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          Out of the corner of my eye, as I reached up into the collection plate Mrs. Gosling held above my head, I saw Becky Chambers making faces at me from the other side of the church.

“You have the last one, Midge,” Mrs. Gosling said.  Quickly I unfolded the square of notepaper.

“It isn’t your own name, is it?” she asked.

“No ma’am.”  I thanked her and turned my back on Becky as I went to my seat.

“We’ll conclude with the devotional prayer on page forty-seven,” Mrs. Gosling announced.

“Miz Gosling,” Earl Satterfield called from the next pew, “what if we don’t have no money for this here present we’re supposed to bring?”

“Heavenly Father – ”she began.

“Miz Gosling,” Earl’s brother Billy shouted, “I ain’t gonna pick up these here lesson books, ‘cause you never make Hiram Gurvey pick ‘em up.  It ain’t fair!”

“ – we thank thee for the many blessings thou hast bestowed upon us,” she continued calmly, watching through half-closed eyes.

Preacher Gosling, who had come up to stand in the empty pew behind the two brothers, reached out and grabbed them by their necks.  They froze like rabbits.  We finished our prayer and Sunday School was over .

Across the way, Mrs. Longerbone dismissed the Junior Achievers, who were already crawling under the pews and spilling into the aisle, with Becky Chambers in the lead.  She couldn’t stand being in that class, ever since I graduated to Young Adults three months ago.

“Who’d you get?  Who’d you get?” she demanded, trying to pry my fingers from around my piece of paper.

“Oh Becky, why don’t you grow up?  It’s not whose name – “

“Yeah, yeah, it’s not whose name you get,” she said, looking cross-eyed and talking through her nose, “it’s the spirit of giving that counts.”  She winked.  “And whether he’s cute or ugly.”

“Oh Becky, honestly!”

We glanced up to see Hiram Gurvey standing just inside the pew, waiting for us to let him out.  Up that close I could see the veins in his eyes and the hairs coming out of his nose.  Becky shrank away, pulling me with her.  I tried to smile.  Hiram looked the other direction.  We hurried on down the aisle toward the front door, as though the fifteen minutes between Sunday School and church would not be long enough for us.

As we stepped out into the gray morning light someone began ringing the bell in the cupola on top of the church.  Becky shouted the news about Sammy Whitlow, whose name she had in the gift exchange.  Last year, when we were together in Junior Achievers, I drew her name and gave her a gold pin shaped like a parasol and set with rhinestones, even though you’re supposed to give something useful.  All the years before that I had always drawn a girl’s name.

“Oh he’s cute,” Becky went on, “but I wish he was older.”

Halfway down the concrete steps we had to wait for the people ahead of us to move.  I couldn’t find my mother, but over in the parking lot my father was leaning against the fender of our pickup, talking to someone.  My little brother David was inside, turning the steering wheel back and forth, pretending he was a race driver.

“Oh look. there’s Daniel Henshel,” Becky whispered, poking me in the ribs.  “He must be coming to church.  He’s in Young Adults, isn’t he?”

Daniel Henshel was standing with his mother and father out by the cemetery hedge.  Last year his family moved to Loon Creek Township , but they still came to our church sometimes.  Daniel had blue eyes, sandy hair, and a dimple, and he was a starting forward on Loon Creek’s junior-high team.

“Oh, wouldn’t you just die if you had his name in a drawing?”  Becky said.  She poked me again as we reached the bottom step.  “If you won’t tell me whose name you’ve got, I’m not going to walk to school with you anymore.”

“Oh Becky, honestly, I wish you’d grow up.”

“Well then, tell me.”

“I got Richard Tomlinson’s.”

“Richard Tomlinson?”

“Shhh, do you want everybody in the churchyard to know?”

“Why, he’s awful, I remember in the third grade when he cut off one of your pigtails – “

Becky’s mother towered over us suddenly. “Where have you been?  I’ve been looking all over for you!  Your father’s ready to go!”

I waved as they went off.  As I turned to look for my own mother, Earl Satterfield stepped onto the boardwalk and caught my coat sleeve.  I tried to pull away but he held fast.

“Whose name did you get?” he demanded.

I kept looking for my mother.  “Oh, you’re not supposed to tell,” I replied calmly.

“Oh come on, it’s all right,” he said.  Billy Satterfield came up beside us and belched.  Earl gave him a shove.  “I got Linda Wardwell’s,” he said, coming closer.

“That’s nice,” I said.  “I’ve got to be going now.”  Linda Wardwell was a high-school sophomore who wore bangs and had braces on her teeth but she had always been kind to me, even before I joined Young Adults.

“No, wait a minute,” Earl said.  His fingers dug into my arm.  “Listen.  I’m not gonna give no present to no girl, so I’ll tell you what I’ll do.  If you got a boy’s name, I’ll trade you, and you can have Linda’s.”

I looked around the churchyard at the people standing in little groups talking to each other.  No one seemed to notice us.  Just then my mother came around the corner of the church with Mrs. Grace Shaw, the Sunday School superintendent.

I thought about Richard Tomlinson and how many times he had made me cry, when we were all in grade school.  He was three grades ahead, but he was always picking on the smaller children.

“Come on, Earl,” Billy whispered.  “Paw’s gonna be after us if we don’t get a move on.”

Earl held out the folded piece of paper.  “Come on,” he said.  “Nobody’ll

know.”

My mother still hadn’t seen us standing there.  I took the piece of paper with Richard Tomlinson’s name on it out of my coat pocket and started to unfold it but Earl snatched it away.

“Hey, wait a minute – ”

“Here, you big baby, you want it back?” he asked, waving a piece of paper in front of my face.  I knew it was the other one.  “You gonna take it?”

“Midge?” my mother called.

I took it.  Earl was running toward the parking lot.  Billy ran after him.  She called again.

“Midge, come on, your father’s waiting, what’s the matter with you?  You know we’re not staying for church.  Here, button up your coat!  How do, Miz Brown, lovely morning, isn’t it?  Midge?  Come along now.”

My father had pulled the pickup around to the end of the boardwalk.  As my mother took my hand, I jammed the piece of paper into my coat-pocket for safekeeping.

We had just come out of Gerencer’s Woods and were passing the old schoolhouse when my father cut the engine and the truck glided to a stop at the edge of the gravel road.  He pointed across the dry, yellow grass to a pair of deer standing just inside the fence line.  It was at least an eight-point buck.  There was no sound but the creak of branches in the wind.  The buck arched its neck and began nuzzling the doe.

“Be a fawn come spring,” my father said quietly.

I took the slip of paper from my pocket and began unfolding it.  I had already told them I had Linda Wardwell’s name in the gift exchange.

“Why is he biting the doe’s neck?” David asked.

I began to cry.  My mother looked at me.  “We’d best be moving on,” she said.

“What’s the matter?” my father asked.

We were already jammed together in the cab of the truck.  I leaned into

the soft brown collar of my mother’s coat and sobbed.  My father started the engine.

“There they go!” David shouted.

“Hush,” my mother said.

“What’s the matter with her?” my father asked.

“It’ll be all right,” my mother said, hugging me.  “Just drive.”

When we got home she took me into their bedroom and shut the door and I started crying all over again as I told her.  The piece of paper Earl Satterfield gave me didn’t have Linda Wardwell’s name on it, it had Hiram Gurvey’s.  Earl had lied to me.  Now I didn’t have Richard Tomlinson’s name and I didn’t have Linda Wardwell’s either.  I had Hiram Gurvey’s.  What a rotten thing to do.  Mother didn’t know how the kids talked about you, the sorts of things they said if a girl gave a present to a boy, even if it was a nice boy, like Daniel Henshel.  That’s why I traded; I wanted Linda Wardwell’s name, so nobody would say anything.  And now I had Hiram Gurvey’s.  What if Becky found out?  What if anybody found out?

My mother put her arms around me until I stopped shaking.  I dabbed at my eyes with one of her handkerchiefs.  “There’s nothing wrong with Hiram Gurvey,” she said finally.

I looked right at her.  “Oh mother, how can you say that?  Hiram Gurvey is a grown man, and he’s ugly and stupid and everybody makes fun of him – and –

and I hate him!”  I threw myself face down across the bed.

There was a knock on the door.  “You all right in there?” my father called.

“We’ll be out in a minute,” my mother answered.

“Oh don’t tell him, please don’t tell him!”

“Now you listen to me, Midge McCallister!  Hiram Gurvey’s your classmate and you have his name in the drawing.  It doesn’t matter how you got it.  The day of the gift exchange, you’ll have a present for him.  You stop worrying about what people’ll think.  He’s your neighbor and you’re his, and that’s all there is to it!”

“But I never see him except at Sunday School,” I said, sniffing and sitting up in the middle of the bed.  I pulled her pillow from under the coverlet and began punching it.

“Living way out here where we do, I never see anybody at all.”

“You have neighbors, wherever you live,” she said, “and you see them when you need them.”

“Well, at least we don’t have to spend the whole seventy-five cents on him.  Mrs. Gosling said if all we had was twenty-five cents, that would be OK.”

“Midge, Midge, I’m ashamed of you.  Don’t you understand what it means to give?  If you’re going to give a present to Hiram Gurvey, it ought to be something he needs.  We’ll get him a nice warm shirt or a pair of pants, no matter what it costs.”

I smoothed back the four corners of the pillows.  “Is that because he’s so poor?”

“It’s not because of anything,” she said, reaching to take the pillow from me.

“But I’ve heard you and Father say we’re poor.  When David and I wanted bicycles – ”

“Nobody who has clean clothes and enough to eat and a roof over their heads is poor.  Your father and I have known what it’s like not to have those things, so we know how much they mean.”

She had gone to the head of the bed to tuck the pillow back under the coverlet. “You and your brothers have always had a present from Santa Claus at Christmas and a cake with candles on your birthdays,” she said, biting her lower lip, “and that’s more than a lot of people had when they were growing up.”

I knew she wasn’t talking only about Hiram.  “And a Christmas tree,” I said, starting to cry again.  With a wail I rolled across the bed and threw my arms around her.

“A what?”

“Oh mother, I love you,” I cried, nestling into the smooth warm place at the side of her neck.  “I love you, and I’ll try to be a good neighbor to Hiram.”

“It’s all right,” she said.  I could feel her tears falling across my own.

“And I’m sorry I said those awful things about him.”

“It’s all right, darling, I understand.”

A knock on the door again.  “Hey, we’re starving out here!” my father called.  We both knew he was teasing.  After one last hug, we went to the bathroom to wash our faces, and then I helped her fix Sunday dinner.

By Wednesday evening on the way home from school I had to tell Becky Chambers to keep her from pestering me about Richard Tomlinson.  She was shocked, and swore she wouldn’t tell a soul.  Like nearly everybody in our Sunday School, she really didn’t know what to think about Hiram Gurvey.

He was the oldest person in Young Adults.  He never really got put in that class, he was just there.  He had been coming to Sunday School and church longer than I could remember, almost as long as my mother could remember.  People said a long time ago other members of his family had come to church, but they had gradually stopped coming, and now he came by himself.

He always got there early and he always sat in the same place in the same pew, next to a full-length window made of panes of yellow and amber glass that had a painted blue scroll at the bottom that said  “In Memoriam: Samuel Bixbee 1839-1923.”  Hiram never moved from that place, except to go outside between Sunday School and church and stand around in the churchyard like everybody else. Except Hiram didn’t visit.

At the beginning of Sunday School the superintendent led everybody in singing before the classes went to different parts of the church for their Bible lessons.  The Young Adults were assigned the three pews up front near the choir, and Hiram would be there already, sitting in his place.  Everybody called it Hiram’s place, and nobody else would dream of sitting there.  I can remember seeing Hiram there when I was in the Sunbeam class, all the way at the back of the church, to the right of the door; and when I was in Junior Achievers, with Becky, up front and to the right.

When you were twelve you graduated to Young Adults and you stayed there until you got married, when you joined the Young Marrieds, who sat in the middle of the church.  People said it made sense for Hiram Gurvey to be in Young Adults, even though he must have been thirty-five years old, since he wasn’t married.  He was probably the only person in that class over seventeen or eighteen.  Out by Monument City , where we lived, everybody got married by the time they were out of high school or else they moved somewhere else.

Mrs. Gosling never called on Hiram to read from the lesson book.  We all knew this was because he had never learned to read.  He never stood up during the offerings, and he never sang any of the hymns, but he bowed his head during the prayers.  He couldn’t talk plain anyway.  When he tried – when the older boys poked fun at him out in the churchyard – his tongue always got in the way and he sounded like a calf bleating.   That made the boys laugh, and Preacher Gosling or some other grownup would always have to come and make them leave Hiram alone.

His chest was thick and round and he didn’t seem to have a neck; his head bulged right out of his shoulders.  His eyes were bloodshot and out of focus.  He always wore patched denim pants and a denim shirt and the kind of braces you could get for thirty-nine cents at Satterfield’s store, except the elastic had gone bad.  He laced up his old boots with bits of string and twine knotted together.  He had always looked that way, ever since I could remember.  But I didn’t know why, except, like everybody said, he was poor.

In Somerset the following Saturday morning, while my father went to see a man at the bank, my mother and I went into Beeson’s Department Store and bought Hiram’s  present.  It was a shirt made of heavy cotton in a blue-and-white plaid pattern.  I picked it out so it would go with his denim pants and would last him a long time.

That evening, while we were sitting around the kitchen table and wrapping the present in red and green Christmas paper, I asked my father why Hiram Gurvey was the way he was.

My father laid aside yesterday’s News-Sentinel he had been reading and began to scrape at the bowl of one of his pipes with the thin blade of his pocketknife.  “There’s always been two or three families of Gurveys up along that branch of the river where Hiram lives,” he began, as though talking to himself.  “Let me see, there was Old Anse, first of all, that was the old man.  He died right before the war. As I remember, he had signed up for the Spanish-American War, to get away from his wife, and he wasn’t a young man then.  And he caught malaria or yellow fever, one of the two.  Whatever it was, they sent him home and gave him a pension, and he discovered that if he didn’t have to work he could put up with that wife after all.  None of them Gurveys ever did work very much,” he said, pausing to puff on the pipe he had just filled with sweet-smelling tobacco.  “They was good on having wives, though,” he added.

“Robert!”

“He had a whole flock of kids.  Most of them lit off somewhere, or got killed taking big trees out of that bottomland, but I remember one named Abel Gurvey, he worked at the elevator in Monument City when I was a boy.”  He chuckled.  “He was probably the only one ever to learn how to count.  Anyway, he got kicked by a horse one day and he was never much good after that, and they had to take him to the county home.  Forgot how to count, I suppose.  ‘Course, some folks say his relatives would never have noticed, all them Gurveys was like that from the first.”

“Robert, you watch what you’re saying.”

“Now I hear tell Hiram’s mother had some sense, I seem to recollect she was originally a Beeman, from Somerset .  I can’t remember which Gurvey she married –

maybe it was Herschel, the one that had six fingers on one hand – but she had nine, ten, maybe eleven children by him before the last one killed her.  And of course they’ve all grown up and wandered off, most of ‘em, years ago, and Hiram, I think he was second or third youngest.  Not much left for him.”

“Why does he come to church and Sunday School?” I asked.  “Nobody else in his family does.”

“I couldn’t rightly tell,” he said, shaking his head.  “I’d imagine most of the ones that are left out there in them old run-down houses, along that branch, don’t even have clothes to wear to come out to the road to get the mail.”

“Midge, it’s getting along toward your bedtime,” my mother said.

“Father, if Hiram’s so poor, how’s he going to buy a gift for anybody, even for twenty-five cents?”

“Worse ‘n that, how’s he going to know who to give it to, if he can’t read?”  He winked at me.  “But don’t you worry about Hiram, he’s gotten along all this time mostly on his own, I reckon he’ll find a way.”

With Christmas a little over a week away, there was hardly time to talk about Hiram again.  School was out, and Mother and David and I had lots to do, getting things ready for when my two older brothers came home from boot camp.  Rex was in the Army, Tom was in the Marines.  They had both tried to enlist as soon as the fighting broke out in Korea , but my father made them wait until the crops were in.  David and I couldn’t wait to see them, and each night we prayed for a good snow so they could go hunting with Father, like they always used to do, and take us sledding on the big long hills up in the north pasture.  Mother was busy with extra choir practices, rehearsing for the Christmas program to be given the Sunday evening before Christmas, and David was to be one of the three wise men in the pageant.  I helped him get his costume ready.  We made him a crown out of cardboard covered with aluminum foil.

When Sunday finally came there was no snow, but there were still three days until Christmas, and David and I kept our fingers crossed.  It was a clear, cold day and we huddled together in the cab of the pickup as we drove to Sunday School that morning.  “Ought to get that old heater fixed one of these days,” my father said as we pulled into the crowded parking lot.  I had Hiram Gurvey’s present wrapped with a big red bow in my lap, and David had one for a boy in his class.

The night before, the Young Marrieds had held a tree-decorating party in the church.  We hurried inside to see what they had done. The tree, a long-needled fir, reached almost to the ceiling, and all its long, curving boughs were bright with paper chains, strings of popcorn and cranberries, corn shuck angels, and other things they had made.  The winter sun shining through the stained-glass windows gave pale lemon and amber hues to all the tiny paper birds and snowflakes and stars.

Everyone in Sunday School sang all the songs we always sing at Christmas time, about the village in Bethlehem, the Christ child asleep in the manger, the angels calling down to the shepherds, and the kings on their camels, following the star.  Then we broke up into our different classes and had the same lesson we always had at Christmas, about peace on earth and good will toward men.  The children in the Sunbeam Class were especially fidgety.  They didn’t have a gift exchange, but they knew about the brown paper sacks of Christmas treat the trustees would pass out after Sunday School was over .

Mrs. Gosling ended the lesson early so we could have our gift exchange.  She called the names and shook hands with the boys and gave the girls a kiss on the cheek, and wished each of us a merry Christmas as she handed out the presents.  Mine was from Marcia Whitlow, Sammy’s older sister, who was a senior in high school and wanted to be a nurse.  It was a gold-plated ballpoint pen that wrote in three different colors – red, blue, and green – when you moved little sliding notches on its side.  I thought it was wonderful.

Mrs. Gosling almost dropped the big box wrapped in newspaper she was handing to Earl Satterfield.

“There’s something movin’ around in there!” he exclaimed.  He began tearing off the newspaper.  As the other boys crowded around, he folded back the cardboard flaps and peered inside. Very carefully he reached in with both hands and lifted out a full-grown rabbit with beautiful black-and-white fur and one black ear and one white.  The rabbit hung there, blinking and twitching its nose.

“It’s from Hiram,” Mrs. Gosling said.  “Isn’t it beautiful?”

Just then the trustees came out of the pastor’s study with the boxes of treat.  All the Sunbeams and most of the younger Junior Achievers jumped up from their seats, and Sunday School was over.

“What’d you get in yours?” Becky asked me as we stood on the steps, waiting to go down into the churchyard.  Her face was half buried in her sack.  “I can see an apple, an orange, a Clark bar, a pack of Juicy Fruit – ”

“Oh Becky, you know they’re all the same.”

“Oh no they’re not! “ she insisted.  “You got a Hershey bar with almonds?  I’ll bet you didn’t – why, you haven’t even looked yet!”

I was leaning out over the railing to watch my mother and Hiram Gurvey at the foot of the step.  He had the present in his hand and was looking down at his boots and nodding now and then.  Even though the church bell had started to ring, I could hear part of what she was saying.

“ – doesn’t fit, if it’s the wrong size, you can just take it back to Beeson’s, and trade it for a different one, you hear?”

Hiram nodded.

“I already told them you might be bringing it back,” she went on.  “Mrs. Lassiter will help you pick out the right size.  All right?”

He nodded again and shuffled his feet.

She reached out and touched his shoulder.  “And Merry Christmas, Hiram!” she said.  He nodded, and went on down the boardwalk and out across the frozen ruts in the yard toward the cemetery .

David brushed past me and pushed his way to the bottom step.  “Two more days till Rex and Tom get here!” he called, waving his sack of treat.  Mother gave him a hug and he ran to join the other boys.  When I reached her side I showed her the ballpoint pen.  She was still gazing out toward the cemetery.

“Hey Midge, it’s starting to snow!”  Becky called, swatting at the first few flakes that were drifting down.

My mother stood there biting her lip.  “Oh dear,” she said, “do you know what I just did?”  She turned and looked into my eyes.  “I told Hiram there’s a shirt in that package, and he hasn’t unwrapped it yet.”

We both saw him standing by himself out near the bare hedge with the snowflakes swirling around him, holding the red-and-green package with the red ribbon.  He was looking back at us.  I raised my hand and waved.  He waved back.

“It’ll be all right,” I said.

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