Beyond Belief - John Powell (good books to read for 12 year olds .txt) 📗

asked, “How long have you known?”
“Since I was sixteen.”
Mike swallowed hard.
“And Ted and Virginia?”
“I don’t know; probably before me. Dad was so into it, he had us believing longer than most. Most kids figure it out by eighth grade.”
“They do?”
Ted walked in and saw the two stressing.
“What’s the matter?” he asked, stepping closer and taking the chair.
“Um,” said Nina, “Mike just found out Santa Claus isn’t real.”
Ted laughed hard until he saw Nina’s expression. She never played with any of her siblings. If she said it, she was telling the truth.
“Really, Mike?” asked Ted, and then he took a second to mull over the facts.
“I’m sorry,” he said after a time. “You are a gullible son of a bitch.”
“Ted,” warned Nina, and Ted bit his tongue.
“Do your kids know?” asked Mike, standing up.
Nina got up too and shook her head. “I want them to figure it out themselves. They love when you tell them stories. I like that they believe in him.”
Ted stood up and leaned against the wall.
“Anne knows, but she’s thirteen.”
“I need to get out of here,” said Mike. “I need to think about this.”
Nina nodded and stepped aside.
Mike stuffed a letter in his pocket and walked from the room.
Nina stood to go after her brother, but Ted put his arm up at the door and shook his head. “He’s all messed up,” he said, touching Nina’s shoulder. “Dad just died, I mean, so let Mike figure this out.”
The rest of the family saw Mike exit the house, leaving the door open and winter wind whistling into the hallway. Mike wore only a sweater pulled over a dress shirt and thick black pants. But he wasn’t worried about the cold anymore.
The neighborhood was only one long strip of houses, and at the main road there was a bar on the corner. Mike hardly visited Mickey’s Pub because the red brick establishment was where his father went with his buddies, and there was something unsettling about drinking at the same place as his father.
Mickey had sold the place decades ago to a tall, light-skinned bartender named Sonny. The redecorated bar had become less Irish in that time: photographs of fifties’ style Americana lined the walls and a jukebox blinked blue-red lights behind the billiard tables.
Two old men with wavy white hair, the only patrons, glanced Mike’s way as he entered the bar, making his way to a back table next to a window. He slid onto the bench and took a moment to look through the glass at the fire water pond hidden from the road by the bar and a clump of trees next door, dusty snow over the frozen water. Each confused wind tussled the snow into tornadoes. It was a frigid, violent scene, and Mike looked away.
Sonny’s brother Gabe bartended during the day. Gabe wiped the table down in front of Mike. “You all right, dude?”
Mike nodded, but didn’t make eye contact with Gabe.
“Anything to drink?” asked Gabe, checking the clock above the jukebox to make sure it wasn’t an unreasonable hour to serve the lowly and downtrodden.
Mike ordered a beer, any beer, and when Gabe brought it over Mike took it directly from the bartender’s hand and swigged. Gabe returned to the bar, but kept an eye on Mike.
After another gulp of beer, Mike took the letter from his pocket and unfolded it. Yellow lights lit the bar dimly, but near the window Mike could make out his poor handwriting. He remembered the year scribbled at the top of the letter. He had asked for a toy rifle, but never received it.
Every year when he sat down to write his letters to Saint Nick, Mike anxiously imagined the elf slicing open the envelope with a knife and casually reading his first in the pile of letters received daily.
Santa Claus made sense. Not everyone celebrated Christmas, and there were time zones, so sunrise was different around the world, and Santa lived remotely in the North Pole, so of course he never gave interviews. He wasn’t a celebrity, after all. He was a saint. As a teen reasoned that elves were likely over dramatizations of Santa’s helpers, as was the idea of magically fitting down Christmas chimneys. Breaking into a house was not difficult. Mike had done it on many drunken occasions with college friends. With the right tools, Santa could enter and exit without leaving a trace.
Lost in thought, Mike hadn’t realized Gabe stood at the table holding the empty beer glass.
“Another drink?” he asked.
Mike nodded. When Gabe walked away, Mike folded the letter up.
“Hey, man,” he shouted. Gabe turned. “Do you have a piece of paper and a pen?”
“Sure, dude.”
The pen and paper was delivered with a fresh beer. Mike withdrew into the corner of the bench and touched the pen to the paper before pausing to think. Then, he began: Dear Santa…

Returning to his father’s house had been difficult, as had been explaining to his family that he was confused about some of the things he believed in. The day of their father’s funeral was not a time to judge their brother on his beliefs, so the siblings tried to comfort Mike and sent him home.
On Christmas Eve Mike called his sister to explain he wasn’t coming over for celebrations. “Things are different,” he said. “Without Dad I’m not sure what it’s all for.”
“The kids want to see their uncle.”
“I won’t be any fun,” Mike promised. “I’ll call anyway, to talk to them, okay?”
Mike’s present to himself was a bottle of whiskey. He drank it at his kitchen table and read through all the letters he had found in his father’s closet.
Without investigating the validity of Santa Claus further, and without discussing anything to do with his father any more, Mike continued with his life, and by February he felt much better. Christmas was two months passed and Spring was just around the corner. Work had been going well. He hadn’t seen his siblings very much, but he called often.
He was lonely on Valentine’s Day, but his office had a party and he made himself sick on chocolates. He decided that when the weather warmed he would buy a new car. He never went back to his father’s house.
In late March the snow melted and mud was everywhere. On a particularly warm day, Mike came home early from work. He parked his rusty car in the driveway and walked to the mailbox. He riffled through the electric bill and a coupon book and decided mail was a stupid thing designed to fill dumps with bill envelopes and coupon books, and he was about to throw the stack away when a small envelope fluttered from the stack and fell to the muddy pavement.
Picking the letter up, Mike saw the return address was missing, but the black ink had his address written out in swooping cursive and the stamp was a reindeer winking.
Puzzled, Mike turned the card around in his hands and hesitated before opening it:

Michael Andrew Moore,

I was truly upset to hear about your father’s passing. His house was always the brightest and boldest on Christmas Eve. His lawn depicted the North Pole much more than it did any religious nativity scene, which I always appreciated because Christmas has become more about family and celebration, a brief gap in the winter to enjoy the warmth of home, and less about Christianity. Your father’s gusto was inspiring and invigorating during my long night of deliveries.

Although disappointed to hear your parents never sent the letter you and your brother and sisters wrote to me, I’m hardly surprised. The world is too busy and too commercial for me now. It has been that way for years. There was a time when I was a child’s sole chance for a toy. Poverty makes everyone appreciate charity. Everything is priced now, and it’s taken me time to come to terms with this, but now that I have I can understand that nothing in this world remains the same forever.

Do not despair, Michael. Nothing is as important as Christmas spirit. As long as I’m a symbol for togetherness and giving, I’ve done my job. I’m old anyway, and ready to retire completely. The truth is, however, that whenever we have a calling we must heed it to the very end. I see from your letter that your nieces and nephew need you to keep their Christmas spirit going. That may be your calling as it was your father’s.

I’m sure that, in time, you will see that everything passes. That is okay, for just like winter gives way to spring- I know winter will come around again. That is truly the gift that keeps on giving.

Merry Christmas,
Santa

Mike held the letter, read it again. Stunned, he looked around as if to find someone there to explain what just happened to him.
He would have mistrusted the letter as a joke played on him by his brother, but along with the new letter was the one he had written as a kid, read at the bar the day of the funeral, and sent off to the North Pole, just to be rid of it.
Mike headed for his front door and a package was waiting for him. It was the same color red the envelope had been, and the address was in the same handwriting.
He opened the box, right there on the stoop, and pulled out a toy riffle, a Huntsman Black Pellet BB, the same he had asked for many years ago. They no longer made the model.
With a sigh, and a smile he couldn’t resist, Mike brought the rifle inside. He called his sister and scheduled a visit to show his nephew a new toy.
It had been a nice funeral that December, but not a sad one, not when tradition kept family, made family, enjoyed it.
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Publication Date: 01-05-2010

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