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A Christmas to Remember

By Linda Brooks Davis

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1908
4 days until Christmas
The line of delicate stitches blurred to a crimson smudge.
Ella Evans adjusted her spectacles and squinted.
The oil lamp cast a feeble glow in a room pitched in black. Sunlight would course through the window come morning, but Ella could delay no longer. Christmas was coming.
Flipping open a cloisonné magnifying glass, Ella peered at her handwork. The outline of an embroidered E emerged, neat and straight.
Aye. She would complete her husband Andrew’s mono- gram tonight.
A child whimpered, drawing Ella’s gaze overhead where her daughters slept. Julia Jane, the youngest of six, rarely awak- ened at night. But recurring dreams plagued JJ’s five adoptive sisters, the orphaned Hanson girls, now daughters of Ella’s and Andrew’s hearts if not their loins.
“Papa!”
Ella stiffened, her hands poised midair.
’Twas Camellia. Another nightmare.
Tossing aside her stitchery, Ella sprang to her feet and
scuttled toward the stairs. Sewing notions clattered to the oak floor, but she paid them no mind. Her child needed her.
Andrew lumbered from the dark hallway, bringing Ella up short at the bottom step.
“I’ll tend Camy, Ella. Again.” A note of irritation had crept into his tone. Two straight lines furrowed the space between his eyebrows.
Ella grasped the baluster and gazed at Andrew’s bare heels as they jackhammered the treads upward and out of sight. Her eyes tracked the drumming along the upper hallway to Camellia’s room.
Andrew’s cooing, gentle as a Sunday breeze, spooled downward to Ella’s hearing. He crooned a melody, soft and low, one Ella had sung herself. In better days.
Ella skimmed her teeth along her bottom lip and cut her eyes toward the front room. Sewing projects dotted the divan and side tables. Should she return to her handwork, leaving Andrew to soothe Camellia alone? Or join them?
The latter would delay her own rest, but ...
Dressed in her flannel wrapper, Ella crept upward, careful to avoid creaky floorboards.
“Find the monster, Papa.” Camellia’s quavering entreaty tiptoed along the hallway.
“No such thing as monsters, Camy.” Andrew’s words created a finger of warmth against the night’s chill.
Ella stepped into Camellia’s open doorway and leaned against the jamb.
“It growled.”
“Only the wind, dear one.”
“But he tried to grab me.”
“The hackberry’s shadows. I’ll show you.” He circled the room with lamp in hand, reassuring his daughter of the monster’s demise.
Camellia’s creature fled in the light, in the security of her papa’s presence. She closed her eyes, and Andrew tucked the bedcovers under her chin.
Ella slipped to her daughter’s side and kissed her cheek. Straightening, she gave Andrew’s hand a firm squeeze. “I’ll be myself again. After—”
“If you continue at this pace, you won’t.”
“Won’t what?” She passed into the hallway, her voice crisp.
“Won’t make it past Christmas. You’ll collapse.” A tip of his head signaled her toward the stairwell.
Ella staggered, and Andrew steadied her. She leaned her head onto his chest, savoring the steady beat of his heart. “I’ll rest. When Christmas has passed.”
“Ella dear ...”
Ella cocked her chin.
Andrew fell silent. He tucked her hand into the crook of
his arm, and they made their way down the stairs.
Ella swept scattered odds and ends into her sewing basket and claimed her usual chair in the front room. Andrew stood in his rumpled night clothes, his figure backlit by the light of the hearth. His ebony hair sprouted from his skull like black-
ened cattails.
“We need you, Ella, not gifts.”
“The worthy woman’s lamp burns through the night, the
Good Book says.” She spread her arms wide as if to encompass the cottage.
Andrew slumped into his Morris armchair, his crystal-blue eyes deep, cerulean pools. “Which comes first, Ella—the worthy or the work?”
She humphed. “I’ll think on that after Christmas.” “Surely this can wait—”
“I must work while the girls are sleeping.”
Husband and wife stared without speaking, and the grandfather clock chipped away time.
At length Andrew stood. “It’s well past midnight. Come to bed. Please.”
“Go on, dear. I won’t be long.” Ella dismissed her husband with a wiggle of fingers. She would rest when Andrew’s monogram was complete. No time tomorrow. Chores were piling up.
His shoulders slumped, and he plodded down the hallway to the rhythm of a dirge. Their bedroom door clicked open and clacked shut.
Ella turned up the lamp and returned to her stitchery. Her needle, still strung with crimson thread, dangled from the fabric held taut in her embroidery hoop. Positioning the point for the next stitch, she paused.
She had forgotten her thimble, of all things.
Ella combed through her sewing notions. There was Mama’s tiny, old thimble. But where was her own?
She shoved her hands between cushion and chair back. Nothing.
She tugged on her bottom lip, ruminating. Mama had bor- rowed Ella’s extra thimbles for her quilting circle. Now Ella was down to one. But what had become of it?
She must complete Andrew’s shirt before Christmas, but ’twas impossible to embroider without a thimble. What a pre- dicament.
She fell to her knees and flung aside fabric scraps, groping under the fainting couch.
A golden-hued curtain of curls fell across her eyes. Sitting on her haunches, she puffed it aside, her Irish dander rising. Failing to complete Andrew’s shirt was unthinkable.
Could there be a forgotten thimble in Ella’s wedding trunk?
She scooted to the rosewood chest that doubled as a tea table—her bridal gift from Papa. At present an unfinished quilt top sprawled across the heirloom as casually as Ella and Andrew had snuggled in the porch swing.
Before they married the last day of 1905. And returned from their honeymoon a month later to find the five Hanson girls on their doorstep—motherless, fatherless, and homeless.
Were the carefree days they once knew only three years past? Surely they were five years ago. Or more.
Life had not prepared Andrew and Ella for such unrelent- ing responsibility.
Ella folded aside the quilt top. Beneath it lay pattern pieces cut from fine white linen. She had ordered the fabric from a Boston textile manufacturer who supplied Papa’s general store. Each piece was pinked along the edges: two fronts, left and right; one back, cut on the fold; a collar, snipped in duplicate; a yoke and facings. And sleeves.
She brushed a hand along the smooth fabric of one long sleeve, its cuff with under- and over-laps, and the interfacing for stiffness.
The edges of the second sleeve were as expertly trimmed, the fabric as smooth, but a third as long as its mate. This sleeve required no cuff.
The saw blades of a cotton gin had stolen Andrew’s left arm three years past. He considered the empty fabric of an unnecessary sleeve to be troublesome.
What need has a one-armed man of two long sleeves? he had insisted as he handed her a pile of shirts. Have the tailor remove the left sleeves and be done with it.
Ella would not hear of it. She would shorten and narrow the left sleeves and sew them closed so they fit like gloves. She would fashion a new shirt finished with splendid details. When Andrew, preacher at Christ Church, donned his coat the Sunday after Christmas, the shortened sleeve would lie without bunching.
She stared into the shadows, her mind aswirl with flurries of contemplation.
A few ladies of Glover County could afford a tailor and dressmaker, as could Andrew who had gained his wealth from investments in a Colorado silver mine before he and Ella met.
Was it right for Andrew’s wife to profit from miners’ labors without lifting a shovel or pickax herself?
Wasn’t the love of money the root of sundry kinds of evil, as the Good Book said? Besides, something about investing smacked of gambling.
Ella would steward faithfully her husband’s preacher salary. No unnecessary finery. Nor a grand mansion. Her hands would feed her family and maintain her home. Her girls would learn to value diligence and the fruit of labor.
Would their life have taken a different path had Andrew’s accident never happened?
Admittedly, accident hardly described the traumatic event orchestrated by Ella’s former suitor turned attacker. Andrew assumed the blame himself, insisting he was defending Ella’s honor but in his anger had been careless. He lost his footing. And a limb.
The memory pooled in Ella’s stomach.
If she had not interviewed at Worthington School for Girls where Andrew served on the board of education ... If she had stood her ground in the face of love ... remained wedded to teaching, Andrew would be a whole man today.
Yet Ella never would have known love. She would have come close—rather like playing softball with the girls, the ball grazing her mitt, barely missing her grasp. Almost but no catch.
If Ella could return to the day she met Andrew, would she? Would she settle for a teaching position and forego mar- riage and children?
Or would she love Andrew in spite of everything? Aye.
Ella gathered the cuff fabric and traced the unformed
letters of the monogram: AEO. Andrew, for Grandfather Evans.
Owen, for Andrew’s father.
Andrew Owen Evans, her dear husband and ...
Her thoughts spiraled to the hillock beyond the cottage.
To a tiny grave bearing their baby boy’s name. Andrew Owen Evans II, born and died just four months past.
A wave of sorrow and exhaustion engulfed Ella. Her once- lively spirit faltered. If only she could find some rest ...
She folded forward, laid her head on a horsehair stool cushion, and wept.
The clock struck the half hour, and she plucked a kerchief from her apron pocket and dried her tears.
An ember exploded in the fire box, startling Ella. Her pulse raced. Sparks shot beyond the hearth stones and winked away, reminding her Andrew had urged her to bed.
What a fine man, her husband. Good. Kind. Generous. And handsome beyond believing. An image of his blue-marble eyes overlaid her surroundings—sewing notions, scraps, and piecework.
Ella inhaled the aroma of yeast bread still cooling in the kitchen pie keep and released a breath between pursed lips. Returning the pattern pieces to the trunk, she snapped her sewing basket closed and snuffed the lamp wick.
Mama’s old, rusted thimble would suffice, though it would pinch.
Come morning, Ella would find the threads of her strength and set about her worthy work. Pinch or nay.

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