Louise Barber woke up and pulled her comforter up to her chin. She stared up at the ceiling as her first thought turned to Mike Kerls. Boy, the last twenty-four hours were a whirlwind of events with the hustle and bustle of final preparations to the mini mart, the busy-ness of the bakery preparing food to take to Mary’s Memory Care, and the Christmas Eve Service and events that followed it. The one thing she was focusing on was Mike Kerls and their first kiss in the Catholic church. Her clock alarm sounded, and she reached over and turned it off. When she returned her arm to the warmth beneath the comforter, she realized the eerie silence. The air was quiet in her room. Something that had become natural was missing, the singing of Kristy rising from across the street below her bedroom. She abruptly threw the comforter aside to hurriedly rise from her bed and quickly walk toward her window. She drew the window curtain aside to look out. The sky was graying toward sunrise to reveal a thin dusting of snow that had fallen overnight but her eyes were drawn to an amazing, unusual sight. She turned away from the window, grabbed her robe from the back of the bedroom door and left the room to make a phone call.
***
Paul was leaning against his car waiting for James to join him. The sky was a pale yellow revealing a thin fog of morning dew. The snow highlighted the neighborhood trees and bushes appearing to him to look like a still-life painting hanging in the writing studio of some unknown author. He smiled. He felt good about himself again. He had a purpose again. God had helped him; Kristy had helped him, and it felt as his life is only beginning.
“Penny for your thoughts,” James interrupted Paul’s thoughts. He was walking up the driveway toward the passenger side of the car.
“I was just thinking that God is good,” Paul said as he opened the door to the driver’s seat.
The two men almost simultaneously shut their car doors and Paul started the ignition.
“So, Paul, what is going on at the mini mart that we have to go at dawn on Christmas morning?” the priest asked his friend directly.
***
Mike waited in the living room of his grandfather’s home. His mother insisted they include Robert Fuller in this early morning adventure. Fortunately, he was up but still in his pajamas when he let them inside the house. Samantha explained the situation and he agreed that he would like to join them. Mike noticed a phone sitting on a coffee table and he decided to call Abe. He waited as the call was picked up on the third ring.
“Merry Christmas!” Abe answered and Mike heard a commotion of sound emerge from his earpiece.
“Merry Christmas, Abe. It’s me, Mike.”
“I know your voice. What’s up?” Abe raised his voice over the racket behind him.
“What’s going on over there?” Mike asked him.
“Santa Claus, you fool! Wait ‘til you have kids,” Abe reminded him. “So what’s up?”
“I got a call from Lou this morning. Something weird happened at the store.”
“What?” Abe asked him quizzically.
“She wouldn’t say. We are on the way over there if you wanted to join us,” Mike told him.
“I’ll see what I can do,” Abe said, and he hung up the phone.
***
The minister’s car had just passed them as Mike waited at the end of Robert Fuller’s driveway to back into the street. He eased out into the street, slowly braked, and shifted the car into drive. As the car started forward, he glanced at the rearview mirror to see a pickup truck following him. He recognized the driver as Richard Dell and his daughter was sitting next to him in the passenger seat. The caravan of three vehicles slowly maneuvered around the corner before the Candle Factory to head into the straight road into town. Mike noticed in the distance on the corner of his store’s parking lot; a tall fir tree rose. The occupants of the car erupted into a chattering of noise.
“What is that?” Samantha asked.
“It is a tree Mom. You can see that, right?” Mike responded sarcastically.
“Where did it come from?” Robert Fuller asked aloud.
“I am sure I don’t know,” Mike answered him in the same sarcastic manner. He turned into the lot and saw Lou watching them as she stood on the corner beside the tree. He continued to a parking space at the front of the store, braked, and shifted the car into the park position. The engine had barely silenced when two of the four car doors opened and two of the members of the car exited it. Mike slowly opened his car door and he followed them. From the blue car parked next to him, two men joined him. The truck that was following him parked nearer to the tree.
He turned toward the tree and paused to observe it for the first time. It was tall, at least forty-foot-tall, rounded at the bottom, less rounded in the middle, and slowly reaching toward the sky with a single branch emitting from the very top. He was puzzled then as he looked at that branch at the very top and noticed a star ornament perched there. He walked to join the crowd now gathering around the tree’s base.
“What do you think of this?” Lou walked toward him.
“Well, I don’t know. Did you ask Kristy?” Mike asked as he stopped near her, still looking up.
“That’s just it, Mike. She isn’t here,” Lou answered him. “Do you see what’s on the tree branches?”
“Looks like candles,” Paul answered for Mike as he and James joined the couple. “They seemed to be lit, too.”
Abe was there now, arriving unnoticed. Mark watched as his co-worker and Anna Dell stepped up to the tree to look more closely at the candles. Anna reached in to extract one from its place on a branch.
“There is a name on it,” she called out as she held it in her hand. “It says Robert Fuller on it.”
“Robert Fuller?” the Candlelight Factory owner asked as he stepped up to join her.
“What’s going on?” Mike asked as he stepped closer to the tree and slowly walked around it, leading a small contingent of characters with him.
He knew it was a Fraser fir, his favorite type of Christmas tree. He didn’t know if they ever got this large but here it stood on the corner of his parking lot. He also noticed hundreds of lit candles throughout the tree branches. He identified them as battery powered like the ones that were used at the previous night’s church service. Near the front of the tree, closest to the street, the black kettle still stood waiting for a handout. Inside the black pot, peaking out above the rim, was a rolled sheet of paper. Mike stopped there and looked around at the group following him. He saw the faces of Lou, Paul, and James nearest him. Behind them were his Mom and her father, Robert, and behind them was Farmer Dell, Anna, and his buddy Abe. They were waiting for him to do something. He withdrew the rolled paper from the kettle. It was tied together with green and red ribbon. He slowly slid the paper trough the loop the ribbon made and slowly unrolled the sheet of paper. He began to read the writing on it to himself.
“Read it out loud Michael,” his Mother instructed him. “We want to know what it says, too.”
“You are right, Mom,” he agreed and paused before he began to read again.
“Dear Candlelight!” he said. “I am so immensely proud of you! In a truly short period of time you have become, as Pastor Paul says, a lighthouse of hope for all people around you. Let your light shine for all to see. So that you won’t miss me very much, I have left you this tree, this Christmas Tree, in the very spot I stood and sang for you, as a living testament to your willingness to do good things for others. Every candle on this tree represents every person in Candlelight and as long as you continue to be a beacon of hope to others, the candles will be lit now and forever. I love you all. Your forever angel, Kristy.”
The crowd around him stood in silence letting the words Mike just read to them sink in. They slowly looked at each other and looked at the tree again. The candles seemed to shine a little brighter but maybe it was just the sunshine that had erupted over the horizon through a gap in the cloud cover that brightened the scene.
“O little town of Candlelight,” Anna began to sing, her voice as sharp and clear as Kristy’s. “how still we see thee lie…”
The others began to join her as they continued to sing the town’s new theme song, “Above thy deep and dreamless sleep the silent stars go by. Yet in the dark streets shineth, the everlasting light, the hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight.”
To be continued…
My First Stories 