Henrietta

Henrietta

Henrietta was a small cherub-faced nine-year-old whose eyes always sparkled. She lived with her mother, father, two brothers and an older sister in a lopsided two room shack of a house with a roof that barely kept out the rain and gaps in the walls that allowed whistling winds to rush through on cold, bleak nights. Their only warmth on those nights came from being huddled together in the main room beneath thick blankets beside a cast iron stove that needed to be constantly fed lumps of coal.

Their house, along with all the other tenement homes, stood beneath the stacks of the factory that pumped dirty black clouds of smoke into the air all day all night every day and cast the world beneath in a gray pall. A dismal stream of humanity trudged through the outer gates that surrounded the factory and up to the large, high doors that opened onto the mystery of dark shadows and orange light from furnaces that ran constantly.

Glimpsing the movement of light, shadow, and people beyond the door stirred in Henrietta images of the deep, dark pits of hell like the ones the preacher spoke of. She was not too far off because each month someone died within those walls. Last month it had been Leslie’s father. The month before Daniel’s. No one spoke, at least not to children, of the cause of those deaths, but they heard the rumors. Ghosts draped in black pitch, faces wane with skin drawn tight over skulls showing hollow eye sockets and ragged teeth, that floated from cauldrons of boiling liquid to trip the unwary who fell from the scaffolds to splatter on hard concrete floors where their blood was quickly bleached so that the countless booted heels that tread the floor were not marred by red.

Henrietta would have dreams of pitched specters, backlit by glowing forges, fleeing rivers of molten iron that flowed over giant crevasses into holes from which agonized lamentations could be heard. When she awoke on hot summer nights from those dreams shivering in dread, the seat of her nightshirt drenched, she would slip from her bed as her father, mother, sister and brothers slept the sleep of the dead. In the dark of night with only the wind, and the occasional barking dog to glimpse her passage, she would make her way down to the outer gates and run along its perimeter with a stick going clack, clack, clack as it struck the high, thin bars of the gate. The noise was comforting. It kept the fear and the nightmare at bay and her early morning run dried her piss-stained nightshirt.

She would sneak back in the same way she had left, through the small window in the backroom she shared with her brothers, to lie awake until the gloom of night was broken by the gray light of dawn. She did not know why her family didn’t wake when she left or when she returned, but they never did. It was as if the nightmare were a spell carried over to the waking world and bound them to sleep.

Only once in her nine years had she experienced the stark clarity of blue skies and colors so bright they made her eyes ache. It had been when they had gone to visit her aunt and uncle on their farm in the country, but even then, they had carried their gray world along with them. It was in their clothes, their manner, their skin, their soul. That day had allowed Henrietta to experience the vibrancy of a world filled with color and smells beyond ash and coal, but that was not her only experience of light to push back darkness. There was one other day when light broke through the gray shroud that covered them like a second skin and shone with a brightness that could not be rebuked or denied. It was on that day Henrietta believed in mystery, magic and something deeper than gnawing hunger.

On Christmas day she woke to a world filled with joy and happiness where the cold of winter could not hold in abeyance a warmth that radiated from within, to push back the ills of forge fires, ash, and smoke pumped from red-bricked chimneys crowding the sky, all because of one fat, jolly man dressed in red, assisted by countless elves, and riding a sled pulled by magical reindeer.

Even though they had to endure harsh winters that slowed the blood and crippled hands and feet with numbing cold while living so desperately they could barely fill the hole in their stomachs, on that one day a family found their stockings filled with small presents and sweet treats wrapped in wax paper.

It was Henrietta who was especially burdened by the cold. It was her thin blood. Despair took hold of her in the winter and caused her bright smile to wither and darken, though it never totally faded. Her parents dreaded when that happened because it was only her shining presence that gave the family the mettle to sojourn on.

Her siblings also tried to lighten her dark moods when they were upon her. They did whatever they could so that the music of her laugh could fill the air. She was the reason happiness was never more than a smile or a laugh away. It was why, whatever their poverty of resources, they scraped and saved every spare penny so that there could be a Christmas and Henrietta could, despite all appearances to the contrary, believe in the magic of Christmas and Santa Claus.

Her sister worked as a seamstress in a building crowded elbow to elbow with other young girls earning paltry wages. Her mother was too ill to work, and the boys not of an age to work in the factory and could have easily fallen into one of the bands of roaming gangs but did not because their parents would not allow it. Her father found whatever work he could from day to day. Taken altogether it was a meager pittance in trying to support a family of six.

Love held them fast against the harsh unforgiving world that did not have an ounce of mercy for those living on the edges of society. It was that love which sustained them, nourished them. Love for each other. Love for Henrietta.

To their own detriment, the members of the family did everything they could for Henrietta. Their hopes suppressed. If only Henrietta could believe in joy and magic and hope even for just one day, then they could find happiness in their otherwise bleak existence.

However, for Henrietta, it was the different. She wondered why there could be no magic to last beyond one day. They were a loving family. They deserved better, but better they did not have.

Their hardship and woe could be traced to when their father had broken his leg and they had moved from the close comfort and companionship of the tenement yards to the shack on the outskirts. Never properly set, he had no longer been able to work in the factory. Before then, neither hunger nor the cold of winter had ever been the constant threat they were now.

Henrietta was in the year of her sixth Christmas of the ones she could remember. It was about this time that she was introduced to the other side of Santa: the dark, unforgiving man who did not take kindly to children who were not good and ended up on his Naughty List.

It was a day, not unlike many others, except that the gray unforgiving pall was broken by clear incisive rays of sunshine that pushed back the glooming.

Henrietta played among the tenement buildings with a motley crew. They were chasing rats. It wasn't a particularly smart thing as they were always reminded when caught and scolded by adults, but it was fun. They had their legs and feet wrapped in old, tattered dirty linens and paper tied around their calves and ankles with pieces of twine or strips leather. They would find a rat rummaging among the trash between the alleys and would chase the animals through the loops and turns of the lanes of the buildings yelling and stabbing at the thing with long pointy sticks until it became so weakened by exhaustion and the loss of blood that it was easily dispatched.

This day they were chasing a large, fat one gorged on the leavings thrown from open doors and windows. It was slow and full and easily avoided when it turned to lunge at them with gnashing teeth. They laughed at its agony, stabbing to keep it at bay, lucky they were many against one.

“There is no such,” Kevin said as he jabbed his stick into the rat’s backside.

“You lie!” Henrietta cried, nimbly stepping aside as the rat, slick from blood and maddened by fear, turned and lunged at her. She stabbed at the beast’s eye and it quickly retreated.

Someone else poked the rat on his other side causing it to turn toward the pain. It went on like that, the rat spinning, running, trying to break free of its circle of tormentors only to be turned back by the stabbing, thrusting sticks.

“Even if he does, he’s not that great. Giving out coal to naughty kids. . .. That’s the worst kind of trick to play,”

“What do you mean?”

“He puts coals instead of presents in the stockings of kids he thinks have been bad.”

Henrietta didn’t believe him then, but had the truth confirmed later by her mother.

That was the beginning of the end of everyone’s hopes and dreams, except for Henrietta.

It was not quite fall when Henrietta began concocting her plan to keep the family in coal. She figured the earlier she made the Naughty List and the naughtier she could be the better. But she had a problem. What could she do that would be so bad that Santa would place enough coal in her sock to last the winter? Not the small things like talking back or not listening or playing tricks. She had done all those things and had never ended up on the Naughty List. What could she do in the most spectacular act of naughty that would be so bad to put her at the top of the List?

She racked her brain but could come up with nothing. So, she decided to take another approach. Santa was an adult, so she tried to think of what an adult thought was bad even though they were confusing and hard to understand at times.

Henrietta began to really focus on what her parents, siblings, and friends said when they were talking about the bad things people did. She had heard such conversations before about sneak thieves, housebreakers. She was familiar with them, had even seen a sneak thief at work before.

She had been with her sister at the market when she saw it happen. Most of the sneak thieves had been boys, but there had been the occasional girl as well. Usually they were around her age and moved among the crowded market in packs, or sometimes alone. Since she was about the same height as they, it was easy for her to see the quick, deft hands pilfering fruit or veggies from stalls or coin from an unsuspecting pocket.

She had pulled at her sister’s sleeve to alert her, but her sister had shushed her with a reproving finger placed to Henrietta’s lips. That had confused her. She had been raised to value the honor of hard work and that stealing was wrong, and if she saw someone stealing, she should tell. When she asked about it later, she was told it was none of their affair and that it was best that they not get involved. Henrietta had done the right thing by bringing it to her sister’s attention, but after that it was out of their hands. Reckoning like that was the reason Henrietta found adults to be confusing and contradictory. They would tell you one thing and do another. Was Santa the same? And if he were, then whatever she did would have to be something really really bad to get her at the top of the List.

She continued to think on it and listen to those around her but could find nothing she believed bad enough until one day at Church. It was one of the usual sermons—half of it spoken in some language she couldn’t understand with a lot of standing, bowing, sitting, and standing—when the idea came to her. It was an ecstatic moment of stark clarity that lit her face so full of joy that her mother asked if she were alright. She mumbled some response that seemed to satisfy her.

How and when were the only other decisions that had to be made. A time when no one was home and before Christmas.

From that moment, she never again had the dream of specters and pitch and screaming souls. She was at peace and her smile was even more radiant than before, and everyone wanted to be around her all the more to bask in her radiance. Because of that, Henrietta found it hard to find any time to complete her scheme until the day she woke to find everyone gone. It was Christmas eve.

She smiled a smile, then, to make the sun blush from embarrassment at its own inadequacy. She knew they would not be gone long so quickly set about her preparations to ascend to the top of the List.

They found her swaying back and forth from a rope hung from the rafters. With each swing and turn of her body the raters creaked and shifted. Dust and debris fell. Fluid leaked down from between her legs to drip, drip, drip from her toes into the puddle beneath her limp body. Her mother screamed, her sister fainted, the boys ran from the horror, and her father could do nothing but stand there as joy and happiness fled his soul in the tears that streamed from his eyes.

On Christmas Day, and every day forward, coal filled Henrietta's stocking like a cornucopia supplying an inexhaustible bounty to the world, but her family never knew because they did not return to that house on Christmas Day, or any other day.

So every day the coal flowed and the house came to be filled with the dark, sooty rock that no one ever used because the small plot on which the house leaned was shunned and slowly faded from public awareness, because in the real, gifts require sacrifice, and sometimes, oftentimes, that sacrifice comes from that which is most precious.