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He dusted stray ashes from the hearth and rekindled the dying fire. It
gave little warmth to Danny, for the chill lay less on his American body
than on his Irish soul. Still, it made a cheerful sight on Christmas
Eve, the only touch of holiday in the almost empty room. He had brought
in a folding chair from the moving van and placed it near the fire.
He should already have been on the road, making his way into the city
and the apartment he had leased just yesterday, but he had come to the
breaking point, the moment of final farewell to the life and the love he
had known in this old house. It could not be done. He could bear no more
dying now.
He sat down. He realized then that he was sitting where the Christmas
tree had stood the year before, the tall and stately beauty he and the
leprechaun had cut down on the far side of the hill and dragged to the
house together. How they had laughed and romped in the snow along the
way, stopping to snowball each other and slip and slide on the frozen
pond.
"Never gonna get the tree to the house this way, you silly elf," Danny
had said, but Dooby had poked him in the ribs and playfully knocked him
down for another tussle in the snow. That final romp had turned into a
session of another sort, right out there in the cold, with Dooby pulling
down the zipper of Danny's fly and planting his lips in the private
place.
"Holy Mother, don't stop!" groaned Danny when Dooby came up for air.
"It'll freeze like a popsicle outside that warm mouth o' yours!"
Dooby grinned, bent his head down, and the rampant penis disappeared
again until Danny groaned. "I'm...goin'...to...hose...ya...down,
me...lep...re...chaun," he erupted in a series of short grunts.
After Danny came, Dooby rolled away and leapt to his feet with a whoop.
"Fine load, lad! Ye wet me to the core!"
Rising to his knees in a struggle to zip his fly with fingers blue from
clutching at the snow in his ecstasy seconds before, Danny watched his
lover bounce back and forth across the fallen fir with the energy of a
man half his age.
"Holy Mother, Doobalin Man," he shouted, "if you'd settle down like an
old elf should, I'd do the same for you!"
Sailing past in an exuberant leap, Dooby yelled back, "Ye'll have yere
taste o' honey, son, once we get back to the house!"
Those words from the past echoed in Danny's brain on his lonely
Christmas Eve. "Come back to the house, my leprechaun!" he cried to the
walls. "Oh, Dooby, you belong with me!"
He seldom thought of himself as an emotional man, but now he leaned
forward in the folding chair, dropped his face in his hands and wept.
Christmas had never meant much to Danny since his childhood days, not
till Dooby came along. It seemed that Dooby brought Christmas with him,
a renewal of the Christmas spirit every day of the year. Each morning
with him was a gift left in the night by old Santy, whom Dooby so
closely resembled.
"Turned white afore I was forty, these woolly whiskers what cover me
face, an' when I come to New York at Christmastime they sez I were
perfect fer the chief Santy at Gimbel's which were in them days a big,
important store," he would proudly explain. "They asked me where I come
from in the Land o' the Green, and I tells 'em 'Dublin,' and how they
laughed fer you know we Irishers pronounce it proper like it's
'doobalin' an' so they calls me Dooby thenceforward, and so I be today!"
How he, too, would laugh when he told that story, and rear back his
handsome head with the fringe of white sweeping back from his ears in a
regular fuzz of curls he said was orange as a carrot when he was young a
long, long time ago. Danny never knew what age his old man
was, and Dooby never told, but come April, Gimbel's swathed him in gold
and green and painted his face to match his billing as the "World's
Oldest Living Leprechaun" and sent him sailing on a magnificent float
replete with rainbow and a pot of gold, waving grandly to the crowds
lining the sidewalks of New York on St. Patrick's Day.
That's where Danny saw him first as the young man came walking out of
Mass at St. Patrick's Cathedral and caught the glint of Dooby's pot of
gold. In all his life, Danny never knew the meaning of love until that
moment on Fifth Avenue when he looked into Dooby's emerald green eyes
and felt the rush of God's sunshine pouring into his heart. As if in a
trance, the handsome lad of twenty-two walked beside the Gimbel's float
all the way to the Battery and waited for Dooby to step down, their eyes
locked in a tight embrace for it was a moment neither had ever shared
with man or woman in all their lives.
Danny sweetest memories of the old house they came to share in the
Hudson River Valley were the wake-up times of morning, when he would
open his hazel eyes and there would be Dooby, his handsome,
white-fringed and balding head angled toward him on the other pillow,
watching, waiting for the love light to spread across the younger man's
face.
"Good mornin', sweet darlin'," Dooby would say. "How's me Danny-boy
today?" Then would come the leaning over, the lingering kiss, the rough
brush of male faces, the heavy scent of sleeping on the lips, the
probing gaze into each other's depths in that kingdom behind the eyes.
.
Danny remembered the touch of Dooby's hand on the private place, the
rush of hot blood that brought on his hardening down below, Dooby's
turning away for the back-to-belly settling into a warm embrace and the
slight shifting for the entry. His drifting mind could almost hear
Dooby's ecstatic sighs at the moment of penetration, his endearing
moans, and his own quickening strokes leading to a final lunge into the
moment of explosion that always climaxed with Dooby's plaintive cry,
"That's true love, Danny-boy!"
Gone forever, that sweet voice, Danny thought on his lonely Christmas
Eve, the price I knew one day I'd pay for loving a man so much older
than myself. But what could I do? For others it is woman, for some a
younger man or a man one's age. For me, it was Dooby, no matter what
sex, what age, and our love indeed was true.
He leaned back and sighed in his folding chair.
Would I, could I, love again, he thought, and give to anyone else what I
gave to him? How do I renew myself and find any more to give? Can such
a thing be done?
A strange noise came to his ears. "When up on the roof arose such a
clatter....."
Oh, give me a break! Danny thought.
"I sprang from my chair to see what was the matter....."
Danny stood up, went to the window and looked outside. It was beautiful.
Snowflakes were falling and sticking to the panes of glass, the biggest
flakes he had ever seen. The hills and the trees were a fantasy land,
and the moving van.....the moving van was gone!
"Oh, my God, all my stuff!" Danny cried and headed for the door. Just
then, it blew open and there stood a man of splendor and girth to match
dead Dooby's. White eyebrows, bushy and flecked with snow, a bearded
chin, bristling and full mustache, red stocking cap pulled
forehead-low, breath frosting in the wintery cold, the man clapped his
bear-like, mittened paws together and pressed them against his nose.
"Damn cold, my boy," he said, "and you're lucky the old man was
shufflin' by. Damned van of yours don't have no brake? Right smack down
to the pond it rolled. I chocked it quick with a broken post. Did ya
hear it crash the fence?"
"When up on the roof he heard such a clatter....."
Danny smiled at the verse that had come to his mind. "Sure did. Thought
for a minute it was Santy Claus. Come in, man. I've got a fire."
The fellow tromped in stomping snow from his knee-high boots to the
naked hardwood floor.
"Solid oak," he said, looking down. "Likely a hunnert years old. Reckon
this old place has got some fine features. I seen it's up fer sale. The
sign outside. Van got that, too. I set it up agin fer ya, boy. Brrrr!
Let me at that fire!"
The old man seemed somehow to fill the room. Danny gave him a grateful
look.
"No coffee, sir," he said. "Nothing to offer you but the warmth of the
fire. I'm not even supposed to be here, you see. I was on my way to the
city, but I.....well, I....."
The stranger had taken up a position with his back to the fire, lifting
his parka at the bottom rear. "I git it, boy. Couldn't leave quite yet.
Hard, ain't it? I mean turnin' your back on the past. But it's got to be
done. Got to go on. What's gone is gone. What's next is just ahead.
Won't get to it if ya don't take that step. Reckon that's what the
future is. One step at a time. Where you was, you ain't
no more. Where you're goin', you ain't there yet. Got to keep movin' on.
Story of my life, I'd say. Never settled somehow. Never found what ya
might call the one."
Danny stood with his hands leaning on the back of the folding chair.
"The one what?"
The old man shrugged. "Don't rightly know, young man. The
one thing, maybe, that woulda stopped me in my tracks. Never found it,
so I don't know. Say, ya mind if I set my old bones down in that chair?"
Danny stepped aside with a nod. "I'm sorry. I should have invited you to
sit before. You saved my van and all my stuff. I owe you, sir."
The man waved his hand carelessly. "You owe me nothin', boy, ‘cept to
tell me maybe why you want to sell this fine old house?"
Danny moved away self-consciously. He and Dooby had lived here as father
and son, a necessary falsehood meant to deceive the world, the
neighbors, the town. But with Dooby gone, Danny suddenly felt it a
betrayal of their life together to continue the lie. "I lived here with
a man about your age when we met fifteen years ago, a man who looked
somewhat like you, sir. We were a couple, you see, and I was proud of
it, but I couldn't say it then. Now I don't care. I loved that man. He
was, I am beginning to think, my reason for living. That's why I'm
having trouble leaving this house. For me, my Dooby is still here. I
honest to God don't know what I am going to do."
Danny surprised himself with these words. He suddenly wondered if he had
said them at all, but the old man's penetrating gaze confirmed that he
had. The stranger studied him as if looking at a map.
"I see by the mist in your eyes," the old one said, "that you did love
him very much." The man extended a hand and took Danny's in it. What a
big hand it was. How small Danny's looked in its grasp. "Sit here by me,
boy, there on the floor, and tell me about it. I sure would like to
hear."
Danny sat down Indian-style and first thing he knew had leaned back
against the old man's sturdy leg. The fire was ablaze. The room had
warmed up now. It seemed less empty. It had taken on a renewed sense of
life.
Danny talked. He talked about Dooby, about the day they met in the St.
Patrick's Day Parade after the Christmas Dooby left Ireland to come to
America, of the look that brought them together and held them together
to the moment of their first touch that night at Danny's tiny
efficiency apartment on the upper West Side.
It had been the first time with a man for each of them. That was how it
began.
It ended fifteen years later, on New Year's Day after last Christmas,
when Dooby fell in the hall, the beat of his loving heart fading gently
away, waiting only for Danny to come in the back door from painting the
rowboat in the shed. Dooby's hand lay outstretched on the floor. In a
panic, Danny called the fire department ambulance, but Dooby motioned
him to his side. Danny knelt and clasped the lifted hand.
"I'm goin'," whispered Dooby, "goin' quickly, love."
Danny shook his head no, his eyes aflood with tears. "I love you, Dooby.
Please don't go."
The dying man's chuckle led to a cough. Danny lay down beside him and
took him in his arms and buried his face in the white whiskers.
"Well, then, I'll be back. We leprechauns, we're immortal, we are.
We're the spirit of the Irish, and that will never die, Danny boy.
You've got the blood of Ireland in your veins, so ye know I speak the
truth, don't ye, boy? This leprechaun will return!"
Danny still lay there when the ambulance crew arrived and lifted away
the lifeless body at his side.
When Danny had finished telling his story, silence hung like a pall over
the room. Even the fire crackled no more, burnt down to embers still
throwing heat, but graying at the edges as they cooled.
"Stir up the fire, boy," said the old man, nudging Danny gently with
his knee.
Danny got to his feet, but his cramped legs gave way and he fell across
the stranger's lap. The old man's arms slipped around him to keep him
from falling to the floor. Though strong, it was a tender touch. Danny
looked up into his eyes. Like magnets, their faces drew closer. Lips
touched and parted. There was a kiss, sweet-tasting, gentle, somewhat
reserved, uncertain, but distinctly a kiss. It gave comfort to Danny,
but he saw a glimmer of confusion in the old man's eyes. The younger man
slid to his knees and lay his head in the old man's lap.
The stranger sighed, and clasped Danny a little closer to him. Nothing
was said, but Danny glanced up again and saw the other's eyes were now
closed, a soft smile resting comfortably on his new friend's lips. It
seemed so much like being with Dooby, Danny felt no sense of betrayal at
all. He nuzzled into the old man's lap and became aware of a faint
stirring there. Not much, but enough to make him bold.
He entered heaven then and tasted love again.
The old bear's paws pressed Danny tenderly at the back of the neck,
becoming more insistent after awhile and then collapsing to the old
man's sides. Danny fell asleep that way, lost in a reverie of Dooby and
past Christmas Eves.
When he woke in the morning, he lay cramped with his head resting on the
seat of the folding chair. His visitor was gone. In a faint panic, Danny
sprang to his feet and went to the door. The snow had stopped. It was a
bright, clear, glistening Christmas Day. Fresh footprints led from the
door to the lawn to the road and then fled out of sight. Danny felt more
alone even than the night before, in the moments before the stranger had
appeared.
He turned back inside, checked that the fire was cold, folded the chair
and carried it out to the van. The old man had done a good job of
chocking. The van perched at the edge of the pond, well clear of the
ice. Danny arranged pieces of the broken fence into traction for the
wheels and backed the van to the road. The house was locked. Without
getting out, he took one last look and drove away, pursued by the most
terrible loneliness of his life.
At the fork in the road, he turned away from the town and headed for the
city an hour away. A mile farther on, he drove on to the highway, and
there, with his thumb stuck out, but looking the other way, stood his
stranger of Christmas Eve. The man shifted his head when he heard the
van approach. Danny looked straight into his eyes.
There was that confusion again.
Danny stopped, reached over and flung open the door, then sat back,
staring at the road. He heard, rather than saw, his hitchhiker get in
and close the door. Somehow he could not lift his foot to the
accelerator. Things seemed unsettled as they were. He heard the old man
shift around a bit before saying, "You're young enough to be my son, and
maybe more than that. I don't git it, boy. I just don't."
Danny could not suppress a chuckle. "Well, sir, I get it. I know what's
going on." He looked at the man at last. "You got some place to go, some
place to stay?"
The man shook his head. "No, sir, to tell the truth, I don't. I'm a
carpenter by trade. Just keep movin' on and stop here and there to do a
job. Been that way all my life."
Danny grinned, reached over and took his hand. "Well, ain't that
something! Dooby and I owned a small furniture company in the city. Now
it's mine. I could use some help around the shop. A good carpenter is
what I need, and you can live with me."
For the first time, the old man let out a hearty laugh. "D'ya believe in
the luck of the Irish? My granny came from Cork, and she used to sit me
at her knee and say it'd be with me all my days. Reckon the old gal was
right."
Still holding the old man's hand, Danny gave it a squeeze. "So you're an
Irisher after all? Why doesn't that come as a surprise?" His words were
addressed more to himself than to the man. The carpenter returned the
squeeze, but looked away. "Well, son, this is all quite a surprise to
me."
Smiling, Danny took his hand away and shifted gears as he turned into
the morning rush of highway traffic with Dooby's last words ringing in
his ears.
"This leprechaun will return!"
THE END
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