“Put them all up on the bed beside him, and he’ll find them in the morning,” Billie suggested. “If you’ll let him stay, Mrs. Craig, I’ll bring him over.”
Tommy was the most excited over his Christmas presents. Kit and Jean had given him a hockey stick and puck to use on the river when it was frozen over, his mother and father a ping pong set that he was bursting to set up in the basement, a model airplane kit from Doris, and a pair of argyle socks and Norwegian sweater from the Judge and Becky. But Billie had given him his most coveted present, his own tame crow, Moki. “Where’d you get the name from, Billie?” he asked.
Billie stroked the smooth glossy back of the crow fondly. “I found him one day over in the pine woods on the hill. He was just a little thing then. The nest was in a dead pine, and somebody’d shot it all to pieces. The rest of the family had gone, but I found him fluttering around on the ground, scared to death with a broken wing. Ben helped me fix it, and he told me to call him Moki. You know he’s read everything, and he can talk some Indian, Pequod mostly, he says. He isn’t sure but what there may be some Pequod in him way back, he can talk it so well, and Moki means ‘watch out’ in Pequod. I call him that because I used to put him on my shoulder and he’d go anywhere with me through the woods, and call out when he thought I was in danger.”
“How do you know what he thought?”
“After you get acquainted with him, you’ll know what he thinks too,” answered Billie.
Always living in a little world of make-believe all her own, Doris received mostly fairy tales and what Kit called “princess stories.” Saved from the old home at Sandy Cove, her mother and father gave her two glass lamps for her bureau and Jean had made the shades herself, out of starched white dotted swiss. Becky had knit each of the girls soft angora socks and mittens in matching pastels, and Beth gave them old silver spoons that had been part of their great great-grandmother Peabody’s wedding silver.
“When you come to New York,” she told Jean, “I’ll show you many of her things.”
Jean nodded, remembering her longing to go away earlier in the evening. But the look in her father’s face made her realize more than anything that had happened in the long months of trial in the country, how worthwhile was the sacrifice that had brought him back into his home country for healing and happiness.