Santa Claus Conquers the Homophobes (19 page)

The Stratton house, for the third time, loomed from below.

* * *

Kathy awoke with the shakes, her skin still burning from eternal hellfire. Inviting warmth filled the bedroom and the odd glow that had
seemed
inviting but was...no, it again embraced her, and the sizzle and burst of pine knots upon an invisible hearth greeted her once more. How real the nightmare had felt. And how real the fantastical scene before her, the jolly old elf and his green-clad girl, and, oh my God, a brown-eyed bunny rabbit whose ear-tips nearly touched the ceiling and whose size and demeanor instantly identified him.

“You’re demons.” Walter’s voice trembled. “We’re on to you. I command you to leave this house.”

Kathy noticed folds and shadows on their visitors’ faces. Seemingly pure innocence glinted, in the candle glow, with hints of menace. How could she be sure? Then she set her jaw. Why struggle for certainty when she could simply surrender her will to God? The Bible could not be gainsaid. Right was right, and only the Devil would try to argue against it. It frightened her how pleasing a shape he could assume. “Get thee behind me,” she commanded, blinking back tears.

“Oh good heavens,” said Santa, “trust your eyes, will you? Trust your heart. We’re who we say we are, and Almighty God has sent us to save your son.”

“Salvation comes only through Christ.”

“It’s okay, Missus Stratton,” said Santa’s stepdaughter in that heartbreaking voice of hers. “We’re in the same camp as Christ. Somehow the Tooth Fairy got into your dreams and tried to trick you. She isn’t very nice at all. Daddy says she once did mean things to me and my parents, but God took away my memory of exactly what.”

“I always believed,” said Kathy, “that Satan’s minions would be ugly with dark brows and hard eyes. But now I see that they can appear however they like, and still be wicked inside.” The hurt on the girl’s face gave Kathy pause, but she steeled herself. “I refuse to be swayed by your pretend sweetness, young lady. You’re nothing but a little devil.”

“That’s quite enough,” said the Santa demon.

The Easter Bunny raised a paw. “If I may, please.” His loving assurance instantly melted Kathy’s resolve. “You don’t know which camp to trust. I understand that. How can we prove to you that we are not demons? We cannot. Even the gentlest of mortals can harbor terrible monsters inside. But we are not like them. Our hearts are pure. All we can do is proclaim the truth and ask you to open yourselves to our words, to test them in the purest place in your hearts, in the place where God waits beyond fear and doubt.”

Kathy let out a sniff and wiped her tears on her pajama sleeve. “Walter,” she said. “I trust them.”

He looked surprised at himself. “So do I.”

“Good,” said the Easter Bunny. “Santa, if you would be so kind.”

Only then did Kathy notice the surroundings. On the right side rose up half the bedroom she had slept in as a girl in Cedar Rapids, the closet, the dresser, the flowered wallpaper. The left side was decked out, she guessed, like Walter’s boyhood bedroom in Santa Fe. On one wall hung a plastic crucifix he had won at a sideshow.

Those bedrooms dimmed, but the scenes that surged up to replace them maintained the split. “Here you both are, taking your first steps.”

Kathy, captivated by the toddlers before them, delighted to see Walter not in faded black and white photos, but as he had been in life. There sat his parents and hers, young and spry, without a trace of gray hair or wrinkles.

“That’s my dad,” said Walter, a catch in his throat.

“Yes,” said the Easter Bunny, “and see how pure your hearts were then.”

Kathy looked. The toddlers shown with divine innocence and only a trace of the parental failings they had begun to absorb. Even their parents were far more free in spirit, observing those triumphant first steps, than she remembered from recent visits.

“Observe your first days at school.”

Kathy and her mom walked up the steps of Harrison Elementary, a buried memory at once brilliantly revived. In her frilly dress, she looked pouty-lipped and doleful as Mommy hugged her and spoke tearful assurances. On the other side stood Walter in a blue jumper and bright yellow shirt, bawling his heart out. Uncanny how every bit of him, as she knew him now, showed itself fully formed right there.

“One more glimpse from early childhood,” said the Easter Bunny, “and my favorite.” As well it might be: Easter egg hunts, hers in a park near her home, Walter’s in a schoolyard. Boys and girls scurried past, swift but deliberate, careful not to overlook any clump of grass that might conceal a splash of pastel.

Walter’s chubby legs carried him proudly to Ellie Stratton. “Mommy, look what
I
found,” he said in a voice that made Kathy fall in love with him all over again. He held up a bright blue egg capped by a canted oval of purple. “That’s great, Walter. Here, I’ll keep it with the others. Go find another, okay?”

Kathy’s younger self merely screamed in delight, half looking but mostly just dancing about, overjoyed to be inside a sunlit explosion of boys and girl yelling and running and going mad with glee.

“Now watch this.” He swept his paw. The children changed color, not just their faces and hands and legs but their clothing as well. A few were pure blue or pure yellow, but most were shades of green, from yellow green to olive, from hunter green to emerald, from olive green to chartreuse to teal. “My Easter egg children,” laughed the Easter Bunny. “The blue ones were born with the impulse to be completely enraptured by the opposite sex, the yellow ones by the same. Observe the engaging mix and mingle in most children at that age. Of course, the off-blue ones will shortly learn to suppress any hint of yellow. And many of the bright yellow ones will hotly insist they are nothing but blue, blue as a clear blue sky, and that they never have been, nor could be, anything else.”

“It looks,” said Walter, “as if I’m mostly blue.”

The Easter Bunny laughed. “Bluish-green as a deep dark sea. But you’ll accept the culture’s tinged lenses soon enough. You’ll convince yourself you’re a true blue American heterosexual boy from your cowlick right on down to your boots.”

Then Kathy saw that her child self was a solid lawn-green. “Look at
me,
” she said. “Are you sure that’s me?”

“Yes indeed, Kathy. The Almighty formed you to be attracted to males and females in just about equal measure.”

“But if that’s true, why don’t I feel it now?”

“If you allowed yourself, and if the messages you’ve heard all your life hadn’t been so powerful and pervasive, you would.”

Kathy felt robbed. The little girl gleefully giggling in all of her unabashed greenness seemed so much more fully dimensional than she felt herself now, a flat woman sitting in a flat bed, her mind sculpted to fit the grown-up world, her heart penned in by strictures, baffles on her eyes and filters on her thoughts. As if in response to what she was feeling, the Easter Bunny said, “Look at this.”

Gone were the Easter egg hunts, and in their place scenes of themselves growing up. Signals from parents and preachers and older peers and TV and songs, sights on the street, who got to hold hands and who did not, lumberjack women and sylphlike men shunned and made fun off—all of it impinged upon them. This was the process by which her heart had been darkened, her judgment warped, and the bright light of generous embrace had been extinguished from her soul.

Walter too Kathy watched turn from a smiling child to a confused preteen to a glum high-schooler, caught up in sports, clamping down on any exuberance save for team spirit, crazy yocks with his friends, and leering jokes at the expense of big-bosomed girls.

Then their childhood bedrooms returned.

“Let’s look in on your boys,” said Wendy. There slept Kurt and Jamie in their beds. The Easter Bunny swept his paw, and Kurt turned the same hue as his father. But Jamie lay there as yellow as could be, compromised by the merest tinge of green.

In that moment, Kathy loved her sons with all her heart and soul. “They’re perfect, aren’t they?”

“Indeed they are,” said the Easter Bunny. “And you must tell them so every day of their lives.”

“I like your boys very much, Missus Stratton,” said Wendy.

“They’re good lads,” chimed in Santa. “They, and all children, deserve unconditional acceptance from their parents in every stage of life, including their passage through puberty. I’ll tell you honestly, Kathy and Walter, I don’t have much truck with mortals once they turn nine or ten. You see why. That they stop believing in me isn’t so bothersome, really, except that it’s a warning signal that misguided judgmentalism is beginning to creep in. Young boys and girls resonate with me. But then, tricked into believing that grown-ups must surely be far wiser than they, they adopt their foolish manner of carving up the world. Precious few are brave enough to hang on to the fantastic realities they enjoy at seven or eight. You see what happens. Don’t let it happen to Jamie.”

“I won’t,” said Kathy, surprised at her vehemence.

“Me neither,” said Walter.

“Stay a little,” she went on. “Show us more.” But her limbs grew heavy and her eyelids ached to close. She felt Santa’s embrace and his comforting kiss on her forehead. “Goodnight, dear one,” he said as sleep claimed her. “Be good always.”

“I will,” she murmured. “I promise.”

Chapter 20. Innocence Rescues a Preacher

“IT FEELS GREAT, HELPING these good people,” said Wendy.

“Yes, it does,” replied Santa.

“It looks as if it’s really going to happen.”

“Oh, but Wendy,” said the Easter Bunny, “you shouldn’t bite into the marshmallow chick before it’s reached your lips.”

Wendy laughed at that.

But Santa steamed, and cursed himself for steaming. What had gotten into him? Here they were, on the final leg of their journey, his team galloping triumphantly through the night sky, and he felt a large measure of discontent.

“Things are going well,” he said to fill the silence, then bit his lip and wished he hadn’t spoken at all. His voice was tight, and he knew that Wendy and the accursed creature in back could hear it.

His discontent stemmed in part of course from an inability to forgive the Easter Bunny his transgressions. Santa didn’t care how transformed he might be. It didn’t erase his past, and his apparent obliviousness to that past was downright infuriating. He ought to be humble, riddled with guilt, unable to make eye contact, eternally penitent. Instead, he charmed their visitants. He charmed Wendy. He even charmed Saint Nick himself, which ticked the jolly old elf off all the more.

But mostly, it was envy. I’m out of my league, thought Santa. The rabbit’s right at home. He takes, in complete innocence, these fallen mortals as they are, accepting and loving them no matter what. He’s the soul of patience, while I lose all patience. That’s not how I was before Pan flared up. Oh, I would’ve been awkward in the presence of adults, but not angry to the point of giving in to the desire to smash their smug little faces. I can’t
stand
their moral blindness, their belligerence, their damned holier-than-thou attitude. Yet in my intolerance toward them, I fall into the same trap!

No matter. “On to the Reverend Taylor,” he continued.

“He’ll be a challenge,” laughed the Easter Bunny. “But I look forward to melting even
his
hard heart. Eh, Wendy girl?”

“We've simply got to win him over,” she said earnestly. “There’s no other way.”

“We will,” said Santa. But at precisely that moment, with even greater resolve, the Easter Bunny said, “We will,” and Santa let his words trail off.

One more visit, he thought. Just one more. Then it’s goodbye, Easter Bunny. Goodbye, grown-ups. And I’ll be in charge again. Things will settle down.

But alas, that was not to be.

* * *

When Ty Taylor awoke to the enticing aroma of roasting chestnuts, the crackle of Yule logs, and the warm flicker of a roomful of candle flames, he swiftly marshaled his mental faculties. All I have, he thought, is my resolve as a man and a Christian. Once more, I’m in my bedroom, at the argumentative mercy of a persuasive and plausible Santa Claus and child.

Indeed, when he sat up, there appeared before him not just the demons he had met previously but a new one. “And you, let me guess,” he said, surprised that the creature’s size did not terrify him, “are the Easter Bunny.”

“Why yes, I am,” said the creature in a voice that brought Ty’s boyhood, in all its richness, back to him.

“Oh you’re good,” said Ty. “Very good indeed.”

“Thank you.”

“But you’ll not sway me. I was close to falling, so guileful the show these two demons put on. But whatever you’re poised to do, you can tell your Master that Ty Taylor remains fixed upon his Lord and Savior. Homosexuality is a sin. The Bible says so, and that’s more than good enough for me. That you would think to convince a preacher of the Lord that such perversity is not only acceptable but to be embraced is, frankly, laughable.”

The Easter Bunny was taken aback. “Really, Reverend Taylor, sir, if I may be so bold, the truly demonic is what was forced upon you in your nightmare. The Tooth Fairy is a creature of chaos. We understand she has appealed to your prejudices, has indeed shored them up. All we have come for is to show you scenes from the past and let you draw your own conclusions.” His voice was simple and reassuring. His limpid eyes touched Ty’s heart.

“I will not fall,” Ty insisted. “I will be strong.”

“Be as strong as you like,” said the Easter Bunny.

“Don’t be upset, Mister Taylor,” said the little girl.

Santa Claus stood to one side. There was something off about him. Why wasn’t he more jolly? More spirited? He had certainly been so in prior visits. Was this bunny demon stealing his thunder? That was what Ty guessed was going on.

“Do you see where you are?”