Go away!
Whitman, John
GO AWAY! WE'RE CELEBRATING CHRISTMAS JOHN WHITMAN hristmas eve, 1949. My wife and I, two years married and she pregnant with our first child, had come back to Ohio after a year of...
...Outside it was snowing and had been for most of the afternoon, blowing in from the north...
...We had coffee and tea, with ginger biscuits and other traditional Christmas cookies, before going up to bed...
...In the thirties, during the Depression, I remember my mother and other mothers on our street feeding men at their back doors, having them sit on the steps, making them a sandwich or stirring up a bowl of soup...
...Before going to bed we would go through the ceremony I had learned in an earlier year of opening one present each, but saving the others until after breakfast on Christmas day...
...Where had he come from...
...By dusk the battalion had moved on, further into the mountains...
...He shouldn't be out on a night like this, bothering people," my father-in-law said...
...Although I cannot speak for any of them (my wife and I through the more than four decades have never mentioned it to each other), that Christmas scene continues to haunt and perplex me...
...now I am seventy-one...
...I had collected eight or nine canteens among my platoon and took them to the point of exchange...
...When he reached the house, he came up two steps and stood beyond the full-length glass of storm door and the pane of the front door...
...A slightly stooped figure, he wore a long, buttonedup overcoat--its wide lapels reminded me of my own lately discarded Army overcoat--and a stocking cap pulled well over his ears...
...Brad, my wife's brother, had climbed a stepladder to place a shimmering gilt angel at the very top of the tree and to secure strings of lights that encircled the branches...
...She had been sent to talk to a Presbyterian minister before our marriage, but she admitted it was not a denomination with which she was familiar...
...Had he found food...
...I followed my wife into the living room and my mother-inlaw asked, "Are you all right...
...Come back to the living room...
...I checked the newspapers to see if a vagrant had been killed, but there was no answer there...
...There were four houses in half a mile, no more than ten in a mileanda-half...
...I was the last to return to the living room and I watched as the man silently turned from the door and started out again through the snow, plodding toward the far opposite corner of the yard, completing a long "V" through the drifts...
...Then, having reached a decision, he stepped back, abruptly waving his arms, and shouted: "Go away...
...Look...
...Though relaxed, all of us were politely dressed up for the evening occasion...
...The nearest house, to the south, only recently built, was three cleared lots away...
...But I never found him, in that year or in others following...
...A door closed...
...When I awoke in the morning I was still at the window, with an ache in my neck and my face chilled...
...Sometimes on Saturday, when I was not in school, I would peer at the shabby, tired men from behind the curtain of an upstairs window or hide in the garage and stare out...
...Between the two doors a large wreath of balsam branches and pine cones hung, so that it partly obscured him...
...The older participants are dead now, but the rest of us are alive...
...Between fast-moving clouds, a half-moon brightened the sky, and there were probably eight or nine inches of snow already on the ground...
...But he still lives, walking bent through the night, coming into the yard and going out again, requesting little, offering nothing, tramping that long "V" in the snow...
...The tracks had been wiped away...
...The snow had stopped, the wide expanse of the yard was clean...
...n May 1944, five-and-one-half years earlier than that remembered Christmas season, I recall clearly and in detail that in the mountains below Rome, somewhere between Fondi and Roccasecca, a mule train supporting our battalion was destroyed and we were without supplies for a day-and-a-half...
...While I waited for them to be returned, another child came up and proffered a wedge of cheese that he had under his shirt...
...Don't make a scene...
...Only a man crazy or desperate would have been wandering that stretch of highway in the blowing snow of Christmas Eve...
...It was no night to be outside...
...I held my silence and my breath, huddled embarrassed on the bedcovers, then pulled myself into the comforter and soon, having reached that extravagant assumption, must have finally drifted off...
...They had not planned to go on that Christmas day...
...My wife and I, two years married and she pregnant with our first child, had come back to Ohio after a year of graduate school at Stanford and were living for the moment in a Cleveland suburb with her family, her father and mother, an older brother and younger sister...
...I didn't answer but continued to watch the man's retreating back until he had gained the road and disappeared...
...We had already tried my family (my father and mother lived alone in a three-bedroom house in the city itself) but it hadn't worked out...
...I took with me as my prize a boxed set of records of Vivaldi's The Four Seasons.When my wife had fallen asleep in the twin bed against the inner wall of our room, which overlooked the wide lawn, I pulled the comforter loose from the foot of the bed beside the outer wall, took my pillow from the head of the bed, placed it on the windowsill, and rested there, looking out at the night and the snow and the long tracks the man had made...
...Across the snow...
...Coming back from Communion on that Christmas morning in 1949, my mind was not where it should have been...
...As if seeing a specter, my wife's father pressed his face against the glass, turning his head this way and that, trying to look beyond the wreath...
...He had drawn half of his return path to the highway, with the snow piling about his ankles with each step, when my wife called to me, "Aren't you coming...
...We were decorating the tree in the living room that Christmas Eve and carrying colorfully wrapped presents in from various upstairs closets to set beneath it...
...The air was filled with swirling silver flakes, catching light from JOHN WHITMAN is the pseudonym of a free-lance writer...
...Five minutes or more later the footsteps returned...
...he asked, and we sat side by side on the rocks as we consumed the better part of the cheese...
...All one afternoon, the canteens of dozens of soldiers were brought to the farmer and his son in the shadow of their house, and they carried them across the rocks and patiently under the enemy's view filled them from a pail lowered into the well and came back across the dangerous rocks to deliver them...
...The broad front yard was broken by a few irregularly spaced trees, a pair of old hickories, a tall, straight-boled walnut that had been spared, and several smaller trees that may have been hawthorns or hackberries...
...I unplugged the window light and placed it on the floor...
...My wife joined me and I remarked, quarrelsomely I am sure, "What did your father say...
...There were no major crossroads, only slogging and cold and the danger of being run down in the dark...
...I was twenty-seven that year...
...Then she lowered her voice and admonished: "You are still their guest...
...At just that moment the figure hesitated and turned toward the house, as if her voice had carried through the walls, but then he went on...
...He's just an old beggar," Brad said conclusively, crawling on the floor behind the tree to test the lights...
...There was a long, nervous silence among us as we fixed the last ornaments on the tree and began cleaning up...
...She had been in the church less than a year (she was baptized in California) and her conversion had never been quite accepted by her parents, nor had they easily welcomed me into their family...
...The clock ticked, the downspout bothered the clapboards, no voice called out, no footsteps came running...
...Commonweal 17 December 1993:11...
...I was struggling against sleep...
...Where had he gone...
...There would be "X" marks made in chalk on the garages and gates where a man could expect to get a meal or alternate signs where he would be refused...
...A peasant farmer and his child took it upon themselves to fill our empty canteens at a well not too far away but which was under German observation...
...Brad said suddenly from his perch above us on the ladder...
...But neither did I forget him...
...I approach each Christmas with a little sadness for him and for myself, that we came so close to meeting but never did...
...was thinking he was probably hungry," I said weakly, sitting down, "and needed a place to get out of the cold...
...In a corner of the room carols were playing on the radio...
...A replica rail fence gave slight protection from the highway...
...I was waiting to recognize that overcoat...
...The house sat far back from the highway, one of only several in a half-mile stretch cut out of woodland...
...He said, 'Can't you see we're celebrating Christmas?' and we are, as much as possible...
...But I remember that during the night, as the snow was still falling, as I passed into and out of sleep, sometime after ! had rearranged the down comforter to better cover myself, sometime after the moon had clouded over a final time, when cars no longer came by and the night had settled into infinite winter stillness, the unexplainable evening tableau began to unwind before me, as if it were a dream dissolving, when illusion and denial and wonder and disbelief and fragile piety were all at once overcome, I turned in the darkness to my wife and, alone and trembling with this revelation, said in what was meant to be a whisper but in my anxiety erupted in a loud voice, "I know who he is !" But she was soundly asleep and didn't stir nor give a reply...
...Sometime during the night someone got up, perhaps my fatherinlaw, for their room was across the hall, and went downstairs, the steps creaking and cracking as each one was met...
...Somebody's coming...
...I could not distinguish his face and realized that I could not tell, even, if he were white or "colored," as we used the term then...
...My wife and I would go to Mass in the morning...
...Can't you see we're celebrating Christmas...
...Within the house a clock ticked and I heard it strike midnight and the following half-hour mark, then one o'clock and later another half-hour, but I heard neither two nor three...
...the moon and from the windows...
...Murmuring to each other, we moved to the front door and gathered in a group behind my wife's father, who had reached the door first, peering over each other' s shoulders, and watched as the figure of a man came on through the snow from the distant northwest corner of the yard, leaving a visible track beCommonweal 17 December 1993:9hind him...
...For some time I was acutely aware of the wind and snow buffeting the downspout at the corner of the house...
...Her parents, as far as I knew, had never regularly gone to church...
...Cars occasionally passed on the high10:17 December 1993 Commonwealway, plowing up rolls of snow, their lights shining blurredly through the night...
...Had he found a bed...
...Swedish crystal heirloom ornaments, as well as less valuable paper cutouts of beasts and birds, were being carefully hung on the tree, while the windows upstairs and down on the front of the house were lit with electric candles...
...Who was he...
...Doesn't he know it's a holiday...
...His coat and hat were covered with an inch of snow...
...Formaggio...
...orty-four years ago...
Vol. 120 • December 1993 • No. 22
