Merry Christmas, Anyhow



	I was just looking at that old train picture up on the wall,
the one of 97 and Luke and both his granddads, Frank and Pete. 
You want to talk about somebody who got in the way of all kinds
of best-laid plans, now, Luke's granddad Pete really did the
job.  Pete didn't mean to ruin a perfectly good disaster, scotch
a guy's chances of selling a really gruesome train-wreck song,
and scare the bejabbers out of a whole houseful of little kids. 
All he did was keep breathing when he shouldn't have--well, not
that he shouldn't have, but everybody thought-- Aw, you be the
judge.  

	First of all, the Junk, Busted and Scrap, or formally the
Jensen, Baltimore and Sandusky Railway Company, couldn't have
been a more Ohio Valley enterprise.  The money was furnished by
New York venture capitalists--men of vision and ambition, men of
grand action, and fortunately for us, men of three- bottle
lunches with brandy chasers.  The work was local, carried out
with the hope of punching a three-foot ribbon of track from Ole
Jensen's little river town south of Wheeling through the steep
Ohio hills to the flatter western ground near Little Baltimore. 

	It seemed like a forlorn hope to any but the dedicated, crazy
and pickled.  All of the equipment and most of the rail was
secondhand, all of it was old even when the work started, and
all of it was way too light for what the grand planners
intended.  Even in good years, which most weren't, there was
never enough money; any cash connected with the railroad always
wandered off before anyone could corral it.  The best grade they
could manage was a hair over two percent--and that ran most of
the forty-two miles from the river to Woodsfield.  And any
competent psychiatrist would have certified all connected with
the enterprise.  None of this deterred anyone connected with the
JB&S, least of all the good souls who actually ran the trains. 
Like bumblebees flying against all aviation wisdom, they did the
job because no one had yet managed to explain to them that what
they were doing was statistically impossible.

	Jeeminy Christmas, but it was cold that year!  It was one of
those early winters when we don't usually get much snow, but all
that December instead of our usual lukewarm gray drizzle we get
frozen gray drizzle interspersed with days so bitter cold that
the icicles ask to come inside and warm up.  Figure it must have
been the early eighteen-nineties. 

	It wasn't that Pete and Sally Schmidt weren't proud of their
kids; it was just that times were hard and the three on the
outside were old enough to start wishing for things for
Christmas. Pete the Fireman, formerly Pete the Brakie, had run
the very first trip on the JB&S.  A man got a lot of respect
working on the railroad.  If Pete and Sally could have eaten
respect, they'd have both been fat.  As it was, only Sally was,
and that for a good reason.

	Ruth was the oldest girl, almost seven.  She had got hold of a
copy of "A Visit from St. Nicholas". She was determined to nail
a sock to the chimney and come out Christmas morning to find it
full.  The heck of it was that with three and a half kids and
Sally not allowed to teach in her Delicate Condition, the five
and a half of them were living on a narrow-gauge fireman's
salary.  The railroad was having a bad case of growing pains,
and Pete and his engineer Charlie kept getting bumped off runs
that paid much.  Ruth would be lucky to come out Christmas
morning and find her sock full of more socks and underwear, let
alone sugarplums and china dolls.  Worse yet, she had her sister
Clara and their little brother Mike all talked into waiting up
to hear the reindeer on the roof and expecting half a toy store
under the tree.  Well, Pete and Mrs. Pete rousted out all their
spare change and scared up a sack of candy for each kid and a
tin truck and a couple of little paper doll sets, but it didn't
look like much of a haul.  

	Then, three days before Christmas, old man Henderson came down
with pneumonia.  That left the job open on the turn from Jensen
to Woodsfield and back.  Three extra runs!  Well!  That was
Providence working if he'd ever seen it.  It meant working from
can't see much to can't see at all, but he and Sally didn't much
care.  The three extra shifts would get them almost five dollars
more than they had expected.  Five dollars would help stock
their pantry for a good chunk of the winter--but they could
surely spare some for stuff to cram under the tree.

	On the night before Christmas Eve, drizzle came down until
about midnight, and then a cold front came through to put a nice
high polish on things.  In the small hours of Christmas Eve when
Pete and Charlie the engineer stepped out on the front porch of
their double house they both did a pratfall that would have put
Laurel and Hardy to shame.  They made faces at each other and
walked the three-quarters of a mile down to the shed to see if
Number Five was as cold as they were.  

	Now this is where Pete ran afoul of Victorian melodrama and
everything.  He should have had the sense to tell Charlie he had
a funny feeling about the run, or better still, should have told
Charlie to take care of his own dear sweetheart for fear that he
would never again clasp her in his loving arms.  What Pete
actually said was-- well, you can about figure what a man
working sixteen-hour days in five- degree weather might say when
he has to get up and go outside at four o'clock on a windy
morning, let alone when he falls on his hind end the first step
out the door, so we'll just skip that part.  Charlie walked
around the engine and tried to oil up all the sticky parts the
frostbitten hostlers might have missed while Pete tried to thaw
out the fire.  The brakeman and conductor stumbled up and they
all did their morning work pretty much in silence, stomping
their feet to keep warm.  They went into the shed for about
three cups of strong coffee apiece to stay awake and warm while
the hostlers tended to the engine.  A handful of half-awake
passengers staggered aboard and the conductor saw to loading up
the empty milk cans they would drop off along the way.  They
were due out at a quarter to seven, traveling in the winter
dark.  Durn if Pete didn't miss his chance again; he didn't ask
Charlie to give his watch to little Mike, or tell him about a
strange dream he'd had about his own funeral, or anything
interesting.  He did bum a chew of plug tobacco from Charlie,
but that was about all he said until they were ready to pull out
and he told Charlie they had all the steam they'd need.

	Oh, yeah, and one other thing: Pete had drawn his pay the
morning before, so while they waited in Woodsfield he'd hit the
stores and bought some little stuff Sally and the kids might
like.  He had put it in a gunny sack and stashed it in the
engine house overnight so none of the little heathens would find
it.  Since it was Christmas Eve, he was carrying the bag and had
hung it up out of the way.

	About this time, if that train-wreck song had ever sold like
Willie Nixon thought it would, Pete would have been thinking
about the Comforts of Home and the Dangers of his Work.  He was
thinking about home, all right--mainly because he was tired and
cold, it was Christmas Eve, and he was looking at another long,
long run.  First they had to get from Jensen all the way out to
Woodsfield, wait an hour or so there and ride back.  By the end
of the day he'd have gone a hundred hilly miles, shoveling coal
all the way, running from before dawn to after dusk.  After
that, sleeping in a lumpy featherbed with his wife's cold feet
up against his kidneys would have been a relief.  The rails were
slick and the sand was lumpy.  The coal in the tender kept
thawing just enough to stick and freeze again.  Pete got sweaty
when he shoveled and froze when he didn't.  The side of him
toward the firebox roasted and his backside turned a pretty
shade of blue.  He understood how old man Henderson got down
with pneumonia. 

	As usual, they whistled going by the house.  Pete and Charlie
figured that anybody who wasn't up by seven-thirty durn well
should be. It was funny how their senses of humor squeezed down
as the mercury did.  Sally didn't run out and wave, but Pete
thought he saw the light on in their kitchen and smoke curling
from the chimney.  That made him feel even colder.  He banged
around the fire more or less automatically, one shovel of coal
to each corner, one to the middle, letting the draft pull the
coal around for him, his foot stomping the door pedal and his
arms swinging in such a rhythm that he looked like a big wind-up
toy.  In this state, they made the run out and back in record
time, which was to say that they were almost on the advertised. 
On the way home, half asleep, broiled on the front and frozen on
the back, Pete didn't really hear Charlie yelp at the slick
rails when they came to the top of the Salt Creek trestle.  Just
after that Pete did hear Charlie yell something very loud and
foul, followed by "Jump, Pete, she's going over!"  Pete started
for the notch between the tender and the engine, but he didn't
quite make it before something whopped him on the back of the
head.  

	The Salt Creek trestle sloped down to the south and curved west
away from the river, not that we ever figured out why. The
inspectors said later that damp sand stuck and froze in the
engine's dome, and the slick rails had let Charlie slide into
the trestle way too fast.  Even when he put on the brakes --and
they knew that he tried, although they weren't working very
well--the wheels had nothing to grab.  Luckily for the few
passengers, the old link and pin couplers were so weak that the
tender broke loose from the engine and cars, leaving the coaches
to skid to a stop on the trestle.  The engine vaulted from the
trestle over a few feet of thin air and tried to make rails out
of the creek end of Bricker Road, which was frozen just hard
enough that the wagon ruts did a pretty fair job.  The tender
flew out the other way, tossed Pete into the air and pitched him
rump over tin cup into the junk on the riverbank just up from
the sandbar.



	Pete didn't remember what had happened when he came to.  He was
lying in the dark, holding the gunnysack of toys and trying to
recall why he would be sleeping on coal.  He was warm enough,
protected from the wind and freezing drizzle.  If he hadn't had
such a bruise collection he might have dozed off to sleep away
his headache.

	As it was, he stretched out on the coal and rested.  The tender
was lying three-quarters of the way into the water, so that the
sandbar didn't quite bury the free end. The scrub trees on the
sandbar hid it from sight from most angles. In the gray light of
the soggy day, the tender could have been any refuse from the
old boatyards, a piece of a wrecked steamboat from the landing,
or an abandoned coal car from the old mine.  There were bits of
old cars and a couple of rusting tenders from the shops up
above, too.  One more rail truck sticking out of the water
wasn't even worth looking at over there. When his headache had
let up some, Pete sat up and bumped his head lightly on the coal
and steel above him.  "The tender's upside down," he said.  	And
then, because the thump had made his head hurt again, he lay
down for another hour or so, and got in a really good relaxing
nap.



	Meanwhile, back in the outside world, Leroy the conductor and
Bob the brakie and most of the Horrified Passengers were running
for the hillside below the Salt Creek trestle. The water in the
end of Salt Creek is fairly deep in the winter, deep enough,
even in those pre-dam days, to hide a tender.  The engine was
parked, just as neatly as if Charlie had taken it in his mind to
do so, on the wagon road by the railroad shops.  Most of the
cars were still sitting on the track north of the trestle.  The
crowd assumed that since the engine had gone off to the right,
naturally the tender must have.  Poor Charlie was no help.  He
had two ribs broken and an ankle sprained when he bounced
downhill, so when the crowd pounced on him his major
contribution to all the hullabaloo was to groan while some lady
waved her smelling salts under his nose.  Every now and then, he
asked about Pete.  Nobody told him, of course.  That would have
been a Shock to his Constitution.  Neither did anybody ask him
where the tender was or even if he'd seen it go, which he had. 
When nobody said anything, poor Charlie assumed the worst and
fainted.  

	Some of the Horrified Passengers (those grim days demanded that
they be Horrified, not just scared or befuddled) had run for the
station instead of the ruins.  The roundhouse crew heard about
the wreck and somebody went flying to wake up the doctor. 
Somebody else went to get the fire department, which summons
amounted to banging on the bell on the city building as loud as
possible. The worthy adult male citizens of the town all bailed
out of their houses and came running with buckets.  The not
quite so worthy very young male citizens all went running after
their dads and big brothers to see where the fire was. The
worthy but culturally restricted women and girls tried to
pretend only mild curiosity while they made excuses to have
business in the south end of town.  When they all gathered at
the fire station, they confirmed the dreadful news: there had
been a train wreck right in town!  

	All of the railroad's previous major mishaps were always
blasted inconveniently out of sight of Jensen.  The promise of
good Victorian melodramatic gore brought everybody out.  The
cars had stayed on the tracks ("Drat!" said the onlookers,
resigned to the sight of only a couple of bodies) but the engine
had derailed and the tender was probably under five feet of
water in Salt Creek.  The engineer had been Most Dreadfully
Injured and the fireman had been flung away by the horrid force
of the crash.  Leroy the conductor, who was white as a sheet and
could have used some smelling salts himself, identified the
missing man.  Gossips flew out Salt Creek to notify the presumed
Widow Pete, who was soon prostrate with grief, and the kids, who
were confused by it all.  Before the fire department even
wandered around the engine, before the doctor even got to
Charlie's side to plaster up his ribs and look at his badly
sprained ankle, before the gossips had even left the front of
the house, Sally's two maiden sisters were already dragging the
black crepe down out of the attic and pulling down the shades.  

	That's where Willie Nixon comes in.  Willie was the chief
reporter for the only newspaper in town.  He was, to put it
mildly, a bit overzealous.  He was also fond of dramatic
headlines that newsboys could use to hawk papers--for instance,
a couple of years earlier he had come up with Dreadful Calamity
in Johnstown!  Thousands Dead!  Entire City Devastated!  Mothers
Bereft of Children!  Fathers Anguish Over Loss of Whole
Families!  Homeless Maidens Mourn All Kin!  Wreckage To Arrive
Here Tuesday!  Read All About It!  Like most newspapermen,
Willie fancied himself quite a writer, and worse yet, a poet. 
He dabbled in music (about the way a duck dabbled in a muddy
pond, said Pete later) and was as fond of grim songs about
tragedies as any other respectable turn of the century soul. 
Willie had even sold a gruesome little ditty about a dying
child.  The editor bought it but commented on its rank
sentimentality, which did nothing to discourage the would-be
poet. 		

	The fire bell rocketed Willie out of his boardinghouse bed that
Christmas Eve afternoon.  He dashed down to the station with his
overcoat half on and heard the news.  Here was a real
heartbreaker right under his nose!  He took down the facts, or
at least what he wanted to be the facts, as he galloped toward
the wreck with the crowd of onlookers. The fire horses passed
him halfway there, which made him hope there would be a Great
Conflagration to spice up the second verse that was already
forming in his head.  He leapt aboard the fire wagon as they
thundered past and began to interview the two firemen.  Willie
was more than a little disappointed when it turned out that the
firemen who had heard about the wreck had hitched up on the
assumption that either somebody might set something on fire or
the horses might like a run to limber up and get warm.

	No matter, he thought when he saw the engine.  People were
really starting to take note now.  Little boys were walking the
ruts the engine had made. Stretcher bearers were carrying
Charlie gently up the hillside.  Men with long poles were poking
the water at the end of the creek.  Willie stood aside for a
moment, flipped a page in his notebook, and began to write:

	Lo, on that frosty morning's dawn

	When first he stepped out of his house

	He knew not that he'd soon be gone

	His last kiss for his sleeping spouse...

	Willie figured he could fill in the required stuff about how
Pete had premonitions and all later.  Right now he wanted to get
to the good disgusting gore.

	But lo! the tender jumped the track!

	The cinders flew, the smoke-pall rolled!

	And then with an almighty crack

	The brave soul plunged into the cold

	"Oh! sweetheart!" was his dying cry

	"Ah, darling!" as he gave his all

	"To see you once before I die--"

	His words were stolen by the fall

	And lonely hours the searchers sought

	His corpse within the frosty deep

	Mayhap he knew, as all we ought

	To speak to God before we sleep...

	It was pure piano-roll corn, and Willie knew it.  He also knew
that it would sell.  He finished the poem in a matter of twenty
minutes and hurried back to the station, writing his note while
he went. The telegraph operator had been busy slinging the
lightning about the wreck to the folks on duty in New York, all
of whom were appropriately aghast.  Word of Pete's demise was
already flying to the board and the major stockholders, who
generally came up with a wreath or a fruit basket or some other
token of regret when one of their trains got loose and mashed an
employee.  Luckily, the operator had to wait for answers, so he
had time to get Willie's work through to the same editor who had
been suckered by his previous smash hit The Mourning Mother. 
Within half an hour, while Willie was watching the press gang
hammer out the extra, a panting boy ran up the steps with a
yellow Western Union sheet in his grimy red mitten.  Willie
glanced at it and felt so good that he tipped the kid a whole
quarter:

	WILL BUY LYRICS! STOP ALREADY HAVE MUSIC PRINTING SOON POST
HOLIDAY STOP

	Heart, thought Willie, don't stop!  But there was more:

	PITIFUL! WIRING FUNDS FOR WIDOW STOP SEND STORY NYTIMES STOP 

  	Whoa!  Not only was he about to be a rich man, but the New
York Times was about to pick up the greatest scoop of his life. 
He was going to hit the big time, kiss Jensen goodbye, grow his
hair long, and spend his days wandering Europe looking sensitive
and poetic and just faintly troubled enough that any number of
rich women might want to cheer him up.

	Sure enough, when he checked back with the telegrapher, an
order for twenty dollars had already gone to Jensen National
Bank for the "Fireman's Widow Fund". Twenty bucks!  Imagine
that!  Willie couldn't believe it.  Fame, fortune and the whole
ball of wax, all dropped in his lap because of one narrow-gauge
engine that couldn't stay on the rails.	



	Pete woke up from his rest feeling considerably better.  He was
still nicely warm (later he would find that he had been lying
over a branch of the spoil bank from the old riverside mine that
was in a more or less permanent state of slow spontaneous
combustion), and if his bruises were making him a little stiff
he couldn't really complain.  He found his shovel-- apparently
he hadn't let go of it when he bailed off the back of the
engine--and began to grub away at the soft dirt so that he could
climb out without bending anything too much.  That took him a
while, and by and by he began to wonder why in heck nobody was
looking for him.  He tried hollering, but the racket inside the
metal tender made his head hurt, so he quit.  He grubbed a
little and rested a little, and by and by he made a hole big
enough to squeeze through.  He picked up the bag of gifts and
stuffed it into his coat, cussed his way through the mud and
started up the empty bank.  It was very strange that nobody was
looking for him.  He started having strange fears that he had
been asleep right through the Second Coming, just like that man
in the magic-lantern slide show at the revival last summer. 
Maybe the engine had blown up and wiped out that end of Jensen,
though he really didn't see how he wasn't decorating the
landscape himself if that were so.  Maybe...what?  He didn't
want to think, because that made his head thump too, so he
concentrated on  climbing the bank.  Someone was setting up a
camera, but Pete knew he was too muddy to be seen in a picture,
so he slogged around behind the back shop where Charlie had
parked the engine.  Funny, there were no tracks, just ruts in
the frozen road.  Stranger and stranger, this day went.  Good
land, it was dark already.  The cloudy nasty sleety skies were
about to open up again.  He sighed and decided that he'd cut
across the hillside to get home.



	The railroad board had been meeting.  That the board met at all
in its New York rooms would have been remarkable, let alone on a
Christmas Eve.  Generally, the board let the managers of its
many small and far-flung shortline investments take care of
things, stepping in only when somebody got his arm caught in the
till above the shoulder.  This day they had decided to meet
under cover of a board session to share a few bottles of brandy,
a large rum-drenched fruitcake, and an afternoon with a French
chanteuse whose style of non-musical entertainment is best left
to your imagination.  In the midst of all the hilarity, somebody
brought in word of the Terrible and Tragic Accident.

	"Thash dreadful," hiccuped the chairman of the board as he
juggled his brandy snifter and the entertainer.  "Oughta pass
the hat fer poor sumbish's wife an' kids."

	Somebody else found a hat to pass.  It was the chanteuse's, a
daring little grape velvet number with ostrich plumes and purple
netting.  She wasn't wearing it, or anything else for that
matter, anyway.  The burly and thoroughly pickled comptroller
lurched around the room jabbing it under fellow board members'
noses and hinting strongly that he would throw up on them if
they didn't shell out.  Between alcoholic and Christmas spirits,
the woozy group in the boardroom dug up their pocket change and
their cigar-lighting bills to fill up the gaudy little hat and
its veil as well.  The comptroller tried to count the take,
couldn't, and handed the money to the secretary with orders to
get it down to the Western Union office.  The secretary agreed
with a happy little hiccup, poured the take into his shirttail,
and politely asked the chanteuse not to put anything back on
until he returned.  The comptroller put the little purple hat on
his round bald head and minced around the room with it singing
"Bird in a Gilded Cage".  Everybody said this was the best board
meeting they'd ever had.



	"What a shocking calamity!"  Willie Nixon patted Sally's hand. 
Four or five women were fanning her even though it was anything
but warm in the house.  The kids were parked in a row on the
couch, trying to figure why they all had to wear their good
clothes when it wasn't even Sunday.  One of the maiden aunts had
tied a black bow and pinned it into young Ruthie's hair.  The
bow was bigger than her head.  Willie forced himself not to
laugh.  "Tell me, did he have any premonition of the tragedy?"

	"If Daddy's dead, are we orphans now?" Mike asked loudly.

	"No, dummy, we're just fatherless.  Mama didn't kick the bucket
yet."

	"When Daddy comes home, will we go to the church pageant?"

	"Daddy won't be coming home ever again.  He went to Heaven." 
Ruthie paused and thought that one over a minute.  "I think."

	Willie sat entranced in the dark parlor.  One of the maiden
aunts, undecided as to the propriety of any gesture in this odd
situation, brought out fruitcake, sliced it, and made a pot of
tea since it was about four o'clock.  Marvelous!  Tea and
fruitcake, little children in all their pure-hearted innocence,
the passing train moaning by slowly in the twilight...

	Actually, Sally wasn't all that bad-looking.  Her eyes were all
puffy, but he could see some promise in that face.  There was an
idea, now.  Nobody could guarantee that he'd sign on steady with
the Times, and anyhow that kind of bourgeois work would never do
for an artiste.  The maiden aunts would probably take in the
older kids.  The new one would get used to him soon enough.  And
my, but those funds in the bank might come in handy.  The last
he'd heard, the New York office had sent a wire for over two
hundred and fifty dollars!

	No, sir, Sally wasn't bad-looking at all.



	Pete was still seeing stars by and by, but at least most of
them were around the sky.  He hiked away from the road, up the
track toward home.  The evening local was just rolling down from
the station as he got to the foot of the long slow grade.  When
the train got close, he stepped aside and let it pass.  He waved
to the engineer in Number Six, who screeched as if he'd seen a
hoodoo.  Mercy, the manners of some people!  Benny was still
howling louder than the engine as Number Six flew down the grade
and rolled up across the curving trestle.  The noise made Pete's
head hurt.  He forged on toward his house.  Nobody else seemed
to be home.  Church, maybe?  Christmas Eve!  Boy, Sally would be
steamed at him for being late.  There was Reverend Fox's horse
tied out front.  Uh-oh.  He was so late that she was mad enough
to talk to the preacher about it.  He sighed and trudged ahead.



	"There's the arrangements to think of," said the Reverend Fox,
who had come over the minute he heard.  "It's a hard time to be
thinking about things like this, but it'll have to be done. 
That way when they bring in his--Was there anything Pete ever
mentioned wanting...?"  Sally was sobbing again.  Reality had
set in.  Unlike some women she had actually liked her husband,
liked lying with him at night listening to the creek and the
night noises and the children stirring around upstairs. Now he
wasn't coming home, not ever, and this had started out to be
such a good Christmas...Somebody shuffled feet on the doormat
out on the porch and started to yank open the door.  Reverend
Fox got up, looked out, said something sharply and slammed it. 
Sally wiped her eyes and looked up just as he slammed the bolt
across.  "The cheek of some fellows!"

	"Who was it, Reverend?"

	"An unpleasant drunk playing a cruel joke."  Now don't be too
hard on Reverend Fox.  He saw Pete on Sundays (well, most
Sundays, when he wasn't working.)  When Pete showed up in
church, he was wearing his suit, had his hair combed, did not
have a lump on his head and wasn't covered with half an inch of
slowly drying mud.  "You must expect this sort of thing, I know,
but it's sad to think that some people, at this of all times..."
 

	Now don't be mad at Reverend Fox for this, either, but all the
while he was stewing about the nerve of that muddy drunk at the
door he was also thinking about how kind and good-hearted Pete's
widow was and how it wasn't fair for something this awful to
happen to her and how she would need a husband to help her bring
up her children.  Reverend Fox knew how hard it could be raising
a family alone; it had been a year since his wife Lillian had
died of a heart condition.  The preacher's own heart hadn't been
in such wonderful shape ever since.  It ached and had cracks all
through it.  On top of missing Lillian like the very dickens,
Reverend Fox had his own two little boys, just two and three, to
think about, and he knew Pete's wife was a good mother.  He
didn't so much want to get married again as think that he ought
to for the boys' sake.  He was new in town, having come in after
Lillian passed on, so he didn't know where to look.  It didn't
seem right for him to look over the single women on Sunday, and
it would be months before he could think of going to the rounds
of summer church socials, even if he could find a nice woman who
didn't care that a preacher didn't make much money.  Pete's wife
would be lonely, and he...Lord knew he was lonely.  Now give him
credit here: he knew about the money, but he honestly didn't
care.  He needed a mother for his boys, she'd need a father for
her children, and this was Providential.  After all, somebody
had to protect her from the likes of Willie Nixon.



	Pete sat outside, stunned.  He had been shivering something
fierce, but the longer he sat outside the less cold he felt
somehow.  Well, so she was mad at him.  The Reverend must have
heard her side of the story and decided to bawl him out like
that and slam the door.  Well, maybe he deserved it., but by
gosh he wouldn't stand for...

	Then it dawned on him: he and Charlie had been in a train
wreck.  There was a commotion over on Charlie's side of the
house.  He got up and peered in the front window.  Charlie was
on the couch with his arm in a sling and everybody was fussing
over him because he looked plenty upset and ready to bust out
crying.  Pete thought about knocking on Charlie's door, but the
black bow on the Christmas wreath stopped him.  He turned and
looked at his own door.  The wreath on it was all black.  The
preacher, the way Benny screeched, the way Sally was all
red-eyed when he looked in--"Whoa," Pete said aloud, "they got
me dead and I'm not."

	Thinking as fast as his chilly brain could work, he decided
that Charlie might not be in any condition for shocks and that
Sally and the preacher were likely not in any mood for them
either. The sensible thing to do (he actually thought, which
shows just how hard he'd got bonked on the noggin) was to go
around back and in the cellar door, stroll in and explain things
kind of gently.  No, that wouldn't work, either.  He remembered
he'd put the inside bolt on the cellar door after the neighbor
kids had got in and snitched a bunch of his apples.  That left
the window in the kids' room, and he could only get to it if he
climbed up the stepped outside of the chimney the way he did
when he painted the eaves up there. After that he only had to
walk across the flat porch roof, which wrapped around to the
back of the house, and step right in the window.  The kids did
it all the time, no matter how often he told them not to.  It
was so simple that he couldn't believe he hadn't thought of it
before.

	He thumped around, crossed the front porch, slogged through the
mud alongside the house, and clambered up the step-like bricks. 
He could already see in the window as he began to wobble across
the porch roof.  One of the maiden aunts had the kids lined up
on the edge of their beds like inquisition victims.  Ruthie had
either sprouted an extra head or Sally's sister had tied another
awful mourning bow.  She had seen one in an old drawing and now
every time some uncle's second cousin died she started doing up
the kids like the horses on the undertaker's wagon.  Hang it, he
thought, somebody really ought to disarm Caroline before she
black-creped everything in town.  

	"No, Ruthie, Santa Claus won't be coming to this house this
year.  How heartless you are to ask such a thing with your
father lying dead in the icy waters!"

	"How do you know he's dead?"

	"Hush, child!  He's surely dead by now if he wasn't killed
right away in the wreck." 

	"Now that's enough of that," he said out loud, and he went to
the window and threw up the sash. The maiden aunt took one look
at him, let out a horrific screech and whacked him over the head
with a large hardbound copy of Pilgrim's Progress.   

	"You killed Santa Claus!" Ruthie roared, nearly beheading her
aunt with the book.  Aunt Caroline wasn't putting up with
nonsense from anybody.  She retrieved the book and held it over
her head, threatening everybody in general with it.  

	"That's not Santa Claus, child.  That's a robber!"  The way she
said "robber", with all the danger and excitement in it, you'd
have thought Carrie was glad it wasn't Santa Claus. "You've got
to remember now, children, your father's gone forever and you're
all alone!  There are men of all sorts who will take advantage
of a defenseless widow and her children!"

	Reverend Fox and Willie Nixon and Sally all came thundering up
the stairs loaded for bear with all the fireplace pokers and the
cast-iron skillet from the kitchen.  They burst in just as
Ruthie was explaining the facts of Christmas according to
Clement C. Moore:

	"...and his nose is all red and he's got a pack on his back and
his clothes are all covered with ashes and soot, and I heard him
climb up the chimney, and he probably couldn't fit, so he came
in the window of our room because we're little and Santa Claus
leaves presents for little children.  And he was smiling, I
think, when he opened the window, even though he doesn't look
very jolly now, but at least he's breathing and maybe he'd like
some milk and cookies when he wakes up."

	The maiden aunt had been reading her favorite grimly cautionary
tales to the children by the light of a single melodramatic
little candle.  Now everybody lit kerosene lamps.  Willie
dragged the dreadful perpetrator of crimes against humanity the
rest of the way into the room, and when they rolled him over
Sally screamed again and nearly fainted.  Then she dashed
forward and tried to embrace Pete, but her belly got in the way
and she fell over on top of him and cracked his head on the wall
all over again. Willie Nixon backed into one of the lamps and
set his coattail on fire and the second maiden aunt, who had
come running from over on Charlie's side of the house, helped
extinguish him before he added arson to the excitement in the
day's headlines..  

	Willie was fit to be tied.  The train-wreck song wouldn't sell
now, and maybe the Times wouldn't want the new story.  Oh, well.
 Europe might be out of the question for him, and so would
fiscal solvency, but he had to admit that Christmas had come
back to one little house in one little town.  Ruthie was a
little disappointed that the intruder wasn't Santa Claus.  The
preacher ran next door to see if the doctor was still around. 
The maiden aunts fluttered around with smelling salts and cold
cloths and warm water.  Pete stumbled downstairs and insisted
that everybody get out of his way because he wanted to wash off
some of the mud before anybody hit him over the head with
anything else.  Willie hied himself back to town on horseback to
fire off a telegram in case anybody in New York was still around
the office.  The telegrapher sent another one to the railroad
board because nobody quite knew what to do with the money in the
Fireman's Widow Fund.  Within minutes the answers came back,
first from the Times:

	PERFECT! STOP CHRISTMAS MIRACLE SELLS PAPERS! STOP GOOD WORK! 
KEEP SENDING! STOP MERRY CHRISTMAS!

	Aw, don't stop Merry Christmas, Willie thought in the first
warm half-second of his life.  That the Times still wanted him
made up for the guy not being dead.  While Willie was being
jubilant on his own account, the telegraph rattled on.  The
board was still in session, though the party was finally on the
verge of dissolving.  The messenger from downstairs had come up
as the board members were sitting around in a reflective and
mellow, or possibly merely exhausted, mood.  The president, who
had been a brasspounder for the Union Army in his day, sent the
messenger home and went down to dismiss the board's own in-house
telegrapher for the night.  He signed on and banged out his
message:

	TELL THEM TO KEEP IT OUR COMPLIMENTS MERRY CHRISTMAS TO ALL!

	It would have been tempting to add "...and to all a good
night", but it wasn't over yet.  Once Pete got warm, he had a
thumping head and ached all over, but the doctor found him
otherwise undamaged.  Just to be sure he didn't get pleurisy or
pneumonia or heebie-jeebies or any other dread disease, they all
wanted him to get into bed.  He wouldn't until he went over and
showed himself to Charlie.  When they got back in any shape to
talk, they both gave everybody a good bawling-out, then somebody
brought out a quart jar of cherry brandy for struictly medicinal
purposes.  They all got Charlie pickled enough that he didn't
cry even though he wanted to.  The doctor didn't let Pete drink
much of it because of his head, so he and the kids made hot
chocolate with some of the cocoa powder he'd brought in his bag
of goodies.  They asked him what else he had in there, but he
just grinned and told them they had to wait until morning and he
hoped that it wouldn't be too muddy.

	The news got around, the way good news does--not so fast as a
disaster, maybe, but fast enough to liven up the Christmas
pageants that night.  Reverend Fox and everyone talked it over,
and when it turned out that Pete really wasn't hurt other than
his headache he suggested that the kids go ahead and take part
in the festivities.  The church was full and the weather cleared
up and the Wise Men forgot their lines and one of the shepherds
fell asleep, so the night was a huge success.  

	It was a success in more ways than one.  Reverend Fox and his
kids were watching the bigger children's part of the pageant
from the end of the front pew when Cassie, the other maiden
aunt, hurried in late.  She took the only up-front seat that
everybody had conveniently and carefully left, which was the one
beside the preacher. Afterwards, over punch and cookies, the
little Fox boys climbed all over her. Reverend Fox asked her why
she had never married, seeing as she was an attractive young
woman who hardly ever missed a Sunday service and always helped
the church with anything anyone needed.  She allowed as how
nobody had ever asked her, and he said he couldn't for the life
of him understand why.  It took them a couple of months to get
around to proposing and till Easter Sunday to have the wedding,
but they stayed married about fifty years and six more kids
after that.  Lillian would have approved heartily. 

	All that night Willie Nixon couldn't understand why he wasn't
more disappointed, but he truly wasn't.  Just for a moment, he'd
thought he might get rich.  Hmm!  Maybe he still could.  It was
okay about the train song.  They printed wreck songs that
weren't true all the time.  He could even fix it so it came out
right.  Maybe that'd work.  And after the Christmas miracle...
maybe he could get some work with the Times after all.

	As he was looking over the telegrams, the other maiden aunt
came up behind him.  Caroline asked him why he looked like he
was stuck between great joy and ponderous sorrow.  He told her,
and she said that Poets had to suffer for Art.  He asked her,
not too politely, how she would know.  She told him that she was
a Poet and had forsaken marriage because she feared that
domesticity might damage her commitment to Art.  Willie decided
that Art was a mean old something or other and told Caroline so.
 Most Victorian highbrows would have been offended, but Caroline
roared.  She said that she too was beginning to think that
suffering for Art was a crock, and that she had been considering
going abroad with the money she earned from teaching piano
lessons.  They decided to skip the pageant, went for a walk in
the sleet, and determined that even if their funds wouldn't
permit either of them to run away to Paris alone, they could
probably get at least as far as New York if they pooled their
resources.  They did so the week after Christmas.  The Times did
hire Willie and then Caroline.  They not only went to Europe but
also managed to make the paper pay for the trip.  They
established themselves in a Left Bank apartment, forsook all
pretenses and declared to the world that they were living as man
and wife without benefit of clergy. They lived...uh ...as
happily as they wanted to ever after, though they were always
referred to in rather hushed tones and never in church.  They
never got rich or famous, but what can we say?  They lived for
Art, who wasn't such a mean old soandso after all.

	As for Pete and Sally, they had their new kid right on the
advertised.  He grew up to run a train, his son turned into a
fireman and later a conductor, and now wherever they are they
can look down on great-grandkids who crisscross the country on
steel rails.  To date, however, not one of them has been whacked
over the head with Pilgrim's Progress.  Pete passed on when he
was old, following Sally by a few short months.  We figure she
stuck her head over the edge of a cloud and reminded him that if
he didn't get a move on she was going to take up with Willie
Nixon.



(Note to the overly serious: 

The Ohio River and Western Railroad, or the Old, Rusty and
Wobbly, on which the JB&S is based, was a narrow-gauge
steam-powered operation, ceased service on Memorial Day,
1931...or not...whichever you choose to believe.  Knowing the
Valley as we do, we would rather think that the spirit of hope
and survival, determination and toughness still lives, that we
can still get our freight where it's going, sometimes even on
the advertised, and that the absence of rails is a mere
inconvenience.  Merry Christmas 1996 from Tom, Gabe and Becky
Morgan!)