The Rocky Road Pact

Chapter 18: Hard Candy Christmas

December, 1981

Mrs. Gardener is my favourite teacher. She's young — this is her first teaching job and everyone loves her, even the saucy boys who say curses and don't do their homework. I guess that's why Jude is here, stringing popcorn for the tree and cutting out little paper snowflakes with me to paste onto the windows. He writes his name on one of them, in tiny letters.

Mrs. G made all the food for the party and she lets us have a brownie for a taste test. They are delicious. She is playing her favourite Christmas album - A Classic Christmas by Johnny Cash. 

My warm feeling of anticipation has returned and I'm feeling Christmassy and happy again. My mother's harsh words aren't ringing in my ears anymore, mainly because Jude is talking non-stop and making me laugh. I didn't even know this kid could string a sentence together and here he is talking my ear off.

Mrs. G sent him to fetch more ancient decorations from the office and I busied myself pasting our snowflakes to the window including the one with his name in the corner. Up over the hill, I saw the first kids coming to school, and felt a bit sad that my time alone with Mrs. G and Jude was coming to an end. 

"Got the last of 'em," Jude said, putting the box on the table. I turned to him and he looked straight at me with a funny expression. 

"What?" I looked down. "Did I spill something on me?"

"No," he said. "You have a sunny smile, Cassie. That's all. I'm going to call you Sunny,"

A sunny smile. No one had ever said that to me before. Something twinkly sparkled in the back of my mind, some little firework had gone off and I felt warm. 

I didn't have a lot of time to process it before our classmates came pouring in and the party was on. Mrs. G made a punch out of orange and cranberry juice and ginger ale and we drank it from paper cups, pretending it was alcohol. We played games and ate cookies and readied ourselves for the gift exchange. There was so much going on, I didn't notice for a while that Jude wasn't there.

"Mrs. G. Where's Jude?" I asked when I could get her to myself for a moment. 

"Honey, he can't come to the party. He just wanted to help set it up."

"Why not?"

"His parents don't celebrate Christmas," she said. "It's against their religion."

I felt bad for him, all the work he did to help prepare for a party he wasn't allowed to go to. "No tree? No presents? His parents wouldn't even let him come to his class party?"

"I'm afraid not," she said, helping herself to another glass of punch. "He wanted to still be a part of it."

"Hey, there's a kid outside!" Moose  pointed, and all the kids ran. I knew who it was before I even looked. Jude was there in his brown winter coat and beige hat, walking. 

"What's he doing?"

"I don't know."

"It's the new kid, Jude. Tell him to come in!"

"Hey, Jude!" Sammy Strong yelled out the window. "Like the song," he said to us and we laughed. 

"Come inside!"

The kids all started to yell to him to come in. A light snow had begun to fall, but Jude kept walking around the school; around and around. He was such a lonely little figure, down there in the snow. My classmates were perplexed.

"He's not allowed," I said finally. "His parents won't let him."

"Wow, that's harsh." Even the mean boy, Moose, felt bad. "Let's give him a present."

The kids got excited as they do when a good idea spreads. "Let's all give him a present!"

The first gift flew out the window and landed at Jude's feet. He shielded his eyes and looked up, puzzled. "Merry Christmas," Moose yelled out. 

"Kids, stop that. Come away from the window," Mrs. G said but by the time she made it over, presents were raining down all around Jude. I looked at my present - I'd drawn Brian Small's name out of the hat and got him some comic books. I caught his eye and held up the gift with a question on my face. In response, he pointed to the window. "Go on, biff it out," he said with a grin, so I did. 

At first, Jude was leery. I could tell what he was thinking - are these kids being nice, or are they trying to clock him in the head with flying objects. Once he realized the true intention, he began to pick up the presents one by one and look at them with a kind of wonder. 

"He has nothing to carry them home in," someone said. I found a large, plastic bag and stuffed it out the window. It fluttered down to him like a bird. He gathered up the presents and put them in the bag. Even Mrs. G. got into the spirit, filling a Tupperware dish with candies and homemade cookies and sending them down. 

The act of tossing our gifts out the window to a lonely kid made us all kind of silly. Everyone was buzzing with a kind of giddy happiness, especially when Jude looked up at us with a shy smile and gave a snappy salute before heading home.

By then, the goofballs in the class were arm in arm, singing Christmas songs. Everyone felt like we were part of a moment then, a very special thing had happened spontaneously. These were rough and tough kids of coal miners and steel plant workers; kids that would just as easily toss you into a snow bank as look at you. But when they saw a lonely kid with no presents, forced to be on the outside of the party and not in, they did a warm and generous thing. It made me proud to know them.

July, 1989

Still buzzing from the night at the fair, I raced up to my room and closed the door. Something Tommy said triggered these warm Christmas memories from long ago. 

Sunny. He called me Sunny.

I looked under my bed for my scrap book of special things I'd kept since I was a kid. I turned a few pages, and there it was. A snowflake cut carefully from delicate white paper, now yellowed with age. In the corner, in neat block letters, was the word Jude.

Tommy was Jude.