Although I doubt that Billy Graham would ever claim me, that’s never stopped me from claiming a kinship with him. We are third cousins, and unlike some other Southern cousin claims, this one is valid. Billy and my grandfather were first cousins. My entire family — at least 150 relatives of any and all bloodlines — lays claim to Billy as well, especially if a crusade is coming to Charlotte or Atlanta, or if he’s just left the Mayo again, and especially if it’s close to Christmas. Ever since I can remember, every Christmas Eve the entire medley of great grandmothers, great grandfathers, grandmothers, mothers, brothers, aunts, uncles, and every breed of cousin from first to fifth — but minus our most famous cousin — gathers to share food and presents, and to brag about our accomplishments since we last saw each other, whether we had them or not.
Maybe it’s in secret anticipation that Cousin Billy will crash our celebration, or perhaps it’s all the recent family converts to the Highway 51 Pink Palace, but alcohol has never been part of the festivities. Unless, that is, you’re bold enough to slither out the backdoor and get into Uncle Bruce’s car, parked among the brigade of SUV’s lined up and down the dark suburban block.
If you were able to make it past the Christian sentries, then there was only one thing to do: have a swig of whatever Uncle Bruce was offering on that particular Christmas Eve. I was the only female audacious enough to join the other renegades in his car, even if it took me until I was in my 20s to muster the bravery. Though I’m now in my 40s, it still takes courage to get past the Cousin Billy bloodlines. They know and you know they know.
All the Christmas Eves when I wound up in Bruce’s car-bar always seemed to meld into one colossal Christmas as soon as the liquor rolled down my throat, while the sounds of overwrought Christmas carols whisked through cracked car windows. My short sneak across those leather seats for a contraband swig always cost me my mother’s glare when I came back inside. Then, stuffed with food, whispers of the car party, and arms packed with presents, we said our goodbyes and promised to call before the next Christmas Eve. This ritual could be counted on year after year, until the Christmas we all got sick after eating Aunt Libby’s homemade candy.
Uncle Bruce may have always served his “defy-the-religious-right-cocktails,” but that year, Aunt Libby dispersed a lethal dose of “how-to-lose-all-your-holiday-weight-in-24-hours.” Shaped innocently as Christmas bells and smiling cherubs, Libby’s candy was the first to go. The next morning, so was I.
The sounds of a typical Christmas morning were different that year: there were no sounds of paper being torn to shreds. . .only the crackling of plastic tops of Pepto-Bismol and prescription suppositories. Alone in my apartment, as I paid homage to the porcelain god, I thought about calling Cousin Billy’s hotline, and getting on any prayer list I could.
Uncle Tommy, the only doctor in the family, diagnosed and treated us one by one. Though he didn’t say so, he probably wished he had stayed on duty at the hospital, because 54 of the 55 relatives who attended the party were ill. Suspiciously, Aunt Libby was the only one who didn’t get sick. Rumor has it she felt so good on Christmas morning that she ran five miles. That was the first clue for Uncle Tommy. The second clue was that although we all had a plateful of this or that, the single commonality was that damn candy. And then the breaking news came that Libby had just gotten over the spew-it virus the day before she made that candy. . .before she transported the germ from Boston on a flight to Charlotte.
For two years, there was a silent boycott of anything she made for the Christmas Eve dinner. On the third Christmas Eve party after the tainted candy, gray hairs having been counted, and weight loss or gain innocently/intentionally mentioned, the Christmas singing cranked up again.
“Deck the Halls” had just begun when I took a swig of tequila in Bruce’s car, and passed it to another cousin in the back seat. But Bruce suddenly intercepted the hand-off, twisted the top back on, and shoved it under his seat. I thought we were finally going to get busted by one of our “Billy wanna-be” relatives after all these years. Bruce flung open the car door, got out, and slammed it shut. We watched him sprint across the lawn: his footprints shimmering in the frozen grass, his breath trailing like a comet. We began piling out of the car. By the time we reached the sidewalk, we could hear someone singing loudly, almost shouting the words to “Deck the Hall.”
It was Bruce, whose stomach was wobbling over his pants and belt buckle like Jell-O. He sang:
“Deck the toilet with loads of vomit,
fa la la la la, la la la la.
Tis the season not to eat Libby’s cooking,
fa la la la la, la la la la.
Since we know our fragile bodies,
Come instead to my car for toddies.”
And then he added one more fa la la la la, la la la la.
That last fa la la hung as heavy as our intestines had three years ago. After all, in a family where the invisible implications of being related to Billy Graham are taken seriously, anything remotely sacrilegious is, well, even more sacrilegious. Add to this the fact that Bruce did more than host the bar in the car. Every year, he managed to offend someone. One year he gave a relative a deer’s butt. Not a head mounted on a plaque, but a deer’s butt, mounted in all of its hairy glory. Another year, he painstakingly sewed a little pouch onto the front of a pair of pantyhose, and gave it to a female cousin who he thought had “balls.” So the year when he dared to interrupt the annual singing, his fa la la la la could have been his last.
But suddenly, Aunt Libby accidentally spat her soda across three feet of carpet. My mother began laughing so hard, she doubled over and wet her pants. We didn’t know what to clean first.
That was the holiday I’ll remember the most: not for the illicit liquor swigs, but because it stomped all over some pretense. I’m sure that Cousin Billy really wouldn’t care about Bruce’s contraband swigs. Why should we have to sneak year after year, when it was obvious that Bruce wanted to be part of the family in his own humorous way. . .and that humor — whether we like our family in its entirety or not — fuses us together, perhaps more than the bloodlines, or Billy.
Julie Townsend teaches at UNC-Charlotte.
At Christmas
A gift of ancient wildness
By Mary Kratt
What gift? Such a dilemma. What to give my brother who could not speak, talk, or walk? What possible Christmas gift could I find?He was bedridden and a victim of Lou Gehrig’s disease, and I, his only sibling, searched for an answer. Surely there was something that might please him. But Christmas was only a week away.
We are a small family. My parents, my brother, and I. He is seven years younger and is 36, no wife, no kids, and his job long gone, of course. He’s a librarian and the first inkling he had of his disease was his inability to cross the street outside his library in the time the WALK sign allowed. Then he had trouble going up and down stairs. And he began to drag his feet.
The doctors were hesitant, vague. They did not want to guess, nor did they wish to convey the bad news they suspected. They studied the soles of his shoes, looking for patterns of movement, for trouble. They suspected it was multiple sclerosis, or worse, Lou Gehrig’s disease, which is fatal and dire. So they would not say. What we did was watch and wait and go about life as though tomorrow were normal, as though good news were possible.
Good news is always possible. I believe this. The good news of Christmas is that hope lies in the small, the simple, the unexpected. So I proceeded to search for a gift that might please him.
A preacher I know asks the bride, then the groom, to repeat in their marriage ceremony, this vow, “I will look for ways to bring you joy.”
What could I possibly give to bring my brother joy?
He was a librarian, but his muscles had quit, all except his eye muscles, which controlled the letters of the alphabet and an electronic device that spoke for him. He was literally frozen. He could not move nor even hold a book or turn pages. He could not operate any gadget. And gadgets were his greatest pleasures. He had bought tons of gadgets for his cameras, cars, and bicycles. But we were in another market now, a new country altogether.
My normal life at home with three children took me to the Nature Museum, where I was a docent. There, while helping with programs, I met a Native American named Gerard Rancourt, an Abenaki Indian from Canada, whose stories mesmerized children sitting on the floor in front of him. And they fascinated me.
Our family has always had well-used books scattered and stacked throughout our house. Dad was a newspaper editor. Mother a high school English teacher who could spout Shakespeare at the drop of a ladle. And both families were large, loud and loquacious. Relatives dropped in constantly with jokes, gossip, and stories, often of unfortunate cousins or neighbors. And we lived in the woods where wild animals were curious, occasional visitors.
One day in December when I listened to Rancourt, the visiting storyteller at the Museum, tell a story about a bear, I wished my brother could hear him. I wished these rapt children could sit in his bedroom at my parents’ house and gasp with him in suspense and wonder as Rancourt plunged tantalizingly toward the end of a colorful tale.
I had been to stores and searched. I had asked my parents what I might buy for them to give my brother for Christmas because they were too involved with his care to consider shopping. They had no suggestions. Their life was beyond suggestion.
So the next time I was at the Museum, I asked Rancourt if he might do a most unusual thing. Unusual for southern Caucasian Americans at least. I asked if he would come to my parents’ house a few days before Christmas, and tell my brother one of his stories.
At the Museum, Rancourt was dark, slight, and unimposing until he began a story. Then he rose like the tale in our imagination and filled the room, filled the world around us. To my question, he answered, “Of course. Where do you live? When can I come?”
This was the man who was the designated storyteller for his tribe, as his father was before him. He was the man who said, “My people are the people of the bear. I tell the stories as they were told to me. My people have always hunted the bear.”
The morning he was to come, my parents were ready. They had extra chairs in my brother’s bedroom. David Huey, the black nurse who had become our dear friend, had bathed and dressed my brother Jim early. In his pale blue pajamas, Jim was raised in his adjustable bed and ready. The doorbell rang in my parents’ small ranch-style house in the woods, and I went to answer.
There he was. A simple shirt and jeans. His long, dark hair. Those piercing eyes. But also, he held a large bird with a hood over its head. It clutched Rancourt’s cloth-wrapped forearm.
“Come in,” I said, as though it were the most normal thing in the world. From then on anything was possible.
The bird was a hawk and as we entered Jim’s bedroom, David and my parents shrank visibly against the wall. A large hawk was hardly what they had expected. But Rancourt proceeded as though he had brought an apple pie or flowers. He sat down in an empty chair, took the hood from the hawk’s head and began to speak.
I wish I could remember what he said. I think it was one of the remarkable animal stories he told at the Museum, a story about a bird, a strange marvelous creature. Or maybe it was about the bear, the story about which the children always said, although they had heard it many times, “Tell it again, the story about the bear.” They always leaned intently forward as he told it.
David, my brother’s nurse, relaxed and leaned forward as he stood by the wall. My parents stood in rapt attention. Because of an injured wing, the bird had been brought to the Nature Museum to heal, Rancourt explained. The regal, alert, fierce-eyed hawk totally dominated the room. After the first few minutes, there was no question but that he belonged there, was calmly pre-eminent in this odd gathering.
And my brother. Oh, his face shone. The delight in his eyes. The clear joy, the pleasure of what he beheld. The story that unfolded in that simple, bare, suburban bedroom dispelled the sorrow that resided there. It encompassed all the possible, all the sky- soaring wideness of the most marvelous place, the most fantastic story.
We are a family who often leans more to fiction than to reality, a quality that stood us in good stead when death waited at the end of the difficult hallway. But that morning with the hawk clutching the protected arm of my friend the Indian Rancourt, we knew transcendence. We had wildness among us. We stood within an ancient tale, a truth that swept around us.
He was soon gone, that hawk. And the Abenaki Indian Rancourt. But we had known gift. My speechless brother beamed pleasure beyond description. He was to live only one Christmas more.
No other Christmas since has been quite so poignant. Nor any gift so enduring.
Mary Kratt of Charlotte has written numerous books of poetry, history and biography. This story was published in Tis The Season by Novello Festival Press.
This article appears in Dec 18-24, 2002.
