Free Jacob's Ladder by Donald McCaig

lap.
    â€œDon’t you get no grease on this,” she said.
    The shirt she’d made for Jesse was white canvas, wrought more thoroughly than delicately, seamed with green thread.
    â€œWhy thank you, Aunt Opal.”
    â€œDon’t you go dirtyin’ it.” She sniffed and set off toward the Quarters.
    Uther fumbled in his pocket for a dime. “For the baby,” he said.
    â€œHappy Christmas, Master.” It wasn’t Jesse’s baby, and Maggie was barely Jesse’s wife, but the gesture was kindly meant. “Happy Christmas, Happy Christmas.” Jesse followed in Aunt Opal’s wake.
    Alexander Kirkpatrick uncoiled himself from the cask which had served as his seat and inspected Stratford Hall’s colonnades as if he might take a notion to buy, provided the present owner hadn’t exaggerated its value.
    Although Stratford contained more cropland than the valley’s other big plantations, Warwick and Hidden Valley, its principal residence was smaller than theirs. Samuel Gatewood’s father, Thomas, had moved the family from the log cabin his own father had built into a one-room brick house with sleeping loft overhead. That single large room was now Abigail’s bedroom. Five years later, when Thomas Gatewood started sawing sleepers for the Virginia Central Railroad, he added the front portion: parlor, dining room, and office downstairs, two bedrooms above. From the drive the house was plainly and rigidly symmetrical. Its front door with attendant window lights was echoed by a second-story door opening onto the porch roof, a roof supported by four hand-molded cement columns, the center two topped by wooden Corinthian scrolls. Since its ground-floor windows were tall and the second-story windows short, the house seemed a toothy smile under a lowering brow. Christmas smoke lifted from chimneys at the gable ends as well as from the kitchen house out back.
    Happily, Sallie took her husband’s arm. “Since I was a little girl, every year we’ve come to Stratford on Christmas Day. That’s Preacher Todd’s horse tied to that maple, and look, Daddy, there’s Elmo Hevener’s buggy.”
    â€œMr. Hevener can do considerable harm to a joint of beef or a smoked ham,” Uther remarked with satisfaction.
    In a white gown trimmed with gold brocade, the mistress of Stratford Plantation waved from the doorway. “Welcome, Uther, Sallie, Mr. Kirkpatrick. Make haste! It’s so much nicer indoors.”
    As they proceeded down the hall, Pompey, Gatewood’s houseman, collected their winter wraps and mumbled something which—had anyone bent low enough to hear—was his inquiry “Christmas gift?”
    It was Abigail’s Cousin Molly’s custom to visit Stratford Plantation over Christmas. Molly Semple’s home was Richmond, and most unmarried respectable women would have preferred the high social season in Virginia’s capital—the gala balls, witty charades, dinner parties which tried the strength of their hosts’ cellars and their cooks’ prowess, the amateur theatricals—all the town fun which filled the days when there was no work on the outlying plantations. But every December, without fail, Cousin Molly made the uncomfortable rail journey to Millboro, where Abigail’s servants would convey her (and many many trunks and portmanteaus) into the tall snow-covered mountains. When Cousin Molly’s friend Governor Wise asked her why on earth, she replied, “Christmas—I mean the real Christmas—comes so much nearer in the mountains.” Cousin Molly’s most treasured gift was gossip of kinfolk and the Tidewater gentry Abigail Gatewood grew up with, but Molly also brought pattern books with the newest fashions (seen no later than the previous spring at the Court of St. James’s), as well as new-fangled manners and speech. Last year Cousin Molly introduced the “German tree,” which