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Show in my father's house/ 129 I stared out the window at the darkened desert, thinking that Ben LeBaron must look like the picture of Cain or Esau in the Bible Stories Book -- bearded and hairy-chested, with a club and fierce black eyes. "It got to be Christmastime," my mother was telling me. "Of course we had no stores to buy presents even if we'd had the money, and very little food. We'd lived on yams and mush for a long time, but that wasn't so bad, we'd always been poor. What bothered me was the thought of our little ones not having Santa Claus come. You see, honey, we knew he'd never find us out in the middle of the Mexican desert, so we racked our brains, trying to think of some way to make the holiday special. After the children were in bed at night, we worked. I cut a broom handle into one-inch sections about like this, and dyed half of them in onion-skin dye. What do you think they were? Checkers! I made a checkerboard out of cardboard and a black crayon. We made little cars and trucks out of scrap lumber from the Mexicans' junk pile. And somehow we scraped together enough molasses to make taffy. Joel --he was Maude's fourth son, the gentle one -- cut down a big mesquite bush for our Christmas tree and we decorated it with anything we could find -- old jewelry and ribbons and yarn. It didn't seem like much, but we were as excited as I've ever been because the children expected no Christmas at all. Then, on Christmas Eve, after we had the kiddies in bed and had put all our homemade toys out, |