HC-66, Box 11014
Pahrump, NV 89048
Copyright © 1999 by W. E. Lopez
Sunshine for Christmas
By
W. E. Lopez
When winter came to the
Lovely Farm, snow covered the fields and pastures with a fluffy blanket of
white. It melted from the roof of
Farmer Lovely's house and formed long icicles suspended from the eaves. In the light of day the icicles caught the
light of the sun and their prism like surface reflected it like a thousand tiny
jewels showing every color of the rainbow.
It even looked like there were tiny colored lights of every hue strung
gaily around the farmer's house for Christmas decorations.
Winter was also the time
Farmer Lovely tended to chores that he had put off during the growing
season. This particular winter he had
decided to install electric lights in the barn. The farmer's home had become electrified years ago when the first
power lines began to crisscross the Ohio valley. Now that he had the time, and a few extra dollars in savings, he
wanted to put electric lights in his barn to avoid the danger of using coal oil
lanterns.
Shortly before noon, two
days before Christmas, a strange noise could be heard approaching the Lovely
Farm. Honker the Goose had been poking
through the hay in the barn looking for tidbits to eat when she heard the
strange noise. She lifted her head in
alarm.
"Oh my goodness!"
she cried. "Something terrible is
coming this way. Run! Hide!
Save your selves!" she told the other animals as she began to
scurry about, heading in no particular direction.
Mrs. Mischief lay curled
atop the bench seat of Farmer Lovely's wagon.
She was rehearsing for a nap she planned to take later in the after
noon. "Will you be quiet!"
she yelled at Honker. "It's bad
enough trying to sleep through that horrible racket without you making it
worse."
Rupert the Squirrel stopped
nibbling at the grain Mrs. Lovely had left in a pie pan sitting on a shelf the
last time she had been feeding the hens.
His whiskers twitched nervously as he listened to the strange
sound. "Oh, that certainly is
terrible! What do you suppose it is,
Steady-boy?"
"It's an
automobile," Steady-boy said.
"I have seen several of them when Farmer Lovely and I make the trip
into Canton."
"Why does it make so
much noise?" asked Giselle the Goat.
"Because they can go
very fast, Giselle, sometimes as much as fifteen miles an hour. The noise is to warn horses and mules that
an automobile is coming down the road and they better look out."
"Well this one sounds
as though it is stopping right here," said Laverne the Llama. Indeed, a shiny black truck with 'Rural
Electric Co-op' written on the side had pulled into Farmer Lovely's drive. "I wonder why it has come here?"
Laverne asked.
"Do you suppose it's
lost?" asked Sunrise the Rooster.
"Or maybe it's coming to eat our grain!"
"Don't be silly,
Sunrise," Steady-boy scolded.
"An automobile is like a wagon, and people use them to haul heavy
loads or to go places very fast. They
don't eat but I've seen people put gasoline into them."
“What’s gasoline?” the
rooster asked.
"It's a liquid that
smells terrible and must taste awful too.
It makes the automobile growl and roar and go very fast."
"I don't think we have
any gasoline here at the Lovely Farm," said Porker.
While the animals were
wondering what this strange vehicle was doing here, Farmer Lovely had come
outside his house and began talking to the two men who got out of the
truck. They went around to the back of
the farmer's home where wires came from poles leading to town and ended at a
small box with a glass meter on it.
Then Farmer Lovely brought the two men out to the barn and opened the
doors wide, which let in the cold winter air and chilled the barn so that the
animals could see their breath in front of their faces.
Farmer Lovely shooed Porker
and Giselle and Sunrise out of the way and lead the two men around pointing at
ceiling beams. "I think I should
have one here, and there, and there, and there," he said pointing. "With a switch over here beside the
tack room. And you better put another
light in there on a separate switch.
Understand?"
The men said they did and
went back out to their truck to bring in ladders and wire and glass
things. Farmer lovely went back into
the warm kitchen of his house because he wanted to go over his books to make
sure the farm was profitable enough to afford the expense of additional
electric lighting. When weighed against
the cost of coal oil, which was always rising, and the possible hazard of fire,
Farmer Lovely felt that electric lights for the barn were a necessary expense.
The two men who had driven
out from the city were still quite cold as they worked. One of the men pulled a flat bottle from his
pocket and he and the other fellow took a few swigs then set it on the shelf
where Rupert had been nibbling from the pie pan. While they worked they would pause frequently and go to take a
sip from their bottle. Mrs. Mischief
wondered what was in the bottle so she jumped up on the shelf and went to take
a sniff! Whewww! It was awful. Maybe this was what gasoline smelled like? Maybe the two men drank it to make them go
faster? One of the men saw Mrs.
Mischief and yelled at her.
"Scat, cat!" he
said.
Frightened, Mrs. Mischief
jumped from the shelf and scampered up to the loft where she stood watch for
rats and mice. She bumped against the
flat bottle and knocked it over into the pie pan where it went, "Gurgle,
blub, gurgle, blub, blub," as the liquid spilled into the pan.
"Darn!" the man
said as he went to pick up his bottle.
"That cat has spilled the last of our whiskey."
"No matter, Jerry. We're done here now. We can stop at Whitey's tavern when we get
back to town and chase the chill from our bones."
Then the two men collected
their ladders and wire and the empty flask and went back to their truck and
soon drove away in their noisy, smelly truck.
Shortly after, Farmer Lovely came out to the barn and flipped the switch
beside the door.
Wow! It was bright as day inside the barn. It seemed as though Farmer Lovely had placed
four tiny suns around the inside of the barn to chase the shadows away. He tried the light in the tack room and,
satisfied, shut off all the lights and closed the barn door and went back into
his house.
Rupert had been hiding in
the loft where the strange men would not step on him. They rather frightened him anyway. Now he came down and went to the pie pan where the grain lay
amidst the puddle of brown liquid. He
smelled it. Wheeew! What an awful smell. Cautiously he tasted it. Yuck!
That was horrible also! He
figured if the men could learn to like the flavor of gasoline, he could too.
He had heard Steady-boy say
that gasoline made the automobiles go very fast and that they could carry heavy
loads, so Rupert wanted some gasoline too.
He took a few more bites and suddenly found that gasoline didn't taste
so bad after all. When he took a few
more bites he decided that he pretty much liked the flavor of gasoline.
When Rupert had eaten all
the grain he found he was quite tired.
He decided to go out to his tree and take a nap in his warm nest of
straw. He turned around to scamper
along the shelf and up to the loft but found that he couldn't walk straight.
"Whooops!" he said
with a chuckle. "Shum-body quit
shaking the barn," he said and then fell off the shelf to land on a pile
of straw below.
"Rupert, Rupert! Are you hurt buddy?" Boo-bah the Bunny
asked him.
"'F coursh not, you
flop eared fur-ball," Rupert told him.
"Get outta my way afore I punch yer lights out. I'm gonna go home fer a lil' nap," he
said.
"Oh, I'm sorry,
Rupert," Boo-bah said. "I
just wanted to make sure you weren't hurt." Never the less, Boo-bah stood aside to let Rupert pass.
"Hurt? Shmurt!" Rupert said. "I c'n fly as good as Diane, I
can." He swerved his way through
the barn toward the crack beneath the doors that led outside and to his hollow
tree. Suddenly he saw the switch that
turned on the tiny suns inside the barn and he decided that it would be nice to
have sunshine inside the barn. It would
be his Christmas present to all the animals.
Rupert would give them light.
Clumsily he began to crawl
up the wooden planks of the wall toward the light switch. It seemed to him that someone was pushing
the barn to and fro and making the walls wobble. Only Steady-boy was strong enough to shake the barn.
"Shhtop that,
Steady-boy," Rupert said.
"You're making me dishy, frien'." But still he kept climbing toward the black switch on the wall. When he reached it he looked at it for a
moment trying to figure out how it worked.
The switch had two shiny
copper blades connected to a black crossbar and then clipped in the down
position by shiny copper clips. At the
top of the switch were two more copper clips with wires attached to them. "Sheesh! This is simple," Rupert said. "Even that silly Honker could figger out how this
works. All I have to do is move the
cross bar up to the top so the copper blades fit into the clips there."
He grabbed the black cross
bar with his teeth and began pushing up.
It was quite a long stretch so he moved one front foot closer and
ZZAAAPPPP! Rupert was knocked from the
wall and landed in a pile of straw half way across the barn. The other animals were frightened and
concerned at first until they noted the silly smile on his face and the regular
breathing of his chest. They decided to
let him sleep until morning.
A long time later Rupert
opened his eyes and could see the sun shining down on him. "My goodness, that's bright!" he
thought. Then he noticed that there was
another tiny sun just across from him.
And there were two more at the other end of the barn. Then he noticed Farmer Lovely had just
finished milking Giselle the Goat and was carrying the bucket of milk out the
door and to the house.
"Hey! Look friends!" he shouted to the rest
of the animals. "I did it! I did it!
I brought sunshine to the barn for Christmas!"
"Rupert, I'm so glad
you're awake," Boo-bah told him.
"I was beginning to worry about you!" the bunny said.
"Ohhh, not so loudly,
Boo-bah. My head hurts! Be quiet please!" Rupert begged.
"Serves you
right," Steady-boy told him. You
drank nearly half a bottle of whiskey Rupert.
You got silly and mean and you were rude and nasty to Boo-bah."
"I did? I was?" Rupert said with a puzzled look
on his face. "I'm sorry, I didn't
mean it," he told Boo-bah.
"We know you didn't
mean it," Steady-boy said.
"But that's what people do when they drink whiskey."
"What's whiskey?"
Rupert asked. "I thought it was
gasoline and I wanted to be strong and fast like the truck the men were
driving."
"Whiskey is something
people drink that makes them do silly things, Rupert. Sometimes when I'm in Canton with Farmer Lovely, I see men who
have drunk too much whiskey sleeping in the street where they could be run over
by a wagon or even an automobile. And
they say and do silly things and break things sometimes."
"Really? Why do they want to do that?" Leroy the
Llama asked.
"I don't know,
Leroy. I guess it makes them feel good
for a little while, even though they may regret it later."
"Ohhh, you are so
right, Steady-boy," Rupert said.
"My head hurts so much and my mouth tastes so bad, I will never
touch whiskey or gasoline again. Cross
my heart!" he said as he lifted one tiny paw to his chest and made an
X. "I just wanted to do something
nice for my friends and I thought that you would like it if I could make the
sun shine for Christmas."
"We're glad that you
tried to please us, Rupert," Laverne said. "But we're much happier just to have you with us safe and
unhurt. Spring will return to the
Lovely Farm soon enough, and with it the warmth and sun shine that we all
like."
"Laverne is right,
Rupert," Sunshine said. "We
all like springtime and summer, but it is the winter which makes us appreciate
the nice weather all the more. Just as
our worrying about losing you made us all appreciate how much we like having
you around. I hope you'll promise us
you'll never do anything so silly again."
"You mean you really
don't mind if I didn't make the sun shine for Christmas?" Rupert asked.
"Of course not,"
Porker the Pig said. "You're our
buddy, Rupert. You're just as important
to us as the sunshine. We can wait
awhile for spring to come back, because we know it will. But you had us quite worried for
awhile."
"Okay, chums. I promise I'll never do anything so silly
again. Honest, you betcha!"
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