Giovanni's Light Read online

  “So he isn’t part of the story?”

  “No,” said Will, “he just wanted the people who saw the picture to think he was a holy man. But he wasn’t. He was just a rich man.”

  “He has a mean face. That’s what I always think when I look at him.”

  They fell silent, looking at the painting together.

  “Is that angel in the corner somebody who paid to be in the picture, too?” Giovanni asked.

  Will chuckled. “I don’t know. But whenever there’s a Nativity scene, the painter will usually stick an angel in somewhere.”

  Will realized that he hadn’t introduced himself. He held out his hand. “My name’s Will Campbell and I’m a painter, but not in this league. I’m a failed painter, at least so far.”

  Giovanni took Will’s hand shyly and then dropped it. Rarely had he done so much talking to another human being in one stretch.

  “I’m Giovanni,” he said, not adding what he thought—that with a lot full of unsold trees, he was a failure, too.

  “I’m glad to meet you,” said Will. And he was.

  Giovanni was the first adult Will had met since moving to Ryland Falls who loved art as much as he did. Then again, Giovanni didn’t live in Ryland Falls, and after Christmas, neither would Will.

  Chapter Nine

  BY NOON ON THE twenty-second, the snow had reached four feet. Miranda Bridgeman was thrilled. At last she had something exciting to write about in her diary.

  “This is not a snowstorm! This is a snow catastrophe! As if archangels had grabbed the four corners of the sky like a bedsheet and dumped all the snow meant for everywhere in the world right on us!”

  Miranda studied the words she’d just written. That’s exactly how it felt and she liked the way she had expressed it. She put her diary away and walked down the hall. Her grandmother was watching television in her room. Miranda stood in the doorway and watched, too.

  “The trucks are out now trying to clear the roads,” said a reporter who was barely visible in a blur of flakes, “but it’s coming down faster than they can plow. And the supply of rock salt—” Just then the screen went blank.

  “Oh, my goodness,” said Miranda’s grandmother, “do you think we’ve blown a fuse?”

  “No,” called Miranda’s mother from downstairs. “The town just lost its power. I’m going to try to dig the car out and go downtown for some supplies.”

  By noon all the stores were sold out of batteries, candles, kerosene, and cans of Sterno. Summer lanterns were taken out of storage. People were hauling in firewood to use in their fireplaces to heat food and water if they didn’t have a gas stove.

  “This is getting serious,” wrote Miranda, who made a grilled-cheese sandwich for lunch by holding a frying pan over the fire in the fireplace. “It’s like we’re back in the 18th century or something.”

  That night, the people of Ryland Falls ate by candlelight and went to bed carrying candles or flashlights. As Miranda lay in bed, listening to the scrape of snowplows moving up and down the street, she tried hard not to think about the darkness. But the harder she tried, the darker the room got, until the excitement of the day gave way to the fear of the night and Miranda’s heart started to beat in her chest like a drum. It was not only dark in her room, but in the whole house, and the whole town beyond that. Certainly a robber would have a field day.

  Miranda’s grandmother heard the door creak. Then she saw a small person standing by her bed.

  “Miranda?”

  The small person nodded.

  “Do you need something? What’s the matter?”

  “I was wondering,” whispered Miranda, “if I could …”

  Mrs. Bridgeman didn’t wait for her to finish. “Get warm under this quilt? It must be freezing. You don’t have enough blankets.” She moved over in the bed, let Miranda slip in beside her, and together they stared at the ceiling as if it were the most interesting object in the world.

  “Grandma,” said Miranda, breaking the silence, “have you ever been in a storm this serious before?”

  “No, but I was in a flood that was pretty bad.”

  “Where?” Miranda couldn’t imagine her grandmother being anywhere but in her room, sitting beneath her Chinese fan collection.

  “In Kentucky. I was trying to lead a sick horse through the mountains and we got caught in a rain-storm.”

  Miranda’s imagination could barely take in all this new information about her grandmother. Leading a horse through the mountains? What mountains?

  “I was a frontier nurse who took care of people who couldn’t afford a doctor. But I wound up taking care of anything that was willing to trust its luck with me—horses, pigs, cows, cats. One time I carried a newborn baby boy in a saddlebag all the way to the hospital.”

  “Were you ever scared?”

  “Sometimes. Yes, I have to say, sometimes I was. But I was more afraid of having a dull life. I wanted to do something different, something that wasn’t what everybody else did.”

  “I think about that, too,” said Miranda.

  “I know. I recognize that in you.”

  “I want to be a writer.” Miranda had never told anybody this before.

  “A writer!” exclaimed her grandmother. “Well, now, that ought to provide you with an interesting life—what do you want to write about?”

  “I don’t know. I just like to describe things.”

  “Then you’ve got the right impulse for the profession. Describing things is what a writer has to do.”

  Pasha came purring up the length of the bed and settled himself in a crease between Miranda and her grandmother.

  “I think Pasha’s feeling a little left out,” said Mrs. Bridgeman, giving Pasha a pat.

  Miranda wanted to hear more about the sick horse and the rainstorm, but was feeling too warm and drowsy to listen. “Will you tell me more stories about your life tomorrow?”

  “If you’re still interested.”

  But Miranda didn’t answer. She was already fast asleep, her nose buried in Pasha’s fur.

  Chapter Ten

  ON THE MORNING of December 23, Edward Crimmins paced around and around the living room like a caged bear. Outside, his car was buried beneath a hard crust of snow. Twice, he had tried to clear a path to it from the front steps, only to see the car disappear beneath new snow almost as soon as he put away the shovel. Now, the phones didn’t work. He couldn’t get in touch with anybody outside the house. He couldn’t get in touch with anybody inside the house, either.

  “Olivia!” There was no answer.

  “Neddie!” More silence.

  “Where is everybody!” he muttered.

  He walked into the kitchen. It was still snowing, and without the overhead light on, the kitchen had a gray, ghostly look. This was the second day Ryland Falls had been without electricity. Breakfast had been cold cereal and instant coffee heated up on a Sterno can. Lunch was canned chili and fruit cocktail. He took the last banana from the fruit bowl and frowned at it.

  The airport was closed and his plane had been hauled into a hangar for safekeeping. This banana would be as close as he would get to a tropical vacation this Christmas. He took a bite and gazed out the kitchen window.

  At the far end of the garden he could see Neddie loading logs from the woodpile onto his sled. The only reliable source of heat downstairs was the fireplace in the living room. Yesterday, Olivia had hung blankets across both entrances to trap the warmth.

  Edward Crimmins took out his pocket watch and looked at it. It was noon, but the snow had made time irrelevant. Nobody could go anywhere or do anything, so there was really no need to know what time it was. Two days before Christmas, Ryland Falls had come to a complete halt. Edward Benchley Crimmins had come to a complete halt, too.

  Well, he thought, putting his watch away, there was nothing left to do but wait it out. As he stood in the kitchen and watched Neddie struggle to pull a heavy sledful of logs toward the house, he felt a strange, totally unexplaine
d urge to cry. Dimly, he remembered another sled from a long time ago, when he had felt this same sense of helplessness.

  Edward Crimmins didn’t know this, but he was one of many people in Ryland Falls who found themselves thinking about things that made them weepy. The silence encouraged it. Sealed within their houses and away from the outer lives and responsibilities that defined and distracted them, they were forced toward a solitude and separateness that most of them had never had to confront for long. Silence was a spade that dug down in the soft soil of people’s memories and brought things up—faces, conversations, relationships, feelings that had been buried, like stones in a farmer’s field.

  A grown man wanting to cry? What on earth is the matter with me? thought Edward Crimmins. I haven’t wanted to cry in years. And I don’t want to cry now! What he did want, suddenly, was to be with Neddie. He grabbed his parka off the peg.

  Outside, Neddie stood with his sled and looked up at the sky, swirling with flakes. He imagined it as a giant piece of paper being cut into countless tiny bits. When all the bits had drifted to the ground, the sky would start over, with a new sheet, the way artists start over with fresh paper in a sketchpad. Then he saw his father coming toward him, and the next thing he felt was a giant, wool-covered glove wrapped around his own on the rope handle of the sled.

  “Two pulling this thing will make it easier,” said his father.

  Together they dragged the logs to the back porch, brushed the snow off them, and carried them inside. Then, when the work was done, Edward Crimmins took Neddie Crimmins sledding.

  A large man taking a small boy sledding in a snowstorm is not a particularly remarkable sight. That day, Cemetery Hill was full of sleds, some of them carrying fathers who sat with their sons just the way Edward Crimmins sat with Neddie, the father’s boots braced against the handlebars and Neddie sitting between his knees, as if they were the arms of a chair.

  But in that other place, where the smallest act of generosity is noted, and the quietest act of courage is heard, events were set in motion that had been waiting a long time for Edward Crimmins to read his lines correctly.

  That night, the Crimmins family ate in front of the living room fireplace. The main dish was hot dogs skewered on the ends of wire hangers held over the flames.

  “I must say, Olivia,” said her husband, “you have made a room without any heat or electricity very comfortable.”

  With candles burning on the mantel, a fire in the grate, and soft yellow light flickering against the walls and curtains, the room was as cozy and richly colored as an oil painting. Mrs. Crimmins sat with her knitting in a wing chair by the fire. Mr. Crimmins sat in front of it, with Neddie, as he had been on the sled, between his knees.

  Edward Crimmins had not felt this peaceful in a long time. Yet the same feeling of wanting to cry rose up in him again.

  He wrapped his arms around Neddie a little tighter and cleared his throat. “Did I ever tell you the story about the sled my father gave me one Christmas?”

  “When?” asked Neddie.

  “I was about your age. Only we didn’t have any money for things like sleds.”

  “How did your father find it, then?”

  “He didn’t. He made it himself. Every night for about three weeks before Christmas he would come home from work and disappear into his basement workroom, and none of us was allowed to go down there and see what he was doing. Then, on Christmas morning, there it was beneath the tree.”

  “Was it a good sled?”

  Edward Crimmins began to chuckle at the memory. “Oh, yes, it was beautiful all right. It was the most beautiful sled I had ever seen. It had shiny brass runners, and bright red handlebars, and smooth, perfectly sanded wooden slats to lie upon. He even painted my name in black letters down the middle. But there was just one problem….”

  “What?”

  “The sled didn’t work.”

  “What do you mean it didn’t work?”

  “When we took the sled to Cemetery Hill, it wouldn’t go down the hill.”

  “Why?”

  “It was too heavy.”

  Edward Crimmins began to rock back and forth in front of the fire, as if he were cradling something terribly sad or wonderfully terrible in his lap. The memory of his crestfallen father, standing at the bottom of Cemetery Hill, watching his son try to make the sled go, filled him with a kind of desperate pity.

  “What happened to the sled?” asked Neddie.

  “I don’t know. All I remember is that the sled didn’t work and it was because my father was poor and I felt sorry for him and I didn’t want to grow up and be poor, too.”

  “Edward,” said Olivia Crimmins quietly from the sofa, “you’ve never told me that story before.”

  “I had forgotten it.”

  All over Ryland Falls, people were remembering things they had forgotten, memories that had frozen the heart and made it hard to feel or remember anything. But sitting in a dark room before a warm fire with his father’s arms around him, Neddie’s heart burned with happiness. He leaned back against his father’s chest, and in one of those silent exchanges of heat that can’t be seen, Edward Crimmins’s own heart began to melt.

  Chapter Eleven

  EARLY ON THE MORNING of December 24, seven-year-old Anna Aragon and her mother climbed aboard a large bus full of passengers. It was going to be a long trip with many stops, and theirs would be the last one. But Anna didn’t care how long it took. The important part was that they were leaving. She leaned against her mother, who shook a thick shawl around Anna’s shoulders, and went to sleep.

  Anna Aragon was smart, strong, and tough. She had to be. Drug dealers hid their supplies in the bushes outside their row house. There were neighborhood gunfights and police chases. One night as she lay in bed, she heard a loud thump, as if somebody had fallen from a ladder or dropped a sack full of bricks on the front porch. She was too scared to look out the window, but the next morning, when she opened the front door, there was a man, lying in a pool of blood.

  “He’s dead,” she signed to her deaf mother. That night, Anna’s mother sat down at the kitchen table and wrote to Anna’s grandmother, who lived in another city two hundred miles away. “We cannot live here anymore,” she wrote. “Anna needs to grow up in a safer place. I will try to get a job that will help pay for our expenses if you will please let us come and stay.”

  Anna’s grandmother had written back immediately. They were to come for Christmas. They could live with her.

  As soon as they received the letter, Anna and her mother threw out what they didn’t want, packed what they did, and took everything else of value to the local pawnshop. The money from the pawnbroker paid the last month’s rent and bought two bus tickets. Before they left the house for their trip, Anna’s mother counted out three bills and put them in Anna’s jacket pocket. As Anna slept, she kept one hand curled around them, until the voice of the driver from the front of the bus woke her up.

  “Miss … miss.”

  Anna sat up and looked around. Her mother was asleep. They were the only people left in the bus. It was nearly dark and snowing hard. Dimly, Anna could see a sign outside, “Elwood’s Market.” But no lights were on in the store.

  “Where are we?” she asked the bus driver.

  “Ryland Falls.”

  “When do we get off?”

  “It’s the stop after this one, but I’m not going over no mountain in this kind of mess.” The driver shook a fist at the snow. “If I knew I had this waiting for me, I wouldn’t have started out this morning. I figure if we turn around right now, we can make it back to where we came from before the roads are totally covered over. But we can’t get over Old Rag tonight. No way, José!”

  Anna’s mother was awake now and looking at the driver.

  “Ma’am,” the driver said, “you need to tell me what you want to do. You can get off here or come on back with the bus and start over tomorrow. It don’t make no difference to me.”

  Anna
had to think fast. “I’ll talk to my mother,” she said.

  The bus driver shrugged, draped his arms over the steering wheel, and stared out the window. Quickly, Anna rearranged the bus driver’s words and passed them on. She couldn’t bear to turn back now.

  “He says we have to get off here,” she signed.

  Her mother’s eyes widened. “Here?” she signed. “Where are we?”

  “Almost to Grandma’s,” signed Anna, “but the bus can’t get over the mountain. So we have to stay here somewhere tonight and then get another bus tomorrow.”

  “Where?” her mother signed.

  Anna looked her mother in the eye and put on her most sincere expression. “The bus driver said he would help us.”

  It wasn’t really a lie. She was just telling her mother what the bus driver would say once she asked for his help.

  Walking to the front of the bus, she planted herself in front of him and reported the conversation with her mother she hadn’t actually had. “My mother says we’ll stay here and that she’d like you to find us a place.”

  The driver shifted irritably in his seat. Who did they think he was!

  “Well, now,” he said sarcastically, “I don’t guess I know where that place would be. This town looks shut down, and I’m not in the business of being no tour director.”

  “We’re staying. That’s what my mother said.”

  The driver threw up his hands. “I’ll get your bag.”

  Anna stepped off the bus into a swirl of snow. There were no lights anywhere, except for a fire in a wire trash can on a Christmas tree lot across the street. She was beginning to lose her courage. Against her will, she felt tears well up in her eyes. No way was she going to ruin everything by crying, but it was freezing cold and in a few minutes she and her mother would be standing in the snow, without anyplace to go.