Brendan Gallagher

Milkie

Joan waited at the window as night fell and with it snow, floating past the frosted panes in cottony clumps. Already the street was clotted with snowdrifts, smudged into creamy hues by the gaslight of the streetlamps and churned into ashen slush by passing traffic. Sparse traffic for the holiday, but then she’d been watching for hours now. Long enough to witness the pure white powder turn the color of coal. For the hundredth time, she wished he would hurry up.

Who needed milk on Christmas, anyways? When she’d asked Mum that, though, she’d smiled tiredly and gestured to her flour-dusted apron and said, what’s Christmas without dairy for the baking?

And what’s Christmas without Da? Joan had wanted to ask, but knew better. That had been this morning, too early to plant worrisome thoughts where there might not yet be any. Of course, that hadn’t stopped Joan having them herself.

No, no. Push it aside. Perish that thought—was that the expression? The general sentiment was correct, anyways. Mustn’t think it or you’ll make it so. Besides, he’d said he was sorry for her birthday, hadn’t he? Given the chance, Da always made things right.

So she watched and wished and fretted as shadows lengthened and the snow piled higher and higher. Much thicker than this and he’d struggle to navigate his bicycle along the narrower alleys, never mind his cart. It didn’t look like letting up anytime soon.

—Your great-great-grandfather? He was mostly a poacher, Grandma Joan tells me with a laugh. I remember him and the other men heading off to hunt pheasants and foxes and quail in the countryside with rifles slung over their shoulders and shotguns broken over the crooks of their arms. But to tell the truth, I was so young I can’t recall much more about him than that.

We are sitting in the alcove adjacent the kitchen, a space dominated by the three-leaf dining table and chairs that have served the house since my father was a boy. My grandfather at the head of the table is framed by the window. Outside, tufts of cottonwood drift past on a languid breeze. A thrum of insect life, teeming with the insipient summer heat, mingles with the nihilistic roar of lawnmowers razing yards the neighborhood over.

Across the table, my grandmother is gathering her memories, absently smoothing the tablecloth’s frothy fringe of lace and stirring a splash of cream and honey into her tea as she sifts the long years.

Talk, when it resumes, skips a generation. My father, seated opposite his father, is hearing much of this for the first time.

My great-grandfather worked as a milkman for a London dairy prior to the second world war. Grandma recalls accompanying him on his delivery route as a young girl, which took them through the canning and packing districts near the dockyards, where bulimic ships partook and partake still in a constant on- and offloading of cargo. Later would come rationing and bombing, and like so many children during the Blitz, grandma and her siblings would be evacuated to the English countryside to live with an aunt. When the war broke out my great Granddad, in his forties at the time, was among the oldest Englishmen permitted to join up. He served in Italy and North Africa, possibly as a medic.

—He loved Italy, and then he was in Tunisia for a time with my Uncle Fred.

I wonder did he see fighting.

—He was in the thick of it, alright, my granddad volunteers. Fred too, boy. I think your uncle Fred was in the Royal Air Force, Joan. It was Reba’s husband who was in the home defense brigade, but he didn’t get out the country.

Granddad was in the RAF too years later, and wasn’t shipped out either (—oh I was in the service, boy, but they wouldn’t send me anywhere because I’m an Irishman), although I won’t learn this until another hot, stuffy day next summer.

—Dad didn’t talk about it when he got back, grandma says. Uncle Fred either.

—No, the men didn’t talk about it, granddad agrees. They were busy getting things sorted on the home front.

Grandma pauses while I mull the Britishness of this observation: stoicism verging on (veering into, some might say) stubbornness. She catches wind of the drift of my thoughts somehow.

—It was wartime, she says. Everybody was moving around. We were all too churned up to dwell on anything.

My grandfather nods, grunts, shrugs as if to say: that sums it up.

Talk returns to great-grandad’s tenure with the London dairy.

In those days milk was delivered door-to-door by horse-drawn cart, a rickety-looking wooden contraption with a milk churn like a burnished camel’s hump in its center, in front of which the milkman sat to drive or, if the going was hard, walked alongside holding the reins. The dray horse a big broad beast and, my grandmother observes, my great-grandfather must also have been quite burly to lug freshly filled milk crates up flights of stairs to crowded tenements. Sometimes he’d send grandma to run the odd small order up to customers sequestered in upper-story flats. Maybe that’s where she found the fleetness of foot that later carried her in ballroom dance competitions.  

In a grainy photograph, the gaffer stands tall atop his milk cart, narrow and glowering against the glaring sunlight. He is wearing a cap to shade his face—the features vaguely familiar almost a century removed—dark trousers, a matching jacket over his shirtsleeves. ‘Milk from own cows,’ read the letters stenciled across the sideboard of the cart.   

Great granddad saw to his duties, prescribed and otherwise, with diligence. According to grandma, this meant he rarely (if ever) refused a proffered refreshment along his route. London housewives would leave grateful gifts on the lower-story windowsills, calling out: Here milkie! Here’s your tea! and: Here milkie, have a cuppa and a biscuit! And without fail my great-grandfather would drink his tea and eat his biscuits, followed by a buttered hard roll and a cuppa at each of a trio of cafes near the end of his route.

—All that before dinner, and he was always a slim man! Hard to say where he put it all.

On the yuletide in question, however, the gaffer’s appetites did him dirty.

—Ruined our Christmas that year, grandma says with a wistful smile.

That morning, great-granddad set out on his usual route at the crack of dawn, promising to be back well in time for holiday supper.

But as the evening stretched on and her father still hadn’t gotten home, grandma’s and her siblings’ spirits sank lower and lower. Meanwhile, their mother quietly steamed, grappling with whether to send the children to bed disappointed or allow them to continue their watch and perhaps be more disappointed still, and frightened besides. At that time the family lived in the cramped servant quarters of a sublet house, a space so small that the children had to sleep nights in rented beds next door. With every hour he failed to appear the prospects of a fatherless Christmas grew, and his family grew more fraught.

Still, Joan kept her vigil, though her eyelids were growing heavy and her thoughts thick as the settling snow. What could be keeping him so long? Supper over and done with, the Christmas pudding too. To distract herself, she’d even helped clear away and scrub the dishes—like a proper young lady, Mum had said—always keeping an eye on the window facing the street. Now her hands were pruned but no less busy, her stomach full but ill at ease, her mind dyspeptic and discontented. Any minute now, yeah? Must be. And yet she’d been thinking that for hours, and no sign—

But wait.

What’s this out of the cold? A man tilted sideways, staggering through the snow alongside his strange steed? His shadow preceded him, and by its cant Joan knew two things at once: her father’s silhouette, and his state of mind. Still, he was home safe, so she sent up a little cheer, a greeting that fogged the windowpane unheard. A door clanged open downstairs and out went her mum to meet him, finger-waving, her chastising puffs of breath pursuing her husband’s shadow up the alleyway like smoke rings. Then dad’s bashful reply, which preceded even his shadow and the words of which, along with whatever apologies and recriminations followed, were masked by the glass, by the mingling mists of heated voices, by the walls and ceiling of the neighboring house as the milkman’s wife marched him inside, and…

Finally by the years.

—Poor Dad, grandma says. Even now I can see him slouched halfway over, trudging his bike up the lane!

—He was drunk, then?

—Ooh boy, you better believe, my grandfather chuckles. I can tell by his comfortable laughter that this is an oft-heard story, become so familiar over long years of marriage that he has taken partial ownership of it. A curator of sorts, sharing in its upkeep.

—As a skunk! Grandma confirms. But her smile is distant, and though the words are spoken like an oft-repeated punchline, she doesn’t laugh. For her, ownership of the memory means laying claim to its sorrow as well as its humor. Yet she too is its curator. It is in the practiced way she recalls it, the delicate handling that, listening, takes me far away from myself.

In the gracious spirit of the holiday, the housewives of London had left tots of warming whisky (or whiskey, and probably both) on their windowsills in place of the customary teatime refreshments. Listening to my grandmother speak of it now, I can almost hear them throwing up the rattling panes to raise cheerful cries of: Here milkie, for your spirits! and: Hear hear, milkie, a toast!

To my great-grandfather lugging dairy through the dull-edged English cold, these tokens of appreciation must have seemed virtuous and sustaining gifts, indeed. So much so that he felt compelled to accept each and every tot with the same diligence and sense of obligation accorded his other occupational duties.

Over the course of his long day, the gaffer must have drunk upwards of a pint of Christmas spirits, more than enough to set him upon the veering path by which he belatedly shambled home. At some point after stabling his dray horse and milk cart, he’d left off riding his bicycle for the security of good old-fashioned ambulation, slowing his progress to a meandering slog. In that state, it was all he could manage to drag the bike alongside him over the several miles between the dairy and home.

The milkman and his wife had words that evening. Which are lost to the years, but as my grandmother tells it, she got her Christmas wish—in a way …

Joan listened as her father, grumbling and fumbling in the dark, lowered himself to the floor between his children’s rented beds and, with his shoes still on, sank into a shallow, sodden sleep on the threadbare carpet of a room not his own. Joan waited until she was certain he was asleep. Then, tiptoeing not to disturb him, she retrieved his crumpled overcoat where it lay discarded by the door and, bundling it, nestled it for a pillow beneath his head. She got an extra quilt from the closet next, which she draped over his prone form before returning to her own bed and drawing the covers up to her chin, snug against the cold London night. Over the whistling rise and fall of his snores she whispered

—G’night, Da. Happy Christmas.

After that, grandma tells me, a favorite uncle accompanied my great-grandfather on his annual Christmas deliveries. An uncle with a motorcar, to make sure they got back in time for supper. Grandma says they took to bringing along an empty bottle to fill with the gifted spirits, and would make off with a neat fifth most years.

Much later, my grandparents crossed the Atlantic together and landed in a papermill town in western Mass where once the rivers frothed grey with pulp, and built the household my father grew up in.

The kitchen parlor of that old house is growing stuffy now, motes of dust suspended in the hot summer air as if in amber. Bubbles of conversation, frozen in time. Outside, wisps of cottonwood are still drifting past on a torpid breeze, never seeming to touch down. An oscillating fan switches on in the living room and lends its squeaking swivel, the driving hum of its plastic fins to the soporific drone of outdoor activity. They meld.

We are quiet for a time until something sparks a reminiscence, and my grandfather says

—Did you know there were already electric cars in the ’20s and ’30s?

I didn’t, I say, and we’re off again, this fresh recollection folding seamlessly into the previous one.

Grandma and granddad are framed by the window as dusk gathers and with it memories, rising to the surface of the mind like the richest cream.

Born and raised on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, Brendan Gallagher moonlights as an author and spends his days working on his Ph.D. in Social-Personality Psychology at the University at Albany, SUNY. In addition to this and other short stories, Brendan is the author of three as-yet unpublished novels (working on it) with a fourth well underway and a half-dozen others gestating in various stages of the written lifecycle. When he isn’t writing, teaching, or working on his research, he enjoys spending time with his wife and two cats, playing piano, singing, songwriting, and training in martial arts.