Merry Christmas
O
N THE MORNING
of December twenty-fourth, Bobby could hardly wait for the night to come. Ever since Jimmy had become their boarder and lived with them, the Smiths had started to open their presents on Christmas Eve. Jimmy had to catch the 11:45
P.M.
bus to Kansas City to spend Christmas Day visiting his friends at the veterans hospital. And it was a good thing, because by that time Bobby and Mother Smith, both too curious for their own good, had usually poked, shook, and rattled their presents almost to death and the gifts might not have lasted until Christmas morning. Still, it was a long wait. Once Dorothy had seen a newsreel of Joan Crawford, her favorite movie star, and her children gathered around a piano singing carols on Christmas Eve, they had to do the same thing. Now, every year after dinner she made them all go in and gather around the organ and sing. Bobby hated the custom with a passion. As far as he was concerned, it just delayed the real meaning of Christmas: presents. At around 9:30 that night, when they finally sat down to open them, the phone rang. Dorothy said, before picking up the phone, “Wait a minute . . . let me see who this is. . . . Don’t open anything yet.” Oh, rats! thought Bobby, who was just about to tear into the big box with his name on it.
They could hear Dorothy saying to someone on the phone, “Oh no . . . oh, you poor thing. . . . Oh . . . well, bless your heart. . . . Yes . . . I’m sure he will. . . . Oh, you poor dear.” She came back in and looked at Doc. “That was Poor Tot. Her mother stole all the presents she had wrapped and hid them in the backyard and now she can’t find them and she wondered if you would go down and open up the drugstore for her so she could get a few things for the kids to have in the morning. I told her you would.”
“All right,” said Doc and got up to get his coat. “You all go ahead and open the presents. I’ll be back in a little while.”
Dorothy said, “We will do no such thing. We are not going to open anything until you get back.”
Bobby asked his mother, “Can’t we open just one?”
“No, Bobby, put that back down.”
Mother Smith sighed. “Poor Tot, to have to work all day and then to have to put up with that crazy mother of hers and try to raise those two children at the same time. I don’t know how she puts up with it all myself.”
“I don’t either, and to make matters worse,” Dorothy said, “James fell into the tree and broke everything again.”
When Doc got downtown he went in and turned on the lights in the drugstore and Poor Tot came in right behind him wearing her aqua chenille robe and house shoes, looking as frazzled as she had the last time this had happened. They went through and picked out a Sparkle Plenty doll and some hair barrettes for Darlene, who was seven, and a few stuffed toys for Dwayne Jr., who was two and a half. As they walked around looking, she picked up a little plastic see-through purse and said, “I just don’t know what to do next, Doc, scream or jump off a building. James is spending my money faster than I can make it. I’m fixing hair all day, and he’s out all night drinking it up.”
Doc told her what he had been telling her for years. “Honey, what you need to do is throw the bum out.”
Tot looked up at him and said what she always said. “I know I should but if I don’t take care of things, who will? God knows nobody else is going to put up with him.”
After Tot left, with profuse thanks, Doc had to wait on several other people who’d come in and wanted to get things as well. But he did not charge them. Everything was free on Christmas Eve, he said.
It was an hour later by the time he could get home.
Finally,
Bobby was able to rip open the big box from his parents. Inside was a great record player, and his grandmother gave him the two records he wanted most,
Mule Train
and
Ghost Riders in the Sky
.
And underwear.
He received money from Jimmy, a Rover Boy book from Betty Raye, and Anna Lee surprised him with a genuine Jungle Jim pith helmet.
Dorothy got a robe, a cameo, and new curtains, Doc a new pipe and pajamas and slippers and, from Bobby, a fishing-tackle box. Mother Smith’s presents were handkerchiefs, perfume, and a beautiful new boxed set of playing cards. Jimmy got his yearly twelve cartons of Camel cigarettes and, from Bobby, a toenail clipper. The girls got perfume, clothes, and cash money, toenail clippers from Bobby, and Dorothy had bought them both scrapbooks. Minnie and Ferris Oatman, who were doing a Christmas-week gospel sing in North Carolina, sent Betty Raye a white leather Bible with her name embossed in gold on the front. And she unwrapped a lovely silk scarf that had her name on the name tag but not the name of who it was from. Later they all went out on the porch and waited for the bus with Jimmy and at 11:45 it pulled up in front and he got on.
As usual, Dorothy was the last one up and when she finished doing a few final things in the kitchen she went into the living room to turn off all the Christmas lights. She stood there for a moment and looked at them glowing, blinking, and bubbling in the dark and they looked so pretty she decided to leave them on all night.
Uncle Floyd Has a Fit
T
WO DAYS
after Christmas, Dorothy was on the air when the phone rang. Betty Raye, walking by, picked up and to her surprise it was her mother. Minnie Oatman was on the other end, calling long distance from the office of the Talladega, Alabama, Primitive Baptist Church and she was hysterical.
“Oh, Betty Raye, honey, something terrible has happened, brace yourself for bad news.”
“Momma, what is it?”
“Honey,” Minnie sobbed, “we lost Chester last night. Chester’s gone and your Uncle Floyd is locked hisself in the men’s room, blaspheming the Lord, and he won’t come out.”
“What men’s room?” said Betty Raye.
“Over at the seafood place. One minute we was happy without a care in the world eating fried shrimp and the next thing we knowed Floyd was running around the parking lot, screaming like a banshee. In the time it took to eat twelve fried shrimp Chester had been snatched right out of his little suitcase in broad daylight and was gonded . . . kidnapped just like the Lindberger baby. And the next thing we knowed Floyd run in the men’s room and locked the door and threatened to drown hisself. We all tried to pry him out, Beatrice and everybody there, but he won’t budge. The boys tried to get in the window to him but he throwed water on them and wouldn’t let them in. We had to leave him at the restaurant and come over here to do our show last night. Floyd’s still holed up over there and your daddy is besides hisself. We’ve got bookings all this week.”
“Oh, Momma, what are you going to do?”
“We’ve got the highway police looking for him right now. If we don’t find Chester your uncle is liable to
never
come out of that bathroom.” Then she wailed, “Poor little Chester, who would steal a poor little dummy? I got to go, your daddy’s waiting. . . . Pray for us, baby,” she said and hung up.
Later, Minnie and Ferris went over and formed an emergency prayer circle at the restaurant while an eight-point missing-person bulletin was being released across the state.
Missing: One ventriloquis
t
’s dummy known professionally as Chester the Scripture-quoting dummy. Blond wig, blue eyes, and freckles. Last seen in a car parked in the parking lot of Wentzel’s Sea Food on Highway 21 wearing a cowboy suit and small cowboy hat.
Ferris was convinced that Chester’s disappearance was the work of the devil, while some of the hard core of the congregation wondered if he had been taken up in the Rapture. Bervin, Vernon, and Beatrice did not know what to make of it but Minnie just kept praying and holding on to her faith that he would come back. Floyd stayed in the men’s room at Wentzel’s Sea Food Restaurant for seventy-two hours until finally Chester was returned safe and sound.
As it turned out, it had all been a harmless prank. Another gospel group passing by saw the Oatman car and, knowing how much Floyd loved that dummy, one of them had snuck in the back and grabbed it. Chester had ridden all the way to Marianna, Florida, where they bought him a child’s ticket on the Greyhound bus and sent him back.
That night in Loxley, Alabama, Chester returned to the stage and sang “Riding the Range for Jesus” and “When It’s Roundup Time Up Yonder.”
“Thank the Lord he’s back with us,” said a much-relieved Minnie to Dorothy on the phone. “I just knowed He wasn’t gonna desert us in our time of need. . . . I tell you, Dorothy, when I saw little Chester come off that bus, oh, it touched my heart so. It was just like the Bible says . . . once’t he was lost but now he’s been found. . . .”
Later that night Dorothy confided to Mother Smith, “She may be loud and she may mangle the English language to a fare-thee-well, but I’ll tell you the truth—if I ever really needed someone to pray for me, or someone I loved, Minnie Oatman would be the first person I would call.”
February, the Month of Love
A
S IT TURNED OUT
, the Three Little Pigs cafeteria not only brought more good food to town, it brought romance as well. The new owners from St. Louis had a daughter who was now in the sixth grade with Bobby. Her Italian father and her Greek mother had produced a dark-eyed, olive-skinned beauty named Claudia Albetta, who soon had all the boys acting silly. In a town that was made up of mostly Swedish and Norwegian and Irish stock she was an exotic creature, as glamorous as Yvonne De Carlo and Dorothy Lamour rolled into one. By February, Bobby was a goner as well. They should have guessed something was up by his recent change in behavior. For one thing, he was using a lot of Wildroot Cream Oil on his hair, and he had put a brand-new shiny dime in his penny loafers.
When Dorothy came home from the grocery store she was surprised to see Bobby still sitting in the kitchen, the table littered with a pack of penny valentines he had bought at the dime store.
“Haven’t you picked one out yet?”
“No,” he said, pushing them around. “These are all too silly. It has to be just right.”
“And, may I ask who this valentine is going to—or is it private?”
“Claudia Albetta,” he told her but added quickly, “It’s not my idea to send some stupid card. Miss Henderson made us all pick a name out of a hat—she wants to make sure everybody in class gets a valentine.”
“Weren’t you lucky to get the name of a girl you like.”
“I didn’t,” Bobby admitted. “I swapped Monroe my Boy Scout knife and an Indian bracelet for it. He kind of likes her, too.”
“Oh, I see.” She sat down beside him. “Well, you have a big selection here.” She looked through the cards and picked up one. “Here is a picture of a kitten with a basket of hearts—that’s a nice one, don’t you think?”
Bobby looked at it again. “I want it to be more serious than that.”
“Ahh . . . I see.” She shuffled through the cards and picked up one with a cupid, looked at it, and put it back down. “No, you don’t want that; what we need is something in the middle, a cross between an adult valentine and a child’s valentine. Not silly . . . but not too mushy.” She chose another card. “Well . . . let’s see, no, you don’t want that either. All right, here’s one. . . . Look, it just has a nice simple heart on it and a nice simple message.
You Are My Ideal Valentine . . . Be Mine.
”
Bobby took it from her and studied it. “Do you really think this is a good one?”
“Oh yes, very tasteful, understated but to the point.”
“Are you sure?”
“Oh yes.”
Bobby seemed pleased and took his pen and wrote across the bottom.
Guess Who.
His mother looked at what he had signed. “Do you mean to tell me that you have gone through all this agony and you’re not even going to sign your name?”
Bobby was horrified. “I don’t want her to know it’s from me! Besides, we’re not supposed to sign our names.”
“Well, how about giving her a hint, just a little one? That would be O.K., wouldn’t it?”
“What kind of hint?”
“I don’t know. Maybe you could narrow it down for her just a tad.”
“Like what?”
“You could say, From your admirer, the boy with the brown hair.”
“Oh, Mother, that’s stupid.”
“No, it’s not. Think about it. Wouldn’t you hate it if a girl liked you and never let you know? You have to have courage about this. . . . Remember, you have to take a chance on romance.”
“What if she throws up or something?”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Bobby, I can’t believe with all the noise you make that now suddenly you’ve gone shy and retiring. What’s happened to you?”
Bobby sat and thought about it for a long time. Then, mustering up all his courage, he even went a step beyond, threw caution to the wind, and signed,
From the boy in the third row with the brown hair and brown eyes.
The next morning Dorothy told her listeners, “If you are standing up, sit down, because I never thought I’d live to see the day that Bobby Smith actually got up, combed his hair without me having to send him back to his room. Oh, isn’t love grand . . . and I do speak from experience. For years now I have been wanting a Sweetheart Swing in the backyard. I don’t know how many times I have said to Doc, Wouldn’t the spot right under the crab apple tree be just perfect for a little Sweetheart Swing so we could sit out here and look out over the fields and watch the sun go down? If you can believe it, yesterday morning after the show, I looked out in the backyard and there was Glenn and Macky Warren putting up a brand-new Sweetheart Swing. Glenn said, ‘Doc sent us over and said to tell you Happy Valentine’s Day.’ So young people don’t have a monopoly on love.” Mother Smith played a few bars of “Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree with Anyone Else but Me.” Neighbor Dorothy chuckled. “That’s right, Mother Smith . . . he better not sit under the apple or any tree with anybody else but me . . . or I’ll have to bean him. Are you listening, Doc?”