Christmas Gift! Fred Chappell With all that weight in its bed, the doughty little Dodge pickup ought to have scrambled backward up the slope with ease and aplomb. The grade was not of Everest height nor of Matterhorn steepness. But there was a clutter of loose gravel on the vague tracks and a layer of dust where a drag harrow had scratched across the truck-path, and the wheels spun futilely, spewing up a brick-colored haze that got into Jerry's nostrils and made him sneeze. After a while, Curly Spurling, who was trying to drive and succeeding only in cussing, cut the motor and opened the door lettered with the words Mill Furniture Co. and stepped out. "Is it going to get up the hill?" Jerry asked. Curly scrawled the dust with the toe of his unelaborate cowboy boot. "I don't see why itwouldn't,but it ain't," he said. Curly was a man who admired machines, fancied he knew them in their logical souls, and held them in cool contempt when they failed his expectations. "So what do we do now?" "Well, Honey Dumpling," Curly said, "there's two possibilities. Either you come up with a hot idea or we try to muscle it. Didn't they teach you how to handle situations like this down at your high school?" Curly loved to rag Jerry about having graduated before he came up at the beginning of this summer to labor at his uncle's little furniture store over in the gritty paper-mill town of Tipton. "Me, I never got past the fourth," he would say, "and you've got your whole degree and here we both are, busting our humps for a salary you could cash into a stack of nickels and set on without making a dent in your ass. So, I ask you, where has all your fancy schooling got you after all them years?" Jerry would reply that his schooling was not completed even yet and that when it was all over at last he expected to have a better plan for making a living than toting sticks of painted wood up and down the blue-green hills of western North Carolina. He had several plans, he told Curly, but he wasn't telling anybody what they were. Word would get around and others would beat him to the feed trough. But he did not have the first inkling how to get this humongous 52 freezer locker out of the pickup truck and then around behind the barn and into the hayloft on that side. This tall barn had been built into the hillside where a gully had crumbled away and on the east the loft opening was about the three feet off the ground and mighty handy for unloading the bales of alfalfa that came from the field spread around the hilltop. But it was not convenient for unloading and storing elephants, battleships, or freezer lockers. Yet this was where Mr. Ward Carter desired to have his new purchase situated for a while. He had bought it for his wife Maidey with a goodish part of the check he received upon the sale of his tobacco crop and he wanted it to be a surprise Christmas gift, the most splendid one he had ever given. They were a childless couple, the Carters, and without any younguns to spoil would sometimes maybe spoil each other with an unexpected extravagance. He was buying the freezer at a cut rate because Mill Furniture wanted it out of their building. They needed the floor space for the new models, this one that Carter bought being three years old, a model no longer manufactured. Even so, for the dirt-farming Carter family a freezer locker was a luxury item and the Mr. designed to wangle the Mrs. into coming around to the barn on Christmas morn and climbing up the ladder from the ground floor and poking her head through the opening in the loft floor and beholding—Lord-a-mercy, Ward!—a huge, gleaming white freezer locker sitting there among the hay bales, as surprising in this place as a steam yacht in a...