Opinion & Comment

Christmas stories should have happy endings, but not always

APPALACHIAN NOTEBOOK - Steve Oden

A sub-zero clipper blew down from the Arctic Circle, throwing the Appalachian community where I worked into a deep freeze the week of Christmas. Unusual weather, it was cold but clear and with bright sunshine. This didn’t keep the creeks and ponds from freezing, and eventually the plumbing, too.

People complained about the weather but nevertheless joined the holiday shopping frenzy. Sidewalks in town were crowded despite the cutting wind. Folks leaned into the frigid gusts, shoulders up protectively and faces turned away. It was too painful to walk, jut-jawed, into the teeth of winter.

Such cold had not been felt since a great freeze in the 1930s, when the Tennessee River turned to ice from bank-to-bank and, according to old timers, Model A’s were driven across.

Caught up in the frenetic activity of the season, no one at first noticed the wizened little man and woman who walked into town. They might have been sparrows, for all the attention that was paid to them. In fact, they were bird-shaped: thin-legged, with bodies swathed in old quilts that hung from their arms like tattered plumage. They walked humped over, with a hopping gait. The quilt edges flapped like wings.

Today, I wonder how many of us, citizens of a tight-knit community who took pride in caring for one another, saw the pair and chose not to wonder about where they came from, who they were. So busy were we with pressing holiday matters – my newspaper deadlines, shoppers buying presents, mothers cooking, families decorating, churches conducting choir practice, businessmen getting desks cleared for a blessed three-day weekend – that these visitors almost slipped from sight… and then what would have happened?

My phone at the newspaper office rang. Charlie, the caller, was an advertiser and friend. He owned the grocery store downtown, placed a full-page every week in my publication.

“Hey, you want a good Christmas story? Look out your front window,” he said.

Our plate glass fronted the courthouse square, where bare oak trees shivered in the wind. On the sere lawn, the old couple squatted. They looked forlorn in their make-shift winter wraps, like migrating birds blown off course and lost.

I grabbed a pen and reporter’s notebook, shrugged on my coat, and headed across the street. The assistant police chief beat me there. He was gently questioning the little man when I walked up.

He turned, twirled his finger next to his temple, and said, “I can’t make much sense out of what he’s saying. Let’s get them out of the cold, warmed up, and then see what the problem is.”

At the fire station, the coffee was always hot, and gas heaters hung in the truck bay glowed red to keep the tanker’s water supply from freezing. It was a gathering place for public service employees, the door always unlocked. The firemen crowded around a card table, where the little man and woman sat cradling cups. Their eyes, dark and shiny, darted with the quickness of birds, as if they were watching for a threat and ready to fly away.

“I know these people,” said the fire chief. “No way did I think they were still in these parts. It’s been years since… Well, I ought to have realized they were still out there. I feel bad, real bad.”

The bird people were brother and sister, twins born with congenital defects and mental retardation. They had spent many years in institutions after an elderly caregiver had died. Something clicked in my memory, and I ran back to the newspaper to check an old file. Yes, there they were in a decades-old, grainy, black-and-white photo, slightly younger, but with the same thin faces and bright eyes. “Twins reunited after 20 years,” stated the caption.

A happy picture, a happy story… and then we forgot them.

The elderly brother and sister lived in a forgotten shack up a hollow where there was no road. When hunters or hikers came near, they hid under the floor, frightened that discovery would mean separation and eventual re-institutionalization. They tended a hillside garden plot in the summer. The old man fished and trapped. They gathered wild fruit. They saw no doctors, drew no welfare checks. They were forgotten.

Then, the freeze hit. Because their well iced up, they couldn’t draw water; their wood pile had frozen, so there was no fuel for heat except the planking they tore from the ram-shackle walls to burn. They had removed wood as high as they could reach, we later learned.

Freezing, thirsty, and hungry, they came forth and reminded us of poverty in our midst. Needy people were always among us but often overlooked, like the sparrows in the bushes and trees. If they didn’t ask for anything, how were we to know? Our indifference as a community wasn’t intentional. No, but it shamed us all the same.

I wish this story had an unqualified happy ending. I wanted to report in the newspaper that the community pitched in to find the couple a new home, established an account in their name, and allowed them to live out their days in happiness. Many people wanted these good things to happen for them.

But, the system doesn’t work that way, however much we want it to. The bird people, who had fallen through the cracks once, disappeared into the great maw of Official Government Benevolence. We heard they were separated, and the old woman soon died.

I know one thing. In that warm fire station truck bay, grown men looked at the pair and saw in them a reflection of our failure.

“What if we’d been given a chance to help them?” wondered Charlie, the grocery store owner. “What if we’d known they were out there and could have intervened?”

It was a failure we all felt and regretted for years.

So, this Christmas, when you pass a Salvation Army bell-ringer or hear of a local coat drive, drop something in the bucket… buy a child a coat… and don’t forget that the poor are always among us in Appalachia. Sometimes, they are like the little birds, easy to miss in the hustle and bustle, drab colored and on the fringe of our happy holiday awareness.

But their bright eyes dart expectantly, even when they have no reason to think they’ve been noticed.