If being born on the 25th of December was a gift, then for Little Nate it was one wrapped in a question for which there were no easy answers. His mother often told him he was blessed. He didn’t feel blessed. Most of the time he just felt confused—and a little bit hungry. Nate was the youngest of four brothers and two sisters, but by the time he was born, even the next youngest—a sister—was married and gone, so that Nate was raised more or less as the only child to aging parents, and that sort of blessing can’t possibly be deserved. His mom and dad just barely made it over the border into Texas before she delivered him by herself in a barn roughly ten miles from the Rio Grande before her husband returned with help. Juán José and Mariána named their child Nátividád like her father who had also been born on Christmas day, and who had never seen his grandchild (and namesake) despite insisting, in a letter sent sometime after Nate was born that he was on his way to Texas from Jalisco where they (except Nate) were all from. So old Náti had been expected any minute now for six years.
With the help of a cousin of his, Juan Jose and Mariana found a niche in the upper edge of the Rio Grande Valley in a spot so isolated that when Nate started school, he had to be bussed thirty- five miles.
It was a quiet life, but a good one. Water was scarce but there was enough food. Juan Jose rode fence for one of the smaller ranches that hadn’t been gobbled up by the King Ranch and those. The family took up residence in an old line shack a little farther out from neighbors than what Mariana would have wanted.
Now with la navidád getting close, she especially missed the customs of her homeland: las posádas, las piñátas, and the bedding down of the Baby Jesus ceremony which she had never felt good enough to perform on her own but had always witnessed at the home of her friend, Doña Ramóna.
Nate, on the other hand, was acquiring new traditions. He asked his mother, “Did you put up a tree before Christmas for Santa Claus to leave a gift when you were little?”
Mariana said, “No. We put our shoes on the window sill on el día de los réyes for the Kings to put a gift in. If we had no shoes to put up, then we might get them for a gift. We always wished for something that we needed, and we didn’t always get those either. We were told not to wish for too much when we didn’t have much to give back either.”
Nate explained to his mother how he’d helped his first grade class decorate a tree with paper chains and handmade ornaments in the manner of Americans who put one out in their homes for Santa Claus to put gifts under. And he said that he really didn’t need anything, but that if he could get something, he would wish for something that played music. Because Nate couldn’t speak English very well yet, but he loved music, knew the words and the tunes to all the songs that they sang in class.
Mariana told him, “I always thank the Virgin for what I have. Praying to Her helps me understand things. I only pray now that you get to see my father, your grandfather.”
Nate turned to his father and said, “Have you ever had a wish come true, Father?”
Juan Jose smiled, and said, “Every one. How big a tree would you want?”
That night before bed, Nate knelt before the Virgin and asked her, “Is there a Santa Claus?”
And that is how Mariana found herself staring at a small hackberry tree that Juan Jose had dug up roots and all and brought inside in a dirt-filled keg, and that Nate decorated by himself, she wondering what she was going to put under it when the socks and shirt she was giving Nate she had planned to give him on the 5th of January.
Her problem was solved (in a way) when a donations group came by with a car trunk full of toys and told Mariana to pick one out for her son, and Mariana, embarrassed no end for having to accept charity for the first time in her life, reached in and pulled out the first thing she touched, said “Thank you!” and went into the house.
On Christmas morning, Juan Jose and Mariana left the house to attend mass at the small church by the main ranchhouse which was a good two-hour ride away on horseback. They had already told Nate about it so that he wouldn’t wonder where they were when he woke up.
But Nate had hardly slept, and he saw them through the window as they rode away, when he made his way to the Christmas tree to see if Santa Claus had indeed come.
He was still sitting on the floor staring at what looked to be cropduster’s goggles attached to an elf’s walking cane when a tapping came from the door and an old gentleman peered through it, and seeing Nate sitting on the floor, he walked in and said, “¿Natividád?” and Nate said, “Sí.”
Then the old gentleman said, “I am Natividád, too.”
Nate stood speechless with wonder holding his gift in front of him like a boy shepherd with his staff at port arms in front of the old man.
Then the man who called himself Natividád, too, said, “And what is that you’re holding there?”
Nate said, “I don’t know.”
Because of all the toys that Mariana could have chosen for a boy who had never seen the ocean nor a stream bigger than a drainage ditch and lived at least fifty miles from any lake or puddle wider or deeper than the trough that his father pumped water into for livestock, she had picked up a snorkle.
Old Natividad said, “Well, it looks like an object in search of usefulness and a name,” and he took the snorkle from Nate, who gave it up not only willingly but with a surprising sense of hope.
For the next two hours, Nate sat on a log by the woodpile in front of Natividad who sat on another log separating the snorkle into its component parts and then whittling away at the tubular piece, jamming wood chips in stations inside its length and then two corklike pieces that he’d shaped with a pocketknife to plug the open ends. All the while, he regaled the boy with stories of people that he’d met along the way, and of the deserts that he’d crossed, and the wonders that he’d seen. Nate took it for granted that Natividad was his grandfather.
When Old Nati was done, he had an instrument with seven holes in a line along its length and a mouthpiece that he’d also carved from wood and fixed solidly into the shorter arm of the U-shape, and into which he encouraged little Nate to blow with his mouth, showing him how to vary the tones by placing the fingers over the holes and then removing them. He said, “The glasses will be useful for crossing windy deserts. May I keep them?”
Little Nate was delighted not only with his gift but that he’d been able to return one. And he played and played. When he saw his parents coming down the road, he ran to meet them and played a tune on the fláuta for them, telling them, too, the story behind it, but when they reached the house, the old man was nowhere to be found.
That night, Mariana and Juan Jose lay in their bed contemplating the events of the day, deciding when the right time would come maybe next year to tell Nate the news that had come through Juan Jose’s cousin (who had just gotten back from a trip to Jalisco) that Old Natividad had died not even a year after Little Nate was born and that he could not have possibly appeared that day. In that moment, they heard the sound of las mañanítas played quietly on a flute, wafting through the night. To their knowledge, it was a tune that Nate had never heard, at least from them. And the goggles were nowhere to be found.
Then in the darkness, they heard the shuffle of boy feet on the earthen floor toward the altar in the corner where they heard Nate say, “Sí, Vírgen. Sí hay Sánto Clos.”
_______
Behold the Child among his new-born blisses,
A six years' Darling of a pigmy size!
See, where 'mid work of his own hand he lies,
Fretted by sallies of his mother's kisses,
With light upon him from his father's eyes!
See, at his feet, some little plan or chart,
Some fragment from his dream of human life,
Shaped by himself with newly-learned art; William Wordsworth
Merry Christmas.
Noe.
