Your baby sister,
Harriett

XIII. CHRISTMAS

“Po’ little thing,” said Hager. “Po’ little thing. An’ here we ain’t got no money.”

The night before, on Saturday, Hager had bought a sack of flour, a chunk of salt pork, and some groceries. Old Dr. McDillors had called in the afternoon, and she had paid him, too.

“I reckon it would take mo’n thirty dollars to send fo’ Harriett, an’ Lawd knows we ain’t got three dollars in de house.”

Annjee lay limply back on her pillows staring out of the window at the falling snow. She had been crying.

“But never mind,” her mother went on, “I’s gwine see Mr. John Frank tomorrow an’ see can’t I borry a little mo’ money on this mortgage we’s got with him.”

So on Monday morning the old lady left her washing and went uptown to the office of the money-lender, but the clerk there said Mr. Frank had gone to Chicago and would not be back for two weeks. There was nothing the clerk could do about it, since he himself could not lend money.

That afternoon Annjee sat up in bed and wrote a long letter to Harriett, telling her of their troubles, and before she sealed it, Sandy saw his mother slip into the envelope the three one-dollar bills that she had been guarding under her pillow.

“There goes your Santa Claus,” she said to her son, “but maybe Harriett’s hungry. And you don’t want Aunt Harrie to be hungry, do you?”

“No’m,” Sandy said.

The grey days passed and Annjee was able to get up and sit beside the kitchen-stove while her mother ironed. Every afternoon Sandy went downtown to look at the shop windows, gay with Christmas things. And he would stand and stare at the Golden Flyer sleds in Edmondson’s hardware-shop. He could feel himself coasting down a long hill on one of those light, swift, red and yellow coasters, the envy of all the other boys, white and colored, who looked on.

When he went home, he described the sled minutely to Annjee and Aunt Hager and wondered aloud if that might be what he would get for Christmas. But Hager would say: “Santa Claus are just like other folks. He don’t work for nothin’!” And his mother would add weakly from her chair: “This is gonna be a slim Christmas, honey, but mama’ll see what she can do.” She knew his heart was set on a sled, and he could tell that she knew; so maybe he would get it.

One day Annjee gathered her strength together, put a woollen dress over her kimono, wrapped a heavy cloak about herself, and went out into the back yard. Sandy, from the window, watched her picking her way slowly across the frozen ground towards the outhouse. At the trash-pile near the alley fence she stopped and, stooping down, began to pull short pieces of boards and wood from the little pile of lumber that had been left there since last summer by the carpenters who had built the porch. Several times in her labor she rose and leaned weakly against the back fence for support, and once Sandy ran out to see if he could help her, but she told him irritably to get back in the house out of the weather or she would put him to bed without any supper. Then, after placing the boards that she had succeeded in unearthing in a pile by the path, she came wearily back to the kitchen, trembling with cold.