This Story Originally Appeared in Two
Parts
"Hey mom, when are you going to the store? I
need a big candy cane."
"What’s a big candy cane?"
"It’s just a candy cane. Only it’s…big. It’s
like this big."
He held his hands in front of him, palms inward
and about 12 inches apart.
"Also it’s kind of big around too. Fatter."
"What do you need a candy cane for?"
"Just…people have them at school. It’s a present
for someone."
His mother looked interested. "Oh, for whom?"
He looked away and mumbled. "Just friends. You
don’t know them.”
"Well, I’m going to the drugstore later. You can
go with me, and we’ll see if they have them there."
"Cool."
She smiled and kept her eyes on the pot she was
wiping dry. "It’s very cute when you say cool, you know."
He exhaled loudly and rolled his eyes as he
slouched off toward his room.
The drugstore did have the big candy canes.
They were on the aisle that normally held school supplies but was being used for
Christmas decorations at this time of year.
Foy leaned forward and peered into a box on a
shelf. It was about as high as his chin. There they were, the big candy canes
he’d been seeing all week at school. Lots of the other 7th graders
were giving them to their girlfriends or boyfriends. It seemed like everyone who
was cool had a big candy cane this year. He was tempted to buy one for himself
so that he could carry it around, but he was afraid someone might ask who gave
it to him.
He selected one from the box and looked it over
carefully to make sure the cellophane wasn’t torn or the cane broken. Satisfied, he took it to the counter. The
cashier, a high school girl, popped her bubble gum and said, “Thirty seven
cents.”
He shoved his hand into the front pocket of his
cool jeans, the ones made of real denim. He had talked his mother into washing
them eight or nine times before he wore them so they would be properly faded. He
pulled out a handful of coins along with some lint, a marble, and a Bazooka Joe
bubble gum wrapper. With his head bent carefully over his full hand, he selected
one quarter, two nickels, and two pennies. The cashier hit a couple of buttons
on the register, then put his candy cane into a paper sack. After that he sat by
the door, waiting for his mother and thinking about Emma.
It had been more than a year since he was
plucked from his idyllic elementary school life with its marbles, playgrounds,
and baseball and dropped into the strange and unforgiving world of junior high.
His parents moved to Houston the summer before he began sixth grade because his
father took a job as the pastor of one of the larger Baptist churches in town.
A week after they arrived, his parents sent him
off to the church’s summer camp. They said it would be a good way for him to
make friends. That Monday morning he boarded one of the middle school buses. A
lot of the kids on the bus were listening to music on small radios, and some of
the boys were even sitting next to girls. This immediately interested him but
was too frightening to seriously consider.
Foy sat in the safest seat he could find, which
was the front seat next to an adult, a place where no other kid wanted to sit.
The drive was eternally long, or at least it seemed to be. He had nothing to do
and no one to talk to.
Several hours into the trip, a note was passed
up from the back of the bus. It was obviously from a girl. It was written in
purple ink, and there was a flower sprouting from the tail of the y. It said,
“Are you the new pastor’s son?” There was a yes and a no at the bottom along
with instructions to circle one. Shaken and uncertain of where this was going,
he circled yes and passed the note to the person behind him. He faced forward
and sat as still as he could.
Another note arrived a few minutes later with a
new message. “Why don’t you come to the back?”
Foy began to panic. Desperate for an excuse to
stay where he was, he wrote, “We’re almost there so I might as well stay” and
again passed it to the person in the seat behind him.
Soon he was tapped again, and a third note was
put into his hands. This one said, “It’s like 2 hours until we get there!”
Foy wrote, “I know” on the note and passed it
back. To his great relief, no more notes came, but when they got off the bus, a
girl walked up to him and said, “Emma likes you. She’s the one in the purple
shirt.” She pointed toward a girl, about his height, who had freckles and light
brown hair that bounced when she walked.
Somehow he ended up next to Emma in the lunch
line, and she said, “Hi.” He managed to squeeze out a meek, “Hello.” His eyes
traveled over her slightly sunburned nose, past some enchanting freckles to her
blue eyes. She was chewing bubble gum very fast. Suddenly she laughed, and it
seemed like her whole face was laughing. He immediately fell hopelessly and
completely in love with her.
The rest of the week was a blur of unthinkable
happiness and emotions that soared to dizzying heights he had never before
imagined. They sat together each night in the tabernacle. The preacher’s voice
dimmed to a faint buzz as they passed notes back and forth. When she bent over
to write, he would watch her hair flutter in the wind from the giant fans. His
heart pounded in his chest, and there was a constant tingle of anticipation in
his stomach.
On Wednesday, having been coached by a couple
of girls about the next move that should be made, they walked together in a
remote part of the camp. He swallowed hard and said, “Uh, do you wanna go with
me?” She said, “Yes,” and the pact was made. They were boyfriend and girlfriend
according to the rules of their small world. They held hands, and he felt the
tickle of her fingers on his palm. His breathing came faster, and that was the
moment that everything changed. Childhood was over and something new had begun.
He rode in the back of the bus on the way home
at the end of the week. Emboldened by his romantic success, he joked with Emma
and played rowdy games with some of the boys that he had befriended. He was
rather drunk on his new life and did things that were beyond comprehension a
mere five days earlier. At one point he even told a bawdy joke that he had heard
in the locker room. The boys laughed and a couple of girls said, “Gross!”
Finally they arrived in the church parking lot.
Kids poured out of all the buses. Foy was looking for his duffel bag in the
compartment underneath the bus when Emma tapped him on the shoulder. He turned
around, smiling.
“I don’t want to go with you anymore,” She said
meekly, almost as if she was embarrassed. Then she turned and walked away. She
got into a brownish car that immediately pulled out of the parking lot.
The pain of it hit his stomach hard. Immediate,
sharp, very physical. He froze from the shock of it, unable to move. Then she
was gone, and he had said nothing to her. He looked around the parking lot.
Everyone else was busy, and no one had noticed. Suddenly he felt completely
alone again, as if the week at camp had never happened. He stood there for a few
moments with his sleeping bag under his arm and his dirty clothes hanging out of
a pillowcase. By some superhuman force of will he managed to say goodbye to the
other boys, but when he got into his parents' car he put his face down to his
knees and bit his bottom lip hard to keep from crying. Luckily his little sister
was fussing, so his mother didn’t notice him.
When he had regained control of himself, he sat
up and gently leaned his temple against the glass of the door and stared at the
part of the ground that is close to the car and goes by fast.
When they got home he mumbled something about
feeling tired and a little sick. As he hurried to his room he heard his mom say,
“Why don’t you lie down awhile?” When he closed the door of his room he felt
safe to let go of his shame and the fear of being discovered. Grief fell over
him. He did not understand what had happened. Perhaps he had done something
wrong or broken some unknown rule of boyfriends and girlfriends. He wondered if
Emma had told the other kids and everyone knew how dumb he was. He didn’t know
anything about this stuff.
He lay on his bed with his face buried in his
pillow. Deep sobs came up from his belly and out of his mouth. There was no
stopping them.
Suddenly he became concerned that his father
might walk in and find him crying. He slipped over the side of the bed into the
space between it and the wall, dragging his pillow down with him. He saw a
familiar patch of golden fur and reached for it. It was his old teddy bear, the
one he had finally stopped sleeping with a few months before. He told his dad
that he had had thrown it away, but he had only put it under the bed. He pressed
his face into the bear’s stomach and let go.
Foy’s memories of that painful summer were
interrupted by his Mom who called him back to the present. She was finished with
her shopping and ready to go. She had apparently forgotten about the candy cane,
or at least she said nothing about it, a thing for which Foy was thankful.
On the ride home, Foy considered the big
question. How and when would he give the candy cane to Emma? She didn’t go to
his school. He was much too young to drive, and he didn’t know where she lived
in any case. He did not want his parents to know anything about this, so asking
for their help was out of the question. There was really only one option. He
would have to give it to her at church sometime before Christmas.
The candlelight service at midnight on
Christmas Eve was very popular at their church. Everyone came, and the kids
liked it because they got to stay out so late. Foy decided that he would give
her the candy cane on that night. He would find her before the service, and they
would sit together in the balcony. At the right moment he would give her the
candy cane, perhaps with a ribbon around it, and she would understand that he
still cared for her. And then he hoped he would be brave enough to hold her hand
again, like he had so long ago.
He had avoided Emma for about six months after the
summer camp breakup. Whenever he saw her at church his stomach would churn, and
he would turn around and walk the other way. Emma’s family did not attend as
regularly as his, so he was only subjected to this agony a couple of times a
month.
At choir practice, when the girls were singing,
he would sometimes watch her in safety while her eyes were locked on the
director. On one of these occasions she pulled out a tube of fruity lip gloss,
applied it smoothly, as if she was an old hand at that sort of thing, then
pressed her upper and lower lips together briefly before letting them pop apart.
He thought he might faint.
In the Spring of their 6th grade
year, he walked around a corner at the church and almost ran into her. She
smiled shyly and said hello. The encounter seemed to break the ice a little, and
after that they often waved or exchanged greetings. But he had been deeply
wounded and did not have the courage to sit with her or reach for her hand.
Then Emma disappeared from church altogether.
Week after week passed and she was not there. She did not attend camp that
summer either, something that disappointed him greatly. He had begun to think of
camp as a magical place where normal life was put aside and boys and girls
walked together, held hands, and made solemn vows.
7th grade began, and it appeared
Emma was gone for good. Foy almost forgot about her as he became caught up in
football and a number of activities at school. But in November she appeared
again one Sunday morning, and he felt a hot flush of emotion. It was clear that
he still adored her. She waved to him in a friendly way, and they talked after
church. There had been some kind of family trouble, and for a time they had
dropped out of church. But things were better, she said, and they were back.
Slightly older and a little more confident, he chatted with her for a few
moments. But he had no idea how to bring up the painful subject of the camp
breakup, which was more than a year old by that time.
As Christmas approached, he came up with the
idea of giving her the big candy cane. He did not realize that the candy cane
craze was limited to his own school and was simply a passing fad. He thought
that big candy canes were a well-known thing to give to a girl that you cared
for. Unable to bring himself to say, “I still like you,” he thought he could
perhaps be brave enough to give her the candy cane. He was certain she would
understand.
In the days leading up to Christmas, the big
candy cane sat in an honored place on his shelves, near his catcher’s mitt and
baseball cards, right under his autographed picture of Roger Staubach. He had
tied a crude and misshapen bow around it with a piece of wrinkled blue ribbon
that he found in the box where they kept the ornaments for their Christmas tree.
School was out, and he went skating and played
touch football in the front yard with his best friend Steve. But always a part
of his mind was thinking about Christmas Eve and Emma. He was haunted by
thoughts of her freckles, her blue eyes, and her laugh, which seemed in his
young mind to be the very source of joy in the world.
On Christmas Eve, Foy’s mother was surprised to
find him dressed and ready to go at 9:00. She laughed and told him they weren’t
going to leave until 10:45. He spent the time in the interim fiddling with the
bow on the candy cane and listening to music on his radio. Finally the time
came, and his mother loaded the children into the car. They arrived a little
earlier than most families. Foy found a good observation spot toward the back of
the foyer where he would be able to see all three doors that led into the
church.
The service began at 11:30. By 11:15, there was
a steady stream of people pouring into the church. As they passed through the
doors, each person took a candle from one of several boxes. Foy picked up two
candles, in case Emma needed one, then returned to his post to keep watch.
At 11:35 the doors to the church were closed,
and Foy was in the foyer alone. He wondered if perhaps he had missed her. He
stayed a few minutes longer, then climbed the stairs to the balcony. He went
down to the front row and began scanning the lower section of the large
sanctuary, looking for that familiar bounce of her hair. The service dragged on.
Scripture was read and carols were sung, but there was no sign of Emma. When the
candles were lit at midnight, Foy sank into the pew with his own lighted candle
in one hand and the candy cane in the other. Somehow he had missed her, but he
couldn’t understand how it had happened.
“Maybe she came in one of the side doors,” he
thought with renewed excitement. Of course that was it. Her family was probably
sitting in one of the side sections where he couldn’t see them from the balcony.
As soon as the service was over, Foy ran down the stairs and out into the night.
People were everywhere, hurrying to their cars, and he darted back and forth
through the crowd, looking for her. He ran back through the church to the other
side, but she was not there either. Soon the crowds thinned and the reality of
the situation became clear. Her family had not come that night. In all of his
planning, it had never occurred to him that she might not be there at all.
He continued to watch the last stragglers with
a faint hope for some miracle, but sorrow was already descending upon him. The
disappointment was more, he thought, than he could bear, for he had no idea if
or when he would see her again. Perhaps her parents would not return at all.
Perhaps she was lost to him forever.
Soon his mother called his name, somewhat
irritated that he had dallied and was keeping the family from going home. His
little sister was asleep and his younger brother was cranky. Not wanting her to
know what had happened, he looked around quickly, then laid the candy cane
gently on the top of a hedge of thick holly that grew near one side of the
church. It stayed on the top for a brief moment, then slipped between the leaves
into the darkness.
In the car his mother chatted about this and
that. She scolded him for his tardiness and went on about plans that the family
had for Christmas. The conversation was odious to him and impossible to
comprehend. That was her world and not his. He never said a word, and his mother
never noticed his quiet sorrow in the darkness of the back seat.
This time he did not cry, but bore the weight
of his grief silently in a way that he thought was right for a man. He was
learning about all of these things.
rlp
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