It was an infuriating book. Daniel was glad to be done with it. If that was the way people thought in New York he could almost understand undergoders wanting to send in the National Guard and take the city over. Almost but not quite.
The next day was Christmas Eve, and when Daniel got back from work a ratty old tree was going up in the dorm under Warden Shiel’s personal supervision. Once the limbs were slotted into the trunk and the ornaments had been hung up and, for a final glory, a tinsely angel had been tied to the top, the prisoners were assembled around the tree (Daniel stood in the last row, with the tallest) and Warden Shiel took their picture, copies of which would later be mailed out to relevant relatives.
Then they sang carols. “Silent Night” first, then “O Little Town of Bethlehem,” then “Faith of Our Fathers,” and finally “Silent Night” again. Three or four clear strong voices rose above the muddy generality, but strangely Gus’s was not among these. Daniel screwed up his courage — he’d never liked singing in public (or anywhere else, for that matter) — and sang. Really sang. The man directly in front of him turned his head round briefly to see who was making such a noise, and even Warden Shiel, sitting there on his folding chair, with his right hand resting benignly on the P-W module, seemed to take approving notice. It was embarrassing in the same way and to the same degree as getting undressed in front of other kids in a locker room. The worst of it was in the imagining. By the time you were doing it, so was everybody else.
After the carols, presents were distributed to the prisoners who had families and friends on the outside thinking of them, following which the Warden went on to the next dorm to repeat these holiday procedures. The presents, as many as were edible, were further portioned out. Daniel bolted one slice of his mother’s fruitcake and put aside another in his mattress. As long as you assumed some part of the burden towards the dorm’s have-nots you could choose whom you were nice to, and the next slice of the fruitcake went, as a matter of course, to Bob Lundgren. The Lundgrens had sent their son a packet of Polaroids taken at their last Thanksgiving dinner, which Bob was studying with baleful incredulity. The banked fires of his inner rage glowed at that intensity. It was all he could do to say thank you.
Gus was in the farthest corner of the room, doling out crumbled cookies from a large tin box. Somehow Daniel hadn’t been expecting that. For some reason, perhaps the slow-healing scar, he’d imagined Gus as utterly bereft and friendless, unless Daniel himself were to become his friend. Daniel made his way over to Gus’s corner and, with what diffidence he could summon up, offered him a piece of cake.
Gus smiled. This close, Daniel, who had a developed judgement of dental work, could see that his perfect upper incisors were actually caps, and of the first quality at that. The lower incisors, as well. All in all, a couple thousand dollars worth of work, and that was only what showed when he smiled.
“The other night,” Daniel said, taking the plunge, “when you sang… I really enjoyed that.”
Gus nodded, swallowing. “Right,” he said. And then, taking another bite. “This is terrific cake.”
“My mother made it.”
Daniel stood there, watching him eat, not knowing what else to say. Even as he ate, Gus went on smiling at him, a smile that encompassed the compliment to his singing, his pleasure in the good, and something else besides. A recognition, it seemed to Daniel, of some common bond.
“Here,” Gus said, holding out the box of crumbs, “have some of mine, Danny-boy.”
Danny-boy? That was several degrees worse than just ‘Danny,’ and even that he’d always resisted as a nickname. Still, it showed that Gus — without their ever talking to each other before — was aware of him, was even curious about him perhaps.
He took a couple broken cookies and nodded his thanks. Then, with an uneasy sense of having done the wrong thing, he moved off, bearing the ever-diminishing cake.
Soon enough the goodies were gone and the party was over. The dorm became very quiet. Over intermittent blasts of wind you could hear the prisoners singing the same carols in the next dorm. Mrs. Gruber, with her mattress wrapped around her where she sat in front of the Franklin stove, began to croon along wordlessly, but when no one else showed any Christmas spirit, she gave up.
In the next dorm the caroling stopped, and a short while later there was the sound of the pickup’s motor turning over. As if he’d been waiting for this signal, Gus got up and went over to where the Christmas tree had been. Someone sounded a note on a harmonica, and Gus hummed the same note, rumblingly.
The hush of the room, from having been a hush of gloom, became the hush of fixed attention. Some people went and formed a ring around the singer, while others stayed where they were. But all of them listened as if the song were a newscast announcing a major worldwide disaster.
These were the words of the song Gus sang:
Daniel couldn’t tell for quite a while if this were a real song or one that Gus was making up then and there, but when people started to sing along at the part that started “Roll over Joe,” he decided it had to be real. There were a lot of songs you never heard in Iowa, radio braodcasts being so strictly controlled.
They sang the song over and over, not just the chorus, which got louder and rowdier with each repetition, but the whole thing. It seemed, if you didn’t fasten on the words, like the most exquisite and decorative of Christmas carols, a treasure from a dim and pretty past of sleigh rides, church bells, and maple syrup. Annette, the feeble-minded migrant woman who liked to drum on the stovepipes, got caught up in the excitement and started doing an impromptu strip dressed in the discarded Christmas wrappings, until Mrs. Gruber, who was officially responsible for the collective good behavior of the dorm, put a stop to it. Prisoners from the next-door dorm came and insisted, against Mrs. Gruber’s protests, that the song be sung over from the beginning for them, and this time round Daniel was able to add his own few decibles to the general effect. People started dancing, and the ones who didn’t dance held on to each other and swayed in time. Even Bob Lundgren forgot about murdering his brother and sang along.