It was the least small thing anyone has done in this house in a very long while. That locket. Samuel told me you never once took it off, not even to wash. He noticed. Children notice.
It was your mother's. Yes, she said. And you sold it. For a ham and an orange for three children you have known four days. I sold it, she said, and turned to face him at last, and her eyes were wet, but her chin was up.
Because she would say this straight, whatever it cost her. I sold it, and I would sell it again tomorrow, and I want you to hear the whole of why, because you have earned the whole of it. My mother is 15 years dead. The locket was the last of her I had. But a locket is a thing you hold, and a Christmas is a thing you give.
And I have come to believe that my mother would rather have been spent on three cold children who needed her than hung around my neck being mourned. That is what she was like. That is the very thing she would have done herself. So, in a way, I did not lose her today at all. In a way, I finally did with her memory the thing she would have most wanted done.
There are worse ends for a locket than that. Caleb Hart looked at this woman standing in his kitchen, who had walked up his road 4 days before with everything she owned in one small bag, who had asked him for nothing but an hour by his fire, and who had, in 4 days, sold the last of her own mother to feed his motherless children, and then quietly starved herself so that they might feast, and had tried with her whole heart to make sure that not one living soul would ever find out. And he understood, standing there, that he was looking at the rarest thing a hard world ever produces, which is a person who gives not for the being seen to give, not for thanks, not for a place or a wage or a claim on anyone, but simply and only because a child was cold, and it was in her power to make the child warm. "Sit down," he said. She looked at him.