SOPHIE’S CHRISTMAS / 25 Apriil 2009

SOPHIE’S CHRISTMAS A CAROL ON GRANDPA’S GUITAR

by Marvin Payne © 2009, M.P.

CHAPTER ONE, THE GUITAR

Sophie wrapped her innocent fingers around the fiddle bow with the tenderness of a lover. She loved her fiddle and the sparks that flew from its willing strings, its warm breath of hope, and the lonesome yearning that rose from its maple-bound soul like a sigh, or a prayer. This child of song was slight and willowy, blonde, nineteen, quiet, and happy to be once again with her family on

Christmas Day at Grandpa’s house.

Sophie slid a chunk of rosin along the ivory horsehair and smiled after her grandfather as he shuffled off toward the closet in the hall. He would reappear in just a moment bearing the guitar they all loved—especially Sophie. As quiet as

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she was, she could still fiddle like a madwoman, but these last few Christmases she’d just concentrated on holding the carols together. She wanted everybody to feel that Grandpa Bronzini, with his golden guitar, was still in charge of the carol singing, as he’d been since faded decades before Sophie was born. He was frail now, his hands ravaged and stiff, his eyes blind to the patient gaze of his faithful fiddler.

Hank Bronzini didn’t need his eyes to find the guitar. His feet knew the steps across the worn carpet to the closet door. His elbows knew the weight of ancient overcoats as he nudged them aside with a creak of hangers on wood. Propped in the corner on the left, the frayed case warmed to his touch. The surface fabric had lifted and peeled back from the wood underneath on about half the neck part and a big swath on the brave body—wounds from valiantly protecting the riches within. The guitar had been Hank’s trusted companion for seventy-two of his ninety years on earth. Muscle, hair, and even height had left him. Houses had worn out and fallen down. Children and their children had grown and gone. Even his adored wife, who came into his life after the guitar did, had passed away and out of it again many years before. The world had changed—the guitar had not.

Hank knew that when he opened the closet door the guitar would be there.

Always.

He hefted the case out into the hall and laid it gently on the bench that was

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for his grandkids to sit on while they took off their snow boots.

There were boots under the bench right now because of the new snow blown in off the Atlantic. The boots were mostly grandkid-sized. Some were great-grandkid-sized. (Moms and dads wore their indoor shoes to this event. The teenagers would wear canvas shoes and T-shirts through the winter—a practice that had deeply divided generations here on the coast of Maine for a very long time.) Hank could hear them all—moms and dads and kids and teens— chattering back in the big living room where the magical tree was. They were all waiting for a moment they loved and looked forward to every year, the moment when Grandpa would play his guitar and they would sing carols together. His playing these days had gotten impossibly clunky and more painful than anyone suspected, but still they cherished the tradition. It warmed the old man to his soul that the tradition had survived and, with Sophie to lean on, it would last at least as long as he did.

Sophie’s grandpa flipped the latches. He hadn’t opened this case in a year.

There was one latch in particular that gave him trouble since the arthritis had stiffened his hands and corrupted his playing. He winced and lifted the lid. The faintest breath of mahogany ghosted up out of the case. Then he let his fingers fall on treasure. He didn’t need his eyes to know the deep glow of the spruce or the gleam of the strings. What his now blind eyes could no longer see, his fingers had not forgotten. He could feel glow. He could feel gleam.

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He lifted the instrument out of its velvet–lined cradle and was surprised, as always, at how light it was, although it was among the biggest guitars made by the C. F. Martin Company of Nazareth, Pennsylvania. It was a model D-18, deep and square-shouldered, with mahogany back and sides, an Adirondack spruce face, and an ebony fret board and bridge. The “D” stood for “Dreadnought,” a class of British warship unleashed on the high seas in the early days of the nineteen-hundreds not long before the Martin D-18 was unleashed on land. This was the kind of guitar that had no fear of banjos. When Hank first bought his guitar, Martin had been making this mighty dreadnought for only a couple of years, though the company had been working up to it for a full century.

Back in 1934, Sophie’s grandpa was sixteen years old. He’d been working hard since he turned thirteen to help feed his brothers and sisters, the many

Bronzinis—the only Bronzinis in his Appalachian town. The Great Depression hung heavy about the neck of North Carolina, and Hank, being the oldest child, had been just big enough to go to work cutting tobacco in the autumn, shoveling winter snow for the few rich folks in town because he got there first and shoveled best, and salvaging lumber fallen from railcars along the tracks in the summer.

The work muscled him, bronzed him, and stood him up straight.

One day a long freight stopped to take on coal and a burly railroad boss, smoking and snoozing in the caboose, spotted Hank at work. The boss sprang

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out and affected an ambush upon the young scavenger. After shaking him by the collar for a bit, he offered Hank a job—this time unloading lumber to where it was actually supposed to go. It would mean moving down from the mountains to the

Piedmont, all alone, but Hank was all right with that, and he could send nearly all his wages home.

The railroad boarded him, so he faithfully put a little bit of that food and bed money away every week for a prize he’d wanted since he was tall enough to turn the dial on his mother’s big radio. Back then, he would twist and fritz until he found the stations where joyful miracles sprang from the speaker—the stations where guitars were played. He’d seen guitars getting picked and pounded on front porches from the time he was a baby, and he loved these booming boxes before he even knew what they were called. The sorrows of his neighbors were eased and their successes celebrated by the players of guitars and players who gather to guitars bearing other instruments fashioned of strings and pegs and wood and hide.

As Christmas of 1936 began its descent on the land, things were getting better back home, and he would of course go there for the holiday. It would be a sweet time together, but he didn’t expect any more in his stocking than a homemade sweet or two. Hank reckoned Christmas was as good a time as any for a dream to come true, so he took his whole two years’ worth of railroad savings into Lysander’s Music Emporium over in High Point and walked out with

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a present to himself, the guitar he held in his hands right now.

Way back then, in Lysander’s, he told himself that he liked the lighter weight of the mahogany over the heavier rosewood. He told himself that he liked the simpler sound and look of this guitar over the rich jangle of the rosewood model.

But the truth was that he couldn’t afford the rosewood dreadnought. At a hundred dollars, it was thirty-five more than he had. So he immediately set about falling in love with its “plain Jane” sibling.

There was plenty to love. It just sounded so good.

Hank’s purchase was not the beginning of a legendary musical career that was destined to end in a tragic plane crash. He never got a dime for his playing, never even tried. He just sat in his attic room at the boardinghouse at the end of the day and slowly strummed a “G” chord over and over, savoring the choral sustain of those open strings until he felt adventurous enough to tackle “C.” The simplest bits of music felt and sounded wonderful and brought him at least an hour of peace every day. He would close his eyes and entice sweet pings and tongs and thrums into places in life that would otherwise have been pale, lonesome, and dry.

Any pain of the past or fear of the future shrank into shadows behind and before him when he played because the music wasn’t in the past, and it wasn’t in the future. It was only now, and it made now into something glowing, rich, and good. He cared for that guitar like a mother for her baby and fiercely protected it

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from all the fiery darts of the world.

He eventually left behind his railroad calling and took on a career in academics, as he liked to say—he drove a school bus. The benefit of this career was that when he emptied the bus in front of the school, he got to follow his passengers inside, and in that way nearly finished high school. Then he embarked on a career in communications—he strung telephone lines through the woods. There were more careers. Short ones. He lost track.

He wound up knowing how to do a lot of things, which he found in those days was the key to making a living. Hoping to make a better one, he picked up his guitar case in one hand and the rest of what he owned in the other and went north to the big cities. He didn’t like them, went right past and finally stopped in

Maine, becoming the only Bronzini on Penobscot Bay. There he worked into his longest career—as a builder. “Nothing taller than a house, nothing longer than a fence.” He worked hard, but when the day ended, work ended. And guitar playing started.

In time, boy met girl—a lovely lass, a hardy daughter of the rocky coast. Not until Hank had courted his true love into the near certainty of marriage did he finally brave playing his guitar for her (he knew lots more than “G” and “C” by then). But as much as he loved this fair maiden with the auburn hair, when she asked to hold the guitar he got very nervous—though he let her do it. Despite his nervousness, they married, and she happily served as mother to every living

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creature in the household except the guitar. It already had a mother.

In the early ’40s Hank was in his early twenties, and he left off mothering for a while. He never for a heartbeat considered taking the guitar with him to war. He missed it sorely, prayed every day that his hands wouldn’t get shot off, and rejoiced when 1945 brought both the surrender of the Axis Powers and the reunion of the soldier and his D-18.

He played it to calm his wife in the weeks before each birth and played it to calm the babies that came. He was playing actual tunes by then, hymns and folk melodies and some little fancies he invented himself. Ripe with child, his wife would rock in her chair and listen and sometimes say, patting her tight belly,

“Baby likes that one.” Mothers know.

After the babies emerged, Hank got their reviews on his playing first-hand.

In time, he got a chance to review their playing, too, whenever they got tired of dancing to the music and leaned against his knee, strumming viciously while he changed chords. He held his breath every time, and it was agony for him when their talons were fresh from the peanut butter jar—but they were his kids and that earned them certain musical privileges. He always inwardly apologized to his guitar after the ordeal and proved his sincerity by rubbing it down with a flannel cloth for a good long time.

When his oldest daughter (who grew up to become Sophie’s favorite aunt) started high school, Hank suffered his first command performance. The music

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teacher, who played the bassoon, didn’t take Hank’s brand of guitar-playing seriously and wouldn’t have known the difference between a D-18 and the

Invasion of Normandy. There was no danger of having to perform for the students of the music teacher. But the dance teacher pestered Hank’s daughter, who in turn pestered Hank, to come and share a folk song or two during their folk dance unit. Playing in public terrified him, and he never did it again.

His family was one audience that didn’t terrify him, though—at least his direct descendants didn’t. He played his kids to sleep every night and was always happy to play for any combination of posterity who would sit still. Or not.

During the great ’60s Folk Music Surge, some descendants actually came to think that Grandpa was cool. A couple of them even played along.

A quarter-century later came little Sophie, the fair-haired child who picked up the fiddle when she was only five and made her Grandfather shine with happiness whenever she came around and they could play together. Mostly they played Irish tunes mellowed by many decades in the Appalachian Mountains, where Hank had his boyhood and first heard music. They played a little bit of bluegrass, too, a style that didn’t even exist until long after Hank bought his guitar but a style that felt easy in his hands. One Christmas they worked up a bluegrass version of “The Holly and the Ivy” that fairly smoked. Everybody in the house stopped gift-wrapping, stopped divinity-making, stopped fussing with the tree

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whenever Hank and Sophie cranked up “The Holly and the Ivy.” Hank loved hearing his granddaughter’s smile as she sawed away on that fiddle. Sophie loved Grandpa’s thumpety-thump on that grand old golden guitar.

She had loved it for these many years, though the thump had gotten softer over every passing Christmas. This year, it was so soft that the friend who paused as he passed the glowing house, the lean young man in a sailor’s pea jacket, could barely hear it under the singing of many Bronzinis. Still, the sailor knew that thump, and remembered back to when it was more than thumps, remembered hearing rolls and glides and finger-dances, the heartbeat and happy glances of an old, old friend. He wouldn’t intrude. He was warmed and cheered merely to remember.

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CHAPTER TWO, SOPHIE

It was autumn of the next year, and the doe’s ears leaned forward as she perked her head up into the sharp breeze that swept in from the sea. She didn’t swallow the dry grass between her teeth—she just listened, eyes wide. A twig snapped, and she stepped like a shadow behind two thick aspens, still watching.

There were feet in the wood, feet many times the size of her own. Fallen leaves crunched with a violence that nearly sent her bounding in fear, but she held still as stone.

A full-grown human shuffled into the clearing, a young female, a fair-haired girl. She didn’t seem to care how much noise her feet made. How foolish. She would be easy prey for some wiser beast. And she easily could have chosen to walk quietly, despite the size of her feet, because she was slender and light- boned. The silence in her face, the stiffness in her shoulders, these were evidence that she could hold safely still. But even when she stopped and stood, waiting, squinting through the trees, she thoughtlessly pointed her foot and dragged it with a great noise in a half-moon shape through the flaming leaves of the sort that lay everywhere across the land, leaves that danced when the sky inhaled and drew them to the cliff’s edge and let them flutter down into the froth of waves below.

The girl didn’t care about the noise. She seemed, in fact, to be listening for more. She sat down on a fallen log and immediately rose again. She walked to

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the cliff and turned back again into the clearing, as though at the cliff she had forgotten to look at the sea. The girl carried something in her hand like a flat chunk of dead bark. She looked into the thing and waited. It didn’t do anything at all—it was dead. Still, she seemed to think it would. She poked at it twice, then shook her head and looked away. She held it to her breast and sat again on the log, finally quiet. The girl sat that way for the time it took for a gull to appear on the northern horizon and swim the sky to the southern horizon.

The thing in her hand suddenly came alive and made a sound like birdsong, but squashed and short. The young woman sprang to her feet and looked hard at it with a hungry face. The noise came again. Seeming disappointed, the girl dropped her hand to her side and ignored the noises until they stopped. She sat.

Then she rose again and dry leaves clattered around her ankles as she walked.

She stopped and looked again into the dark thing as though it would speak to her. It was silent, and she walked back and forth, crunching the leaves to powder, almost.

The girl didn’t seem to be afraid, but the deer was afraid for her. Startled, they both turned their heads toward a call from just beyond the trees. Another human, larger, a young male, came into the clearing. The girl forgot the thing in her hand, and the humans wound themselves around one another. The doe feared the girl might be devoured by him and stole away deeper into the woods.

From there, she couldn’t see the lean fisherman in the stern of the lobster

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boat who gazed shoreward at the pink rocks and the autumn forest above them.

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CHAPTER THREE, THE PAWN

Norm Nichols, a solid, square sixtyish man with longish grey hair, was the

“Norm” of Norm’s Music & Pawn, Incorporated, on Water Street, a stone’s throw inland from the wharf. Most pawn shops are long on guns, cracked motorcycle helmets, and partial sets of socket wrenches, and short on fine musical instruments. Norm’s was the other way around. On the shelf where another shop might have displayed a dusty food processor next to a frayed fisherman’s creel,

Norm had a vintage fiddle next to a mountain dulcimer—then came the frayed fisherman’s creel. Behind several pairs of skis, another shop might have a

Korean guitar with a Spanish name, missing one of its pegs and two of its strings.

Norm had some skis, too, but not on the same wall as the Martins and the

Gibsons, the old Fender Stratocasters, and the one ancient harp-guitar that wasn’t for sale. Other shops smelled of beer and motor oil. Norm’s smelled of rosewood.

Even before he dropped out of Boston College and started hanging out in the coffee houses of Cambridge, Norm Nichols had begun swapping guitars. Not long after he was married, still a student, he rented an upright piano because he thought it might be good for the children that would surely come into his family.

But when he abandoned his half-hearted commitment to becoming a dentist, his perky young wife wasn’t willing to abandon her dream of being married to one.

So she walked out and so did the vision of little fingers poking piano keys.

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When the movers from the store came to pick up the piano, they reminded

Norm that he’d gotten it on a “rent to own” deal. He suddenly found himself with sufficient credit at the store to relieve them of a cheap 12-string and a reliable

Japanese six-string. These he promptly traded to an old classmate for her slope- shouldered Gibson with the sunburst finish. Trades like that followed. Typically, two guitars for one—but the one was always better than either of the two. Never having enough capital to open a real music store, Norm became a pawnbroker. It was a living. And occasionally he discovered buried treasure.

Late on this November morning, Norm leaned on his glass-topped counter, tapping at a grimy calculator when the bell over the door jingled. He looked up, and a young woman carrying an ancient guitar case came through.

Norm was a friendly guy. “Happy Thanksgiving!”

“What? Oh. Thank you. Can you look at this?” She laid the worn case on the glass and undid the latches. Her fumbling fingers betrayed a profound nervousness. Most people who laid bits of their lives on his counter were at least a little nervous.

The pawnbroker’s eyes widened when he saw what was lying in the case.

With an effort to narrow them back to normal again, he looked up keenly at the young woman across the counter. “This here’s a gorgeous D-18! Any idea how old it is?”

She was blonde, slight, and wore a modest autumn sweater, a knit cap, and

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faded jeans. He guessed she was about twenty and a lot prettier than she looked right now. She answered quickly, “It was bought new in 1936.”

Nineteen thirty-six. Norm thought it was impossible, or at least miraculous, that such pristine beauty should survive that many years. “Let’s see what the serial number says about that.” He raised the fat end of the guitar to his eye, holding it almost like a rifle pointed at the girl’s heart. He was peering into the guitar through the sound hole for the number stamped on the end of the neck- block. He mumbled it over to himself. Then he took a tattered card out of his pocket and ran his long finger backwards over a column of numbers.

Stifling his amazement, he told the truth. Norm was a truthful guy. “Well, looks like it was built a coupla years earlier than that, 1934. That was the ‘Golden

Era’ for these guitars—the ’30s up to World War II. Looks almost brand-new. You never see that. You’ll see a D-18 this old about as often as you see snow in

August, but never one lookin’ this good.”

“The owner took real good care of it,” the young woman said.

Norm glanced up from the guitar, suspicious. “The owner? Only one owner?”

The girl quickly chose a shadow on the floor under a bass fiddle far to the left of the pawnbroker as the safest place for her eyes to look. “Yeah. Only one.”

The pawnbroker cocked his head. This skinny kid surely wasn’t out buying heirloom guitars in 1936. She sensed his gaze and quickly added, still focused on

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the shadow, “except for me.”

Norm wanted to ask her where she got it. He wanted to ask her who died and willed it to her. If nobody had died, he wanted to ask her if she was fabulously wealthy. She didn’t look fabulously wealthy. He wanted to ask her if she was fabulously lucky. She didn’t look fabulously lucky. He wanted to ask her if the one owner before her was fabulously stupid or fabulously generous. But he couldn’t ask any of those questions because any one of them would trip him into revealing what the guitar was worth, which was a lot. He’d said too much already.

So she spoke instead. “What’s it worth?”

“Are you lookin’ to sell?”

“No!” A spasm of horror gripped her face as she let go of the shadow on the floor. “No.”

“Hey, easy.” The pawnbroker hadn’t expected such a fervent reaction. He realized right then that the idea of selling it, a common transaction across a counter like his, had surprised her like a bat out of a breadbox. His suspicion that she didn’t really value this rare guitar evaporated. Obviously, it meant more to her than he’d thought. He said, much more gently, “You want to pawn it, then. Is that it?”

The girl was trying hard to look as though she hadn’t just been yanked out of panic like a drowning sailor out of the sea. She sputtered, “Uh, yeah. What’s it worth?”

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Norm Nichols didn’t want to answer that question. But neither did he want to mislead her. “How much do you need?” He held his breath.

“Can I get eight hundred?”

He let it go. “Sure. Eight hundred, easy.” He hid a grin as he turned away to a desk behind him and came back around in a few seconds with a fist full of hundred-dollar bills and a double slip of paper. She reached out for the money and he drew it back, pretending he hadn’t seen her reach.

“I need to fill out this form. It becomes our contract.” Norm stuck the money in his shirt pocket and wrote while he talked. “Thirty days at 10% interest. That’s

$800 to you now and $880 back to me in a month. If you don’t redeem it inside a month, it’s mine.”

She surprised him with a sudden, sharp confidence, “Oh, I’ll get it out long before then. There’s a big Christmas bonus coming.”

Norm clarified, not unkindly, “If you redeem it first thing tomorrow morning, it’s still $880.”

“Yeah, well--”

The pawnbroker proceeded, “I’ll need to see your driver’s license. While you’re gettin’ that out, your name is . . . ?”

The confidence slipped. She looked for a moment as though she were searching in her brain for her name. Then, not as though she’d found it but as though she’d given up the search, she said, “Sophie. Sophie Bronzini.”

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CHAPTER FOUR, THE MOON

The moon on the horizon laid a silver band across the surface of the warm

Caribbean sea. The band shimmered on the dark water, connecting the white orb and the massive ship. Furrows of dark water shushed away aft and fractured the bright beam, churning it to foam. The breeze on the top deck was like the breath of a baby, asleep. Three thousand souls aboard the cruise ship slept also— except for those who worked through the night, those who played through the night, and the young woman, slight and willowy, blonde and sweatered, who leaned against the rail on the top deck, watching the moon.

The moon comforted her a little. Sophie needed that. Absently, without looking down, she dragged her toe in a crescent on the bare deck, as though she were tracing the edge of the moon. The real moon above her looked nearly the same as it had on the night before. It looked exactly the same as it did when she was a child. She felt like a child now.

Back then, she watched it rise over hills and through trees. Every time she rode home from her guitar-picking grandpa’s house in the backseat of the car at night, she asked over and over again why the moon out the window was following her. The long answer from the front seat never made a bit of sense.

Now, across a black and empty forever of water and deep space, it followed her again. But she had no one to ask now. She was alone. Alone as the moon.

No musicians played. No children shot squealing from the ends of water-

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slides. No cheery crew member asked if there were anything they could do to help her enjoy her cruise. No speakers blared out instructions in Italian on how to get the most Jamaican souvenirs for the fewest American dollars.

She didn’t have to be alone. Eleven decks below her, under the water line, beneath even the hope of portholes, Rob Lucero slept in the cabin that was booked in her name. She could always go below and be with Rob. Maybe. She turned away from the moon and lay down on a reclining deck chair that smelled of sunscreen. A mammoth beach towel wrapped her against the baby Caribbean breeze and the giant ship below droned her slowly off to sleep.

In colder waters, a lonely fisherman hummed a Celtic tune as he lightly rode the helm. Alone in his long silver boat off the coast of Maine, he wasn’t lobstering, but gratefully watching the moon.

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CHAPTER FIVE, THE PLEA

For most people, the 24th of December was mainly Christmas Eve. For

Norm Nichols, who loved Christmas at least as much as most people, it was mainly the day the contract on the ’34 Martin D-18 ran out. It also being

Christmas Eve, he closed the pawn shop early. He wouldn’t get out the guitar and play it, though, until he was dead sure that it was his. There wasn’t any reason why it wouldn’t be, but the young lady had been so sure she could redeem it. There was always the possibility that she’d been injured somehow, that she lay unconscious in some hospital. Or had amnesia. Or had been kidnapped. He had to wait. Norm had been watching the calendar anxiously for the last few days, feeling guilty for hoping she wouldn’t come through the door on time but hoping nonetheless.

Maybe it was this guilt that made him hesitate to call the deal “closed.” Or maybe it was simply that some nobler part of him hoped that a miracle would happen and that she’d somehow come, even though the moment for miracles had, according to contract, passed. Probably, also, he wondered what kind of

Christmas she would have if the guitar suddenly wasn’t hers anymore. Talk about coal in your stocking.

The pawnbroker hung around the empty shop for awhile, fiddling absently with the microphone on a little sound system that someone hadn’t redeemed, trying to decide how much to sell it for.

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Norm had turned off the overhead fluorescent light, and the darkened interior of the cluttered store was now illuminated only by the colorful glow from an elaborate Tiffany lamp, which Norm had acquired from a down-on-her-luck, elderly woman. The December chill was barely held at bay by the hissing of a yellow and blue flame dancing behind the grill of an ancient gas heater—Norm’s was an old building.

An open-backed banjo hung on the wall nearby, and Norm took it down and began plucking it, singing into the mic some words that sounded suspiciously as though he were making them up on the spot.

Come, you children, you sailors, you thieves, and you pawnbrokers,

Call on your patron saint.

Saint Nicholas listens, so tell him you’re good.

He’ll give you a coin if you are or you ain’t,

‘Cause he knows all your sorrows and hears your complaint.

It was a warm, rackety banjo tune, but outside in the dark, the icy December wind battered the lit-up, red and green plastic bells suspended on wires above

Water Street, whipping them into a frenzied dance.

The real bells over his doorway suddenly bounced as if they wanted to ring, but the door was locked and they couldn’t. They bounced because somebody

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was banging on the glass. Was it the guitar girl?

It was, at least, a girl, he thought, more from her movements than anything else. She was bundled up too much for him to tell, otherwise. He couldn’t see her face—her breath had frozen on the glass. He had flipped the “open” sign to

“closed,” she was just ignoring it. She banged on the door again—not a Big Bad

Wolf kind of a bang—it was more a two-frightened-pigs-at-the-door-of-the-brick- house kind of bang. Norm hung up the banjo and reluctantly shuffled over to welcome the inevitable.

Close up, Norm could make out a familiar face wrapped in a plaid muffler.

Even through the frost, he could tell it was a desperate face. It was the face of the young woman he didn’t want to see. And yet wanted to see. It was the face of

Sophie Bronzini. As he let her in, the liberated bells barked at one another.

“Miss Bronzini?”

“Oh, Mr. Nichols!”

“Norm.” He shut the door quickly.

“Mr. Nichols, I know you’re closed, but I have to talk to you!”

“Well, you can certainly talk to me after closing time, I guess. You just can’t buy stuff. That would mean I was working.”

He hoped she would laugh but knew she wouldn’t. He saw a battle raging in her face, a war between fear and fake confidence. Fake confidence fired the first shot.

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“Mr. Nichols—“

“Norm,” he repeated.

“Mr. Nichols, I’m hoping we can come to an agreement on my guitar!”

“Well, um, ‘Sophie,’ isn’t it?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, Sophie, I thought we had already come to an agreement, back about

Thanksgiving time. What did you have in mind?”

Fear took aim. She dodged the bullet.

“You know how the economy’s been . . . I mean, well, even some banks are having to, um, temporarily, halt their cash flows.”

“You need to ‘halt your cash flow’?”

“Yeah. Something like that.” She looked down at her hands, melting snow dripping on them from the cuffs of her heavy coat. “Y’ know, manage my assets wisely.”

“You don’t have the money to redeem the D-18.”

“Oh! Um, Yeah, I mean, that’s an asset . . . that I need to manage.”

Norm sighed. “Sophie, I don’t know a gentle way to say what I need to say, so I’ll just say it. The D-18 is definitely an asset. But as of today it’s not, strictly speaking, your asset.”

Her economist mask fell. “But, it was! I mean, what’s the difference in just a couple of days? I mean, I can redeem it! Just not now!”

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The pawnbroker knew he had the right to toss her out on her ear. He wasn’t, however, the tossing type. And in the face of the young woman to be tossed, Norm saw that fear was in full assault.

“Didn’t you say a month ago that you had a bonus coming from your job?”

“I don’t have a job.”

“Don’t have a job?”

“Well, I did then, but I lost it.”

“Fired you at Christmastime? What kinda good cheer is that?”

She chewed her lower lip and answered, “I, um, I didn’t show up for the biggest selling day of the year.”

Norm knew the day she meant. “The day after Thanksgiving. Black Friday.”

“Yeah. I usually got Fridays off. Um, they called me to come in, but I . . . I wasn’t home.”

“I’m sorry,” Norm said, “that seems a little drastic. Tough luck.” He was quiet for a bit. It really was tough luck. “I guess it’s not real easy to get work, right now,” he offered, lamely.

She laughed a short, little, absolutely humorless laugh. “Tell me about it. I tried getting on as a gift-wrapper. I applied at a half-dozen stores as a greeter. I couldn’t even get hired as a pizza-sign waver!”

“Ouch.” Norm Nichols was feeling her pain. He was feeling some, himself.

He faced a difficult choice: cut some slack for the kid who was hurting so badly or

25 SOPHIE’S CHRISTMAS / 25 Apriil 2009

score the kind of victory every pawnbroker dreams about. Trusting in his frail courage, he heroically surrendered to the little angel on his right shoulder and poked once at the counter-top with his finger. “Tell you what . . .“ The little demon on his left shoulder was chattering like mad—he ignored it. “I’ll extend the contract on the guitar—another month, if you want—just means a little more interest, is all.” He thought that such a monumental sacrifice would at least make her smile.

She looked miserable. “If I don’t get it tonight, it may as well be never.”

“Wait, I thought you just said you couldn’t . . .” Norm saw her about to break and spouted an attempt at a joke. “What’s the rush? Do you wanna give this guitar as a Christmas present?”

She froze for just an instant, as though an idea had landed on her mufflered head and might easily be frightened away. “Yeah . . . Yeah, I need to give it to my grandpa!”

“Can’t he wait? You could give him a picture of it in a fancy card and say it’s coming in a month. I’ll tell ya, January’s a great time to get a—“

“No! No. I mean, he really has to have it for tomorrow.”

“Why?”

“Um, every year I let him play it for the whole family on Christmas Day.

Cousins, aunts, uncles—you know, Christmas carols and stuff. It’s a tradition.”

“And you want him to have a guitar of his own. Starting tomorrow.”

26 SOPHIE’S CHRISTMAS / 25 Apriil 2009

“Yeah.”

“I think you know this is a pretty good guitar—you must love him a lot.”

Sadness bumped the fright out of her voice. “Yeah . . . I do.”

Up until now, Norm hadn’t been able to make much sense of her reasoning, but these last words he understood—perhaps because there was no reason in them, at all—just truth. Truth he could feel. And it felt different from all the other words the girl had spoken.

“I’ve got an idea,” he said, and the angel on his right shoulder became suspicious. “I have this other guitar—haven’t even taken it out of the box, yet. It’s practically a clone of your guitar, except built in China. It’d cost you less than half what you owe on yours, and it’s brand-new!”

“Aw, hey, I don’t think you underst—“

“Hold on! I’m makin’ you a deal, here! Because it’s Christmas and because you’re in a jam, give me fifty bucks and you can pay the rest when you’re in better shape. I’ll even discount it to my cost. Your grandpa’ll love it!” Again, Norm expected a smile. Maybe even a tear or two. He got neither.

Her next words were soft, a little fearful, but filled with stone-solid conviction. “It . . . it has to be the Martin.”

“Miss Bronzini.” Norm sighed, and his words had in them the same weight of truth as he’d felt in hers about her love for her grandfather. Both his shoulders were empty of supernatural beings. “That’s about the best I can do. I’m sorry.”

27 SOPHIE’S CHRISTMAS / 25 Apriil 2009

Even through all her winter wrappings, Norm could see her breathing quicken. “Mr. Nichols, I gotta have that guitar!”

Norm had never faced quite this flavor of desperation in a client. “Can you borrow from relatives?”

“You don’t get it! It’s too late for that!” Now there was anger. She swallowed it as best she could. “I . . . There are reasons why I couldn’t go to them before.”

Norm Nichols, proprietor and pawnbroker, had a speech filed in his mind that he had delivered on many occasions. Always, on these occasions, the audience had been limited to himself. No one else had ever heard the speech.

He hadn’t imagined anyone would ever have to. He couldn’t imagine anyone ever wanting to.

“Miss Bronzini,” he began formally, immediately realizing that this one time out loud couldn’t be as formal as it had always been in the auditorium of his mind,

“you can say it’s just eight hundred bucks. That’s only about half a mortgage payment for me—I live right upstairs, so there’s no house to pay for, just this building. If you saw my car, you’d believe me when I say I don’t have a car payment. If you can’t pay me, my retirement fund won’t take a hit because I don’t have a retirement fund. I can do without the eight hundred. You could be the Girl

Scouts asking me to buy eight hundred dollars worth of cookies, and I might even do it. I could even do without . . .” he swallowed hard, “. . . the D-18.”

None of this was part of the speech stored in his head. He was almost

28 SOPHIE’S CHRISTMAS / 25 Apriil 2009

surprised to hear himself say it. He moved on to something more like the speech.

“But there are . . . rules. Rules of how to do what I do. If I break the rules a lot, I’m outta business—that’s easy enough to see. But if I break the rules even once, even though I’m still in business, I stop being what I’ve chosen to be.”

The next line was a direct quote from the pulpit in his memory: “I cease to be a pawnbroker.”

Sophie squinted and frowned, listening hard. This was where the speech had always ended. But there had never been an audience before.

“You don’t have to understand this. Nobody else has to understand this.

Only I have to understand this. But you have to hear it.” He didn’t tell her that she was the first, and probably the last, who would ever hear it.

She didn’t say anything at all, mostly because she didn’t, in fact, understand it. Norm didn’t know what to do other than just let her stand there and not understand it. Finally, he had an idea.

“Sophie, I can let you play the guitar, if that would make you feel any better.”

She let out a sigh of disappointment, embarrassment, and irony. It was a long sigh. “No, I don’t even play. Just some fiddle, back when I had one.”

“‘Had’ one?”

“Sold it. Last month.”

“To redeem the guitar?”

“No. Before I came here the first time. It was for . . . something else.”

29 SOPHIE’S CHRISTMAS / 25 Apriil 2009

“Sorry ‘bout that.”

“Thanks.”

This was more mystery than the old pawnbroker could handle—why this fiddle-less fiddler who couldn’t play guitar would own the finest guitar he’d ever seen. His curiosity rose. For that reason, and because he couldn’t bring himself to close the door behind her with a flat “No” on Christmas Eve, he needed to keep her in the shop just a little longer. He feared, as well, that she might be just desperate enough to jump off the nearest bridge. The nearest bridge that he could think of was in the miniature golf course—but she could sprain her ankle pretty badly. Wait! he thought, There’s the pier—it’s closer, that’s where she’d go!

Norm had never thought much about this kind of thing.

It wasn’t that she seemed in a hurry to go—her mission was incomplete.

And besides, it was bitter cold out there on Water Street.

“Well, ma’am, I play a little. May I? Just for a bit?”

She looked at him sharply, wondering why he felt he had to ask permission when he’d probably been playing her guitar nearly non-stop since Thanksgiving.

He read her mind. “I never open a case while the instrument inside still belongs to somebody else.” He turned and stepped out of the main shop through a door into a dark room with shelves. The door was already open, but it had an enormous dead-bolt lock on it. He reappeared with the half-skinned case.

“This masking tape with your name on it that’s stuck across the latch? It

30 SOPHIE’S CHRISTMAS / 25 Apriil 2009

hasn’t been shifted. It’s not much of a seal, really, but I respect it.”

Mr. Nichols was the only pawnbroker Sophie had ever met. He’d been nice enough from the start, but she’d always thought of the whole pawnshop world as kind of shady and “wrong-side-of-the-tracks.” Now there were these lofty speeches and weird code of honor. She was baffled. “Sure. Yeah. Play it.”

“So why don’t you take off your coat and sit down.” She took off her coat, but didn’t sit down.

He slung the old piebald case around from behind the counter and lay it on the plank floor in front of the chair from which the banjo tune had risen. He lifted out the old guitar with reverence, sat down carefully, and tuned it. It felt to him like it hadn’t been tuned in a year. Well, that figured.

He finally had it where he wanted it and played a thoughtful jazz verse of

“Silent Night.”

“Pretty,” Sophie said, as though someone had handed her an ice cube and she’d said, “Cold.”

But then the old pawnbroker rolled out a plaintive old Celtic tune that seemed to grab the girl by the collar and jerk her closer. His left-hand fingers marched and slid and hammered-on. His right-hand fingers rolled across the strings and plucked them in twos and threes. His hands were two dancers—their dances of two completely different kinds, but linked in every step by pulsing strands of bronze. The tune seemed haunted by the blind harpist who’d written it

31 SOPHIE’S CHRISTMAS / 25 Apriil 2009

three centuries earlier in a land of silvered fog upon the green. He looked up and noticed Sophie’s mouth hanging open and stopped playing. She was transformed.

“That song . . . I mean . . . well, I . . . . You, you play just like my grandpa did

. . . before the arthritis!”

“Tell ya what. I’m gonna take that as a compliment.”

“Oh, yeah . . . . Really. I mean . . . wow, that’s really weird.”

“Is it still a compliment?”

She actually laughed just a little hiccup-y laugh. “Yeah. Yes! I . . . wow.”

“It has words!” which was more than Norm could say for the stammering girl.

“Yeah?”

“Yes,” Norm said, “about an epic bloody battle between two vast armies.”

“Wow, it doesn’t sound like a battle song.”

“Well,” the old guitar player admitted, “it’s two armies of fairies.”

“Fairies?!”

“Yeah, but the words have never been translated from Gaelic. How’s your

Gaelic?”

“Um, not good.”

“That’s okay, I wrote some new words in American. This tune never sounded like mad fairies to me, either—always sounded more like a lullaby. So I

32 SOPHIE’S CHRISTMAS / 25 Apriil 2009

made it a lullaby for Joseph to sing.”

“Joseph?”

“Well, Christmas. Y’ know, Joseph and Mary and—“

“Yeah, right, yeah. Stupid. Yeah . . .”

Norm corked her flow of embarrassment by singing:

Little Jesus, sweet baby, my lady’s child,

All heaven on a straw bed,

Little lovely one, lie still, lie still, lie still awhile.

Lie still, lie still, rest your head.

“I like that,” she said.

“There’s more,” he said.

“Oh, sorry.” She reckoned the pawnbroker was better at lyrics than at speeches. But the words could have been about stamp collecting—it was the tune that enchanted her.

Little stranger, you fell through the sky so wild,

Through angel gossamer wings.

Little lonely one, lie still, lie still, you’re God’s own child.

Lie still until Mother sings.

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“You belong to the strong Father of earth and stars.

Shepherds alone know who you are:

My lady’s son. But just her husband’s guest.

Sweet heaven’s baby, let your fair mother rest.

Norm kept playing, just a guitar-waltz through the verse music again. It was one of those performances where a bomb could go off in the street, or the hardware store would come to repossess the floor, and the song would continue like a river flows. Sophie had drifted over next to the banjo hanging on the wall.

Almost blindly, as though she were being directed by some outside force, she tapped on the banjo drum in rhythm to Norm’s playing. She continued through his singing of the last refrain.

You belong to the wronged and the deep-sorrowing heart.

You’ll go long in the deep dark

and bring a song to all who pray and weep.

The song slowed down.

Lie still, lie still.

Sweet Jesus baby, you belong fast asleep.

34 SOPHIE’S CHRISTMAS / 25 Apriil 2009

And on the last chord, Sophie softly thrummed her fingers over the open banjo strings.

“Oh! I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to wreck your—“

“No-no-no! It’s nice when somebody plays along.”

“Well, I didn’t mean to . . .”

“There’s a fiddle on the shelf over there. A good one—older than this guitar.”

Sophie’s eyebrow went up. “I thought you said other people’s instruments were sealed.”

“Oh, not this one. It’s mine, now—the lady couldn’t redeem it. It’s been about fifteen years since . . .” Norm saw Sophie’s pain at being reminded of unredeemed things and immediately felt stupid.

“Hey, I’m sorry.”

“S’ alright.”

“Take it out. Play along. You know this one?”

The pawnbroker began playing the Coventry Carol, “Luly, Lulay.” He played it slowly, mournfully. Sophie surrendered and took up the fiddle—just long, slow notes, like sighs. Her eyes were closed the whole time. When it was finished, she opened them, as if from a dream, and was startled to find her companion grinning at her. He cheerily spoke.

35 SOPHIE’S CHRISTMAS / 25 Apriil 2009

“Know the words?”

“Some kinda Christmas lullaby, isn’t it?”

“Sort of. It’s about Herod massacring the innocent children around

Bethlehem.”

“What?”

“I thought it might cheer you up.”

“What?!”

“Well, you’re just awful bummed.”

“Wouldn’t you be?” She clutched the fiddle at her side like a weapon. “I mean, if it was Christmas Eve and . . .”

“It is Christmas Eve. Ya know this one?”

“Is it about a massacre?”

“Naw.”

Norm struck into the refrain of “Angels We Have Heard on High,” playing big block chords and singing with all his might, “Glo-o-o-o-o-oh, oh-o-o-o-oh, oh-o-o- o-Oh-ria in excelsis Deo.” And then again. On the repeat, he gestured for Sophie to sing. She hesitated, and Norm said, seductively, over the guitar chords, “Come on, the alto part. This is only good in parts.”

“I . . . don’t think so.”

Norm stopped playing. “Don’t you know it?”

“Of course I know it!”

36 SOPHIE’S CHRISTMAS / 25 Apriil 2009

“How long have you known it?”

“Since high school choir.”

The pawnbroker tilted his head slightly to the side and closed one eye.

“Nope, I bet it’s longer than that.”

Sophie shook her head sharply, as if to shift clutter out of her brain. “Mr.

Nichols, I don’t know what that’s supposed to mean.”

“Okay. Who sang those very words on the night Baby Jesus was born?”

“Um, angels?”

“A-plus. Ready for the next question?”

“Okay.”

“Name three.”

“What?”

“Name three.”

“That’s not a question!”

“Pretend it is.”

“I . . . what do you mean?!”

“I mean, were they just union angels, or what?”

“What?”

“Come on, what if all those singers were just real folks who hadn’t been born yet?”

“I don’t know.”

37 SOPHIE’S CHRISTMAS / 25 Apriil 2009

“Well, think. Suppose some shining lady in a white dress and carrying a white clipboard steps out on a cloud and announces, ‘The most wonderful thing that ever happened is scheduled for about thirty-five minutes from now. Anybody who feels like singing about it, hustle on over to this quadrant of the sky.’ I mean, would you have gone? Now that’s a question!”

“I guess . . . I might have.”

“Okay then, alto part.”

Sophie laughed awkwardly for an instant. She knew she’d been suckered into singing, but she let it happen. Norm sang the bass part this time and she the alto. Then he asked her, “Do ya think you could play the melody on the fiddle and sing the alto part at the same time?”

She accepted the challenge. “You’re on.” And they almost made it through before the whole thing collapsed and they both laughed. This time Sophie’s laugh wasn’t a hiccup or a surprise. It was a release. When it subsided, she could feel that they’d both been in the same good place together for a moment. It was strangely comforting.

“Mr. Nichols,” she asked shyly, “do you know ‘The Holly and the Ivy’?”

“Yeah, yeah. Sure. I like that one.” He strummed a chord and began singing in a dignified madrigal style:

¨The holly and the ivy, when they are both full grown,

of all the trees that are in the wood—“

38 SOPHIE’S CHRISTMAS / 25 Apriil 2009

Sophie interrupted, “No, no, no, not like that.” She sawed some open fifths on the fiddle in a country “Let’s-get-this-thing-started” sort of way—jang, jang-a, jang, jang-a, jang, jang-a, jang . . .

The holly and the i-vy, when they are both full grown,

of all the trees that are in the wood, the holly bears the crown.

The melody was the traditional melody but with a lot more zip and twang, and the accents were all on the “bluegrass” beats. Then the chorus took off in a whole new direction, right up through the hills and hollers of her grandpa’s mountain home.

Oh, the rising of the sun and the running of the deer,

The playing of the merry organ, sweet choirs clear.

Without stopping, she repeated the chorus and Norm fell right in, boom- chucking the guitar part and wailing a high lonesome harmony. Sophie sang the next verse:

The holly bears a blossom as white as the lily flow’r.

And Mary bore young Jesus Christ to be our sweet Savior.

39 SOPHIE’S CHRISTMAS / 25 Apriil 2009

Another rousing chorus and she nodded for Norm to take the third verse.

The holly bears a berry as red as any blood,

And Mary bore sweet Jesus Christ to do poor sinners good.

It struck the pawnbroker that this last line was a genuine country-style lyric, regardless of how madrigal choirs and carolers had sung it for uncounted ages.

One more chorus, then a repeat, then Sophie smiling, again with her eyes closed as the sustain of the guitar hung in the air.

Norm said reverently, “It’s nice to sing about somethin’ you believe in.”

Sophie answered reverently, “I can sure believe in this fiddle.”

“Yeah, it’s a good one. But, I mean, y’ know, the words.”

Suddenly back on earth with her eyes open, Sophie said, “What? Oh, yeah.

I guess so.”

The flatness of her words surprised the pawnbroker. “You do, don’t you?”

“Do what?”

“Believe in the Baby Jesus.”

“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe . . . not really. But I like the music.”

40 SOPHIE’S CHRISTMAS / 25 Apriil 2009

CHAPTER SIX, THE FISHERMAN

The bells over the door jangled again. Norm looked up, annoyed that he’d left it unlocked.

“Sorry, we’re closed! Come back after . . . Hey! Josh!”

“Avast, Norm! Merry Christmas!” A tall, thirty-something man of no apparent beauty strode into the shop, wearing a frayed navy peacoat and a Greek fisherman’s cap. He looked like he was coming “below” out of an ocean gale.

Not every young man shouts “Avast” when he comes into a pawnshop. But this particular fellow was a man of the sea—more precisely, a lobsterman.

Usually it was the pawnbroker, a complete landlubber, who shouted “Avast” when the fisherman came around, which was not regularly, but often. Instruments of music had passed between these two over the years, and the sound of guitars and other stringed wonders. And the occasional mug of microwaved hot chocolate, when the shop was quiet. There was an easy, comforting manner about the young man that made his every appearance in Norm’s Music & Pawn,

Inc. a welcome surprise.

“Who’s watchin’ the boat?” Norm asked.

“Angels, of course. It’s Christmas Eve!”

The guitar caught the boatman’s attention, and he stared at it. “Gorgeous D-

18! I wanna have a closer look at that in a minute!” He gave Sophie a quick “Hi,” then asked Norm, “Can I pay another visit to that bass fiddle in the corner? I’m

41 SOPHIE’S CHRISTMAS / 25 Apriil 2009

making friends with it, y’ know.”

“Sure! Isn’t it startin’ to feel like it’s yours? I’m lookin’ for a quick purchase, here. It might disappear if you set sail again without it.”

The younger man laughed. “Norm, I come back to port every afternoon.”

Then he retreated to the corner of the shop, where he tapped the barrel of the battered bass and closed his eyes, listening to the resonance—smiling a little. He pulled out a handkerchief and dusted it off, gave the handkerchief a sharp shake, then quietly began bumping the big flat keys toward “in tune.” Norm and Sophie started up another carol.

Just a phrase or two into a bouncy take on “I Saw Three Ships Come

Sailing In,” a voice rose from the corner. “Hey, I know that one. Can I play along?”

Norm called back, “Can’t hurt, I guess—if you play soft enough. Come on over!”

“You’re a funny man, Norm.” The bass player left his peacoat in the corner and joined them with the bass. His playing added more than a third layer to the music. Sophie had played with enough good musicians to know that one plus two often equaled more than three. Joshua seemed to bump their strength up to about five.

Smack in the middle of the third verse, Norm brought the song to a screeching halt. “Manners! Sorry! Josh, this fiddlin’ Christmas elf is Sophie

42 SOPHIE’S CHRISTMAS / 25 Apriil 2009

Bronzini.”

The young man stretched out his weathered hand to the girl. “Joshua

Mercedes. Glad to know you.” He squinted. “Bronzini, huh?”

Sophie stepped back and covered her retreat with an awkward giggle.

“Mercedes? That’s a rich name—what do you drive?”

He dropped his unshaken hand and smiled. “A bike.”

When Sophie didn’t laugh, Joshua turned to the man with the guitar. “That is some D-18!” Sophie wilted slightly at the reminder of the guitar that lay at the center of the storm, but then Norm resumed the go-ahead rhythm of the song, and she fell in with Joshua.

It sounded terrific. Sophie took a solo. Both men shouted, “Take another!”

After that, it was a pure free-for-all, everybody soloing at once. It would have left an audience cross-eyed. It left the players nearly breathless.

Joshua said, “Lady, you sure can play that fiddle!”

Sophie allowed herself a self-conscious smile.

He went on, “No kidding, you are the real thing!”

Sophie felt a slight shudder of falsehood and willed the smile to stay right where it was.

Joshua wasn’t done. “You sound like you’ve been playing since you were a kid!”

Sophie remembered fiddling at Grandpa’s knee, and the smile yelped away

43 SOPHIE’S CHRISTMAS / 25 Apriil 2009

like a frightened puppy. She mumbled, “Hey, let’s play another.”

They played another—a quick-step jam on “Joy to the World.” Sophie looked over her bowing arm at Joshua, who glanced up from his earnest thumping and smiled at her. She relaxed. It appeared he wasn’t on her trail, or on her case. She even imagined in that moment that he might be on her side. He was, at the very least, in her key and loving it. She let her feelings change shape, in a way she’d learned a long time ago. She retreated from her thoughts and fears and schemes and let her consciousness flow out her arm and into her innocent bow, lashing out this bright and holy tune.

Then a more mellow “Away in a Manger” settled easily into their strings, but it only led to another run of smoking romps. Sophie Bronzini was lost in the music, plucked from a cold tempest and tossed into a warm, swirling wind of song.

A couple of hours passed, with no more than a dozen words between the players. But meaning cascaded in the music. Norm, forgetting his profession entirely, chugged out his fatherly hope and Christmas wonder. Sophie spun a bright curtain of “now” around them, passionately weaving it against all cold and dark that hovered beyond this moment. Joshua just loved it—the music, the moment, the old man, the girl, the echo of these songs in the frosty street, the memory of voices above Judean hills.

The boom of his bass was so deep and true that it seemed to connect the

44 SOPHIE’S CHRISTMAS / 25 Apriil 2009

music and the players to the earth like roots, but every now and then his strong fingers would soar up the neck for a lick that tossed them skyward. Sometimes he stayed high for a whole verse, lifting them for a time up onto a level where it wouldn’t have surprised Sophie to turn and see an angel picking a mandolin or a cherub perched on the counter and slapping a banjo.

There was an intimacy here that Sophie hadn’t felt since . . . . Who was yelling?

“O Come, All Ye Faithful” had crashed to an end, and Norm hollered, “Josh, take a vocal on one! What do ya know?”

Joshua considered for a moment in the electric silence. Sophie couldn’t tell if he was thinking of what to sing or deciding whether or not to sing it.

Finally he said softly, “Here’s one I know pretty well.”

He didn’t announce a key or count off a tempo. His left hand dropped to the shoulder of the bass, simply holding it up, and his right fell limp at his side. He raised his eyes toward heaven and began to sing, his voice naked, clear, and lonely. Nobody played.

I am a poor wayfaring stranger,

While trav’ling through this world of woe.

Yet there’s no sickness, toil nor danger

In that bright world to which I go.

45 SOPHIE’S CHRISTMAS / 25 Apriil 2009

I’m going there to see my Father.

I’m going there no more to roam.

I’m only going over Jordan.

I’m only going over home.

Without a part to play, Sophie didn’t know where to look. Norm gazed on the face of his friend, but Sophie couldn’t. The singing was too real, too raw, the song too close for comfort. It was like breath against her skin. It was breath against her skin. She was a little embarrassed. She closed her eyes. Oddly, the embarrassment ebbed away in the dark. Peace settled in its place, and Joshua’s voice danced in the sudden distance like a lantern on the riverbank.

I know dark clouds will gather ‘round me.

I know my way is rough and steep.

But golden fields lie out before me,

Where God’s redeemed shall ever sleep.

I’m going there to see my Mother.

She said she’d meet me when I come.

I’m only going over Jordan.

I’m only going over home.

46 SOPHIE’S CHRISTMAS / 25 Apriil 2009

No bass fiddle had played high “angel-seeing” stuff. Still, when Sophie opened her eyes she almost expected to see one. Instead, she only saw Joshua, looking like one. There was a magical silence. Norm broke it. “Um, Josh, you sure that’s a Christmas song?”

Joshua answered mildly, “Why not? I reckon the baby in a manger was the

Redeemer. Maybe any song about redemption belongs in a Christmas jam.

There’s a carol that calls Christmas ‘the dawn of redeeming grace.’ You need to brush up on your carols, Norm.”

Sophie wondered which carol Joshua was talking about. Then she remembered. “Silent Night.” Of Course. She’d sung that line a thousand times, but she’d never heard it.

Norm grinned. “Well, it might be just on account of you’re in a pawnshop, where stuff gets redeemed.” He glanced at Sophie, who seemed arrested in thought and whispered to himself, “Or not.”

Having brought them to the brink of awkwardness, Norm launched them into the relative safety of a raucous “God Rest Ye, Merry Gentlemen.” Smiles returned and safety prevailed.

Every few moments since they’d started to play together, Joshua had leaned over his bass fiddle and studied the instrument on Norm’s lap. At first, it seemed like mere appreciation. Then, as the playing rolled along, it became curiosity. The guitar looked almost brand-new, like a reissue of a classic, but

47 SOPHIE’S CHRISTMAS / 25 Apriil 2009

Joshua knew what to look for, the unmistakable signs that testified of “vintage.”

The tortoise-colored pick guard appeared to be under the finish, not on top of it, as it would be on newer guitars. There was a tiny dark crack in the wood alongside it where it had shrunk and the spruce beneath it had not. The thin saddle on the bridge had deepened from pale ivory to amber. Nearly invisible finish cracks graced the guitar like spiders’ lace. This guitar was old. More than that, this guitar was familiar. The pawnbroker absently strummed an open “G,” and it seemed to throw a switch in Joshua’s memory. His appreciation and curiosity ignited into amazement.

“I have seen that thing before! I’ve played it! That’s Hank Bronzini’s guitar!”

Norm began a “Who’s Hank Bron—“ but Joshua tumbled forward to the certain and terrible question.

“What’s it doing here? He wouldn’t pawn that in a million years!”

Sophie gulped air. The idea that someone as young as Joshua might be a friend of her grandfather’s took her utterly by surprise. She panicked. “Don’t tell him! Please, don’t tell him!”

“Don’t tell him what?” Joshua asked.

Deer are jumpy creatures. When they freeze in the headlights and open those terrified eyes, maybe they’re not so much “changed” by the surprise as they are “revealed” by it. They can no longer pretend that they’re not there. And, blinded by the light, they can’t see any path of escape. The doe-eyed Sophie,

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though, frozen in Joshua’s stunning blast of light, was amazed to find that she didn’t even want to escape. To die? Maybe. To be once again in the dark?

Certainly. But this guy clearly knew too much already, and there was something gentle and authentic about his voice, his music, the clarity in his eyes that made the prospect of any more lying, or even half-truth-telling, obscene. She knew she had to reveal to her grandfather’s friend the very truth she wanted him to conceal.

She was, of course, compelled in this. But as she surrendered, she felt a great weight lifted from her shoulders, as by angels. It was the weight of armor.

Norm mistook the quiet of her resolve for evasion. “Sophie, did you pawn a guitar that wasn’t yours?”

The resolve didn’t stay quiet. It filled with tears.

She broke and sobbed, barely choking out the words. “Oh, I . . . I was so stupid . . . selfish! I . . . . What’ll I tell Grandpa?”

Norm offered, “The truth?”

Joshua joined him, gently inviting, “How about you practice on us, Sophie?”

The girl generally didn’t live according to slogans, but she knew in this moment that “The only way out is through.” She plunged ahead.

“I . . . I fell in love.”

For Sophie, that had seemed like the biggest thing in the world, like the most noble reason for doing anything. Now, when she heard herself say it, it sounded pretty small. She tried to say it bigger.

49 SOPHIE’S CHRISTMAS / 25 Apriil 2009

“For the first time in my life somebody, I mean, some guy went out of his way to make me feel like I was a whole person. Suddenly I wasn’t just a cute kid with a fiddle. He said things that made me want to . . .”

She caught herself, and said more simply, “He told me I was beautiful. I believed him.”

“But, that’s a good thing,” said Joshua.

“Yeah? Not if the guy’s a jerk.”

The two men looked at each other, nodded, and conceded that this might be correct.

“He came on so gallant, romantic. He had huge ideas!”

Norm and Joshua asked, one after the other, “Huge ideas?”

“Like what?”

“Like Thanksgiving dinner in the Caribbean.”

Norm said, “Sophie, you’re gonna have to explain that one.”

She shot back, “That’s how I felt, too! It was just this bizarre proposition. Not like skiing on autumn leaves or frying eggs on the radiator of your car . . .”

Norm interrupted, “Wait. Wait. Is that a date? This ‘eggs’ thing?”

“It was for us. We did crazy stuff! Fun stuff! But nothing as crazy as he came up with for Thanksgiving.”

Norm was still stuck back on the eggs. “Did you . . . have a lot of these dates?”

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Sophie was quiet for a moment, then took a deep, stuttering breath. “We had four dates.”

Norm whistled through his teeth. “Four dates? Then Thanksgiving dinner on the Caribbean? Don’t most people have about twenty times that many dates, first? And the last couple are the one where they get engaged and then the one where they get married?”

Joshua laid his hand on Norm’s shoulder to quiet him. “So, Sophie, this

Caribbean thing?”

“He said he wanted to give me an early Christmas present. I thought he was nuts to do anything that expensive, but he said he had this humongous

Christmas bonus coming the first week in December. So would I buy his ticket and he’d pay me back for both of them.”

Norm aha’d, “So it was his Christmas bonus you were expecting!”

“Yeah. Guess I should have said . . . but it didn’t matter, in the end.”

This was painful for the pawnbroker. “He got what he wanted and didn’t even pay you back?”

She brightened just a tiny bit, just short of a smile. “He didn’t even get what he wanted. As soon as the ship pulled out from the dock, I knew it wasn’t right for me to be there. I told him so the first time we sat down in the dining room . . .”

“What’d he do?”

“Within an hour he was after the Swedish waitress. Oh, man, I was so

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dumb! I mean there’s ‘wrong’ and then there’s just plain ‘stupid’! I don’t know which makes me feel worse.”

Joshua’s hand had remained on Norm’s shoulder. Now he put the other on

Sophie’s. She sighed and continued quietly, resolutely.

“Everything else I told you is true. The job hunt, being broke. I had to max my cards just for food and rent.” The scent of bitterness wafted into her voice.

“‘Course, the Christmas bonus was history.”

Norm remembered something. “You said you sold your fiddle?”

“To help pay for my ticket—I sold it ‘cause I didn’t think it’d pawn for enough. Probably would have. Doesn’t matter, now.”

She gazed down with enormous sadness at the precious instrument in her hands. “I think that’s all. Except for one more thing. The biggest pain isn’t about .

. .” she faltered at his name, “Rob, at all.”

Joshua asked, “Rob’s the guy?”

“Yeah . . . yeah. He isn’t worth the pain. It’s my grandpa. It’s . . . . Ah, this’ll kill him!” She broke down.

“Sophie.” It was Joshua’s gentle voice. “I wouldn’t cause your grandpa any pain for all the world.” He just listened to her cry for a bit. Then she looked up into her new friend’s face with a questioning look. Joshua pulled the handkerchief from his pocket and wiped her tears. The fabric smelled to her like fine old bass fiddle. Then he turned to his host, his manner suddenly brisk, and said,

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“Honorable Captain Nichols, sir, someday I’ll actually buy this bass.” He lugged it back to the corner, grabbed his coat, and with a quick “Merry Christmas, you two,” Joshua left the shop.

Sophie was astonished. “Wow, that was . . . . I mean . . . . What’s . . .”

The pawnbroker shrugged. “Hey, don’t look at me.”

She choked out, “I thought he . . .”

“What?”

“It seemed like he might . . . . Oh, I don’t know!” Grief covered Sophie like a tide, and she sank to the floor, sobbing.

The old man looked around frantically, like a man trying to find a lifeline to throw to a drowning swimmer. Then he realized he was holding one. He knelt down awkwardly next to her on one knee, the guitar balanced on the other, and began a light-hearted picking pattern. Stabbing wildly at what a kindly uncle might sound like, he sang:

You better watch out, you better not cry,

You better not pout, I’m tellin’ you why.

Santa Claus is comin’ to town.

Her sobs continued. He persevered.

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He’s makin’ a list, checkin’ it twice—

Gonna find out who’s naughty and nice.

Santa Claus is comin’ to town.

Was she calming down?

He sees you when you’re sleeping.

He knows when you’re awake.

He knows when you’ve been bad or good,

So be good for goodness . . .

He had been watching his chord hand, but he looked across at Sophie when her stifled sobbing exploded into a wail. This was so entirely the wrong song. He tried something else. Something very, very else—a memory of Sunday

School. In the voice of his childhood teacher, over gentle strums, he sang:

Fair is the sunshine. Fairer, still, the moonlight,

And all the stars in heav’n above.

Jesus shines brighter, Jesus shines purer,

And brings to all the world His love.

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Sophie’s sobs quieted. She sat huddled on the floor, her shoulders still heaving a little. Norm couldn’t see her face. But she was quieter.

Fair are the meadows. Fairer, still, the woodlands,

Robed in flow’rs of blooming spring.

Jesus is fairer, Jesus is purer—

He makes the sorrowing spirit sing.

Norm didn’t know the next verse. That was okay—it felt right to end on the notion of sorrowing spirits singing. He wondered how he could make Sophie’s sorrowing spirit sing. The song seemed to suggest that he couldn’t.

“Sophie?”

She didn’t respond. He still couldn’t see her face. With a groan, he struggled up off the floor. He returned to his chair, leaned back with a weary sigh, and began playing his little tune about an Irish battlefield swarming with fairies.

But he wasn’t playing for Sophie. He was just playing because the playing was in the now, and he couldn’t think in any helpful manner about either the past or the future. And if he didn’t know how to comfort, he at least knew how to play.

As his fingers traveled the frets, his head fell back, and he closed his eyes.

Sophie looked up and felt safer in his darkness. It reminded her of her grandfather’s darkness and of the light and comfort she had always found there.

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She felt the pawnbroker’s failure to heal her, and was, for the first time, grateful for his clunky attempts. She even began to pity him a little. This was a tiny miracle swelling into being, a little miracle of self-forgetting.

Norm’s fingers slowed as they crept up on the end of the song. He seemed to wake up, and when he found Sophie still and tearless and gazing at him, he took it as a sign that she was on the mend. So he had a grand idea, and burst into a rip-snappin’ reprise of “The Holly and the Ivy,” a slam-dunk solution if there were ever to be one—and the miracle popped like an overblown bubble.

Sophie stood and Norm stopped playing. To remember Grandpa’s old duet with her was like a shimmering flame: it could warm, and it could burn. Scorched, failed, and desperately unhappy, she set the heirloom fiddle on the counter, grabbed up her coat, and headed for the door . . .

. . . where she crashed into Joshua, who sailed into the shop with all the subtlety of a British dreadnought.

“Oops, sorry, Sophie. I beg your pardon.” He careened past her. “Norm! I want to redeem that guitar!”

Sophie froze in the doorframe.

“Too late to redeem it, Josh—the contract’s up. You can buy it, if you want.

At least, well, you can lay it away.”

“Aw, it’s never too late to redeem a glorious thing like that. What’s it worth to you?”

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Norm reckoned his friend knew very well what the guitar was worth, but

Joshua had asked a different question. What was it worth to Norm? The old man felt just a little awkward as he snuck up on this negotiation. “Well, it’s re-e-eally old, and it’s re-e-eally good.”

Joshua smiled. “Like you, Norm.”

The Pawnbroker frowned and stopped sneaking. “Very funny. I reckon eighty-three thousand.”

Joshua nodded.

Sophie didn’t hear anybody laugh. Why didn’t anybody laugh? The rotation of her world came to an abrupt halt. As did her breath. And nearly her heart. She collapsed against the glass. “Eighty-three thousand?! You loaned me eight hundred dollars on it!”

Neither man paid her any attention. Joshua said, “I’m more of a redeemer than a buyer. You know that. How about you just pretend I’m a blonde and pretty fiddle player and let me redeem it at, oh, a thousand percent interest.”

“What, eight thousand dollars?”

Joshua nodded again.

“But that’s a tenth of what it’s worth!”

“Maybe, but it’s also ten times what you loaned on it.”

Stung, Norm held out for justice. “Josh, it wouldn’t be right! It’s an eighty- grand guitar!”

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Joshua grinned, “Eight thousand is all I’ve got.”

Norm tried to speak, but only sputtered.

Joshua nudged, “What’s seventy-five grand between friends?”

Norm raised one eyebrow in extreme doubt, “You have eight thousand in cash?”

Joshua stood up straighter. “What with liquidating this and that, I’m a good deal more flush than you might imagine.”

“This is about pawning, not plumbing!”

Joshua laughed, then said softly, “No, Norm, it’s about sacrifice.” Norm just shook his head, purely bewildered, his eyes fixed on the D-18. The score of a lifetime.

The fisherman whispered, “C’mon Norm, you can do it. It’s Christmas.”

The pawnbroker looked him in the eye for a long breath. Understanding crackled like an arc between them. The young woman watched, frozen in fear and denial. Finally Norm shouted, “Done!” and handed over the guitar, turning away so he wouldn’t grab it back again.

Sophie couldn’t believe any of this was happening. It was like a tornado was turning above her, with clouds of dollars and guitars and twisted words and raised eyebrows in a howling serpentine on the wind, and she was alone in the tight black cone far below where it clawed at the ground, yanking her like a top and pulling her heart right out of her chest.

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She whirled on Joshua and howled, “We played music together! I spilled my soul for you! I trusted you! You made me think you’re a good guy! And now you’re ripping off my guitar?!”

Joshua calmed the storm and looked her square in the eye. “Your guitar?”

“Yeah! My . . . .” She faltered, and there was dead silence in the pawnshop for many seconds. Sophie lowered her chin to her chest and finished, “My grandfather’s guitar.”

Joshua clipped the guitar into its case and placed his hands gently on her shoulders, “As of now, this guitar is redeemed, Sophie.” Then he picked up the case and walked away.

“Redeemed?!” she cried after him. “More like stolen!”

The bells mocked her, an icy breeze knifed in, the door thudded shut, and

Mr. Mercedes, with his new guitar, was gone.

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CHAPTER SEVEN, “THE DAWN OF REDEEMING GRACE”

Sophie watched the dark birthing of Christmas Day. She sat alone in her basement rental and watched it coming, heard the holy tick of midnight, then watched it go, a shadow scampering into the past, where all the other

Christmases were bright. On the evening before, she had gotten just close enough to Baby Jesus to wonder if He was teaching her how it felt to be betrayed by one she trusted—like He had been. It was the same pain her grandfather was about to feel. At about the hour when the naughtiest among her nieces and nephews were stealing on tiptoe into their cold living rooms to poke and shake dark packages, she sank into merciful forgetting on her couch, without a blanket.

The phone woke her up at about eleven in the morning with a jangly “Merry

Christmas!” from her mother. Sophie was startled, then remembered hard reality, then answered in a flat, gray voice, “Oh. Yeah, Mom. Thanks.” It was time for

Sophie to get to Grandpa Bronzini’s. Mom thought Sophie should be there before the pie was all gone. Sophie thought she should be there before Grandpa went to the closet in the hall.

She changed out of yesterday’s clothes into cleaner jeans and a sweater and pulled a brush seven strokes through her hair, hardly seeing herself in the mirror. She saw instead her grandfather’s face—the way it used to glow when he sat down with the old Martin, the way it winced for just an eye blink when his stiff hands bent for a chord and dragged the first strum across the strings, the way

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light almost came again into his vacant eyes when his family began to sing.

It may have been snowing on the sidewalk that snaked around the hill to

Grandpa’s house. Sophie didn’t know. Flakes may have settled on her muffler and lashes. Sophie didn’t see them. Sophie didn’t feel them. If they had been hot instead of cold, she wouldn’t have felt the pain of them. Yesterday she felt her pain. Today she felt Grandpa’s. On the slow walk, three cars full of cousins and aunts and uncles passed her on their way to the Bronzini Christmas. Each car honked. Sophie didn’t hear them.

The strings of colored lights on the porch burned pale in the gray daylight.

Sophie didn’t see them. The front door was opened and shut, opened and shut, as grandchildren and their parents went in, and grandchildren and their snow toys went out again. Sophie walked around to the back of the house, hoping she might find her grandfather in the kitchen, where she might be able to pull him away from her fussing aunts for just long enough to break his heart.

She opened the back door, and the breath of hot apple pie washed over her like a wave. This sweetness, at least, got through her dead senses. And made her sad. Grandpa wasn’t in the kitchen. For the moment, no aunts, either. She walked across the floor, pushed open the farther door just a crack, and glanced over the scene in the living room.

Babies scooted on the floor, chewing wrapping paper and threatening lower branches on the tree. Only one was crying, and stopped when his mother

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scooped him up. Another reached her tiny finger to the tip of a warm amber spark on the tree and was lost in the wonder of it. The baby’s four-year old brother swayed above her, leaning his face inward and outward from a big red glass ornament, laughing as his nose filled the shining planet and then his monstrous eye on the next swing in and then his mouth like a dragon to swallow the world.

She surveyed the grown-ups quickly, looking only for one among them. He wasn’t among them. It was painful to see the grown-ups because not long after the pie (pie was always first at Bronzini Christmases and dinner much later), they would all share in the heartbreak her foolishness and wrong had caused. And who could possibly know what other hurtful emotions might follow the heartbreak?

Grandpa had to be told first, not only because he was the real victim, but because he would deal with heartbreak in the best way, even though his would be the greatest. Hank Bronzini knew a thing or two about heartbreak. He had walked that bleak valley before. Sophie hoped fiercely that he loved her enough that perhaps, after a while had passed, he could be her guide there. She wanted with all her heart for Grandpa to believe in redemption, even if she didn’t.

“Wham!” Sophie caught the force of the kitchen door right up and down her forehead and across one eye. If she hadn’t been only an inch from the wood, it might have knocked her silly. One of the great-grandkids shrieked up from very far below, exploding with instant compassion and remorse, “Aunt Sophie! Did I

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killed you?!”

“No. No, Kyle, I’m . . . I’m fine. You didn’t see me there—it was my fault.”

“Sophie?”

“Sophie?” Voices piled on top of one another. “Hey, it’s Sophie!”

This attention was exactly what she most dreaded. She would have retreated, back through the kitchen door, except one last voice, thin and ragged, called out, “Sophie!”

“Grandpa?”

“Sophie, come into the hall.”

Her doom was upon her. All the other voices broke into cheerful bits and hums and rambles, right where they had been before Sophie came to ruin their

Christmas. Her feet were like lead in her shoes, but she made them move.

Grandpa waited patiently, his sightless eyes unreadable. She finally covered the impossible distance between them and whispered, “I’m here.”

He fumbled for her elbow and led her into the hall, where they were all alone together. Sophie heard nothing more of the family buzz behind her.

Hank Bronzini said softly to his granddaughter, “I want to show you a

Christmas present I got last night from a friend of mine.” She had no idea what he might be talking about but when he opened the closet door, Sophie shut her eyes tight against his certain reaction. She heard him shove the coats aside and waited for his voice. It wouldn’t come in a scream of disbelief or a shout of anger.

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It would be a puzzled little grunt of “What?” and then a mumbled “Hold on, here.”

Then the calamity would dawn upon him slowly. She would have to jump in quickly with the brutal story, so he wouldn’t have to suffer twice—once under any mystery about the theft and again with the totally non-mysterious betrayal and disappointment. But she didn’t hear his voice at all. She heard the scrape of a guitar case being drawn from the shadows.

Sophie opened her eyes and gasped. She stared at the case. No other case looked like that. Had Joshua been here? What other magic could explain it? Or had it all been a dream? No, the pawnshop had been real. The cruise ship had been real. The terror of Christmas Eve had really come. But the fisherman, too, had been real. Here was the case. Could there be the faintest flicker of hope that the guitar was inside? The guitar that had been born at sixty-five dollars, had passed through a distant heaven of eighty-three thousand, and had been reborn, redeemed, on Christmas Eve for eight grand, hard cash?

Against all hope, it seemed to be so. That mysterious stranger had given these two tender souls escape from half the heartbreak—the guitar was home.

But if Joshua had brought home the guitar, how much of its story had he brought along with it? Any part was enough to condemn the thief, the betrayer.

Sophie’s heart, broken like bread, was truly ready for anything—any correction, any rebuke, any rejection, any wound, as long as truth happened. She was grateful Grandpa couldn’t see her tears, and she didn’t speak.

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The old man opened the case, lifted out the glowing guitar, and strummed a

“G” chord (the easiest one). As the strum hung on the air like a choir, he whispered in melody the words “Si-i-lent night, ho-o-ly . . .” That’s as far as he got. His empty stare fixed for a moment on a point in the middle of her forehead and he said, “Sophie, it’s time for confession.”

Fresh tears started from her eyes. Again, she didn’t speak, but reached out and grasped his elbow, hoping it would mean something to him that would serve as a beginning of the terrible words she must say.

He spoke again. She thought it was her turn, but her Grandpa spoke. “I’m ready to confess that my playing needs a little support.” Sophie blinked. Where was he going with these bewildering words?

He set the guitar on the snow boot bench and reached back into the closet, groaning with stiffness, this time to the high shelf. “My Santa from last night is a pretty giving sort of guy.”

Sophie nodded, afraid to speak, and knew it was stupid to nod to a blind man. He turned from the closet and held out something in her direction that she couldn’t make out through the tears. “The guitar isn’t his only gift, my love.”

Grandpa opened the case for her and held out the old fiddle she’d played on the strangest Christmas Eve of her life.

She finally spoke, choking out, “He went back and . . . ?”

Grandpa answered her unfinished question. “My friend Joshua . . . he . . .

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well, yeah. He does that. I’m surprised—a little sad, y’ know—that you never met him before now. The boy’s like a son t’ me . . . when he’s ashore. Heck of a bass player.”

As his little girl fell into his arms, sobbing out loud, Hank lifted her chin, smiled through his own tears now, and simply asked, “The Holly and the Ivy”?

~

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