RUSTY & PEPPER: CHRISTMAS MISCHIEF by Susan Buffum
There were five Riley children and all of them sported a different shade
of red hair.
Ruby, at thirteen, was the
oldest. She had long strawberry-blonde
hair that she was fond of brushing and swinging around her head in a movie
starlet-like fashion. Carmine was eleven
and had dark red hair that almost looked purple. He was bookish and wore glasses that sat
crookedly on his nose because they were always being sat on or stepped on, even
when they were still on his face! Pepper
was nine, and he was a live wire! He had
unruly, wavy red-orange hair and freckles in a spray across his nose and cheeks.
Rusty, the seven year old, had
crinkly light-orange hair. He was a bit
of a daredevil and no one ever saw him without a Band-Aid or two taped
somewhere across his arms, legs or chin.
Chili was the youngest at four years of age. Her hair was a fiery red fluff. She looked like a little fire-cracker but
actually possessed the sweetest temperament of any child around.
Mr. Riley was a dentist and Mrs. Riley ran the used book shop down in
the village where they lived on Shady Hill Road in the old Butterfield
farmhouse that had stood empty and neglected for over a decade before the family
moved in. When the older four children
were in school and Dr. Riley was in the big town at his office and Mrs. Riley
was in the village in her shop, a neighbor, Mrs. Monroe, watched little
Chili. Mrs.Monroe bred basset hounds and it
wasn’t unusual for Chili to come home acting like a dog some days. She never had to worry about fleas however as
Mrs. Riley gave her a bath and shampoo every evening.
When Dr. Riley and Mrs. Riley were not at home Ruby was in charge of
watching the younger Riley children. She
accomplished this from behind her closed bedroom door with her cell phone
firmly pressed to her ear, an open bottle of nail polish before her and a tiny
paintbrush in her hand. Carmine was no
problem whatsoever. He’d ensconce
himself in an over-stuffed chair in the library behind the seldom used formal
dining room and bury his somewhat pug nose in one of the multitude of dusty
volumes rescued during one of his mother’s scavenger hunts at flea markets,
book sales, yard sales and estate sales.
He was currently reading Wodehouse and could often be heard chuckling to
himself. If Ruby had remembered to pick
up Chili on the walk home from the bus stop, then little Chili would be
emptying out the kitchen cabinets that were never arranged to her complete
satisfaction.
Rusty and Pepper were another matter entirely. They weren’t exactly bad boys. They never did anything with malicious intent
or out of sheer meanness. They were
merely mischievous, and very imaginative.
They didn’t like to gab on the phone with their friends. They thought books were a big ho-hum. And they had no quarrel with the way the
kitchen cabinets were organized. They
were action-oriented boys. Adventurers!
*
It was almost Christmas. The
fields surrounding the farmhouse were covered with over a foot and a half of
pristine snow not yet trampled by the boots of intrepid explorers such as Rusty
and Pepper who had better things to attend to inside the house, for in a big
walk-in closet up on the third floor they had discovered a huge cache of gaily
wrapped packages with labels attached indicating that they were for the flock
of relatives who would be descending upon the house on Christmas Day for
feasting and gift exchanging. (Mrs.
Riley had a much more clever and original hiding place for the immediate
family’s gifts that Rusty and Pepper had not yet discovered much to their
chagrin.)
Disappointment at not finding their
gifts was the primary motivating factor for the little bit of mischief the two
boys got up to there in the wainscoted interior of the closet that was
illuminated by a single sixty-watt bulb suspended from the ceiling high in the
rafters above their heads.
History does not offer any clue as to which of the boys suggested the
gift tag switch.
Perhaps it was mutual
inspiration. However the idea was
conceived, the boys spent an industrious hour and a quarter carefully peeling
off the stick-on labels that were neatly written in their mother’s
old-fashioned cursive hand, and reapplying them at random and upon whim to various
and sundry packages.
That day no one asked where the boys had spent the afternoon nor why the
knees of their jeans were embedded with dust.
Mrs. Riley noticed that Pepper had three broken fingernails, the result
of his picking diligently at the label edges, but the boys always had ragged
nails and she couldn’t keep straight whose nails she had last clipped. She
didn’t think it was important to wonder why they were so raggedy all the time
anyway- boys would be boys after all.
Her job was primarily to keep their nails clean and trimmed so that the
school nurse would not feel compelled to call again to ask if she was feeling
poorly and in need of help caring for the children.
A similar scenario took place about five days before Christmas. Ruby was chatting on the extension phone in
her parent’s bedroom, her cell phone having been lost at school, to her current
best friend Natasha Dubok. Carmine was
slouched in the library chair rereading Dicken’s A Christmas Carol for
possibly the hundredth time. And little
Chili was in the kitchen studying the plumbing under the sink as she had seen
the man in the overalls doing at Mrs. Monroe’s earlier that day. She was such a clever impressionist that she
was mimicking his manner of speech very precisely, for which she would later be
bewilderingly reprimanded by her father while her brothers snickered behind
their dinner napkins.
Rusty and Pepper were in the living room admiring the big Christmas
tree. The whole house had been lavishly
decorated with ropes of artificial greens with sprigs of real holly and plastic
mistletoe tucked in among the boughs.
Electric candles glowed warmly in all the windows. An antique creche sat prominently on the
mantle. And once more, no one knows
exactly who declared, “The tree is so pretty it ought to be outside where
everybody can see it!” Neither does
anyone know which boy it was who suggested it should be put someplace high
enough so that the whole village could get a good look at it! All that is known is that the police log for
that date indicates Mrs. Riley drove the family van off the road and smack dab into
the Post’s picket fence three houses away from her own when she was distracted
by the vision of a beautifully decorated live Christmas tree all aglow on the
front porch roof of her home.
Of course all the children professed ignorance as to how the tree had
come to be on the porch roof. Dr. Riley
declared that the tree must have harbored a latent exhibitionist tendency and
had unplugged itself surreptitiously at some point during the course of the
afternoon, lurched in its stand across the living room and then into the front
hall, hopped up the stairs sloshing water and trailing tinsel in its wake,
maneuvered itself through the front bedroom doorway (which happened to be Dr.
and Mrs. Riley’s bedroom), shoved open the balky sash after a dexterous display
of its nimble boughs by unfastening the latch, then stuffed itself through the
tall narrow opening, leaving a trail of multicolored glass fragments from an
array of shattered ornaments on the lid of the cedar chest. And
then, it had set itself up on the
porch roof and even wired itself to
the shutters for stability! And,
oh! Clever tree! It must have made a detour down to the
basement for the tools and wire it had needed before it even attempted to climb
the stairs, and had managed not to
shed a single needle or leave a
thread of silver tinsel behind as evidence!
And then there
was the matter of how it had plugged itself into the wall socket in the hallway
using an assortment of extension cords collected from various locations around
the house. How had something of this magnitude occurred in a house full of
children without even one child being a witness to any one segment of the
production?
Little Chili had looked up at her father through big, earnest
ginger-brown eyes and asked, “Daddy, don’t you believe in miracles anymore?”
It was one of those rare nights when all five children went to bed
early, and Dr. and
Mrs. Riley sat in the quiet family
room, staring at one another for quite a while before finally bursting into
laughter.
Very shortly thereafter followed the mysterious Eggnog Episode. Dr. and Mrs. Riley invited co-workers and
colleagues over on the Saturday night of the weekend before Christmas for a
nice holiday get-together catered by Mrs. Brownley and Mrs. Lipinski of Moveable Feasts and Fetes. The children were supposed to remain upstairs
and amuse themselves with various and sundry electronic diversions under the
supervision of Ruby and her current best friend Mariette Henry who had been
invited to sleep over.
Ruby and Mariette were busy painting little Chili’s tiny fingernails red
and green for the holidays. Carmine was
lying across his bed reading Thackery with a frown line creasing his forehead
between dark brows. Rusty and Pepper
were supposedly playing an X-Box game in their room way at the back of the
house.
The narrow, twisted back staircase was behind a door in the second floor
hallway right outside Rusty and Pepper’s shared room. There was another door at the bottom of the
staircase that opened into the big farmhouse kitchen, right beside the doorway
to the pantry where the caterers had set up their trays of delicacies and the
punch bowls prior to serving. Carmine’s
room was across from the second floor doorway to the back staircase and he
later professed no knowledge of anyone using that staircase during the hours of
the party. Little Chili’s room was on
the other side of the staircase doorway.
She had been put to bed precisely at nine o’clock and had never gotten
out of her bed once she had been put into it.
Ruby and Mariette could recite almost verbatim the dialogue of a film
noir they had watched on The Movie
Channel from nine until eleven, and then they had dialed a psychic hotline
to learn all about their love prospects for which the ensuing long distance
telephone bill would attest to their being occupied from eleven until eleven
fifty-three.
Rusty and Pepper declared that they had been playing their game and had
no idea how the whole bottle of Fletcher’s
Castoria had gotten poured into the eggnog punch bowl in the pantry. They did acknowledge that they had slipped
downstairs about eight forty-five for a snack from Mrs. Lipinski. She had given
them little fingers sandwiches, an apple tart apiece, glasses of milk and a
plateful of ribbon candy to share with the other kids, but they had forgotten
to do that.
And no one had any explanation either for how the sticky candy cane had
found its way into the pocket of Mrs. Cadbury’s black sable fur coat.
*
The Riley’s got through a relatively uneventful Christmas Eve, going
caroling on the village green then to church over in the big town for Midnight
Mass. No one wanted to go to bed as is
usual in a house full of excited children, but eventually the five Riley
children were tucked into their beds and were peacefully dreaming of
skateboards, CD players, books and baby dolls.
Christmas morning was fun and festive, filled with shrieks of excitement
and delight mingled with a few groans of disgust as packages of socks and
underwear were opened.
There was a happy clamor in the house
all morning as the children played with new toys and gadgets and relatives
trickled in from near and far.
After a delicious dinner of roast turkey with chestnut stuffing, mashed
potato, sweet potato, turnips and green beans, cranberry sauce, pickles and
olives, apple and mince meat pies, all prepared by the combined efforts of Mrs.
Riley, her sisters, her mother, Dr. Riley’s mother and wizened little
Great-Aunt Edie, the family adjourned to the living room to exchange gifts.
While the Riley’s “oohed” and “ahhed” over the gifts that they received,
there was a curious silence from the recipients of gifts from the Riley’s. Three-year old Biff looked at his gift, an
elegant new pipe, with a puzzled air for a few moments before finally sticking
the stem between his teeth with a shrug.
Grandpa Donovan flushed as he tore the tissue from a very lacey gown and
dressing robe set. Aunt Gayle looked
suspiciously around at her relatives after she opened a cordless electric
razor. Uncle Frank seemed bemused by the
bottle of perfume in his package. It
wasn’t all that long before Mrs. Riley noticed the pipe clenched
between little Biff’s teeth, the very same pipe she had bought for her father,
and that Great-Aunt Edie was smiling and cooing over a See ‘n’ Say toy purchased for Biff.
With a roll of her eyes and an exasperated sigh Mrs. Riley set about seeing
that everyone received the correct gift.
She then noticed that Rusty and Pepper had disappeared. She was about to unleash a furious bellow for
them to come back this instant when the two boys appeared in the doorway
holding lit candles, their unruly hair plastered flat with a liberal
application of tap water, their freckled faces glowing.
Everyone turned to look at the boys
as they began to sing “Hark, the Herald Angels Sing” in their pure, high little
boy voices. Tears filled Mrs. Riley’s
eyes as she looked at her sons, and then she began to sing too. Soon everyone was singing.
Afterwards it was remarked that it had been the best Christmas ever in
the farmhouse on Shady Hill Road.
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