Like no other before or since, I remember Christmas Eve, 1937. That was the year my great uncle had come to live with us. In the few months that I knew him, Great Uncle Seamus seemed very old, wracked with a deep cough, tufts of hair growing out of his jowls and ears like a bear. I would sit by him as he carved whistles from fish bones by the fire, hearing about how back in the Old Country he learned to swim and fish the coldest waters that an Irishman ever braved and an Englishman ever shrank back from.

More than anything, I learned to delight in his stories, for a storyteller he was, in the way of Irishmen. When Uncle Seamus felt well enough, when his cough would allow it, he’d gesture with his clay pipe in the firelight, and tell me about how St. Patrick, captured as a boy by Irish pirates and made a slave, tended sheep up in the emerald pastures beyond my family’s village back in County Mayo. “Now Patrick was not an Irishman, as people suppose,” he’d lean in and whisper, his breath smelling of hot toddies and pipe-smoke, “but if ever a man rightly deserved to be Irish, I expect it was him.” Sometimes I wondered why, years after St. Patrick had escaped being a prisoner there, he’d returned to Ireland to share Jesus with his enemies. It seemed to me that he’d have had good reason to stay far away and keep Jesus to himself. So I wondered at Patrick, who played the snakes out of Ireland, and at the people who had stolen his youth and yet still had some kind of claim on his heart. To me, it made no sense.

It also occurred to me to wonder why my grandpa, Seamus’ brother, had never spoken about him once in my hearing. Seamus had spent most of his life alone in the family cottage back in Ireland, his young wife having died in childbirth more than a half-century before. My mom said his home, a square stone refuge from the wet winds that swept in from the Irish Sea, was no place to be sick and alone. So Dad went and brought him to be with us.

We always went to church on Christmas Eve, and on Easter, too. My mom, busy plastering our hair down with Brill Cream, had given up on calling my Grandpa to entreat him to go with us. She’d tried for years, but he’d say “Going to turn cold,” or he’d grumble that he had nets to mend, that the fish didn’t know it was Christmas. Uncle Seamus, though, turned out to be one of those mass-going Catholics. He got started on getting ready hours before we were to leave, pausing often to rest, muffling his cough with a grey handkerchief, spotted with blood. His first and only Christmas with us, we sat on the aisle near the middle, my brother Jimmy trying to step on my toes and scuff my boots. My great uncle’s head lolled forward occasionally, as the priest, new and nervous, offered the homily. I don’t recall anything he said, but when he finished, he invited those present to stand and share memories of Christmases past. After a long, awkward pause, a few did so, and I noticed that Uncle Seamus was now staring over across the aisle. Following his eyes, I leaned back and saw my grandfather sitting impassively on the back row by the door, having come in late.

Uncle Seamus looked funny to me, fidgety, even disturbed. When he got up, I thought we were leaving early, but instead he waited for the priest to recognize him. Wringing his tweed cap in his knotty, fisherman’s hands, Seamus said, “I want to say…I mean to say…that if I’ve offended against any man, here or elsewhere, I am sorely sorry. And I ask the Lord’s undeserved forgiveness. Maybe Christmas is as good a time to do that as any.” As he sat down, I felt my father’s face flush, and some grown-ups around us shifted uncomfortably. I looked up at Uncle Seamus, wondering if he had done something wrong, but he stared straight ahead. Back near the doorway, my grandfather, his eyes dark and downcast, got up and left before the Mass.

That night I lay awake after my brothers had drifted off. I tried to go to sleep, but I had in my mind images of Uncle Seamus and St. Patrick being chased across green fields by pirates that looked like my grandfather. When the knock at the front door came, loud and intrusive, I sat bolt upright. I went to the window, and below on the front steps I could see my grandfather, leaning on his cane, looking up at Uncle Seamus, framed by the yellow light of the hallway.

I slipped out of my room and down the back stairs to the cellar. Previously my brothers and I had discovered that by opening the door to the coal chute we could listen in on our mother gossiping with the neighbors. Uncle Seamus was trying to get his brother to come in, but I knew he wouldn’t. Grandpa hadn’t visited one time in the three months that Seamus had lived with us. So Seamus went in to get his coat, and I opened the coal door a little wider, cringing at the rasping sound it made. Above, I could hear cars in the street, and occasionally, my grandfather’s rubber boots shifting in the trampled snow.

Uncle Seamus came back out, closed the door, and the two stood on the stoop, wet flakes falling around them. It seemed a long time before they spoke, and already my bare feet were aching on the cement floor.

“Bit of a surprise, it was.” That was my Grandpa speaking, as if to no one in particular. His tone was suited to a remark about the weather, but I knew what he meant.

“Aye, it was to me, too. Don’t expect the little Father liked it too much.”

Silence followed. I jumped when a metallic clatter filled the cellar: my great uncle was tapping out his clay pipe on the railing.

Uncle Seamus cleared his throat. “You know, John, I didn’t plan on loving her.”

“Aye. I didn’t plan on ye loving her, either.”

More silence. My cheek was now cold on the rough plaster of the basement wall. Uncle Seamus spoke, more quietly than was his way: “You know she feared you, John.”

“Aye. I’d considered that.” After brief pause, which I imagined was punctuated by my grandfather letting out a big breath, he said “I guess we both have to ask the Lord for his forgiveness, Seamus. Here, this is for you.”

“What is it?”

“Open it and you’ll see.”

I heard the faint sound of tearing paper.

“Where did you get this?”

“I’ve long had it.”

“When was it taken?” My great Uncle’s voice sounded small, as if he were in pain.

“I expect she’s seventeen there. It was taken the summer she and I began courtin’, and about a year before she became yer wife.”

“Why do ye give this to me, John?”

“If a man had a picture that uncommonly beautiful of my wife – I’d want to have it.”

“Ah! Her eyes look like she’s laughing in her way.”

“Aye, in her way.”

Somewhere someone opened a door and called for their dog to come in.

“I see the paper’s a bit yellowed.”

“Eh? I suppose it is. I wrapped it for ye the first Christmas after she- after she and yer child were gone. But the Devil convinced me each year to hold back from giving it to you.”

There was silence, blending with the brush of engines and tires in wet slush. “I’m grateful, John. I’m most grateful. And me, I don’t have a gift for you.”

“No, you already gave it to me, Seamus. Now I’ll just be waitin’ for Jesus to keep unwrapping it fer me.”

Through a small gap between the coal hatch and the russet bricks of our house, I thought I could see a star peering down through thinning clouds. “Would ye like to come inside, John?”

“Aye. That’d be alright.” And then, a bit louder, in a voice that made my hair stand on end: “And any boys in the cellar had best be getting to bed, lest St. Nicholas should stumble over you while he’s collecting your coal lumps.”

I rushed to my bedroom, its windows already damp with my brothers’ slumbering breath, and buried myself under blankets. As the radiator pinged its night song, I lay there pondering what my grandfather had said about Jesus unwrapping his present. I thought of how long Uncle Seamus had lived alone in his house by the sea, and beside it, the two cairns he’d piled for his young wife and the baby they’d both waited for. As I drifted off to sleep, I had the clear sense that maybe what Jesus is unwrapping is us, ourselves before God, as we are called out like bandaged Lazarus into the sunlight. I wondered if Patrick went back to Ireland because he knew that it was the place where Jesus would finally unbind him. I kept the dream of that sunlight before me until it filled the room, and my brothers were leaping from their beds, in the way of children when there’s gifts to be opened.

Copyright: David J. Rochford III, 2008

Use with permission of the author: pastor@stmarksmethodistcom.