“. . . I . . . .. . . . vvv . . . . . . . . . . . . yyy . . . . . . . . . . . . u . . .!”
“Oh, Dad!” I cried. “Let me say it for you!”
He stood very still and waited.
“Were you trying to say I . . . love . . . you?”
“Esssss!” he cried. And burst out, very clearly, at long last: “Oh, yes!”
“Oh, Dad,” I said, wild with miserable happiness, all gain and loss. “Oh, and Pa, dear Pa, I love you.”
We fell together. We held.
I wept.
And from some strange dry well within his terrible flesh I saw my father squeeze forth tears which trembled and flashed on his eyelids.
And the final question was thus asked and answered.
Why have you brought me here?
Why the wish, why the gifts, and why this snowing night?
Because we had had to say, before the doors were shut and sealed forever, what we never had said in life.
And now it had been said and we stood holding each other in the wilderness, father and son, son and father, the parts of the whole suddenly interchangeable with joy.
The tears turned to ice upon my cheeks.
We stood in the cold wind and falling snow for a long while until we heard the sound of the bells at twelve forty-five, and still we stood in the snowing night saying no more—no more ever need be said—until at last our hour was done.
All over the white world the clocks of one a.m. on Christmas morn, with Christ new in the fresh straw, sounded the end of that gift which had passed so briefly into and now out of our numb hands.
My father held me in his arms.
The last sound of the one-o’clock bells faded.
I felt my father step back, at ease now.
His fingers touched my cheek.
I heard him walking in the snow.
The sound of his walking faded even as the last of the crying faded within myself.
I opened my eyes only in time to see him, a hundred yards off, walking. He turned and waved, once, at me.
The snow came down in a curtain.
How brave, I thought, to go where you go now, old man, and no complaint.
I walked back into town.
I had a drink with Charles by the fire. He looked in my face and drank a silent toast to what he saw there.
Upstairs, my bed waited for me like a great fold of white snow.
The snow was falling beyond my window for a thousand miles to the north, five hundred miles to the east, two hundred miles west, a hundred miles to the south. The snow fell on everything, everywhere. It fell on two sets of footprints beyond the town: one set coming out and the other going back to be lost among the graves.
I lay on my bed of snow. I remembered my father’s face as he waved and turned and went away.
It was the face of the youngest, happiest man I had ever seen.
With that I slept, and gave up weeping.
The End
