And All the Bells:
A Laramie Christmas Story
—A Michigan Skylark
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"Andy, can I borrow yer geography book, that big brown one?"
It was an odd request. But I jumped to fulfill it without asking questions.
Fishing under my bed, I found my trunk, still full of papers and sundry other things from school that I hadn't unpacked yet. I pulled it out and dug around until I found the book he'd asked for—Coleman's An Historical Text-Book and Atlas of Biblical Geography. On my way out of the bunk room I grabbed a second sweater from the dresser. The wind was making up outside, and it was getting colder by the hour. The failing afternoon light augured snow and soon.
For the most part, Jess had been quiet all morning after he returned from the Bates ranch. He'd stayed seated at the dining room table working on a stirrup leather after the three of us finished lunch. His request for my book had been the first words he'd spoken since absently thanking Jonesy for a biscuit, which he hadn't touched. To fill the silence, Jonesy and I kept up a conversation about the weather and how we hoped Slim would get back from town before it turned ugly.
When I appeared with the book, Jess unbuckled his sewing palm and pushed his work aside to make room on the table for the leather-bound volume. "Thanks, pard," he said, opening it up to the table of contents. I didn't want to appear nosey, but I furtively peered over his shoulder as he ran a finger down the headings, found what he was looking for, and turned to a hand-colored map, # IV, titled "Palestine Under the Judges and Kings"
Early on in my acquaintance with him, I gathered that Jess hadn't had much formal schooling, but I knew for a fact that he could read a map as well as (probably better than) my geography teachers in St. Louis. His skill in cartography was a marriage of necessity and natural inclination. On the one hand, he'd had to follow maps (some of them badly drawn and inaccurate) as a dispatch rider for the army, and on the other hand he was just plain curious about things—polar bears, for instance, and due process of law.
"That's what I thought," he said to himself, checking the scale of miles and remeasuring a distance with his thumb. "It ain't a harbor. And no harbors handy."
Unable to contain my curiosity, I blurted out, "What ain't a harbor, Jess?"
"Isn't a harbor," Jonesy shouted from the kitchen, his hearing always acute when grammar was in play. It was several days before Christmas, and Jonesy's Christmas baking frenzy was upon him. Every surface in the kitchen lay under a mixed precipitation of sugar and flour, including the floor, which displayed a confusing snarl of tracks from the Majestic to the pie safe to the sink. He'd just come back from the chicken coop with an apron full of eggs. The kitchen-door slam reminded me that I'd promised to do that chore for him and fill the wood box after the noon meal.
"I'm getting the kindling!" I shouted back as I headed for the front door. Just as I reached for the knob, my big brother burst into the room, his arms full of brown paper parcels from Benson's General Store.
"Whoa, there General Sherman! Don't kill the quartermaster!" he said as we nearly collided with each other.
"That better be the candied ginger and my coriander," was heard from the kitchen over the clatter of a pan and the splot of an egg landing.
"Near 20-mile from the littler sea; rising 50 from the bigger one…" muttered Jess, not looking up from the map or paying Slim or me any mind. "Three mules, more likely, or donkeys, maybe. But why three for two passengers, including the lady?"
Slim looked from me to his partner, back to me, his eyes squinted quizzical.
"Lady? There's a passenger lady?" Jonesy's hearing was also acute when stage business was raised and his query brought him out of the kitchen on the double. He looked past Slim, out the still-open front door, trying to catch a glimpse of the mysterious lady traveler.
"In the song," said Jess, frowning into the map.
"Song? What song?" Slim had begun to lose his grip on the tower of packages he was holding, two of which had tumbled to the couch by the window, the third I grabbed before it hit the floor. His hold on his temper was the next to go.
"What the hell are you going on about?"
"Christmas…" The warning was issued in a hiss; Jonesy's eyebrows quirked in my direction.
Slim's uncustomary profanity tapped Jess' attention at last and he looked up at the three of us with an unfailingly winning contrition.
"I'm sorry, pard; Andy, Jonesy. I been trying to work it out, but it won't make no sense, no how."
As he spoke, he got up in one silver movement and gathered the remaining packages from Slim's cramping arms, nodding me toward the buckboard with its remaining load of packages—just starting to turn white in the nascent snow—and herding Jonesy ahead of him back toward the kitchen. Once all the provisions (and no small quantity of treats) had been safely stowed away in cupboard and bin, he resumed his explanation.
"At Bill's this mornin', when I was picking up the tree, I heard Betsy Bates and some of her chums singin' in the kitchen, one of them Christmas songs…"
"Carols," Slim interjected.
"Yeah, carols; one of them." Jess continued. "It was a right pretty one. Hadn't heard it since I was little, and 'd forgotten it til I heard it again today. Ma used to sing it to us older ones before the babies came." He paused. "Anyhow, on the way home I got to wondering about them ships."
"Ships?" I asked. Slim's look of irritation was slowly melting into simple confusion.
"I couldn't remember anything about 'em in all the stories she told us—Bethlehem stories, that is—and so I looked in Andy's book. And there wasn't any."
"Any ships?" I asked. Jonesy had begun to lean in to the conversation, bread dough and dinner momentarily displaced in the hierarchy of his priorities.
"Harbors, for ships. None nearby, anyway."
"Nearby where?" Slim, this time.
"Bethlehem. Nothing but sand there. No seas. And why three?"
"Three seas?"
"Not seas. Ships," he insisted, as if we were all being rather dense for school-taught men. "There was only two of them, the baby and the lady. What did they want with three ships? And what was she whistling? Hard on a baby, whistling. They don't cotton to it."
Light was dawning.
"'I Saw Three Ships,'" Slim said, a distant sweet memory beginning to rise up for him.
"Huh?" I said, now as solidly at sea as a square rigger.
"That's the one!" Jess said, nodding happily. "But I can't make the stories line up. What's it supposed to mean, Slim?"
"I don't know if I can say, exactly," Slim began, shucking off his boots and taking the cup of hot coffee that Jonesy had brought out for him. "It's a Christmas carol, and an old one, from England, I think. At least my Ma's folks taught it to her and they were born in Derby before they came here. You're right, the words say three ships and only mention two passengers, the Christ child and his mother, Mary."
"What happened to Joseph?" Jonesy asked, indignant, "and those wise kings, three o' them, and all them angels?"
I let his pronoun go unchallenged. "And the animals?" I asked.
Jess cocked his head toward Slim, fully confident that his friend would have the answers we were looking for.
"I don't know," Slim said again. "It really doesn't make much sense when you think about it." He fell silent then. Jess bent to put a large log on the fire, poking the coals back into a blaze. He remained learning against the mantel, his gaze distant and thoughtful.
"It's mighty pretty, just the same," he said quietly.
"Maybe it's like the poet said," Slim began, "the one who wrote about the Ancient Mariner…"
"I like that one!" I interrupted. "'He prayeth best, who loveth best/All things both great and small…'"
Jess looked up and continued: "'For the dear God who loveth us/He made and loveth all.' Yeah, Andy, I like that one, too."
"Well," Slim continued, "that poet, Coleridge, he also wrote that sometimes we have to suspend disbelief if we want to get at the deeper meaning of things."
"What's that mean, Slim, 'suspend belief'?" Jonesy asked, bringing a cup to coffee now to Jess and me and easing himself down gingerly in Jess' rocker.
"Disbelief," Slim corrected. "I think he meant that in order to understand something that's strange to us—something that doesn't make sense—we sometimes have to put our faith in the beauty of it, when facts and logic can't explain it." He trailed off, not satisfied with his answer.
He wasn't satisfied. But Jess was.
"You mean beauty, like finding a song again when you think you've lost it. Like a baby a' sailing on the sand, finding harbor in a place where there is no harbor. Like each of us making a harbor for others when they need it. Like the music you hear when someone says: 'Welcome, pardner. Welcome home.'"
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NOTES
Merry Christmas, Happy Hannukah, happy holidays to all who celebrate.
I had hoped to post this little story on Christmas Day itself, but ran out of time.
So, it comes to you on Boxing Day with my best wishes.
The carol that Slim and Jess remember their mothers singing is called I Saw Three Ships. It dates back to the 1600s in Great Britain, and its origin story is not known for certain. I myself have sung this carol for decades, but it was only this Christmas—as I was writing the story, as a matter of fact—that it occurred to me how odd it was that there were three ships and only two passengers.
Why three? Jess wonders. And so do I.
I saw three ships come sailing in
On Christmas Day, on Christmas Day
I saw three ships come sailing in
On Christmas Day in the morning.
And what was in those ships all three
On Christmas Day, on Christmas Day?
And what was in those ships all three
On Christmas Day in the morning?
Our Savior Christ and his Lady
On Christmas Day, on Christmas Day
Our Savior Christ and his Lady
On Christmas Day in the morning.
And they sailed into Bethlehem
On Christmas Day, on Christmas Day
And they sailed into Bethlehem
On Christmas Day in the morning.
And she did whistle and she did sing
On Christmas Day, on Christmas Day
And she did whistle and she did sing
On Christmas Day in the morning
And all the bells on Earth shall ring
On Christmas Day, on Christmas Day
And all the bells on Earth shall ring
On Christmas Day in the morning
And all the angels in Heaven shall sing
On Christmas Day, on Christmas Day
And all the angels in Heaven shall sing
On Christmas Day in the morning