Inspire, Fall/Winter 2009

22 FALL/WINTER 2009 THE I never asked my mother about the man who was my father, but on my tenth Christmas I gathered my nerve as we put up our decorations. My heart pounded as we pulled Grandma’s porcelain nativity pieces from a box of ornaments. I took a small cow from its packaging and placed it on the coffee table. I fumbled for the right words but knew I just had to come out with it. “Do you ever wish my father was here?” I asked, keeping my eyes on the bluish-white cow. She worked in silence, her hands fluttering like moths. “There was a king once,” she said, peering at me over her glasses. “On a whim he decided to place an enormous boulder in the middle of the road.” “How’d he get it there?” I asked, lifting a lamb from the tissue paper. She paused. “I don’t know. I’m sure he had an ox move it.” “It’d take more than one ox to move a huge boulder, wouldn’t it?” She sighed, pushing her glasses up on the bridge of her nose. “He had six oxen push the boulder.” “Now that seems like too many.” She shook her head and turned Mary just so on the table. “Okay. Four oxen moved the boulder. The king then threw buckets of water on each side of the rock so there was nothing but mud surrounding it. Many of his courtiers and soldiers grumbled about the enormous rock in the road as they walked through the mud around it. Wealthy merchants and dignitaries from neighboring kingdoms complained about the king and the conditions of the roads in his kingdom, yet no one would do anything about the gigantic roadblock.” She added bits of straw around the nativity, pushing extra around each animal. “In time a peasant came along, carrying a sack over his back.” “What was in the sack?” I asked. “Candy?” “Sure,” she said, shoving the tissue paper back into the nativity box. “When he sees the boulder, he sets his bag of candy on the ground and finds a fallen tree branch, jamming it at the base of the rock, but guess what?” “It won’t budge,” I said. “Not an inch. So he climbed on top of the branch and jumped with all his might but … ?” “Nothing,” I said, picking up the baby Jesus. “Put Jesus back on the table,” she said, pointing. “So the peasant looks all around him again, and way off in the distance he sees the oxen coming his way. The oxen smelled that sack of candy.” An excerpt from the most recent book by Donna (Payne) VanLiere ’89 Unwrapping Christmas Secret