the fields with him to work. Nor was I allowed to go to school to learn to read or write. By tradition, only boys were allowed to do these things, and Uncle Silas was a very traditional man.

“Honor God by knowing your place, little Layla,” he would tell me over and over. “Let your Aunt Lodi teach you all the womanly tasks, and learn to be satisfied by them.”

Well, I wasn't. By “womanly tasks,” Uncle Silas meant I should become expert at cooking gruel and wheat cakes and lamb stew, and at washing clothes in the nearby river and fashioning brooms from river reeds and stout limbs of wood. My aunt did these things with a smile on her face, for she loved Uncle Silas dearly, but sometimes in the evening when he was out talking with his friends she would quietly tell me to not only keep my dreams, but to make them come true if I could.

What were those dreams? Not to settle for a woman's secondary place in a small farming village, for one thing. I had no quarrel with others who wanted nothing more out of life. Each of us should have the right to decide who and what we want to be. But when travelers passed through Niobrara on their way to somewhere else more exciting, I heard them mention Constantinople and Athens and Rome and I yearned to see these places for myself.

I also badly wanted to learn to read and write. We were a Christian community, and there were priests who would gather the boys several days each week for informal lessons. No one had paper and ink to spare back then. The priests would take sharp sticks and scratch letters and numbers into the dusty ground, while their pupils gathered around. When I tried to quietly join them, hanging back at the edge of the group, the priests would eventually notice me and shout that I had to go away immediately. But I kept trying, and each time I might learn a new letter or a new combination of letters that spelled a word before I was ordered to leave. By the time I was ten I was able to read and write quite adequately, though Aunt Lodi and I kept this a secret from Uncle Silas.

It was no secret from him, though, that I could do what in those days we called “sums,” adding and subtracting numbers. At night in our hut, Uncle Silas would sit by the fire and try to do the accounts for the farm, adding up the money from the bushels of wheat he'd sold that day, and subtracting the wages he'd paid his nomad helpers to harvest it, then factoring in the cost of new seed. He was a kind man, but not good at math. He would say all the numbers out loud, hoping that would help him get the totals right: “Sixty-four coins for three bushels, plus seventy coins for four more, less sixty-nine coins for the help and forty-four for the seed, and that leaves . . . twenty-two? That doesn't sound right. Sixty-four and seventy, less sixty-nine and forty-four. Twenty-three? Twenty?”

“It leaves twenty-one, Uncle Silas,” I said from across the room, where I was already wrapped up in my blankets for the night. Children went to bed quite early then, usually as soon as it was dark.

“What? Are you certain?” Uncle Silas blurted, and he spent the next several minutes muttering various sums until, finally, he saw that I was right. “Layla, how did you know that? Have you sneaked over to the boys' school again while they were studying mathematics?”

“No, Uncle Silas,” I said, and it was the truth. That morning, I hadn't sneaked over during their math lessons. They'd been working on reading and spelling instead.

“Then how in the name of heaven are you able to calculate sums so quickly?” my uncle demanded. “It's quite unwomanly, I fear.”

“Layla has a natural gift for sums,” Aunt Lodi said, looking up from the shirt she was mending. “God-given ability is not unwomanly, I'm sure.”

Uncle Silas was less certain, but he still found it convenient to have me help him keep his daily accounts—so long as I did this in the privacy of our home, where no neighbors could observe it. It was pleasing to me to have this special privilege, but I still wanted something more out of life. And, as I grew up, I became more aware of what that was, because of certain stories I kept hearing.

Throughout Lycia, there were tales of a mysterious gift-giver who came to poor people in the night and left them things they needed—cloaks or blankets or sandals. Those who were hungry sometimes awoke to find bread or cheese or dried fruits beside their beds. This was a wonderful, even miraculous thing, because times were hard and most people had all they could do to provide sufficiently for themselves and their own families. Charity was rare.

But this unknown gift-giver, who apparently was ageless since he'd been carrying out his wonderful mission for over ninety years, took charity to previously unthought-of heights. He bestowed his presents in big cities like Myra and smaller towns like Lycia—and Niobrara! Several times during my childhood, some of the nomads camping outside the village came whooping into town, crying out with joy that someone had left new cloaks for their children, or enough bread and cheese to feed their families for a week! Though none of the gifts was ever enough to supply anyone's needs for years or even months, it was the gesture itself that brought such happiness. Someone cared enough about poor people to seek them out and quietly minister to their specific needs.

I don't mean to imply that no one else cared for the poor. At the end of each harvest, after all our bills were paid and enough money set aside for the rest of the year, Uncle Silas was pleased to distribute the remaining grain to the men he'd hired. They, in turn, could sell the grain in other markets and use the money to feed and clothe their wives and children for a little while. This was one public task Uncle Silas gladly shared with me. I loved going with him to the nomad camps and handing the small sacks of grain to the hungry, ragged people there, though afterward I remembered their thin cloaks and thinner bodies and wished I could do even more. Twice, Uncle Silas punished me for giving my nice sandals to nomad girls who were barefoot. My punishment was only being sent to bed without supper. Even when he ordered me to go to my blankets, Uncle Silas added that he understood why I had done it.

Uncle Silas

“It's a sad thing, Layla, to see the poverty in this world,” he said, gently patting my shoulder. “But you must learn, girl, that there's only so much any of us can do to help other people. If they're meant to be hungry or barefoot, that can't be any of our concern.”

“Who means them to be hungry or barefoot?” I asked. “If I could, I would spend my whole life bringing gifts to people.”

Uncle Silas sighed the way grown-ups often do when children ask difficult questions.

“I suppose God decides who is rich and who is poor,” he said. “We must leave these things to him. As for you, girl, no life of gift-giving is possible. Get that thought out of your mind. You're almost twelve now, and in another year or two it will be time for you to take a husband and have a family of your own. Think of that instead.”

I
was
thinking of that, when I wasn't dreaming of traveling the world and going out anonymously in the night to give gifts to the poor. All the other girls my age in Niobrara acted obsessed with the idea of marriage. They seemed to believe they would be asked to marry a young man, move into a home with him, have and raise children, and live happily ever after. When they talked about it, they never mentioned the endless chores that made up most of a married woman's life. I didn't mind chores, ever, if I thought they were accomplishing something worthwhile. Planting wheat would have been exciting, had Uncle Silas allowed me to do it, because stalks would grow and grain would be harvested and people would eat. But sweeping a floor just moved dust from one place to another. It seemed to me there was no real accomplishment in that. I had nothing against marriage, either, if I could be an equal partner rather than my husband's servant.

Because Niobrara was a small town, everyone knew everyone else and families often planned from the time of their children's birth who might grow up to marry whom. Though Aunt Lodi understood my dreams of travel and independence, Uncle Silas made a point on too many nights of mentioning various village boys to me, always adding what there might be about them that would make them desirable husbands.

“Have you noticed Hiram's son Matthew lately?” he might ask Aunt Lodi over dinner, pretending to be talking to her but really intending to be heard by me. “He's just turned sixteen, and he's a strapping young fellow, a very good worker. Of course, he's got three older brothers and Hiram's farm isn't big enough to support all the extra families when the four boys marry, but if Matthew married the right girl who inherited her own place, I think he'd be a fine provider.”

At twelve, I was not pretty and seemed unlikely ever to become so. My jaw was long, and everyone said my eyes had the unwomanly quality of looking right through people, instead of my gaze being modestly cast down at the ground, which was more proper for a nice girl. No prospective husband was likely to want me for my looks, or for my attitude.

But I was going to inherit Uncle Silas's farm when he and Aunt Lodi passed away, and a very good farm it was. Enough wheat could be grown there to support a family in comfort, if not luxury, and all but the very richest young men in our area were very aware of this possibility. And so, as I became thirteen and then fourteen, boys and even older widowed men began dropping by our home, supposedly to visit my uncle and aunt but really looking over our barn and fields and the niece who would someday own them. When they greeted me, often praising my beauty and charm, I knew they were lying. They thought the farm was beautiful and charming, not me. After each one left, Uncle Silas would ask what I thought of him. My response was never satisfactory.

“Blast it, girl, there must be some man you would like to marry!” Uncle Silas shouted in the spring of 395, raising his voice because he was so frustrated. “I'm not like other men who order girls to marry someone specific. I'm letting you make your own choice. But you must make it soon, Layla! Your aunt and I are getting older, into our fifties, and we could die at any time. You are eighteen, already almost past the prime age for marriage. You must have a husband to take over the farm and care for you!”

“Why must I have a husband at all?” I asked for the hundredth, or perhaps the thousandth, time. “I could run the farm. I can certainly take care of myself, too.”

Uncle Silas shook his head. “Young women must have husbands, Layla. That's all there is to it. Talk to the girl, Lodi! See if you can get her to see the sense of what I'm saying.”