Your Son and Mine
Charles Ingalls had been in a foul mood all day and had exiled himself to the barn for most of it. The steel grey sky that was a sure sign of an approaching snowstorm hadn't helped. Nor had the brisk north wind that had arisen and cut through his homespun clothes like a knife as he went about his chores.
Still, it was mostly him.
It was one of those years when Christmas eve fell on a Sunday. They'd attended services that morning and the Reverend Alden had chastised him and the other farmers for bellyachin' over the last week about the sudden turn in the weather and what it meant for the crops, which were sure to be lean again this year, and about the continuing lack of money that would come as a result of it. The last year had been a hard one and it looked like the new one would be no better. He hadn't been able to put anything aside. There'd been no money to buy anything for Caroline. What they had – which wasn't much – had been used to fill the girls' Christmas stockings and even at that, the threadbare things would have hung loose on a scarecrow they were so lackin' in presents. It made him feel, well, like he couldn't provide for his family. Like he wasn't what he needed to be as a man.
Like maybe God was angry at him.
Caroline, of course, had told him that was nonsense. She'd told him in no uncertain terms that they didn't need anything but one another for Christmas and that wantin' more was – and these were her very words – like spitting in God's eye. 'Charles Ingalls,' she'd said – arms anchored firmly on her slender hips and with that 'look' on her pretty face – 'you have to trust. Next year things will be better.'
Charles snorted. It took a bit, but eventually he'd managed to talk himself into believing it. Next year the crops would thrive. Next year he'd make enough to buy his wife a fine bonnet with real silk ribbons to decorate it, and those girls of his would get two oranges each in their stockings and a piece of peppermint to boot. He'd just about managed to convince himself that the lack of money was what had been eatin' at him all week long and that, now that he'd figured that out, he'd be able to enjoy Christmas the way he was supposed to. It wasn't until he started tendin' the animals, until he looked in the stall at their milk cow and saw her feedin' her young'un, that he knew it was a lie. There would be no joy in his heart this year. Maybe not ever again. Something was missing. Some one was missing.
Freddie was missing.
Charles thrust out a hand and gripped the stall wall to steady himself. He stood for a moment, feed bucket in hand, and then turned and opened the barn door and stepped outside. As he looked up into the late afternoon sky, tears ran down his cheeks and a sob escaped him. He knew he was being ungrateful. He knew he had everything – more than a man deserved – but he didn't have the one thing he really wanted.
"Why, God?" he whispered. "Why did you send Freddie only to take him away? It would have been..." Charles voice broke along with his spirit. "It would have been better if he had never been born."
"Charles?"
Caroline's voice brought him back to himself. With a quick swipe of his coat sleeve over his eyes, the curly-haired man called out.
"I'm here. Just finishing up."
"The girls want you to play the fiddle so they can dance. It's Christmas eve, Charles, for Heaven's sake. Leave that and come inside."
"I'll be there shortly."
"Don't make it too long."
Charles sucked in air and closed his eyes.
Just long enough to move on.
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The storm had arrived.
It was just before twilight and all the animals were burrowed in or bedded down. Outside the house a thick layer of snow blanketed the land and the world had grown hushed. It was a time to stay indoors, to sit by the hearth and enjoy the roaring fire, to put down his fiddle and pick up his pipe and enjoy that final bit of last year's leaf – and to anticipate that, perhaps, under the Christmas tree there would be a small aromatic bundle that would supply the coming year.
Instead he was bundled from head to foot in wool and flannel, with one scarf tied around his neck and another tethering his hat to his head, wearing his coat and carrying his middle child's as he trudged through the snowy fields looking for his missing daughter. After supper he'd roused himself enough to play the fiddle, though his heart wasn't in it. Caroline and the girls had danced and laughed until his wife called a halt, saying she was as winded as a day-old nor'easter. Fanning herself, her cheeks red and rosy, she'd gathered up Mary and headed into the kitchen to check on tomorrow's fixin's as he'd turned toward the fire and started thinking. He remembered Laura sayin' something about checkin' on her cat. Whitey was a pretty little thing, not quite a year old. He'd had a hard time of it, comin' into the world, and though he'd made it fair enough, he'd never thrived. Caroline wasn't one for a cat in the house, so Whitey made his home in the barn with the other animals. Laura was always checkin' on him, even when he'd sternly tell her to, 'Let it be.'. His girl had been worried tonight when the snow started fallin'. 'But, Pa,' she'd said in that way she had that wasn't sassin', but wasn't listenin' either, 'there's so much snow! Whitey's the color of snow. What if one of the cows or horses doesn't see him?' He'd laughed at that as he pulled on his coat and headed for the barn.
He wasn't laughin' now.
When he'd opened the door, he'd expected Whitey to run out to greet him like he usually did. When the cat failed to appear, he went looking and found him sure enough – in the back of one of the stalls. Charles swallowed hard and blinked his eyes. The snow was in them, of course. He wasn't cryin' because of a cat. Still, he couldn't drive the image of Laura's cat – his little body broken and his white coat stained with blood – from his eyes, or the sound of the cat's death cries from his ears. He'd had to do it. He had to put the little creature out of its misery. What he hadn't realized until he had heard that other cry – the one that came from his child – was that Laura had been hiding the barn, cryin' her eyes out, and had seen what he'd done.
Just as he hadn't dreamed she would run out into the middle of a storm.
Charles Ingalls halted. With his face to the biting wind, he pulled his collar up about his cheeks and peered into the snow as he called his daughter's name and waited. And called. And waited.
Nothing.
He'd taken no time before starting out – not even enough to tell Caroline what he was doing. At a sprint, he'd raced for the house and opened the door and grabbed Laura's heavy winter coat, scarf, and knitted hat from the peg. Mary was the only one who noticed. With a wink he told his oldest that he and Laura were goin' for a little walk, and then winced as he closed the door on the lie. He told himself he had to do it. There was no time for explanations. Laura could outrun him easily with those little sprinter's legs of hers.
But that wasn't the reason.
He knew how dangerous it was, to do what he was doing; without food, with only the supplies he kept in his pocket, runnin' blind into a snowstorm. Both he and his daughter could die. Probably would die.
It might be the last Christmas gift he could give them.
A few more minutes peace.
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Charles knew Laura's usual haunts and he checked each one along the way – behind the chicken coop, by the sod house, in that nook of trees near the end of the path to town. As he did and found nothing, he grew ever more fearful, and therefore more angry, and finally simply desperate. It hadn't been all that long since a neighbor's children, walking from the barn to their house, had gotten turned around and three of the five of them had frozen to death within a stone's throw of their home. His daughter knew better. He had taught her better!
Grief was no excuse for placing herself and others in danger.
As Charles continued on, the sun set. The fallen snow, struck by its dying rays, should have moved him with its beauty. The gentle white hills gleamed like fire on a copper pot. Instead, the encroaching darkness was all he could see and it filled him with fear. Where was his child?
Could he find her before she froze?
As he trudged forward, the frightened man hugged his child's heavy winter coat to his chest. He felt ashamed that he couldn't remember what Laura had been wearing when she left the house. He'd watched her whirl and dance, but his mind had been elsewhere on his own troubles. The memory was a blur of motion – all his pretty girls spinning like colorful tops in their Christmas dresses with maybe a light shawl tossed over their shoulders. Once again, the curly-haired man was struck by the uncertainty of life. Everything could be fine – better than fine – one moment and the next you'd find death was knockin' at the door.
Charles halted again. The wind had picked up and it drove the snow into his eyes, making it hard to see. When he found Laura, the two of them were going to have to seek shelter and hunker down until it passed. There would be no making their way home through the storm. He had an idea of which direction the house lay in, but only an idea – and not enough of one that he would stake their lives on it.
"God," he breathed into his ice-encrusted scarf, "help me find her."
Then he heard it, impossibly, rising above the wind. Laura's voice.
"Pa!"
A wave of emotions crashed over Charles at the sound of it, threatening to drag him down under a tide of joy, rage, and terror. Joy that he had found her. Rage that he had had to look in the first place. And terror that he wouldn't be able to locate Laura by her voice alone. That she would slip away from him.
That she would die.
Cupping his gloved hands to his lips, he called out as loudly as he could, "Laura! Where are you?"
"Here, Pa!" her little voice answered.
Taking a step forward, he shouted again. "What can you see? Half-pint, look around! Tell me what you see!"
"It's white! Pa. It's white everywhere!"
"Half-pint, you get hold of yourself. Remember what I taught you!" How many walks had there been in the woods? How many times had he taken his older girls out at night and shown them how to make their way home by the stars? How many funny little trees and man-shaped rocks had he pointed out so they would know the way? "You gotta give me something!"
He waited. So long he feared his sweet little girl might never speak again. Then –
"I see that rock that looks like a horse!"
They rode it during the summer. All of them. Whoopin' and hollerin' and pretendin' they were cowboys. The horse-shaped cluster of rocks lay about a mile and a half from the house, on the right-hand side of the road, near the mouth of a small cave.
Closing his eyes, Charles whispered, "Thank you, Lord!" Then he called out again. "Laura, go to the horse. You stay right there. You hear me? Go to the horse and don't you move!"
Her voice came from a different place this time. A bit to his right. "I'm there, Pa! I'm at the horse!"
Now all he had to do was get there too.
"Keep talkin', Half-pint. I'll follow your voice. Keep talkin' to me!"
For a moment Laura said nothing. Then she started talkin', callin' his name at first and sayin' how she was waitin' on him to come, and then addin' how sorry she was for what she'd done and then, well...
It all came out.
"I told you, Pa. I told you...one of them cows would...step on Whitey!" She was cryin', her pain spillin' out with the tears. "How...come God let him...die, Pa? I prayed and prayed that...God'd keep him safe and...He let Whitey die! Why, Pa? Oh, why?"
He imagined he could see her standing there, lost in the snow, her tears turning to ice on her cheeks; sobs wracking her little shivering body. 'Pa will have the answer', she was tellin' herself. 'Pa will know why.'
What Laura didn't know was that there were icy tears on his cheeks too. She didn't know that he had no answers.
That he wanted to know 'why' too.
A moment later he spotted her, her little frame wearin' its fancy dress and shawl, outlined in the falling snow. His heart near stopped at the sight. Taken off-guard by the raw emotion that swept through him, Charles paused. Only for a second or two. He stared at her and she stared at him and then she asked, her voice trembling.
"Is it all right if I move now, Pa?"
Falling to his knees, Charles opened his arms wide. "Half-pint," he managed to say just as she started running. And there, in the midst of the storm, they became one in an embrace that told him he had only just been in time. Laura was shivering from head to toe. Her little lips were pale and slightly blue. Moving back, he pulled her heavy winter coat and scarf and knit hat from his kit and dressed her in them and then, pulled his own coat off and wrapped that around her too. Then he lifted her up and carried her over to the cave that lay behind the rock horse. The snowdrifts were more than a foot high now. He kicked them out of the way and, just before he ducked to enter, glanced at the sky. The moon was up. It's pale light revealed the falling snow, which showed no sign of stopping.
Gently, Charles kissed his child's forehead as he took her into the only sanctuary available to them.
It was up to God now, whether or not they survived.
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Charles awoke to a painful burning in his fingers and feet that told him he was alive. He shifted and looked down and let out a sigh of relief when he saw his daughter's chest rising and falling regularly with sleep. She was tucked up against him, still wearing his coat and her own. One little arm circled his waist and the other lay across his thigh. He'd managed to kindle a small fire before they settled in and it had helped to take the edge off the chill. It was burning low now and there was no more fuel.
Carefully, so as not to wake her, he shifted so he could look out the cave mouth. Outside the storm still raged. The wind whistled and the snow whirled maddeningly, blocking out any vision of the sky. At a guess, he would have said it was morning, but there was no way to tell for certain. As he looked at the solid white wall, tears filled Charles' eyes and pain shot through him. He wasn't injured, though he could tell there had been some frost nip. The pain he felt was for his wife and other daughters, for the fear and terror they must be feeling that would eclipse the joy of Christmas. There would be no feast this day. No joyful singing. No reading of the Christmas story. No humble prayer of thanks.
Only worry and dread.
As he sat there, wishing he had some way to let Caroline know they were alive – at least for now – Charles felt his child stir. Laura's fingers flexed and then gripped his. "Pa?" When he looked down, she added tremulously, "Are you mad at me, Pa?"
Was he? He knew he should be.
"I'm not mad, Half-pint," he said at last. "But I have to admit I am a little disappointed."
She sniffed. A tear fell, striking his leg and penetrating the homespun cloth that covered his leg. "I'm sorry, Pa. Really I am. But...Whitey..." Laura's small frame shuddered. "Why did God let Whitey die? I mean, Pa, he had to...fight so hard to live." She drew in a breath and let it out with more tears. "Why'd God have him born just so he could die?"
Charles shifted uncomfortably, his child's words coming so close to his own.
"I know it hurts, Half-pint," he replied, "but...but you have to be thankful for the time Whitey was with you. Think of good things, like all those mornings you got up and he was sleepin' at the bottom of your bed and your Ma didn't know it."
"I'd shoo him out the window," she said, her tone wistful. "I was always worried he was gonna fall when he went out that window."
Charles squeezed her hand. "Tell me about Whitey," he said. "Tell me how come you loved him so much."
Like children do, Laura took him seriously. She thought long and hard before answering. "Well, sir, he made me happy." She beamed with the memory. "And he sure was about the prettiest cat I ever seen, all white like snow..." Laura stopped abruptly. He felt a tremor run through her. When she spoke again, her words seemed small as she was. "All I can see now is what that ol' cow did to him."
The images were there for him as well, not of Whitey, but of his son. Freddie ill. Freddie fever-bright in life and ghastly pale in death, his little body swaddled and laid low in a wooden box.
"I wish Whitey'd never been born. It ain't fair." She sniffed. "God should do somethin' about it."
Charles sucked in air like a dying man. Laura's arm tightened on his chest.
"Are you okay, Pa? You ain't sick, are you? I'm sorry, Pa, that I ran away. I'll never –"
He shook his head. For a moment it was all he could do. For the moment he couldn't speak – he'd been swept away to another time and place, to a hot, dry desert land, to the night when a brilliant star blazed high in the heavens, raining down on a baby sleeping in a manger; lighting the path for all those born into a dangerous and desperate world that cried out with everything that was in it that life wasn't fair, that there had to be something better – that somewhere, something or someone had to make it right.
And they were right.
Life wasn't fair. A man shouldn't have to sweat and slave to pull his living out of the ground – ground that refused to yield to him, that was choked with weeds and often barren or so sodden with rain that the tiny fragile plants that promised life rotted away. A man shouldn't have to stand by as winds and hail stripped his fields bare, as sickness came and robbed him of...
A man shouldn't have to welcome his son into the world amidst shouts of hallelujah and then bury him only heartbeat later.
Like God buried His son.
"You are mad at me, ain't you, Pa?"
Charles pulled his child closer into his embrace. "No, I'm not mad, darlin'." Charles paused to collect himself before speaking again. "You know what, Half-pint?" When she shook her head, he went on. "I think you runnin' away was God's Christmas gift to me."
Her little face turned up toward him. "Huh?"
Charles loved the way Laura said that. He wondered if God loved it when he said it too.
"I've been kind of sad lately," he told her.
"We know. Ma said it was because of Freddie."
Charles snorted. So God had been talking to Caroline too. "Well, your Ma's right. You know why? You know what I was thinkin'?"
She shook her head again.
He drew a breath . "I was thinkin' it would have been better if Freddie had never been born."
"Just like me," she said, her words coming out in a whisper of disbelief.
"Yeah, just like you." They were too alike, the pair of them. Too quick to dismiss joy for sorrow.
"But you don't think that now?"
"No." Charles looked out on the new day. "You remember, Half-pint, what it is we're celebratin' today?"
"Christmas!"
"And what's Christmas?"
"When Jesus was born, silly," she answered with the common sense of a child. "Don't you know that?"
He smiled. "And what comes next?"
Laura thought a moment. "In church, you mean? Is it Easter?"
Charles nodded. "It ain't long between them, is it?"
"No, it ain't." Laura chewed her lip. "So, in a way, Jesus wasn't here any longer than Whitey or Freddie. Was he?"
It might have been thirty-three years, but to God that was less than the few months he had known his son, or the near year Laura's white cat had survived. For each there had been so much contained in that short space. For Whitey, there was the indomitable spirit they had come to know and love, the little kitten who refused to die before he lived. For Freddie, in those few months... Well, there were no words for what his son had given him.
And for Jesus...
He had given them all.
Charles took his daughter's hand in his own and held it to his heart. "Let's you and me make a pact, okay?"
Laura solemnly nodded. Her other little hand moved as she said, "Cross my heart."
"Let's you and me agree that we're gonna remember what Whitey and Freddie gave us and not...how they left us, or what time we wish we'd had with them. Let's be grateful for the time we had and remember them with smiles, not tears." He brushed a lock of hair from her eyes and smiled. "Let's you and me remember that it's not how much time you have, but what you do with it that counts."
"Jesus sure made it count, didn't he, Pa?" Laura agreed solemnly. "I bet God never wished Jesus hadn't been born, even though He knew what was ahead." She paused. "Is that why we celebrate baby Jesus bein' born at Christmas, even though we know there's a cross at the end?"
Out of the mouths of babes.
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It wasn't too long before they were found. Isaiah had come to bring the girls presents, braving the snow and the storm as he had done all those years before in Kansas. He'd set out to find them and did, just as the sun reached its zenith. The snow had relented and he found them walking hand in hand and singing praises.
When they reached home he expected a scolding, or maybe tears. Instead they were greeted with smiles and kisses. Christmas dinner was on the table and waiting as if there had never been a thought that they might not make it home.
That night as he fed the livestock, Charles paused again with the bucket in his hand and looked up at the evening sky.
"Thank you, God," he said. "Thank you for your son and mine. "