• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 6724 0

cauldrons and racks, heavy aluminum nut-processing devices—came out of deep closets. Great seasonal dunes of sugar and towers of tins appeared. Several cubic feet of unsweetened butter was melted down with milk and sugar (for chocolateless fudge) or with sugar alone (for Dorothy’s famous Christmas toffee) or was smeared by Walter onto the reserve squadron of pans and shallow casseroles that his mother, over the years, had bought at rummage sales. There was lengthy discussion of “hard balls” and “soft balls” and “cracking.” Gene, wearing an apron, stirred the cauldrons like a Viking oarsman, doing his best to keep cigarette ash out of them. He had three ancient candy thermometers whose metal casings were shaped like fraternity paddles and whose nature it was to show no increase in temperature for several hours and then, all at once and all together, to register temperatures at which fudge burned and toffee hardened like epoxy. He and Dorothy were never more a team than when working against the clock to get the nuts mixed in and the candy poured. And later the brutal job of cutting too-hard toffee: the knife blade bowing out under the tremendous pressure Gene applied, the nasty sound (less heard than felt in the bone marrow, in the nerves of the teeth) of a sharp edge dulling itself on the bottom of a metal pan, the explosions of sticky brown amber, the paternal cries of God fucking damn it, and the querulous maternal entreaties not to swear like that.

On the last weekend of Advent, when eighty or a hundred tins had been lined with waxed paper and packed with fudge and toffee and garnished with Jordan almonds, Gene and Dorothy and Walter went out giving. It took the entire weekend, often longer. Walter’s older brother, Mitch, stayed behind at the motel with Brent, who, although he later became an Air Force pilot, as a child was easily made carsick. The candy went first to Gene’s many friends in Hibbing and then, with much backtracking and dead-ending, to farther-flung friends and relatives, down through the Iron Range to Grand Rapids and beyond. It was unthinkable not to accept coffee or a cookie at every house. Between stops, Walter sat in the back seat with a book, watching a feeble window-shaped patch of sunlight hold steady on the seat and then, when a right-angle turn was finally reached, slide across the canyon of the floor and reappear, in twisted form, on the back of the front seat. Outside were the eternal paltry wood lots, the eternal snowed-over bog, the circular tin fertilizer advertisements tacked to telephone poles, the furled hawks and bold ravens. On the seat beside him was the growing pile of packages from homes already visited—Scandinavian baked goods, Finnish and Croatian delicacies, bottles of “cheer” from Gene’s unmarried friends—and the slowly dwindling pile of Berglund tins. These tins’ chief merit was that they contained the same candy that Gene and Dorothy had been giving since they were married. The candy had gradually morphed, over the years, from a treat into a reminder of treats past. It was the annual gift the poor Berglunds could still be wealthy in.

Walter was finishing his junior year in high school when Dorothy’s father died and left her the little lakeside house in which she’d spent her girlhood summers. In Walter’s mind, the house was associated with his mother’s disabilities, because it was here, as a girl, that she’d spent long months battling the arthritis that had withered her right hand and deformed her pelvis. On a low shelf by the fireplace were the sad old “toys” with which she’d once “played” for hours—a nutcracker-like device with steel springs, a five-valved wooden trumpet—to try to preserve and increase mobility in her ravaged finger joints. The Berglunds had always been too busy with the motel to stay long at the little house, but Dorothy was fond of it, had dreams of retiring there with Gene if they could ever get rid of the motel, and so did not immediately assent when Gene proposed selling it. Gene’s health was bad, the motel was mortgaged to the hilt, and whatever small