James Cain - The Baby in the Icebox and Other Short Fiction

And when Bert took the wreath of flowers from Mr. Glynn, and turned around to pick out some woman to give it to, it wasn’t a single woman in the hall.

So Bert looked around, and his face got red, and a kind of a silly-looking grin stayed on it. And then he swallowed a couple of times, and dropped the wreath down on the floor. And then he walked straight out of the hall. And then he went to the hitching rack, and got on his horse, and rode out into the night. And nobody down there ain’t seen him from that day to this.

Down in the country one time they got a new principal to the high school, name of Hartman. And he was a kind of funny-looking guy, and he taught science. So pretty soon he began to teach them pupils in the higher grades all about how the animals has little ones, and he was wasting his breath if you ask me, because if it was anything them tough mugs didn’t know about the animals and all the rest of it, why it wasn’t much. But along about Thanksgiving it begun to be some talking around. A whole lot of people, they let on they didn’t think much of it, teaching boys and girls stuff like that. And pretty soon, the board of trustees, they held a couple meetings.

So just about that time Hartman, he stood up in the assembly hall in front of the whole school, little children and all, and give them a little talk on Christmas. And he says the best thing is to know the truth about Christmas, and the truth is that it ain’t no Santa Claus, but only your father dressed up, and the real way to celebrate Christmas was to quit thinking so much about presents and to go to church and give thanks that Jesus Christ was born that day.

Well, did you ever cuff a hornet’s nest with the butt end of a fishing pole while you was trying to jerk a big one up on the bank? That’s what it was like when Hartman made that little talk. Them little children went home bellering to their father and mother, and a couple dozen big Ikes showed up at the school and wanted to fight, and things got hot. So the trustees, they made up their mind what they was going to do pretty quick. They fired Hartman, and took the key to the school away from him, and put one of them woman teachers in charge till they could get somebody else.

So that kind of eased things off, but Hartman ain’t left town. He hung around and he would come over to one of the stores from the little house where he lived at on the edge of town, and buy some stuff, and then duck away without speaking to nobody. So the day before Christmas some of the boys fixed it up that they would kind of give him the idea that he better beat it. And what they was going to do was go around that night and take him out, and maybe fan him a few times with a strap, and then make him kneel down in front of Doc Merritt, who would have on the Santa Claus suit that he used to wear up to the festival at the Methodist church, and then let him take his pick would he leave town hisself or get rode out on a rail.

So they done it. The Doc put on his suit, and him and about a dozen others sneaked over there. And when they beat on the door, they could hear some running around upstairs, but not nobody come to the door.

“Come on out, Hartman!” they hollers. “We brung Santa Claus with us and we want you to look at him.”

But still nobody come to the door, and they was getting ready to break it down. But all of a sudden a light showed, and through the glass in the door they seen Hartman running down the steps, fast as he could come. And he opened the door and come running out without no hat.

“Grab him!” one of them hollers, and a couple of them made a pass at him.

But he throwed them off like they was puppy dogs or something, and went running up the street fast as he could go. And they was so surprised all they done was stand there and look at him.

So it seemed like it was something funny about it and they opened the door and peeped in. And right away they could hear something upstairs. It sound like a woman crying.

“Hell,” says one of them. “Let’s beat it.”

“Wait a minute,” says Doc Merritt. “Shut up, you guys.” And he listened, and then he tiptoed upstairs.

“What’s the matter?” they says when he come back.

“Boys,” he says, “this party is off. It’s his wife. She’s having a baby.”

So he sent a couple of them over to his office, and give them the key, and told them to bring him his kit, and went back upstairs. And the rest of them, they felt kind of ashamed of theirself, and they beat it.

So Hartman, where he was heading for was Doc Merritt. And he run over to his office, and didn’t find him there, and then he helloed over to the boardinghouse where the Doc lived at, and didn’t find him there. And then he got kind of wild, and went running all over town, in stores and everywhere, trying to find the Doc. And not nobody could tell him where the Doc was, on account this fanning bee had been kept pretty dark, and everybody was wondering what was up.

So in about a hour, here he come running back, and he didn’t have no Doc and he didn’t have nothing. And when he went upstairs he almost fainted. And then he begun blubbering and crying and carrying on like he was crazy, and the more the Doc tried to calm him down the worse he went on. Because it was all over, and what he seen was the Doc, wrapping up the new baby boy in a little piece of woolen cloth. But what the Doc had forgot was, on account he had been working so hard, that he still had on the Santa Claus suit, with the whiskers still sticking to his chin, and for all Hartman could see it was Santa Claus hisself that had brung him his child and made everything all right.

“It is a Santa Claus,” he kept saying over and over, even when he got it straight what happened. “Oh, God, after the way I ran and prayed, and then come back and find—” And then he would just cry.

So them eggs that was going to fan him, they was trying to tell theirself it was all a joke by that time, and they showed up with a lot of Christmas stuff, and a drum for the kid. And it was all over town in an hour about how Hartman has changed his mind about Santa Claus, and maybe ain’t so sure how little ones gets in the world no more, so Christmas Day the trustees held a special meeting and took him back. So after that he done fine. So it looks like to me Santa Claus pulled a fast one on him.

DECEMBER 22, 1929

When I was about fifteen years old, I and all the other young men about town used to resort to various schemes to give the impression that we had reached man’s estate. Some of us acquired girls, some took jobs, some played poker, and some just talked. But Bob Plummer, son of one of the Metho-preachers in town, made the mistake of hatching a scheme so grand that it challenged the gods; and that, as we all know, is merely storing up dynamite against the lightning bolt. Bob’s scheme was an individual shaving mug, no less. He went away to Wilmington, Delaware, with his father one spring, to attend the annual conference, and when he came back he had it in his suitcase. He didn’t show it around, of course, and boast about it. That would have been a gross strategic blunder. He merely strolled around to Johnny Vandergrift’s barber shop in the most casual manner, left it there, and told Johnny that from now on he would come on Saturday nights to be shaved.

Well, that, as you may understand, was a bombshell; it made girls, jobs, poker games, white pants, and all such things seem childish nonsense by comparison. By twos and threes that afternoon we all had a look at it, coming to jeer, remaining to be struck dumb with awe. There it stood in plain view, among the hundreds of cups belonging to Johnny’s regular customers, and on its pearly face, in beautiful gold letters, was his own individual name, thus: