A CHRISTMAS MEMORY Truman Capote Imagine a morning in late

1、A CHRISTMAS MEMORYTruman CapoteImagine a morning in late November. A coming of winter morning more than twenty years ago. Consider the kitchen of a spreading old house in a country town. A great black stove is its main feature; but there is also a big round table and a fireplace with two rocking cha

2、irs placed in front of it. Just today the fireplace commenced its seasonal roar.A woman with shorn white hair is standing at the kitchen window. She is wearing tennis shoes and a shapeless gray sweater over a summery calico dress. She is small and sprightly, like a bantam hen; but, due to a long you

3、thful illness, her shoulders are pitifully hunched. Her face is remarkablenot unlike Lincolns, craggy like that, and tinted by sun and wind; but it is delicate too, finely boned, and her eyes are sherry-colored and timid. Oh my, she exclaims, her breath smoking the windowpane, its fruitcake weather!

4、The person to whom she is speaking is myself. I am seven; she is sixty-something, We are cousins, very distant ones, and we have lived togetherwell, as long as I can remember. Other people inhabit the house, relatives; and though they have power over us, and frequently make us cry, we are not, on th

5、e whole, too much aware of them. We are each others best friend. She calls me Buddy, in memory of a boy who was formerly her best friend. The other Buddy died in the 1880s, when she was still a child. She is still a child.I knew it before I got out of bed, she says, turning away from the window with

6、 a purposeful excitement in her eyes. The courthouse bell sounded so cold and clear. And there were no birds singing; theyve gone to warmer country, yes indeed. Oh, Buddy, stop stuffing biscuit and fetch our buggy. Help me find my hat. Weve thirty cakes to bake.Its always the same: a morning arrives

7、 in November, and my friend, as though officially inaugurating the Christmas time of year that exhilarates her imagination and fuels the blaze of her heart, announces: Its fruitcake weather! Fetch our buggy. Help me find my hat.The hat is found, a straw cartwheel corsaged with velvet roses out-of-do

8、ors has faded: it once belonged to a more fashionable relative. Together, we guide our buggy, a dilapidated baby carriage, out to the garden and into a grove of pecan trees. The buggy is mine; that is, it was bought for me when I was born. It is made of wicker, rather unraveled, and the wheels wobbl

9、e like a drunkards legs. But it is a faithful object; springtimes, we take it to the woods and fill it with flowers, herbs, wild fern for our porch pots; in the summer, we pile it with picnic paraphernalia and sugar-cane fishing poles and roll it down to the edge of a creek; it has its winter uses,

10、too: as a truck for hauling firewood from the yard to the kitchen, as a warm bed for Queenie, our tough little orange and white rat terrier who has survived distemper and two rattlesnake bites. Queenie is trotting beside it now.Three hours later we are back in the kitchen hulling a heaping buggyload

11、 of windfall pecans. Our backs hurt from gathering them: how hard they were to find (the main crop having been shaken off the trees and sold by the orchards owners, who are not us) among the concealing leaves, the frosted, deceiving grass. Caarackle! A cheery crunch, scraps of miniature thunder soun

12、d as the shells collapse and the golden mound of sweet oily ivory meat mounts in the milk-glass bowl. Queenie begs to taste, and now and again my friend sneaks her a mite, though insisting we deprive ourselves. We mustnt, Buddy. If we start, we wont stop. And theres scarcely enough as there is. For

13、thirty cakes. The kitchen is growing dark. Dusk turns the window into a mirror: our reflections mingle with the rising moon as we work by the fireside in the firelight. At last, when the moon is quite high, we toss the final hull into the fire and, with joined sighs, watch it catch flame. The buggy

14、is empty, the bowl is brimful.We eat our supper (cold biscuits, bacon, blackberry jam) and discuss tomorrow. Tomorrow the kind of work I like best begins: buying. Cherries and citron, ginger and vanilla and canned Hawaiian pine-apple, rinds and raisins and walnuts and whiskey and oh, so much flour,

15、butter, so many eggs, spices, flavorings: why, well need a pony to pull the buggy home.But before these Purchases can be made, there is the question of money. Neither of us has any. Except for skin-flint sums persons in the house occasionally provide (a dime is considered very big money); or what we

16、 earn ourselves from various activities: holding rummage sales, selling buckets of hand-picked blackberries, jars of home-made jam and apple jelly and peach preserves, rounding up flowers for funerals and weddings. Once we won seventy-ninth prize, five dollars, in a national football contest. Not th

17、at we know a fool thing about football. Its just that we enter any contest we hear about: at the moment our hopes are centered on the fifty-thousand-dollar Grand Prize being offered to name a new brand of coffee (we suggested A.M.; and, after some hesitation, for my friend thought it perhaps sacrile

18、gious, the slogan A.M.! Amen!). To tell the truth, our onlyreallyprofitable enterprise was the Fun and Freak Museum we conducted in a back-yard woodshed two summers ago. The Fun was a stereopticon with slide views of Washington and New York lent us by a relative who had been to those places (she was

19、 furious when she discovered why wed borrowed it); the Freak was a three-legged biddy chicken hatched by one of our own hens. Every body hereabouts wanted to see that biddy: we charged grown ups a nickel, kids two cents. And took in a good twenty dollars before the museum shut down due to the deceas

20、e of the main attraction.But one way and another we do each year accumulate Christmas savings, a Fruitcake Fund. These moneys we keep hidden in an ancient bead purse under a loose board under the floor under a chamber pot under my friends bed. The purse is seldom removed from this safe location exce

21、pt to make a deposit or, as happens every Saturday, a withdrawal; for on Saturdays I am allowed ten cents to go to the picture show. My friend has never been to a picture show, nor does she intend to: Id rather hear you tell the story, Buddy. That way I can imagine it more. Besides, a person my age

22、shouldnt squander their eyes. When the Lord comes, let me see him clear. In addition to never having seen a movie, she has never: eaten in a restaurant, traveled more than five miles from home, received or sent a telegram, read anything except funny papers and the Bible, worn cosmetics, cursed, wish

23、ed someone harm, told a lie on purpose, let a hungry dog go hungry. Here are a few things she has done, does do: killed with a hoe the biggest rattlesnake ever seen in this county (sixteen rattles), dip snuff (secretly), tame hummingbirds (just try it) till they balance on her finger, tell ghost sto

24、ries (we both believe in ghosts) so tingling they chill you in July, talk to herself, take walks in the rain, grow the prettiest japonicas in town, know the recipe for every sort of oldtime Indian cure, including a magical wart remover.Now, with supper finished, we retire to the room in a faraway pa

25、rt of the house where my friend sleeps in a scrap-quilt-covered iron bed painted rose pink, her favorite color. Silently, wallowing in the pleasures of conspiracy, we take the bead purse from its secret place and spill its contents on the scrap quilt. Dollar bills, tightly rolled and green as May bu

26、ds. Somber fifty-cent pieces, heavy enough to weight a dead mans eyes. Lovely dimes, the liveliest coin, the one that really jingles. Nickels and quarters, worn smooth as creek pebbles. But mostly a hateful heap of bitter-odored pennies. Last summer others in the house contracted to pay us a penny f

27、or every twenty-five flies we killed. Oh, the carnage of August: the flies that flew to heaven! Yet it was not work in which we took pride. And, as we sit counting pennies, it is as though we were back tabulating dead flies. Neither of us has a head for figures; we count slowly, lose track, start ag

28、ain. According to her calculations, we have $12.73. According to mine, exactly $13. I do hope youre wrong, Buddy. We cant mess around with thirteen. The cakes will fall. Or put somebody in the cemetery. Why, I wouldnt dream of getting out of bed on the thirteenth. This is true: she always spends thi

29、rteenths in bed. So, to be on the safe side, we subtract a penny and toss it out the window.Of the ingredients that go into our fruitcakes, whiskey is the most expensive, as well as the hardest to obtain: State laws forbid its sale. But everybody knows you can buy a bottle from Mr. Haha Jones. And t

30、he next day, having completed our more prosaic shopping, we set out for Mr. Hahas business address, a sinful (to quote public opinion) fish-fry and dancing cafe down by the river. Weve been there before, and on the same errand; but in previous years our dealings have been with Hahas wife, an iodine-

31、dark Indian woman with brassy peroxided hair and a dead-tired disposition. Actually, weve never laid eyes on her husband, though weve heard that hes an Indian too. A giant with razor scars across his cheeks. They call him Haha because hes so gloomy, a man who never laughs. As we approach his cafe (a

32、 large log cabin festooned inside and out with chains of garish-gay naked light bulbs and standing by the rivers muddy edge under the shade of river trees where moss drifts through the branches like gray mist) our steps slow down. Even Queenie stops prancing and sticks close by. People have been mur

33、dered in Hahas cafe. Cut to pieces. Hit on the head. Theres a case coming up in court next month. Naturally these goings-on happen at night when the colored lights cast crazy patterns and the Victrolah wails. In the daytime Hahas is shabby and deserted. I knock at the door, Queenie barks, my friend

34、calls: Mrs. Haha, maam? Anyone to home?Footsteps. The door opens. Our hearts overturn. Its Mr. Haha Jones himself! And heisa giant; hedoeshave scars; hedoesntsmile. No, he glowers at us through Satan-tilted eyes and demands to know: What you want with Haha?For a moment we are too paralyzed to tell.

35、Presently my friend half-finds her voice, a whispery voice at best: If you please, Mr. Haha, wed like a quart of your finest whiskey.His eyes tilt more. Would you believe it? Haha is smiling! Laughing, too. Which one of you is a drinkin man?Its for making fruitcakes, Mr. Haha. Cooking. This sobers h

36、im. He frowns. Thats no way to waste good whiskey. Nevertheless, he retreats into the shadowed cafe and seconds later appears carrying a bottle of daisy-yellow unlabeled liquor. He demonstrates its sparkle in the sunlight and says: Two dollars.We pay him with nickels and dimes and pennies. Suddenly,

37、 as he jangles the coins in his hand like a fistful of dice, his face softens. Tell you what, he proposes, pouring the money back into our bead purse, just send me one of them fruitcakes instead.Well, my friend remarks on our way home, theres a lovely man. Well put an extra cup of raisins inhiscake.

38、The black stove, stoked with coal and firewood, glows like a lighted pumpkin. Eggbeaters whirl, spoons spin round in bowls of butter and sugar, vanilla sweetens the air, ginger spices it; melting, nose-tingling odors saturate the kitchen, suffuse the house, drift out to the world on puffs of chimney

39、 smoke. In four days our work is done. Thirty-one cakes, dampened with whiskey, bask on windowsills and shelves.Who are they for?Friends. Not necessarily neighbor friends: indeed, the larger share is intended for persons weve met maybe once, perhaps not at all. People whove struck our fancy. Like Pr

40、esident Roosevelt. Like the Reverend and Mrs. J. C. Lucey, Baptist missionaries to Borneo who lectured here last winter. Or the little knife grinder who comes through town twice a year. Or Abner Packer, the driver of the six oclock bus from Mobile, who exchanges waves with us every day as he passes

41、in a dust-cloud whoosh. Or the young Wistons, a California couple whose car one afternoon broke down outside the house and who spent a pleasant hour chatting with us on the porch (young Mr. Wiston snapped our picture, the only one weve ever had taken). Is it because my friend is shy with everyoneexc

42、eptstrangers that these strangers, and merest acquaintances, seem to us our truest friends? I think yes. Also, the scrapbooks we keep of thank-yous on White House stationery, time-to-time communications from California and Borneo, the knife grinders penny post cards, make us feel connected to eventf

43、ul worlds beyond the kitchen with its view of a sky that stops.Now a nude December fig branch grates against the window. The kitchen is empty, the cakes are gone; yesterday we carted the last of them to the post office, where the cost of stamps turned our purse inside out. Were broke. That rather de

44、presses me, but my friend insists on celebratingwith two inches of whiskey left in Hahas bottle. Queenie has a spoonful in a bowl of coffee (she likes her coffee chicory-flavored and strong). The rest we divide between a pair of jelly glasses. Were both quite awed at the prospect of drinking straigh

45、t whiskey; the taste of it brings screwedup expressions and sour shudders. But by and by we begin to sing, the two of us singing different songs simultaneously. I dont know the words to mine, just:Come on along, come on along, to the dark-town strutters ball. But I can dance: thats what I mean to be

46、, a tap dancer in the movies. My dancing shadow rollicks on the walls; our voices rock the chinaware; we giggle: as if unseen hands were tickling us. Queenie rolls on her back, her paws plow the air, something like a grin stretches her black lips. Inside myself, I feel warm and sparky as those crumb

47、ling logs, carefree as the wind in the chimney. My friend waltzes round the stove, the hem of her poor calico skirt pinched between her fingers as though it were a party dress:Show me the way to go home, she sings, her tennis shoes squeaking on the floor.Show me the way to go home.Enter: two relativ

48、es. Very angry. Potent with eyes that scold, tongues that scald. Listen to what they have to say, the words tumbling together into a wrathful tune: A child of seven! whiskey on his breath! are you out of your mind? feeding a child of seven! must be loony! road to ruination! remember Cousin Kate? Unc

49、le Charlie? Uncle Charlies brother-inlaw? shame! scandal! humiliation! kneel, pray, beg the Lord!Queenie sneaks under the stove. My friend gazes at her shoes, her chin quivers, she lifts her skirt and blows her nose and runs to her room. Long after the town has gone to sleep and the house is silent

50、except for the chimings of clocks and the sputter of fading fires, she is weeping into a pillow already as wet as a widows handkerchief.Dont cry, I say, sitting at the bottom of her bed and shivering despite my flannel nightgown that smells of last winters cough syrup, Dont cry, I beg, teasing her t

51、oes, tickling her feet, youre too old for that.Its because, she hiccups, Iamtoo old. Old and funny.Not funny. Fun. More fun than anybody. Listen. If you dont stop crying youll be so tired tomorrow we cant go cut a tree.She straightens up. Queenie jumps on the bed (where Queenie is not allowed) to li

52、ck her cheeks. I know where well find real pretty trees, Buddy. And holly, too. With berries big as your eyes. Its way off in the woods. Farther than weve ever been. Papa used to bring us Christmas trees from there: carry them on his shoulder. Thats fifty years ago. Well, now: I cant wait for mornin

53、g.Morning. Frozen rime lusters the grass; the sun, round as an orange and orange as hot-weather moons, balances on the horizon, burnishes the silvered winter woods. A wild turkey calls. A renegade hog grunts in the undergrowth. Soon, by the edge of knee-deep, rapid-running water, we have to abandon

54、the buggy. Queenie wades the stream first, paddles across barking complaints at the swiftness of the current, the pneumonia-making coldness of it. We follow, holding our shoes and equipment (a hatchet, a burlap sack) above our heads. A mile more: of chastising thorns, burrs and briers that catch at

55、our clothes; of rusty pine needles brilliant with gaudy fungus and molted feathers. Here, there, a flash, a flutter, an ecstasy of shrillings remind us that not all the birds have flown south. Always, the path unwinds through lemony sun pools and pitchblack vine tunnels. Another creek to cross: a di

56、sturbed armada of speckled trout froths the water round us, and frogs the size of plates practice belly flops; beaver workmen are building a dam. On the farther shore, Queenie shakes herself and trembles. My friend shivers, too: not with cold but enthusiasm. One of her hats ragged roses sheds a peta

57、l as she lifts her head and inhales the pine-heavy air. Were almost there; can you smell it, Buddy she says, as though we were approaching an ocean.And, indeed, it is a kind of ocean. Scented acres of holiday trees, prickly-leafed holly. Red berries shiny as Chinese bells: black crows swoop upon the

58、m screaming. Having stuffed our burlap sacks with enough greenery and crimson to garland a dozen windows, we set about choosing a tree. It should be, muses my friend, twice as tall as a boy. So a boy cant steal the star. The one we pick is twice as tall as me. A brave handsome brute that survives th

59、irty hatchet strokes before it keels with a creaking rending cry. Lugging it like a kill, we commence the long trek out. Every few yards we abandon the struggle, sit down and pant. But we have the strength of triumphant huntsmen; that and the trees virile, icy perfume revive us, goad us on. Many compliments accompany our sunset return along the red clay road to town;