Tilden was known among us as “Mr. Christmas” because of his child-like attentiveness to every nuance of the holidays, continuing long after he officially ceased to be a child. He was the first to have those strings of tree lights that looked like flames, or the tips of kindergarten pencils. If one of the bulbs burned out, the whole string went dark, so most of our Christmas trees would have negative spaces where we had been too idle to seek for the faulty link—but not Tilden’s tree. It blazed and twinkled, for he would find the dead bulb like a terrier finding a rat in the basement. My dad’s store supplied all this stuff, so I knew the details of how much of Tilden’s yard work money he spent on magical Christmases. Those lights burned hot. Most of us dealt with that by turning them off every so often, but Tilden found reflectors made of aluminum, that made each bulb look like the Bethlehem star, beamy and many-colored. You’d sweat in the room with the tree, but you wouldn’t worry the whole thing would go up in smoke. The town had not been electrified for that long, and Tilden’s ease with the electric part of Christmas made him a welcome guest up and down the streets, helping to find shorts and dead bulbs, explaining how things worked, helping to set up the tree so it wouldn’t burst into flames the first time the switch was flipped. Under his own tree he set little villages made of chips from the wood pile, a metropolis of pioneers in tiny log cabins, through which lights shone as if each had an enchanted fireplace of a different color. Toy animals were placed about to indicate farms and pets and, I suppose, the kind of outdoor zoo that would have obtained in Jesus’s day. The lead army men he had gotten from his uncle stood about guarding things in their funny WWI hats. There was a pond made of a mirror laid amid cotton batting (which was snow) and on that mirror floated plastic swans. It was a little queer—of course we told him so—but it was also pretty wonderful. I hope we told him that, too. There were no big department stores in our town, and Dad’s Santa in the hardware store window and the crèches in front of a couple of the churches were all the inspiration he had. It was a miracle, if you thought about it.
Tilden’s Electric Wonderland is part of what materializes when I summon up Christmas. But what lingers most deeply is the perception of a single perfect Christmas, made from fragments of recollections cast over a period of ten or more years. There was but one Christmas, unfolding in a particular way we fashioned and enforced for ourselves over the whole of our boyhoods. The family tree must be decorated in a certain way, and you remembered from year to year what that way was. This bulb went here; that bulb went there. Variation was forgetfulness. Forgetfulness was the opening act of a sadness that grew through the years and would not be cured. We knew these things without being told. It was Yule, whose enchantments struck deeper even than the Nativity Story. You went to church. You sang the carols. You knew they were intimations of something vast and silent, something that needed to dwell in the mountains and the singing gorge of the Wyona, and could never quite come to town.
Christmas Eve was for families, and church. So the day before, or the day before that, we had our own ceremony, which seemed to have been ordained. Nobody that I remember organized a moment of it. Maybe we copied it off Andy’s circle, or Dad’s, or maybe it was a discovery of us ourselves. We peregrinated, like Magi, from house to house, taking in the food and the peculiarities of the family Christmases, as we took in the peculiarities of one another throughout the year.
We started at Vince’s. We presented this to one another as a courtesy, and never spoke aloud the actual reason, which was that Mrs. Silvano typically hit the sauce around 7, and if we wanted her company at any level of consciousness, we had to have been there and gone. Unlike the other mothers, Mrs. Silvano did not bake, but she organized the store-bought cookies in artful ways, in concentric circles on the round plates (alternating dark and pale if that’s what came out of the box) and in interesting ranks and files on the square ones, replacing one of the proper shade when one got devoured. Sometimes there would be bologna cut with cookie cutters in the shapes of stars and snowmen. These you could fold over onto a cracker or just put into your mouth whole. This was her understanding of proper hostessing, and we took it that way, admiring her skills and attentiveness from behind the rims of our glasses of orange punch. She had been Homecoming Queen in her time. We understood. Vince was allowed to call his mother a lush in moments of frustration, but we, never.
Coach was not present for these events. Sometimes he was upstairs—walking around on the wooden floors gave him away—but often his car would be gone and Mrs. Silvano would say he went to get something she needed, but whatever she needed must have been in Knoxville, for he didn’t come back. Coach didn’t spell “Christmas” to us, so it was all right. Getting together with the guys must have seemed pretty homo to him.
Tilden was next, and he’d be beside himself with excitement. We wouldn’t be through the door yet, and he’d be showing us his newest gadget or setup, how he made his electric train go around and around the multicolored cabins, over the looking-glass lake, among the lead giraffes and doughboys and whatnot. He would have baked the cookies. He would have made the really amazingly good date bread that you could spread with oleo and jam from his mother’s plum trees. His mom would be there to hand him things he needed, but it was his show. Tilden was a happy kid—a life without drama, so far as I could see—and I think his happiness spread from the Christmases he lit up as though he himself were the Christ Child. There he was, his red crew cut lit by the blazing tree lights, chomping on his own cookies, smiling, smiling. That boy was a mystery with all the doors open. I knew him better than anyone else in the world, and yet I didn’t know him. He was clever that way.
My house was last because Mom was the best cook, and we had bunk beds in case things evolved into a sleepover. We gave our buddies our gifts when we got to my house, little things we’d made or bought at my dad’s store, Dad conspiring in it by making me go do something else if one of my friends walked in, so it would all be a surprise. One year Vince gave me a flashlight. One year Tilden gave me one of his lead animals, a bison really too hefty for the scene under the tree, that holds down papers on my desk to this day. One year my mom took an art class down in Asheville (that’s a whole other story) and I got her to teach me what she learned enough that when I took photos at the Falls, I could come back and color the prints with watercolors so they looked like faded and pastel versions of the real thing.
If it was snowing when we got to my house, it would be perfect. Nothing could go radically wrong for the whole year after if it was snowing when we got to my house. I think it always was.
Glen fit right in regarding the Christmas revels. We were a little older, and so the sacred things were no longer so sacred they couldn’t be adapted a little. You had to pass Glen’s house to get from Vince’s to Tilden’s, and we waved as we passed to Glen’s mother and big sister standing on the stoop waving back at us. His father would be inside reading the paper beside a huge floor lamp, the Christmas tree across the room from him. This was right. This was the way it should be. The father should be sitting with the paper. The mother should be watching her boy and his friends pass through the snow onward into darkness. We didn’t go in. The ritual was too set for that. Glen understood. He could fit in in his way, but not in all ways.
The temptation when the time came was to invite our girlfriends. We thought about it, but in the end we didn’t. We said to one another, “Why would they be interested?” It was all pretty boyish. Sherry was the only of the girlfriends of the time who lasted, and she never batted an eyelid over her exclusion. If she wanted to come she never said so. In married life one learns that women long for their men to have buddies, hobbies, diversions, to go on camping trips and get the hell out of the house now and then. But then we admired them for being able to do without our company even for a couple hours.
If the three of us owned Christmas, Glen still found a way in. New Year’s was open. That could be his, if he wanted it.
One New Year’s remains frozen in memory. Glen had come to our houses before Christmas, eating the cookies, talking with the dads and moms who then made their courteous exits. He was the kind of teenager parents like, and would tell you so afterwards, his politeness and good vocabulary and all that. He’d bought us all Bowie knives as presents. This was at once very cool and very odd. Four Bowie knives with shellacked buckhorn handles, exactly alike. I pictured us striding through town with them stuck in our belts. It was not right to ask, “What the hell put this into your head?” but maybe it was his move to be as woodsy as the rest of us presumed ourselves to be. Plus, they were no odder, the Bowie knives weren’t, than other things we’d opened under the twinkling tree through the years. Maybe it was that there were so many, a little arsenal in case some enemy should arise to take the place of the Japs and Krauts.
“I have another gift,” Glen said.
Tilden looked around to see if it was under the tree.
I said, “What? You and Vince finally announcing your engagement?”
Vince didn’t want to laugh, but finally did. But it was as if Glen hadn’t heard. He continued, “It’s for New Year’s Eve. A little surprise. You gotta promise me New Year’s Eve. All right?”
Vince said, “I’ll call Lauren Bacall and tell her she’s on her own this year.”
So we promised Glen New Year’s Eve. He handed the three of us envelopes. We opened them. They turned out to be three parts of a map to the Falls of the Wyona.
“We’re going to the Falls?”
“Yeah. The surprise will be there.”
“It’ll be freezing,” Tilden observed.
Glen had drawn the maps himself, and covered the corners with “Hic sunt dracones” and compass roses and things you find on ancient maps. I had the first part. He wanted us to start at the edge of the school grounds, where the long overland path to the gorge actually does start.
“Can’t we drive?”
“We’ll drive back. I’ll have a car in the parking lot.”
So on New Year’s Eve the three of us lined up at the edge of the high school parking lot. That in itself was a dip into nostalgia. It had been a long time since we’d actually hiked to the Falls, and longer still since we hadn’t used the various shortcuts and by-ways learned through the years. We were entering by the gate. We were going the full way. This turned out to be good, for the sights we saw that night were, altered by darkness and winter, the sights we saw the first time we had gone together to the Falls, hesitant, chattering like the children we were, unsure of the way. The swifts gathered in a cave in South America now, and the bats clung to the ceiling asleep. The salamanders dozed under the ice. We were alone, the first souls in a bewintered world, or the last.
Then into the wilderness.
It had snowed a couple of the days since Christmas. The snow turned pink because of the angle of the sun. It had melted in town, but here the snow was sheltered by the trees, which, though bare, shed a coolness around them winter as well as summer. Out of the crusty whiteness poked the skeletons of ironweed and Joe-pye, and deeper in, the ruined towers of the wood lilies, with their seed pods perching on them like winter birds. The actual birds left tiny thready tracks atop the crust, while the foxes and the deer fell through and dug furrows toward their night retreats. It was not that cold, despite Tilden’s fears; soon I was sweating and had to open my jacket.
Vince said, “Wait.” He plowed through the snow and plucked something off an old apple tree that was the last remnant of a farm that must have stood there generations ago. It was an envelope. On it was written, “Arden.”
Vince handed the envelope to me. I opened it. Inside was a photo of me as a tiny, tiny boy in a fat snowsuit, so round and warm I could scarcely move. The hand reaching down to steady me ran off the edge of the paper, but I knew it was my mom. I was smiling. I was so, so happy. Maybe I had never been quite that happy since. I felt myself grinning in the gathering twilight.
Tilden said, “Cool. Move on?” I nodded. We moved on.
Tilden had the second section of the map, and though we knew the way, we opened it in case there was a message or a surprise. A big circle in orange crayon surrounded a black . . . thing that would have been a mystery to anybody else, but which we recognized instantly as the shelf stone. The shelf stone is a black monolith about twenty feet high, sticking right out of the roots of hemlocks, upon which, chest high when we first entered the woods, but waist high now, is a flat outcrop like a shelf. The resemblance to a pagan altar in a jungle movie was too great to ignore, so we always left something on the shelf—an apple or a candy—for the forest gods, and it was always gone when we passed by again. We made for the shelf stone—it was a little off the path. That part of the woods lay in shadow now, so Vince snapped on his flashlight. Something sat on the shelf. I walked over and turned a piece of paper to the light. The paper said “Tilden.” The paper was held down by something, and when Vince turned the light on it we saw a line of carved animals, a horse and an antelope and a kangaroo, all beautifully wrought out of some heavy blond wood none of us could guess at. Tilden stared at them for a moment while Vince held them in the light. Then he put them in his pocket and we moved on.
At the point where Tilden’s map failed, I took over the light and Vince looked at his third of the map. “It says we have to turn out the light when we hear the sound of the Falls.”
I didn’t like that much. I think we all heard the Falls before we acknowledged it, because it was almost full dark, and we had no light but that. But eventually Vince shrugged, and sighed, and turned out the light. I heard him say under his breath, “That boy—”
As our eyes adjusted we saw a couple of things. One was that the snow and the clear stars provided enough ambient light to keep us from running into things. The path that Glen had carved with his boots was a deeper blue in the blue-white of the snow field. We could follow it easy. Additionally, there appeared to be a source of light up ahead, different from the stars, less piercing, warmer, golden. When we got a few yards further on we saw that Glen had put candles in paper bags settled into the snow, and those were lighting the way. I touched one of the bags. It wasn’t even hot. The snow must have balanced the heat of the flame. How had Glen known that and we not? Maybe a hundred of these torches set at intervals led us to a grove that we knew quite well—the excellent picnic grove—but that was changed somehow. We entered the grove. At the far end of it a living white pine had been festooned with candles, and the candles were burning. There was barely breeze enough to make them flicker, and Glen had chosen a place—as we often had—sheltered from the weather on all four sides. Glen stood beside the tree. He was difficult to see—all you could see were the little flames and the bit of pine branch nearest to them. He must have known this, so he moved into as much of the light as he could, and said, “Welcome.”
The shellacked handle of a Bowie knife glittered in his belt.
My recollection is that one word. “Welcome” was the only one uttered. Glen had provided four logs, and we sat down on them and looked at the tree. Mom and Dad had candles on our tree when I was little. It sent me there. It sent me home. Yes. This was it. This was perfect. It was the best ever. It was the one thing that had yet happened in my life to which I would apply the word “holy.”
We heard a low dragging sound. It was Vince moving his log so it was directly opposite Glen’s. He sat back down. They were staring into each other’s eyes. Glen put his hand out and Vince took it. They sat so the candlelight washed over them, as though that were the one thing it was meant to do. Eye to eye, hand in hand. I wondered why there had been no gift for Vince, but I understood now: this was it. The whole artifact was it. The walled garden, the tree of flames, the roof of stars—they were Glen’s gift to Vince, lover to beloved. I was dropping tears onto the snow.
Vince said, “Wherever you go, I will find you.”
Glen said, “Me too.”
After that came such quiet you could hear the candle flames. Then we heard another sound, chuckling, funny-sounding, from low down in the darkness. I speculated that it was a gnome or something talking to itself—the atmosphere was conducive to such thought—but it came close and when it broke into the circle of light one perceived it was a skunk. Now, we were all woodsmen, so we knew a skunk is the calmest of creatures, totally hospitable unless you manage to frighten it. I was going to warn, “Don’t get up, don’t run,” but nobody seemed inclined to do so. Our little friend waddled from log to log, nosing at our clothes to see what manner of creatures we might be in the dead of a winter night with the little fires around us. When he was satisfied, he waddled off, chuckling and singing to himself, until his black and white faded into the ink blue of the undergrowth. The forest had blessed us. The spirits had taken form and communed with us for a precious moment.
Glen got up after a few moments and said, “Onward.”
The roar of the Falls felt tremendous after the quiet of the grove. Glen led us to the brink, and then down a bit of path to a place we knew that overlooked almost the whole drop of the Falls, from the crest to the secret bottom, a little less secret now for its ice and glinting snows. The path should have been slick, and I kept bracing myself, but it became clear that Glen had thought of that too, breaking the ice—with his boot heel, I guess—and scattering it before we arrived. We’d stood there for maybe ten minutes when the light changed. The Wyona flows from the east, so at its far end there was a conflagration of pink and orange, piercing through the hundred mile tangle of trees. While we watched, the moon hove above the horizon, blood red, and then flamingo, then orange, then rising shell-pink until it reigned in snow whiteness in the middle of the sky. It was a half moon only, but it drowned the darkness in a flood of light. It hit the top of the Falls and turned it into a fountain of pearl. Vince and Glen embraced. Tilden and I embraced, and then we made the rounds until everybody had been embraced, singly and communally.
Tilden said the fourth thing that had been said, “This is the best night ever.”
We assumed it was past midnight and another year. It was getting cold, and my toes were a little numb. We turned back. We gathered the candles from the tree, and dumped snow in the candle-bags, meaning to come for them in the morning. We took a different way, for Glen had brought his car so we wouldn’t have to walk back, though maybe, considering it all, we should have. The moon would then have come to the middle of the sky, and turned the Falls from top to bottom into a pillar of diamond. We knew. We didn’t have to see. The same moon lit up the parking lot with blue clarity. There was Glen’s car all right, but another one beside it, one with its motor running. A cloud of steam came from the exhaust. When we entered the open space the doors of the car opened.
Vince said, “Fuck.”
There in the dome light stood Coach. Out of the back seats came a couple of the Varsity guys, looking sleepy and confused, but ready to do whatever Coach demanded. Innocent Tilden said, “Happy New Year, Coach—” and began walking toward him. Coach passed him on the pavement without a sign. He was making for Vince. I had absolutely no idea of what to do. I prayed to Jesus he had come there to wish his son Happy New Year. Unmistakable in the moonlight, Coach shot out his arm and said, “What the hell is this?” I couldn’t see what he meant, what he was holding in his hand. Neither could Vince, or at least Vince made no reply. Frustrated by the night, Coach wadded up the thing in his hand and threw it so it hit Vince in the face. It was paper. It fell to the frost at their feet.
“Boy, I asked you a question. What the fucking hell—”
“I’m not going with you, Dad. I’m going with Glen.”
“Like fuck,” Coach said. He motioned behind him without turning around. The bruisers from the back seat ran forward. Vince turned to run, but Coach was on him like the panther he was, dropping him to the pavement. Coach was steel and sinew, and I could hear Vince’s head crack on the ground. He stopped fighting. The other two came up and held me and Tilden off. I had no idea what was going on, so I couldn’t get the fight up in me. Besides, the capability of hitting one of our friend’s dads was not in us. Glen moved forward out of the shadows, but one of the linebackers crumpled him with one punch. Then they were gone.
I picked the wad of paper Coach had thrown off the frost and put it in my pocket. Glen drove us home. Tilden kept chattering, “What? What? What?” but Glen was silent. When I was home and emptying my pockets, I found the paper. It had dried in my pocket on the ride home, though in places it had smeared a little. I opened it and read. It was a letter from Glen to Vince:
Dear Vince,
You must have figured out it’s me putting these notes in your locker. Or, if you have more than one admirer, just don’t tell me. I will try to be content with your kisses. I will try to be content hearing you tap my window in the dead of night, opening, feeling you sink into my arms. You smell of the tree, you know, the tree you have to climb to get in my window. I like that. You know what I like better? On the gorge rim by starlight, with the Falls roaring around us and the swifts flying out at first light, you and I body to body, heart to heart. I still can’t believe that you love me. I’m trying to find the lamp I rubbed to make this wish. I wonder sometimes what would happen if your dad found out, but he’s so stupid we could do it in front of him and he wouldn’t know. Word is he does it with his players, so maybe it’s all right. I want you to know something. If we ever get separated . . . if we ever get parted, you’ll know where to find me. If you want me, come. Come find me. I will wait until you come, for I know you will come. If you want us to be a secret, we can start there, we can start again in the most secret place in all the world. I will not come back unless you come for me. I know you will come. I feel you will come. Nothing else matters.
Your Glen
We had four days before school started up after Christmas vacation. We needed every one of them to decide what to do. In the end we did nothing. Vince appeared at school with a shiner and a small bandage and shaved space on the back of his head. We sat together at the café table as if nothing had happened, talking about everything but that. We didn’t see Glen for weeks. Tilden had access to the typed-up school roll (being an office helper during first period), and reported that Glen Copland was out of town with his parents, an excused absence. When he came back we knew only because he disappeared from the absence roll. He didn’t come to us. He didn’t seek us out. He merely reappeared. I smiled to him in the hall as if he were a new kid again, and had never met. He smiled back.
I packed the Bowie knife away in the top of my closet. It looked like there would never now be an occasion to use it. I still had the wrapping paper and the bag it came in. I really hadn’t looked at everything in the bag when I opened the present—you know how kids are. Folded in there was a sheet of handwritten stationery. I think it was something Glen had dropped in to give me a little flavor of himself—he being a little hard to get at in the normal ways. In the same handwriting of the fatal note Coach threw in the parking lot was the following:
—found slender cliffbrake in a wet seam right where the river goes over. Wyona builds a roof of spray to protect it. Cool. Cool as a glacier. Three, four tiny little stalks. In a thousand miles there’ll be no other, I think. The light shows through them green on the white stone behind. Mr. Berg says it only grows in the north and that I must have misidentified something else. I ask it what it is. It tells me. Slender Cliffbrake.
Bracken.
Hart’s tongue.
Spleenwort.
Wall rue.
Slender cliffbrake.
Arden likes the flowers. They grow where it’s dry. I find him flowers and he smiles.
Rose mallow.
Corn cockle.
Evening primrose.
I wrote “club moss” down but had to scratch it, because it’s not a flower.
Climb down to the bottom. The ferns would hate it if they had ears, all that noise. Bruuuuuuuuuu—forever and forever, like a Hindu praying. Bruuuuuuuuuuu. I climb down to the bottom. I keep saying that sentence to myself, “I climb down to the bottom.” It must mean something more. I keep repeating it because I don’t get it. I’m not supposed to be here by myself. Horsetail in the quiet backwaters of the pool. I stay long enough to watch the swifts come home. I’ll be afraid in the dark climbing back up, but it’s worth it. Watch carefully. I watch carefully where they home, the zillion birds. Listen, there’s a hole in the water. Part of the cliff sticks out, and there’s a hole in the Falls under it, twice as tall as me, and no wider. Thousands and thousands all pass through. I climbed to the bottom and now I must go in. If you go careful around the rim it’s OK. Slippery, but OK. Liverworts I’ll have to come back for. Hold onto the wall with two hands. It’s not big, though, not very big. The pool will let you go around. Then I stood there. I stood at the door, smelling, listening. I whispered pretty quietly into the door in the water, “I’ve climbed to the bottom now.” I wish I hadn’t. There is someone there. There is someone in the cave under the falls.
Cut myself climbing. Kept looking back. Everyone says you shouldn’t go there by yourself. Now I know why.
I dialed six of the numbers to Glen’s phone. I set the receiver down before I dialed the seventh.