15

Waking up in Memphis is not at all like waking up in Goose Rock. The sun doesn’t have to strain to get over mountains; the air is rich and flat. It’s not just the wide paved streets but the river—everything feels light and free, like the day you peel off your winter underwear.

Opie has left for the mill by the time I get downstairs, but there are eggs and biscuits in the warming oven.

“I’ll have another cup of coffee while you eat,” Omie says. “Would you like some?”

“I’d like to try. Mama doesn’t allow me coffee at home.”

“Don’t that beat all!” Omie says, smiling. “Rena was drinking coffee when she was half your size. You can tell her I said that.”

As I watch Omie pour the dark drink into a flowered cup, I realize it’s not age that keeps me from getting coffee at home, it’s money. Surely Omie knows that. She sets the cup by my plate.

“Today,” she declares, “Opie brings home our Christmas tree. He’s had his eye on it all fall and just dug it up last week.”

“Dug it up?”

“Oh yes. You’d think a man who makes a living cutting trees wouldn’t blink at chopping down one more for Christmas. Not Opie. He’ll drag this fellow home, tend it like a babe, and then take it back to the woods.”

“You couldn’t do that at home,” I say, thinking out loud. “The ground would be frozen.”

“That rarely happens here. Anyway, Opie says this one’s big enough for all our decorations, so this morning you and I need to get them out.”

After breakfast she carries in two big boxes.

“Opie got these down from the attic before he left.”

Mama says we’re never sure of staying anywhere long enough to put things in the attic. Our tree tinsel is all in Mama and Daddy’s chifforobe.

Omie’s decorations are wrapped in tissue: red candleholders, a string of silver beads. There are a few wooden ornaments—a dog, a piano, and red and green glass balls. Finally, at the bottom of the second box, the star—peeling silver with a bent green outline.

“I know it’s shabby,” Omie says, slipping her finger into the spring which holds the star to the treetop. “but William got it for me, that first Christmas after the war. He was our oldest child, you know, Opie’s and mine. He was your mother’s half-brother, but he might as well have been her son the way she doted on him. And when he came home from France without a scratch—we could hardly breathe, we were that happy. Met him at Union Station, same as you. All those uniforms, some boys wounded, crippled, and ours straight and whole as the finest tree. We cried then, I’m telling you, even Opie, and Rena had her arm through William’s all the way home.”

Omie looks at me, but it’s not me she’s seeing. Maybe not anybody.

“Well, we’d heard, of course, of the flu epidemic. And I worried some. But I guess I figured William was charmed. He looked the part: deep blue eyes, hair dark as poplar honey. And even when he took sick, he joked and carried on.

“‘Send me the prettiest nurses! And send Rena! She’s better than a flower cart.’

“Two weeks in bed, the fever broke and he began eating. Before you knew it he was up walking around. Got me this star from Ostriker’s Jewelry, went with Opie to the mill.”

“Did he get the flu again?”

“No, no, it wasn’t that.”

She slips the star off and lays it on the table.

“By Christmas week, William was his old self. Going to dances, helping bring home the tree. But the flu had done something to his heart. New Year’s Day it stopped while he was shaving. A boy who survived the battlefields. Who would believe it?”

"I' m sorry, I say.

Omie shakes her head.

“It was a long time ago.”

“But you remember.”

“Oh, honey, I remember when the midwife put him in my arms.”

“Like Willie.”

“We never called him Willie.”

I mean our Willie—like Daddy handing him to me.

“How old is that baby?”

“Almost three months.”

“William was twenty-one. And Rena—the way it took her, well I thought we might lose her too. That’s what happened to the star.”

“What?”

“We didn’t put Christmas away until after the funeral, and Rena and I were right in this room taking down the tree. I slipped this from the top branch and it sent the needles raining. ‘William’s star,’ I said as I handed it down.

“Your mother tried to tear it apart and, when that didn’t work, she threw it across the room.”

Mama?

“‘I never want to see another Christmas,’ she said, over and over. When I went to fetch the star, she called it stupid, ugly. ‘Why should it last and William be gone?’

“No answer to that, of course, but I’m glad to have it.”

She holds up the battered star.

“William knew quality. And this was his gift. I’ll bet Rena wouldn’t scorn it now.”

Opie brings the tree—a soft-needled pine—and after lunch we set it up on the little sun porch. Clip on the candleholders, drape the beads, and set the star. When I reach for a glass ball, Omie says, “I used to save that part for Laura.”

“You mean for her tree?”

“No, to put on ours. She never has one of her own.”

“Why not?” I blurt out.

“It’s Cress partly. He says plants and animals belong outside. And he and Laura move so much it would be hard to keep up with one more box.

“But Laura loves a tree. And loved these ornaments from the time she was a baby. And some painted eggshells I had—that child was a fool for color. She wanted to know what hen laid the gloried eggs—that’s what she called them—and when I explained they were painted that way, she was insulted. ‘God should have done that Himself,’ she announced. Did you ever hear of such a child?”

“She sounds like a combination of Anna and Helen.”

“I wish she could see them then. It might soften her toward a child. Laura needs… but what am I doing, running on like this? We need to clear these boxes away before I start dinner. Tomorrow we’ll see Laura. You can tell me if she’s like your sisters then.”

As we pack up the boxes, it’s not Aunt Laura I’m thinking of. It’s Mama and William. She must still love him to give Willie his name. And I wonder: When I threw the gravy boat, did it make her think of the star?