By M. Allen Cunningham

Christmas time. Both daylight and evening the town lay green and cold under a gauze of winter cloud. Some days, light snow salted the two peaks of Mount Diablo. The men and boys started bringing small coulter pines down from the hills and into the houses, where they weighed the branches with candles and tassels. The Nortonville Women’s choir held a concert at the Congregational church. Mother sang that evening, clumped with the ladies on steep risers swathed in lamplight. Father and I listened from the darkened pews. Afterward everybody convened in the Good Templars’ Hall for fellowship around three big vats of cider and little cups of bread pudding. I ducked through the bustling crowd and stepped outside into the night chill.

Everything felt idle out there. The cloudy air lent a tainted whiteness to the evening. Beyond that icy scrim, the town gave out only a tiny noise—faint echoes from the Exchange Hotel a half-mile off. I watched my breath flow in bluish steam. Some dim light spilt from the imperfect glass of the hall windows, dissipating in the dark a foot from the building. I dug my hands into my coat pockets and began crunching across the gravel beneath the angling light. As I rounded the side of the hall, I spotted a waifish figure, the slight profile of a girl. She was standing on a wood crate, leaning into the glow at a window.

Black hair tied back from a pallid brow. Skirts waving softly above lifted heels. She had her chin at the rough sill and just as I spotted her she turned my way. Narrow face half-dark. Black eyes. Chin delicate like a girlish elbow. The curling plume from her mouth was gilded in the window light.

For a long moment she held my look and said nothing, stared me up and down as if I’d caught her at some mischief and she was judging whether she should trust me or run.

I’d never seen her before. Her hands tugged at a shapeless woolen cape. I thought I heard her breath shudder with chill.

I said: “You’re new here.”

She moved her head slightly in what seemed a timid nod. The line of shadow rolled softly on her face.

In a placid, husky voice she said: “Is that bread pudding they’re eating?”

I nodded. Then it occurred to me I was standing in shadows, so I stepped forward into the residual light and said: “Yes.”

She moved her mouth as if to speak, but instead turned back to the window.

“Would you like some?” I said, but I could already see she would. “You won’t come in?”

She shook her head. “Don’t know a soul in there.”

I told her to wait and went inside the hall again. Moving through the crowd toward the serving table, I glanced to the window and caught sight of the girl’s face, pale beyond the reflections in the glass. She was watching me, and I gave her a quick smile.

When I brought the warm cup outside, she was standing just beyond the corner of the hall. I nearly ran into her as I came around. She was already murmuring thanks, her two cupped hands coming from her cape. She spooned up a clod of pudding and a little steam ribboned upward. The silver glinted in her mouth and then she chewed quietly for a moment, swallowed, thanked me again, and said once more: “I don’t know a soul in there. I just arrived yesterday. You’re the first, you know.”

“The first?”

“The first to know me. Not a soul before you.”

Standing off the crate now, she looked younger than I’d deemed her a few moments before. My age probably. Perhaps a year older. She was savoring the pudding like some ambrosial nectar.

“I watched you standing about in there,” she said. “You looked funny eating your pudding with all those grown-ups around you. I wanted you to come out here.”

“You did?”

“Yes. I knew you’d be the first to know me.”

“I’m Asher Witherow.”

“Asher Witherow,” she said, trying the name on her tongue, mingling it in the pulped pudding. “That’s not what I imagined you’d be called. It sounds like the name of a dying thing. While I watched you through the window, I called you David.”

“My father’s called David.”

“Is he? Don’t you think it’s a living name? I love David in the Bible. Such heroism. Such bravery and music.” She turned and walked back to the window, climbed onto the wood crate again and stood there waving me near. I stepped up beside her, her figure so slight that we could both fit there.

“Which one is he?” she said.

“Who?”

“Your father.”

“That one, there.”

“With the long beard? Yes, he looks like a David. And do you have a mother?”

“Of course. She’s there by that post.”

My breath fogged the glass and the girl’s fingers came up and rubbed it clear.

“In the green dress?” she said.

“The blue. She sang in the choir tonight.”

The girl was silent a minute, her figure warm beside me. She made a little humming sound. “I think she’s different.”

“Different?”

“Don’t you think so? What’s she called?”

“Abicca.”

The girl turned her shoulder to the wall and brought the pudding up between us. She scraped the last of it from the rim of the cup and sucked softly at the spoon. I watched the pupils of her dark eyes grow large again.

“I wouldn’t have guessed her for your mother,” she said.

“No?”

“No, but that happens sometimes. Is your father a miner?”

“Of course. And your father?”

“A miner, yes. We come from the Colorado black-towns. Las Animas County. Too much snow for poor mother—she had the whooping cough. I didn’t like it either. Gray snow, always gray. There’s color in this place at least.”

She turned and set her chin at the sill again and gazed at the lamp-lit crowd inside. I watched her watching them. Her face looked keen with measured thought, a subtle intelligence simmering there. Something coming up slow like a heat from her depths into those sagacious eyes. Her warmth beside me seemed to express that stirring.

“Asher Witherow,” she said softly. “We’ll be friends now, won’t we?”

I looked in the window again. “Yes,” I said. The word fogged the glass. “Tell me your name.”

She leaned away from the window and jumped down off the crate and stood holding out the empty cup and spoon. “Tomorrow.”

I took the cup.

“I’ll find you tomorrow,” she said, and with a demure smile she turned and vanished in the darkness.