Michael Malone - Weebly

tawny hair, and next the sound of his voice singing
through her childhood. "I Want to Be Happy." And
"Barney Google." And when he drove her, shy and
teary, to boarding school, he sang "When You Wish
upon a Star,"
while in the backseat her mother kept repacking all
of Beanie's new bags and telling her to do a hundred
things that had she been a southern belle, and half a foot
shorter, she might have been able to do. And Beanie
had always thought, that sad December in 1941 after
her father had been killed at Pearl Harbor, how much
her dad would have liked the new song, "White
Christmas," which all the people of Dingley Falls
gathered to sing together around the town tree that
stood without lights that year, and in the next few dark
years of the war. Stood with only a gold star at its top,
like the gold stars in the windows of more and more
houses in Dingley Falls and Madder. A tall native
spruce that grew not far from where Elijah Dingley had
planted his copper beech and blessed it with a long
laugh and a short prayer: God keep us in health and
heart. God keep us in bread and ale. God keep us at