In God We Trust Read Online Free Page A

for pocket use. At this point, luckily, the bell rang, callingus back to our labors before I had to divulge my own gifts, which I knew did not come up to these magnificent strokes of genius.
    I had not yet made an irrevocable choice for my mother, but I had narrowed the field down to two spectacular items I had been stealthily eying at Woolworth’s for several weeks. The first was a tasteful string of beads about the size of small walnuts, brilliant ruby in color with tiny yellow flowers embedded in the glass. The other and more expensive gift—$1.98—was a pearl-colored perfume atomizer, urn-shaped, with golden lion’s feet and matching gold top and squeeze bulb. It was not an easy choice. It was the age-old conflict between the Classic and the Sybaritic, and that is never easily resolved.
    For my father, I had already made the down payment on a family-size can of Simoniz. One of my father’s favorite proverbs, one he never tired of quoting, was:
    “Motorists wise, Simoniz.”
    He was as dedicated a hood-shiner as ever bought a fourth-hand Graham-Paige, with soaring hopes and bad valves. I could hardly wait to see him unwrap the Simoniz on Christmas Eve, with the light of the red, yellow, green, and blue bulbs on the tree making that magnificent can glow like the deep flush of myrrh and frankincense. It was all I could do, a constant tortured battle, to keep myself from spilling the beans and thus destroying the magnificent moment of stunned surprise, the disbelieving delight which I knew would fell him like a thunderclap when he saw that I had gone all out.
    In fact, several times over the supper table I had meaningfully asked:
    “I’ll bet you can’t guess what I got you for Christmas, Dad.”
    Once, instead of saying: “Hmmmmm,” he answered by saying: “Hmmm. Let’s see. Is it a new furnace?”
    My kid brother fell over sideways in nutty little-kid laughter and knocked over his milk, because my father was one of the most feared Furnace Fighters in Northern Indiana.
    “That clanky old son of a bitch,” he called it, and many’s the night with the snow drifting in through the Venetianblinds and the windows rattling like frozen tom-toms he would roar down the basement steps, knocking over Ball jars and kicking roller skates out of the way, bellowing:
    “THAT SON OF A BITCH HAS GONE OUT AGAIN! THAT GODDAMN CLANKY SON OF A BITCH !!”
    The hot-air registers breathed into the clammy air the whistling breath of the Antarctic. A moment of silence. The stillness of the tundra gripped the living room; the hoarfrost sparkled like jewels in the moonlight on my mother’s Brillo pad in the kitchen sink.
    CLANK! K-BOOM! CLANK! K-BOOM ! CLANK!
    “SONOFABITCH !”
    CLANK! K-BOOM! K-BOOM! CLANKCLANK !
    He would be operating something called The Shaker, a long iron handle that stuck out of the bottom of that zinc and tin monster called The Furnace.
    “For Chrissake, open up the goddamn damper, willya! How the hell did it get turned all the way down again!? GODDAMMIT !”
    My mother would leap out of bed and rush into the kitchen in the dark to pull a chain behind the broom closet door marked “Draft.”
    “FOR CHRISSAKE, STUPID, I SAID THE GODDAMN
DAMPER!”
    My kid brother and I would huddle under our baseball quilt in our Dr. Denton Sleepers, waiting for the uproar to strike us. That’s why my brother knocked over the milk when my Old Man said the thing about a new furnace. Indiana wit is always pungent and to the point.
    My father was also an expert Clinker Fisher. The furnace was always producing something called “clinkers” which got stuck in the grates, causing faint puffs of blue smoke to come out from under the daybed.
    “Sonofabitch clinker!”
    The Old Man would jump up at the first whiff and rush down into the basement for a happy night at the old iron fishing hole with his trusty poker. People in Northern Indiana fought Winter tooth and claw; bodily, and there was never a letup.
    I had not yet decided