Who Will Be Joseph

by Esther North

On the first Sunday of Advent we begin preparations for the annual Christmas pageant. Forewarned, every little girl appears in her most angelic guise, visibly praying that this year she will be singled out for the coveted role of Mary. Most boys don’t want to be singled out. They are however quite easily encouraged in packs. We’ve had as many as five kingly Magis strutting around in golden crowns and flowing velvet cloaks. More reticent boys are bundled into striped bathrobes or fleecy blankets and sent off to abide in the fields. The Angel Gabriel pretends to be reluctant. Mary is selected and not a few teary-eyed angels are fitted for wings. Then, the big question: “Who will be Joseph?” Boys from six through twelve suddenly manifest stone-deafness or try on some behaviour that they hope will disqualify them. No one wants to be Joseph.

It may be nothing more than a self-conscious boy-girl thing but I believe it is something far more universal: no one wants to be Joseph.

Grey old Joseph vested in drab brown, shoved to the back of the stable. Not a figure boy or man aspires to. The world is dismissive of self-denying Joseph. But God’s plan for our salvation depended on him. Mary could not have made it on her own. Mary needed a man independent enough to walk with her, whatever the world said, strong enough to shelter and protect her whatever it cost. A man attuned to God’s purpose for his life.

My grandfather was such a man and my earliest memories are of him on the prairie farm where my life began.

In fact, I first saw the light of day in a Salvation Army Home for Unwed Mothers. The year was 1937 and a child born out of wedlock was not the casual affair it is today: it was a family’s shame and secret.

My mother was the first born to Edward and Maggie. Her porcelain fine skin was washed with whey. Her Christening gown fashioned from her mother’s wedding dress. She was destined to become the bearer of her parents’ own lost dreams.

Just before Maggie’s fourth birthday her mother had died. With no extended family to turn to there was little her father could do but assign her, along with her two year old sister, to the orphanage so that he might go on scratching out a living in a famine-stricken homeland. The girls would never know if their father had given permission for them to be sent, but sent they were with a dozen more children and a handful of nuns, to resettlement on the Canadian Prairies.

In another County of Ireland, a young man twenty years Maggie’s senior was telling his mother of his plans to emigrate. Young and able Irishmen were leaving by the boatloads and the way forward, as Edward saw it, was the possibility of a homestead on the Canadian Prairies. His father, all but broken by the infamous potato famine, had been glad for his son’s proposal.

His mother wept and argued, “You have a good job right here.”

“It’s the only job, Ma, and they’ve said young Tom can have it. You’ll not lose the wages,” Ed reasoned.

“Things will get better,” his mother said.

“Not in your lifetime, Ma. Not in mine. Before the English starve us out of our land, I’ll go of my own choosing.”

“What about all that learning in Kilkenny? What about the seminary? What use will your books be if you’re ploughing fields away there?”

“Ma, the learning’s always for good. I’ll be quoting chapter and verse to the cattle. I’ll have fields of cattle, Ma.”

With that he leapt up and coaxing his mother to her feet, danced her around the kitchen in a jig. Exhausted by his infectious enthusiasm, she released him with a smile that cost her untold love, “Away with you then.”

“Before you know it I’ll be sending money home,” he said. “I’ll be sending for you all to come to Canada.” In her heart she didn’t believe a word of it, but she believed in her son.

The young man from County Carlow had travelled the length and breadth of Ireland, but he had never seen so much land as he travelled through for three days and nights on the train from Montreal to the prairies. Careful with every penny, he bought a team of oxen and a plough to claim his quarter-section homestead. There were too few trees to make a decent log cabin, but Ed was resourceful and seeing the massive square-cut timbers left scattered along the railway line bordering his land, he hitched the oxen up to salvage them and built a small one-room house that would withstand any winter storm.

Distances between settlements were great, but neighbourliness was always near at hand. On a Saturday evening young men could escape their solitary lives at a caeleigh gathering hosted at the one grand home. It was there that, long after he’d given up hope of finding a wife who would love a man of his age and simple life, Edward met Margaret.

His host met him as he rode into the yard and, the horse stabled, urged him towards the house, “Come and meet our new girl, Ed.”

Margaret was eighteen and sent into service from the Convent. Her raven hair was tied in a knot at the nape of her neck. Her apron was cinched around the tiniest waistline Ed had ever seen. He was enchanted while his hosts watched with a parental approval. It was, they admitted later, exactly the match they had hoped for.

The nuns educated their girls well in fine manners and the arts of making a home. With Margaret came the homey frills Ed had lived without: curtains and the few pretty dishes that were their wedding gifts. Cream was churned into butter and buttermilk made into biscuits. Bales of sheared sheep’s wool were sent off to the mill to be turned into new blankets and skeins of colourful knitting yarn. They spent their long Winter evenings by the fire, Maggie knitting the yarns into warm wool sweaters and socks that Ed declared were ‘fit for walking to the North Pole!’

At the first signs of Spring they broke new ground for a bigger garden. When the Summer sun threatened to dry out the soil, Ed hauled water from the deep well. They picked wild strawberries and Saskatoon berries for pies. They picked fresh vegetables from their garden which was growing as well as their child in Maggie’s womb.

It was Autumn, when the fields of grain were golden, that their daughter was born. Maggie’s heart overflowed with the love of God. For the first time in her memory she had a home and family.

There were only two extravagances worth mentioning in Ed’s adult life. The first was the diamond engagement ring he placed on Maggie’s finger when he asked her to be his wife. Their children would find it hidden away in a velvet case when it no longer fit on her finger. They lost it, but not before they used the diamond to etch their names on the bedroom window. The second extravagance was the professional photograph taken of their firstborn. Clothed in a dress that Maggie had knit in intricate lacy stitches, their three-month old daughter looks like a pampered, if bald, china doll.

Ed wrote a long letter to send with the photograph. His mother’s response was a testament of love and a litany of good advice for her inexperienced daughter-in-law. Soon, he hoped, he would take his wife and daughter home to meet his family. It would never be possible. This exile was permanent.

My grandfather never begrudged the hard work. His love for Maggie and their children never flagged but he railed against God that his family should again be struck by famine. The drought on the prairies filled their mouths and larders with dust. There were no green pastures. The Border Collie herded the cattle from one dry slough patch to another. The chickens remarkably pecked out survival and eggs could be taken to town in trade for staples.

One constant in life on the prairie farm was the train. You could set your clock by its passing at 9:30 in the morning and again at 4:45. Their imaginations fueled by stories of travel to far away places, the children would dash up the knoll to wait for the afternoon train. At the sound of the whistle they waved enthusiastically to the Engineer, the many passengers who waved back, and especially the Conductor who tossed out the highly prized bundle of newspapers for their father. At Christmastime and often during the years of drought, there would be a second bundle tossed off the train: clothing, food, and treats
for the children who used up all their mother’s letters crayoning large thank you signs. The whistle would sound a Toot! Toot! Toot! You’re welcome.

Ed couldn’t believe the headline that screamed across the front page: STOCK MARKET CRASHES. All of North America was plunged into the Great Depression. Could things really get worse? With his distrust of governments, Ed was certain there would be a costly payback for any benefits they might receive. He was convinced that they had to make it on their own.

The family in the big house was looking for a good, reliable girl. Her living would be included and there would be a fair wage to her parents. Maggie and Ed watched with heavy hearts as their fifteen year old daughter left for her first job. They assured each other it would only be for a while. It would be for life.

Their daughter was ill-equipped for life away from home. When the news came that she was pregnant, her parents blamed themselves. She and the boy were too young. There was no question of marriage. They had no prospects. In the manner of the day, the unwed mother-to-be was sent away. She went to a home in the city where her employees were sympathetic friends of the Salvation Army and girls could work their way through the long, lonely months with some self-respect. Everyone planned for the baby to be adopted by a good family. Everyone except Ed.

“She’s one of ours,” he said, “and we’ll raise her. The devil take the gossips and what they might say.”

He travelled by train to the Salvation Army Home for Unwed Mothers and took us home. As soon as I could be weaned it was agreed that my mother should return to her job in the city. She would be able to send money home. My grandmother had her own youngest child still in her arms and I was often entrusted to the care of distracted teenage aunts. The aunts were of little interest to me. My grandfather was the centre of my world.

I believe that I learned to walk early, at eight months, so that I could pursue him. If he turned around or reached out his hand we were there: the toddler and the old Border Collie. In his footsteps, by osmosis, I learned that the world was filled with amazements. I still know the healing touch of a dog licking a scraped knee and the breathtaking wet cold of sod freshly turned by the horse-drawn plough.

The pace of a horse suited my Grampa. A man could think. A man could gallop across the prairies and remember that he had been a lad riding thoroughbreds in the Irish races.

When one of the neighbours chugged up on a shiny new John Deere tractor he shouted out a greeting, “Fine machine.”

“It’ll change farming.” The neighbour shouted back.

Grandfather nodded but it seems he didn’t think it would be a change for the better. He never did drive a tractor.

Nor did he drive a car. What good was a car during a Prairie winter?

It may have been a trainman or a sailor, but I believe it was a Gypsy from one of Grandfather’s stories who first thought of replacing an open sled box with a small house for winter travel. Cabooses had windows, a back door, and a stove pipe that sent up signals to let the world know: all is well and warm for this family.

Inside the caboose simple wooden planks provided benches down each side. Storage bins underneath secured the grocery packages and the mail. An old scuttle held firewood specially cut for the miniature space heater. Lulled by the rhythm of the harness bells and the skreek of the runners on frozen snow we travelled in the certainty that the horses knew the way home. We sang our repertoire of songs and listened to each other’s stories, said our night prayers if it was getting past bedtime.

Night time, I thought was the best time to travel. As far as they eye could see the earth was ablaze with diamond-sparkling snow and where the snow left off, the prairie sky was ablaze with stars.

“There’s the Big Dipper,” Grampa would say quietly.

He would point all the constellations: the Big Dipper, Cassiopeia the queen, and the Lyre that had been carried up into the heavens by the Nine Muses. As he retold each story, he drew the mythic shapes on a slate of cold window pane fogged with our breaths.

Grandfather might have been one of the Magi. He was always star gazing. Then again, you might have thought he was a shepherd if you’d seen him rushing to herd the stock into the safety of the stables ahead of a prairie storm.

He never did hurry himself out of the way of a storm. Grampa always stood and studied approaching storms.

“Look!” he would exclaim. “Did you see that sheet of lightening? Watch the colour in those forks.”

“Count now,” he’d say. “You can tell how near the storm is by how many counts between the lightening and the thunder.”

When I involuntarily trembled, he comforted me with the thought that the Holy Family was lighting lamps and moving the furniture out of the way of leaks in the roof. At the first pelting drops of rain or hail, we ran! We knew about leaks in the roof.

We knew about such simple pleasures as the taste of coarse homemade bread dipped in honey-sweetened, milky tea. We knew about Faeries and the Little People, about the saints and martyrs of Grandma’s prayers, and all the mysteries and adventures that came to life in grandfather’s stories. We knew about life and death first hand.

Grampa had told me that the foal would be born that night and that I could be present for this birthing. I struggled against sleep as long as possible but it was just before dawn that he came to wake me.

I leapt from my bed. Trousers and sweater tugged over my flannel nightgown. We hurried towards the barn, the light from the oil lantern bobbing in the shadow of his steps. There I watched a miracle happening. It was messy. The straining. The blood. The foal dropping onto the straw. I don’t suppose I have ever seen anything more wondrous.

The foal was the colour of coal gleaming and on her forehead a white, white star. The mare watched as her foal took staggering first steps on spindly legs. We laughed.

Grandfather led me outside. He dimmed the lantern light as dawn began to break and we sat wondering at the miracles of birth and the stars fading across the prairie sky.

“Do you think the foal has a star like the star on her forehead?” I wondered.

“Doesn’t every living creature have a star,” he said.

“Do I have a star?” I asked knowing his answer by heart, wanting to hear it again.

“You most of all,” he assured me and folded me inside his sweater against the cold of the dawn and some cold reality of growing up that I didn’t yet understand. The wool smelled reassuringly of the stable and the fields.

“Isn’t your name Esther,” he continued, “and that meaning Star Child?”

“ I thought I was Fatherless Child,” I said having recently been stung again by school room secrets that are shared in whispers meant to be overheard.

“Not at all,” grandfather chided me. “Every child of God has Himself for a father.”

“I have you, Grampa,” I said.

Abruptly he hoisted himself to his feet and took my hand, “Come,” he said, “Let’s go and see to their first nursing.”

He tucked the wobbly-legged foal in close to the mare. It nuzzled around finding its way then sucked hungrily.

“Isn’t it a wonder,” Grandfather said. I giggled.

Whitman-like my grandfather began, “Dying is much like being born, you know.” Weaving a story around the facts, he told me that he was going to die. Not sometime in the future. Soon.

“No! Don’t say it.” I stopped my ears but his gaze held me until I knew it was true and I wept. He rocked me in his arms until the first wave of anguish passed.

“There now,” he said handing me a big old rag of a handkerchief. “Don’t go baby-back. Wait and see what God is meaning in all of this.”

The comfort of my grandfather was never a cotton-wool coddling kind of comfort, it was a Holy Spirit kind of comfort: strength giving.

For more than a year Grandfather overcame the pain of stomach cancer to prepare himself and us for his death. He made time alone for each member of his family. He listened to our dreams, gave us permission to say whatever had not been said, to say good bye. He blessed each one of us. He said that his life had been one wonderful adventure after another and now he couldn’t wait to see what God had planned for him.

I was twelve when my grandfather died. Fifty years later I made my pilgrimage to Ireland. I knocked on the door of the house where he grew up and imagined his mother weeping as she bade him farewell. I stood under the spreading apple tree that he and his father had planted in the garden. I marvelled at the beauty of the Connemara ponies and valued all the more his gift to me of a dapple-grey Shetland. I imagined that I saw him on the playing field at Kilkenny where the boys still wear the same uniform. I sat in a crowded West Country pub with a peat fire warming us, everyone joining in the songs, and dancing to the music even as they remained seated on long wooden plank benches and crowded into snug booths.

For a while I was a child again in that long ago and far away prairie kitchen where my grandfather was dancing the Irish jig around the pot-bellied stove. His stockinged feet scarcely touched the floor boards, his body remained stiffly erect, arms at his sides, and his look was straight ahead as though he was looking into another world. Perhaps he was.

The Sunday we begin to rehearse the pageant is the day that I unpack the tokens of my own Christmas rituals and traditions. Out of boxes come ribbons ready to tie fresh cedar to the front door wreath. Three woolly sheep from a church school project, affectionately named Shirley, Goodness and Mercy. Bits and pieces too worn and tattered to display, too precious to throw away. I always unpack the Nativity sets last. I carefully remove layers of tissue paper from the charming folk-art from Costa Rica, the carved marble crèche en ovum, a fragile blown glass that looks like a diamond-etched window pane, a carved wood bas relief.

My favourite Nativity figures are three unpainted clay santons from Provence: Mary kneeling, the baby Jesus in the manager, and Joseph leaning on a walking stick the size of a toothpick. I never pack them away. They remain on the mantle year round.

From time to time I hold the tiny figure of Joseph tightly in the palm of my hand remembering the strength of my grandfather’s hand holding mine. As I set him down again to watch over the virgin and child, I wonder about all the women and children who are victims of today’s famines, prejudices, and secret sins.

Where are all the men God is calling to step out of the ranks of strutting kings and the flocks of gone-astray sheep to help make families holy again? Who is listening? Who will be Joseph?”

Copyright © 2004 Esther North