As she set out the next time, trudge-weary Mattie met Bodkin on the stairs. He’d thrown in the towel and struggled back through snow up to his armpits. Head down against the windy whiteness, Mattie cut over to Shuter as the fastest way to get to Hopkin and bring him in. When she reached Pembroke she could make out ravaged snowmen on both sides of the street. Even Hopkin’s two had been looted. When she couldn’t find him in the tree she had a brief hope he’d followed the perpetrators. Then she made out a white bundle up on a higher branch and called his name.
Mattie struggled back to the office with Hopkin under her arm. When he’d thawed out, the elf told her and the others how, by the light of the street lamp near his tree, he’d seen a sledded handcart pull up beneath him, heaped with snowman heads tied up in bright wool scarves, high hats, carrot noses, twiggy arms, and hockey sticks. When snowman parts from his two in the yard were added to the cart it moved on through snow too deep for Hopkin to follow. But the cart pusher left large square footprints behind him.
For Mattie, square footprints could only mean one thing. Her rival, Queen Alicia, was in Toronto. But where and why?
She walked to the office the next morning amid a racket of snow shovels. The shopkeepers had hired snowdrifters to clear their sidewalks. One wore a bright wool scarf. “Father Christmas?” she asked. He nodded, then nodded again across the street at a thin, elderly man in shabby clerical black, including spats against cold feet, talking with two homeless men under the Regent movie house’s modest marquee. “Father Christmas,” he said.
The man in black walked away and Mattie kept pace with him on the other side of the street. When he went into a luncheonette, she crossed over and slipped onto a stool next to him. “They say you’re Father Christmas.”
He turned a long gray face to look at her just as the counterman arrived. “The usual?” he asked the priest in a Belfast accent. When Father Christmas nodded, the man asked, “And what about the Missus?”
“Tea,” said Mattie sharply. “And separate checks.”
As the smirking counterman moved away, the priest said, “My name is Christie. I’m a Catholic priest. I give the snowdrifters scarves around this time of year. Not much of a leap for them to call me Father Christmas.”
“Where do you get the scarves?”
“Who wants to know?”
“The Snowmen’s Aid Society has hired me to find out who’s murdering snowmen around here. Maybe it’s for their scarves.” The counterman returned with their orders. When he was gone, Father Christmas said, “I grew up around here. Tough part of town. But we don’t murder snowmen or rob them, either.”
“Like I said, where do you get your scarves?”
“Finish up and I’ll show you,” he promised, adding, “Talk about knitwear, in the seminary I was considered a comer. My mother even knitted me purple socks. For when I made bishop, she said. So did our archbishop’s mother. His Grace was a classmate of mine. Unfortunately I fell in with the tippling-clergy faction. Still, His Grace has always kept an eye out for me. The snowdrifters are my parishioners. ‘It takes one to know one,’ said His Grace, but in the kindest way.”
Back out in the weather, they headed west on Queen. “The Sally Ann folks do good work,” said Father Christmas. “But they’ve their rules. A lot of people fall through the cracks, and that’s right into my parish. I keep an eye out for places for my people to stay come winter. Thought I’d found one last year over on Mutual where we’re going now, an empty old factory in the shadow of the gasometer with all its second-floor windows knocked out. Thought maybe we could board them up with inside doors and put in a woodstove. But moving in closer, I saw these big guys working at something inside, couldn’t see what. So I crossed the place off my list. But around back I found a garbage can stuffed with wool scarves and I helped myself to them to hand around. And I came back later just in case. More scarves. This year, too.”
They reached the factory and Father Christmas led Mattie past several handcarts with sled runners to a side door with a window in it. He saw something move behind the glass and cupped his hands around his eyes to peer inside. Then he jumped back with a shout. “It’s a damn rink rat,” he said, and taking Mattie’s elbow, he tried to lead her back out to the street. “Never saw one face-to-face before. Like staring at a giant fish head frozen in a block of ice.”
But Mattie stood fast. “They won’t come out. They don’t like daylight. Not much of it around where they come from.”
“You know the rink rats?”
“By another name,” she admitted and went over and rattled the doorknob.
When her husband told her, “Sorry, Doll-Face, I want a divorce. I can’t do this Santa gig without Queen Alicia, the woman I love, at my side,” Mattie’d been too hurt and angry to protest. But elf divorce procedures grind slowly. Refusing to stay under the North Pole dome with the other woman, she moved outside to Slagview Cottage, across from the dump for defective candy canes and near the chilly encampment of Alicia’s Phrygian entourage. Every day for the next year she went back inside to manage the kriskringlite mine, run the Toy Works, and, in the fall, to direct naughty-or-nice operations.
Much of her free cottage time she spent feeding the arctic or vested hummingbirds (Archilocus cardiganii) who survived the winters there by feeding on warm polar bear earwax. The bears were frequent visitors to the candy-cane slag. Santa’s Own Whippet Lancers had the job of killing the creatures if they became too bothersome. An officer in this fine old elf regiment always presented any dead polar bear earwax to Mattie, who’d put it out in a warm bowl for the hummingbirds, watching through the frosty window as the tweedy little things fed. Alicia’s bodyguard, the Bucket Brigadiers, square-jawed, hefty men who seemed built out of blocks of ice, were avid hummingbird watchers, too, and soon came over with their binoculars.
Some called Phrygia twice blessed. Its detractors called it “Left-Over Land.” The inhabitants lived in utter darkness. But every unpredictable now and then, as if a mighty door had swung open, the entire kingdom was bathed in light and then, abruptly, fell back into darkness.
Sometimes the great door that brought the sudden light would stand open too long, as if by an indecisive opener, and the ice-people and their dwellings would begin a slow terrible melt. Then the daring Bucket Brigadiers risked their lives rushing around in red wagons with bells ringing to throw buckets of ice on the sweating people and homes. The House of Fröst had enlisted these brave Brigadiers as special bodyguards to the royal family.
Brigadiers spoke as if through mouthfuls of ice cubes. When Mattie, deep in furs, came out to join them she soon learned their language, communicating with them by maneuvering her denture around in her mouth. They told her the vested hummingbird was their clan totem and spoke, in their innocent, block-headed way, of a golden age when the little things serviced men’s ears as well as polar bears, just as the razor-billed bunion bird (Pedes rasa) tended sleeping humans’ feet and the tweezer-tweezer bird (Nostriles etuia etuia) wove its elaborate hanging nests made from human nose hair.
The factory door swung open. Mattie’s old friend Captain Berg of the Bucket Brigadiers greeted her with a click of his square heels and ushered her into a large dim workshop illuminated by a small fire burning under an iron cauldron in a distant corner. Berg’s men were working with long-handled pitchforks to feed the fire from a pile of coal, hockey sticks, twigs, and high hats, and the cauldron from bins of carrots, snowman heads, and what looked like hat sweatbands. A heap of discarded scarves lay nearby.