A Christmas Tale

            A simple Wednesday morning creation of my own

            Abby didn’t have a pot to piss in and that was no lie. She lived, impoverished and alone, in a tiny cabin not one hundred yards from the edge of Mayfield. She had resided there all of her adult life. She was fifty-two, and counting. She had been married once, but her old man, Burt, drank himself silly and finally, on Christmas Eve five years before this lonely one, he had choked on his own vomit and unceremoniously met his Maker on a street outside Jack’s Bar in town. It was a relief.

Their one son, Hank, had headed out on his own when he was fifteen, two months before his pop died. He’d had enough of Burt’s belligerence and had slipped out undetected on a night so frigid that opaque ice coated the windowpanes and the wind howled relentlessly muffling his escape.

 Abby had not had the wherewithal to locate Hank and in the years that followed had heard not a word from him. It occurred to Abby that Hank had gone the way of his daddy but she quashed that thought in exchange for hope. Someday.

            Christmas Eve, 1950, blew in like so many before, cold and blustery, and as was usual, Abby sat alone gazing into the fire. “Need another log or two,” she muttered aloud. She stoked the blaze watching embers flare and bite into fresh wood. She watched mesmerized and her notions of ideal holidays gathered one on the heels of the other, storms of longing. How did I arrive at such a place? What I wouldn’t give for a holiday miracle of my own.

Though both Burt and Hank were gone, Abby thought only of Hank and she did so daily, the ever-present sense of loss perched like a bird on her shoulder. God only knows where he is now. It’s been over five years. He’s twenty now. A man. She closed her eyes envisioning him – dusty brown hair, azure eyes, lanky, and surely now as tall as young pine. So lost she became in her imaginings that she did not hear the knock at first, but then she did, the pounding insistent.

“Who on Earth could that be?” she asked aloud. “Better be somebody with a good reason for disturbing me.”

She stood slowly, walked to the wide, wooden door and pulled it to her. She peered into a dusky light at a man. He was a full foot taller than she. He stepped forward and with tender fingers touched her shoulders.

“Ma,” he murmured in a voice so familiar that it made her weak. Her heart quivered with joy. Hank.

Hank’s slightly crooked smile formed as it always had when he continued. “I’m home, Ma. Me. Hank. I’m finally home for Christmas.”