Chronologically, this tale falls between The Last of the Old Days and A Little Weather, both of which are being extensively rewritten for the new version of If Ever I Forsake Thee.
Happy and Sad Holidays is set in the last days of December, 1969 and first day of the new year and decade. Van Van den Berg and Sarah Winewood have been married a year and four months. She is three months along with her first baby. He is radically reshaping Cole County, her wedding gift to him. The cast of characters is large, lively, and at times, little short of unruly. The tale is an exercise in what Sarah calls the “human salad.”
~~~~~ ~~~~~ ~~~~~ Sarah had been astonished a year earlier by Van’s first painting, a golden bright, curiously small study of the larger lake by October afternoon sunlight, and awed to silence and tears by his second, an equally compact portrait of herself biting into an apple with Katsumi’s hand on her left shoulder, which he had done that spring. She still considered the lively dance tunes he loved inferior to the classical music she preferred, yet supposed she would have had to have been born deaf not to know he was by far the more inventive musician.
As well as she had ever been able to discern, marital happiness was icing on a cake rather than sustenance, though she liked icing as well as anyone.
Van, for his part, was having the time of his life.
He had taken stock of any number of girls and a few grown women as prospective wives. He had liked this about this one, tolerated that about another, disliked other things about yet another; in retrospect, it seemed absurdly obvious he had done no more than indulge himself in sleeping around and dancing on his merry way.
All in a seeming moment, he had been chosen by a girl he had tried and found wanting, albeit charming in her own way. He had let himself be chosen in large measure simply because Sarah had said, “I do like you ever so much, of course, Van, and surely would tell you I love you if I’d any idea what it might mean; when all’s said and done, however, marriages are arrangements, are they not? ‘Alliances,’ perhaps? One’s by no means averse to bouquets and cards and dates and chocolates, all that merry silliness, though at the heart of the matter, new bluid’s needed, good stock.”
“‘Breeding stock’?” he had teased her.
“Precisely.”
Unless Sarah fell off a galloping Arabian and lost the baby and ended up in a wheelchair for life, their children would probably be intelligent, good-looking, tall or of average height, and above all, well loved. They would read books rather than watch television, make music instead of listening to radio tunes and watching ball games, study karate and shoot and hunt and fish and cook and build things, and be encouraged at every turn to let curiosity be their guide. Van wanted to build schools and find teachers good enough for his children, whereas Sarah was sure having them tutored at home would prove the sensible course, yet they were of a single mind: his haphazard and her lackluster educations were out of the question.
His dainty bride, always an impeccably dressed and groomed, incomparably gracious hostess, was also a feral woman who tore open freshly shot deer and ripped out their hearts and livers to devour raw, and wore garments of deer and bear and rabbit and otter skin she made herself. The sole surviving heiress to a fortune amounting to at least $1.5 billion loved to sleep on rustling ferns in wigwams, gathered mushrooms and medicinal herbs in the forest, danced naked around fires in snow storms. She had hired a woman in New York to shop for her and oversee each Friday’s airborne grocery delivery, yet would no sooner have paid someone to look after her horses and cattle and other livestock than have allowed him to enroll Katsumi in school in Winewood. Van had an idea Sarah thrived upon the appearance of contradiction much the same way she loved to strut and posture and pose and listen to herself traipse along the invisible line between drama and melodrama: simply because that was the way she was.
~~~~~ ~~~~~ ~~~~~ They proceeded in a loose circle most of the way around the open area without spotting recent rabbit tracks, then westward into the forest again, then northward until they relocated the stream, which they followed toward the lake. Conrad pointed out fresh tracks. His father slowed long enough to glance at them and shake his head, then pointed out more tracks of about equal density and announced they had just arrived in Bunnyville.
Conrad knocked down a rabbit, and found the snow surprisingly less deep, nearly dense enough in places to support him. It proved the largest rabbit of the day thus far: hardly the plumpest either had ever seen, yet sizeable enough to fill one of the big frying pans.
“Figure we got a three-pan, maybe ’bout a four-pan bunch’a bunnies so far. Eh?”
“Yuh,” Conrad answered.
“Prob’ly more like three, I gotta figure. Good thing she’s got ’nough fry pans, though, eh?” Andy chuckled, and they shared a low laugh.
Mary Jo Wetherell had married Andy Gallagher in June, 1955 with a single age-blackened cast iron skillet to her name, which her mother had given her as a girl of about twelve. She could boil and simmer and bake and grill as well as any woman she knew and better than plenty, yet believed things tasted better fried, preferably in her own mixture of lard, vegetable oil, and a dollop of bacon grease for flavor, ideally over a full flame. She had inherited a second skillet from her mother-in-law, a smaller, lighter thing that had promptly been relegated to the back of the basement pantry’s top shelf. Her mother had given her a second good big deep stout pan. An old woman they knew had died, and the sole surviving daughter, who had left for Wisconsin years earlier, had traded Hansa nearly all her dishes and pots and pans for a maple table Tiny had made in high school and her recipe for crumple cookies. Mary Jo had never bought a frying pan in her life, though she had traded three big jars of pickled apples for an arthritic neighbor’s big pan, which she had admired for years. People knew she was partial to cast iron frying pans, the older and deeper, the better, and gave them to her when they bought electric pans, found them at rummage sales and swapped them for her canned specialties, inherited them and tried to use them and were glad to give them to someone big enough to wrestle with them. By Christmas, 1969, Mary Jo had acquired eleven full-sized frying pans, of which the six best, (never touched with steel wool, but cleaned with coarse salt or carefully rubbed with fine sand from the stream behind the house she had grown up in,) hung from nails pounded into two boards above her stove. That noon’s Christmas dinner had taken five pans to prepare, one short of the most she had ever used at once.
Andy would have enjoyed watching her figure out how to keep six pans hot on a four-burner stove, all or all but one filled with beer-dunked, breaded sizzling rabbit. Four rabbit were enough for a meal, especially if some of the kids would just as soon have eaten hamburgers “Enna-fuckin’-way,” he told himself, “it sure’s shit don’t work for shoe polish en’t gettin’ a whole fuckin’ luckin’ tuckin’ hell of a lot God-damn’ warmer out here.”
As though in answer to a prayer, a medium-sized, nearly fully white rabbit appeared partly behind the base of a pine about 25 yards away.
~~~~~ ~~~~~ ~~~~~
Happy and Sad Holidays Size: 106 pages, 625 kilobytes
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