Who Has Seen The Wind by W.O. Mitchell

Author:W.O. Mitchell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McClelland and Stewart-Bantam Limited

"He came, Brian! He came!"

Bobbie was jumping on the bed, his hair bright in the winter sunshine that filled the room.

Brian jumped from bed. "C'mon!"

Their stockings, lumpy with oranges, each with a colored cardboard clown protruding from its top, hung from the mantel of the fireplace. Bobbie's sleigh that could be steered was before the tree. Bobbie threw himself upon the parcels.

"Wait a minute!" cried Brian. "They're not all yours—just with your name!"

He began to sort out the presents upon which Maggie the night before had printed in the large block letters that Brian could easily read.

Anxiously Brian watched the growing pile of parcels beside him. He opened a deep box to find it full of colored cars and an engine, in little compartments. He opened another—a mechanical affair which when wound caused two long black men to dance, all the while turning around. Slippers were in one promising-looking parcel. As he opened the last of his parcels he was filled with the horrible conviction that something was wrong.

Then he saw a parcel behind the Christmas tree. His name was on it. He opened it. They were not tube skates; they were not single-runnered skates; they were bobskates, double-runnered affairs with curving toe-cleats and a half-bucket arrangement to catch the heel of the shoe.

For a swift moment Brian's heart was filled with mixed feeling; disappointment bitter and blinding was there, but with it a half-dazed feeling of inner release and relief that he had got skates. They were skates, he told himself as he turned them over in his hands.

"What's the matter, Brian?" Bobbie had looked up from his fire engine.

Brian got up and went into the living room; he sat on the window seat next to the shamrock plant, the bob-skates upon his knees. When Bobbie came through a while later clutching a hockey stick a foot longer than himself, Brian paid no attention to him.

Throughout dinner he spoke only when spoken to. When his father and uncle were seated in the living room with lighted cigars and his mother and grandmother were in the kitchen, washing the dinner dishes, he went unnoticed to the haliway, put on his coat and toque, and with the bob-skates went out.

He passed other children as he walked, pulling Christmas sleighs and Christmas toboggans, some with gleaming Christmas skates slung over their shoulders. Through the fiercely tinseled snow sparkling unbearably in the sunlight he walked, not toward the downtown bridge where children and adults swooped over cleared ice, but toward the powerhouse and the small footbridge. There he sat near a clump of willow, fitted the skates to his feet, buckled the straps over his insteps, and went knee-deep through the snow on the riverbank to the ice.

Once on the ice he stood for a moment on trembling legs. He pushed with one foot; it skidded sideways; the other went suddenly from under him, and he came down with a bump that snatched his breath. He got carefully up and stood uncertainly. He pushed a tentative skate ahead, then another.

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