A Husbandman’s Christmas
/By Chuck Hill
Auburn, Alabama
My father was the husbandman, he who tilled the soil, the gentle nurse of baby goats and a papa to all small children. There was certainly magic in his touch, for his blueberries bore in the hardest of years and the blossoms of his lilies rivaled the sunrise in their beauty and their joy.
My father was 7 years old that Christmas, 87 years ago. It was the year the last red wolf in Neshoba County was hunted down, and my father said that in the early autumn, there had been a great migration of squirrels, which filled the oak trees for days on end. And he said that in October he and his brother, George, had caught a two-headed king snake, each head turning to battle the other as if it were his enemy.
In those days, there was great hardship in Mississippi, as there was throughout the land. Perhaps your parents or grandparents have told you of those times and of the Great Depression. Families and men and women wandered the countryside seeking work and shelter and food, but there was little comfort to be found.
Despite the hard times, my grandfather and grandmother provided well for their family. On their small farm on the Pearl River, there was always enough to eat, and the farmhouse was warm and cheerful. And while my father’s overalls were patched and faded, he and my Uncle George and my Aunt Catherine never went hungry.
There were catfish in the river and rabbits to be snared in the hedgerows. Figs and persimmons were sweet and plentiful. The bottomland along the river grew corn and all the vegetables they needed, so that when winter came, there was hay and silage aplenty, and their smokehouse was filled with hams, and their larder was packed with pears and potatoes and beans put by for the wintertime ahead.
Christmas was joyful in those days. Although the gifts they exchanged were never anything more than a homemade doll or kite or a stick of penny candy, it was a season for singing and games and telling stories, a time of love and music and hope for better days ahead.
Each Christmas Eve, my grandfather followed the tradition of ringing the farm bell, an invitation to any who might be out along the road. Usually, no one would come, but from time to time a wayfaring traveler would welcome the family’s warm food and their kindness and shelter.
One Christmas Eve, my grandfather rang the farm bell and waited for a few minutes in the darkness. Perhaps he looked at the silver moon rising in the cold winter sky. Perhaps he listened to the cows in the stable lowing for their calves. Perhaps he heard a great horned owl call from the tupelo trees along the river’s edge. He returned to the cozy kitchen. Places were being set and food being transferred to plates when my grandfather heard a light tapping at the door.
“Ah,” he said, “lay out another place for I believe we have a guest with us this night.”
He opened the door to find an old man wrapped in a faded green stockman’s coat of a style not seen in many years. The old man was in dreadful shape, naught but skin and bones, and each time he tried to speak, a terrible cough racked his body. My grandfather helped the man in and set him in his own place at the head of the table. Granddaddy poured him a thimbleful of whiskey, and Grandmama ladled up a warm broth and crumbled cornbread into it.
Slowly, the old man was able to take nourishment. And to everyone’s amazement, he began to eat and eat and eat. Three times, my grandmother piled his plate high with ham and sweet potatoes and turnips and butter beans and biscuits — and three times the ragged man sopped up every last drop of gravy and pot liquor. And still he managed to find room for three fat slices of my grandmother’s pound cake.
Finally, he pushed himself back from the table, and said in a funny, archaic speech: “I am much obliged to ye. Now if ye would do me the kindness of showing me to your barn and making me the loan of a comforter, I am bone-weary with a tiredness and fain would lie down.”
My father took the lantern and directed the old man to the barn, and his sister, Catherine, carried the blanket. The old man was well accustomed to barn straw, and fashioned a comfortable bed among the resident horses and cows and mules and the hounds who nuzzled round.
“God bless ye,” he said, as the two children left him there. “God bless this household and all who be in it.”
Christmas Day broke cold and clear. My father was the first one up, and headed to the barn to check on his calves and the newborn colt. But when he opened the barn door, he says, the old man was no longer there. On the straw lay the bundle of tattered clothes, shed like a snake’s skin — and when my father bent to examine them, he saw that the straw around the bed had become green and alive, like alfalfa cut fresh from a summer field. And looking around, my father saw living tracks heading from the barn and into the fields, each step a green imprint where the winter-brown grass had returned to life. A cluster of dried oak leaves that had been stepped upon was as fresh as May, and an apple branch under the footprints was filled with white blossoms. Even the stile over the fence had leaves bursting from its dry, cracked slats.
The writer’s illustration of the Green Man, a design that’s been around since the year 400 and has been been incorporated into European church architecture since the 13th century.
There was no other sign of the old man, but far across the fields, my father said, he saw a young boy, a stranger in a green cap and a shining emerald suit, running with a herd of whitetail deer. And my father heard a peal of laughter, like a ringing silver bell, as the boy and the deer disappeared into the forest along the river.
Now, on Christmas Eve, we in our family make it a habit to leave on the porch light and set an extra place at our dinner table, for the lad in green will have become an old man again. Be ready, for I think that this is the year that he returns. And he will have a great appetite — for his is a terrible, consuming hunger. But we have a rich bounty to share.