Christmas Day in the morning, when Coverly woke and romanced Betsey, was dazzling. The frost on the windowglass, shaped like shrapnel, distilled and amplified the light. Maggie came early and opened the furnace drafts and presently hot air and coal gas began to pour out of the registers. Binxey emptied his stocking and unwrapped the presents that Coverly had bought for him and they all had breakfast in the warm kitchen off a wooden table that was as slick and porous as hand soap. The kitchen was not a dark room but the power of light on the new snow outside made it seem cavernous.
Moses woke in a crushing paroxysm of anxiety, the keenest melancholy. The brilliance of light, the birth of Christ, all seemed to him like some fatuous shell game invented to dupe a fool like his brother while he saw straight through into the nothingness of things. The damage he had done to his nerves and his memory was less painful than a sense he suffered of approaching disaster, some pitiless fatality that would break him without making itself known. His hands had begun to shake and in another fifteen minutes he would begin to sweat. This was the agony of death, with the difference that he knew the way to life everlasting. It was in the bottles of bourbon Honora had left in the jelly closet. He thought of bourbon while he shaved and dressed but when he went down to the kitchen and found them sitting at the table there he saw them not as the members of his family but as cruel obstacles, standing between himself and the alpine landscapes in a bottle of sour mash. The coffee and orange juice that Maggie gave him seemed innocuous and nauseating. How could he get them out of the room? If he had only thought to buy some presents and left them under the tree, he might have been alone for a minute. “Jelly,” he exclaimed. “I want some jelly for my toast.” He went into the closet and shut the door.
Going through the dining room after breakfast Coverly saw that Maggie had set the table for twelve guests and he wondered who they would be. Honora had always had a large table at Christmas. After Thanksgiving she would begin—in public places—trains, buses and waiting rooms—to look around for those faces that bore the inexpungeable mark of loneliness and invite them to her house for Christmas dinner. Intuition and practice had made her discerning and she could single out her prey unerringly and yet, knowing as she did how the passion of loneliness runs through the lives of all men, she was oftener rebuffed than accepted by strangers who, she saw, as they turned away from her, would sooner spend their holiday in a bare room than admit to her or even to themselves that they lacked a host of friends and relations and a groaning board. Wayward pride had been her adversary, and a formidable one, but the wish to fill up her table seemed, like her love of fires and her disinterest in money, aboriginal, and she had once gone up to the railroad station waiting room on Christmas morning and corraled the strays who were warming themselves there at the coal stove.
Coverly cleared the walks after breakfast. The loud ringing of his shovel on the paving had a singular and a foolish charm, as if this rude music, this simple task, evoked the spirit of Leander in a happier role than he had seemed damned to play out in the wreckage of the old house on River Street. The blinding light on the snow seemed to ring again and again around the boundaries of the village like the vibrations of a rubbed water glass, but even that early in the day the brilliance of the light could be seen to shift, to be the lights of one of the shortest days of the year.
The Bretaignes and the Dummers came in at eleven. Maggie gave them sherry and raspberry shrub. There was such a hard and mischievous light in Moses’ eye by this time that they did not stay for long. Some time after noon Coverly was standing at a window when he saw the yellow bus he had seen on the night he returned. There was the same driver, the same passengers and the legend HUTCHINS INSTITUTE FOR THE BLIND. The bus stopped in front of the house and Coverly ran down the stairs, leaving the hall door open. “Wapshot?” the driver asked. “Yes,” said Coverly. “Well, here’s the company for your Christmas dinner,” said the driver. “They told me to pick them up at three.” “Won’t you come in?” asked Coverly. “Oh, no, thanks, no,” the driver said. “I got stomach trouble and all I want is a bowl of soup. I’ll get something in the village. Turkey and all that. It makes me sick. You’ll have to show them up the steps though. I’ll give you a hand.”
