Читать книгу Christmas Every Day (And Other Stories) - William Dean Howells - Страница 5

TURKEYS TURNING THE TABLES.

“Well, you see,” the papa began, on Christmas morning, when the little girl had snuggled in his lap into just the right shape for listening, “it was the night after Thanksgiving, and you know how everybody feels the night after Thanksgiving.”

“Yes; but you needn't begin that way, papa,” said the little girl; “I'm not going to have any moral to it this time.”

“No, indeed! But it can be a true story, can't it?”

“I don't know,” said the little girl; “I like made-up ones.”

“Well, this is going to be a true one, anyway, and it's no use talking.”

All the relations in the neighborhood had come to dinner, and then gone back to their own houses, but some of the relations had come from a distance, and these had to stay all night at the grandfather's. But whether they went or whether they stayed, they all told the grandmother that they did believe it was the best Thanksgiving dinner they had ever eaten in their born days. They had had cranberry sauce, and they'd had mashed potato, and they'd had mince-pie and pandowdy, and they'd had celery, and they'd had Hubbard squash, and they'd had tea and coffee both, and they'd had apple-dumpling with hard sauce, and they'd had hot biscuit and sweet pickle, and mangoes, and frosted cake, and nuts, and cauliflower—

“Don't mix them all up so!” pleaded the little girl. “It's perfectly confusing. I can't hardly tell what they had now.”

“Well, they mixed them up just in the same way, and I suppose that's one of the reasons why it happened.”

Whenever a child wanted to go back from dumpling and frosted cake to mashed potato and Hubbard squash—they were old-fashioned kind of people, and they had everything on the table at once, because the grandmother and the aunties cooked it, and they couldn't keep jumping up all the time to change the plates—and its mother said it shouldn't, its grandmother said, Indeed it should, then, and helped it herself; and the child's father would say, Well, he guessed he would go back, too, for a change; and the child's mother would say, She should think he would be ashamed; and then they would get to going back, till everything was perfectly higgledy-piggledy.

“Oh, shouldn't you like to have been there, papa?” sighed the little girl.

“You mustn't interrupt. Where was I?”

“Higgledy-piggledy.”

“Oh yes!”

Well, but the greatest thing of all was the turkey that they had. It was a gobbler, I tell you, that was nearly as big as a giraffe.

“Papa!”

It took the premium at the county fair, and when it was dressed it weighed fifteen pounds—well, maybe twenty—and it was so heavy that the grandmothers and the aunties couldn't put it on the table, and they had to get one of the papas to do it. You ought to have heard the hurrahing when the children saw him coming in from the kitchen with it. It seemed as if they couldn't hardly talk of anything but that turkey the whole dinner-time.

The grandfather hated to carve, and so one of the papas did it; and whenever he gave anybody a piece, the grandfather would tell some new story about the turkey, till pretty soon the aunties got to saying, “Now, father, stop!” and one of them said it made it seem as if the gobbler was walking about on the table, to hear so much about him, and it took her appetite all away; and that made the papas begin to ask the grandfather more and more about the turkey.

“Yes,” said the little girl, thoughtfully; “I know what papas are.”

“Yes, they're pretty much all alike.”

And the mammas began to say they acted like a lot of silly boys; and what would the children think? But nothing could stop it; and all through the afternoon and evening, whenever the papas saw any of the aunties or mammas round, they would begin to ask the grandfather more particulars about the turkey. The grandfather was pretty forgetful, and he told the same things right over. Well, and so it went on till it came bedtime, and then the mammas and aunties began to laugh and whisper together, and to say they did believe they should dream about that turkey; and when the papas kissed the grandmother good-night, they said, Well, they must have his mate for Christmas; and then they put their arms round the mammas and went out haw-hawing.

“I don't think they behaved very dignified,” said the little girl.

“Well, you see, they were just funning, and had got going, and it was Thanksgiving, anyway.”

Well, in about half an hour everybody was fast asleep and dreaming—

“Is it going to be a dream?” asked the little girl, with some reluctance.

“Didn't I say it was going to be a true story?”

“Yes.”

“How can it be a dream, then?”

“You said everybody was fast asleep and dreaming.”

“Well, but I hadn't got through. Everybody except one little girl.”

“Now, papa!”

“What?”

“Don't you go and say her name was the same as mine, and her eyes the same color.”

“What an idea!”

This was a very good little girl, and very respectful to her papa, and didn't suspect him of tricks, but just believed everything he said. And she was a very pretty little girl, and had red eyes, and blue cheeks, and straight hair, and a curly nose—

“Now, papa, if you get to cutting up—”

“Well, I won't, then!”

Well, she was rather a delicate little girl, and whenever she over-ate, or anything,

“Have bad dreams! Aha! I told you it was going to be a dream.”

“You wait till I get through.”

She was apt to lie awake thinking, and some of her thinks were pretty dismal. Well, that night, instead of thinking and tossing and turning, and counting a thousand, it seemed to this other little girl that she began to see things as soon as she had got warm in bed, and before, even. And the first thing she saw was a large, bronze-colored—

“Turkey gobbler!”

“No, ma'am. Turkey gobbler's ghost.”

“Foo!” said the little girl, rather uneasily; “whoever heard of a turkey's ghost, I should like to know?”

“Never mind, that,” said the papa. “If it hadn't been a ghost, could the moonlight have shone through it? No, indeed! The stuffing wouldn't have let it. So you see it must have been a ghost.”