Christmas with Tucker (4 page)

Truth was, I wasn’t sure I could do it or wanted to do it. I resisted the impulse to say “It’ll be hard to help with the morning milking from Minnesota” when the thought of leaving the farm and my grandparents behind became even more upsetting. That would be a very hollow victory for me. I lost my composure and tears formed in the corners of my eyes.

I just stood up and walked out of the kitchen. The sound of a chair being pushed away from the table suggested what I already knew. My grandmother would be following right behind me.

I turned around to face her and she clutched my arm. “George, we’ll get up and do the chores together. It’ll be all right.”

I felt like a little boy and was angry with myself for losing control. At the same time, I needed some comforting and was glad to get it. I wanted to be like my father and grandfather, capable of so much, without a word of complaint along the way. I just did not know how to do it.

“Thanks, Grandma, but I’ve been thinking.…”

She looked at me patiently. “Yes?”

I tried to swallow my words as soon as they came out. “Maybe it’s time for me to go to Minnesota.”

There was a very brief flash of pain in her eyes and then she smiled in an accepting way. “We’re all mad, and sad, and frustrated, and it just comes boiling over sometimes. It happens to all of us.” She took my hand and with more love than I could
imagine existing in any one person, said, “George, if you want to be with your mother in Minnesota now, we’ll make it happen. You go read for a while and relax. Make a decision when you’re feeling better. We wouldn’t want you to stay here if it isn’t where you want to be.”

She patted me on the back and I retreated to my living-room fort: a brown sofa with the fireplace on one side and a stack of my library books on the other. I tried to rid my mind of the problem by escaping into a book. Somewhere between the beginning and the end of the story I was trying to lose myself in, another realization surfaced. There were only three members of McCray’s Dairy before it lost its strongest partner. My grandfather was struggling hard to take up the slack. If I left, it would be down to a team of one. It would be pretty lonely for him and I didn’t want to let him down. I wondered if Grandpa could run the dairy without me and doubted he could afford to hire anyone else.

DECADES LATER
, I would constantly tell my son to remove his ever-present headphones so that I could speak to him. I sounded like a broken record—
“Todd, take those things off so you can hear me.”
When I was thirteen, the constant refrain was “George, please put your book down and come in here and talk to us.”

At the sound of Grandma Cora’s voice, I shook myself into the present and walked into the kitchen. She was finishing cleaning up from dinner and Grandpa was still reading the paper. Without looking up, he asked his question.

“Is this nameless dog of Thorne’s any good?”

“Sure.”

“What’s he like?”

“Well, he seems all tuckered out right now.”

With the water running as she washed the dishes, my grandmother misheard my answer, with interesting results.

“Well,” she chimed in brightly. “Tucker is a very nice name for a dog.”

My grandfather looked up from his paper and smiled at me.
Neither of us saw any reason to correct her. So I just went along. “Good a name as any.”

“I want to see this Tucker for myself,” she said, drying her hands on her apron. She held open the back porch door. “Why don’t you come and show him to me?”

I stayed on her heels, curious to know what she’d make of the dog. She knelt beside the setter, who opened his eyes and gave her a trusting look as she gently massaged his ears.

My grandfather got up from the table and joined us. He smiled as she conversed with the dog.

“Tucker, you are a fine dog.”

It took less than five minutes. Tucker could say goodbye to the back porch and hello to inside living quarters.

“George, please take Tucker inside right now where we can properly care for him.” She followed me into the house and pushed a pile of scraps into a steel bowl. Tucker did not bother to chew much of anything; he just gulped it down. When he finished, he settled down beside Grandma, who’d joined my grandfather at the table, and stretched his paws out in a contented way. She continued to scratch his ears and pet his red coat, praising him for no discernable reason, though she used his new name every chance she could, as if to teach it to him. “Sweet Tucker, nice boy.… Tucker, you’re going to like it here.… Are you still hungry, Tucker?”

Retreating again to the sofa, I left Grandpa in the kitchen reading the paper. Occasionally, he would look over at Grandma with a raised eyebrow as she kept up her patter with Tucker.

It was getting close to bedtime when what remained of my living-room reading time was again interrupted. My grandmother was still in the kitchen, now carrying on an intense conversation with my grandfather that was quickly losing the
casual tone that I could naturally tune out while reading. The rising volume of her voice reflected her agitation.

“All of those years of John wanting a dog and you were so stubborn about it—now you bring home a dog. How did you think it was going to make me feel?”

“The dog needed a home. What else was I to do? Besides, I thought it would do George some good.”

“George is going to Minnesota and that dog is going back to Frank’s when he gets out of jail. How is that going to work?”

“Not so loud, Cora, he’ll hear us.”

Soon there were muffled sobs from the kitchen.

“Do you want me to find another place for the dog?”

“Bo, it’s not that.”

“Then what?” he asked.

I heard her let out a long, low moan. “When I glance at our little George, I see John. It makes me want to bust inside.” She tried to hold back her tears, but she just sobbed. “Oh, Bo, even the smallest things trigger memories and make me think of John. First we lost him, and soon enough we’re going to lose George, too. He may not even last here till Christmas—he just told me so. Nothing is going to be right on this farm.”

“Don’t say that, Cora.”

“What else am I to think? My insides have been chopped to pieces. I don’t understand. How do you stay so calm?”

My grandfather let out his own long sigh and spoke in a determined way. “It’s like this, Cora. We can’t afford an avalanche. For now, that’s all I am trying to do.”

“What do you mean, Bo?”

“One loss triggers another, and another, and before you know it, the whole family is busted apart at the bottom of the hill. Just a pile of rubble.”

Unable to resist, I peeked, unnoticed, into the kitchen. My grandmother’s head was buried in my grandfather’s massive chest. She hugged him tighter. “I know,” she told him sorrowfully.

“We can’t let that happen. I’ve got to stay tough—for you, for George, and for the whole family.”

“You’re my granite. You’ve always been. Nothing ever has and nothing ever will knock us down from the top of McCray’s Hill.”

He pulled her closer. “I won’t let it.” He plucked four or five pins from her hair, loosening it from its knot and letting it fall down her shoulders, the way she wore it at night. He ran his fingers through it in a comforting gesture.

“What am I going to do? I can’t go on like this anymore.”

“It’s November. You’ll do what we do every year.”

“What’s that?” she asked.

“After you make the best Thanksgiving dinner in Cherokee County, you’ll waste weeks of time putting up all of your Christmas decorations, just like you always do.”

“How can I do that, alone, without John and Sarah helping me? You know how much they loved Christmas. The girls were always the first ones to drag the decorations out of the basement and string the lights. Now they are all gone.”

“I’ll help you. George is still here. We’ll do it, somehow.”

“I’m sorry, but right now Christmas seems frivolous.”

He held her cheeks in his hands. “You’ve got more substance than any person I know. There is nothing frivolous about keeping our traditions alive. It may be just what we need to stay propped up. I need you to do it.”

I crept upstairs, not wanting to disturb them and feeling vaguely guilty for listening in and watching them. It was only November, but it was cold getting ready for bed. Tucker followed
me up the steps and sniffed about my room. I pulled a blanket down from the top closet shelf and put it on the floor. He stared at it and then leapt up onto my bed, apparently not that interested in cold oak floor planks. After shutting off the light and situating Tucker at the foot of the bed, I pulled the covers over my head and tried to get warm. The “Minnesota” debate continued to rage in my head. It was easy to picture my mother near a cozy fire, resettled in the beloved hometown she’d always missed, laughing with family and old friends and enjoying the evening in front of a television, something no one around here seemed to think we needed. I loved my McCray grandparents deeply, but I had fond memories of the Peterson side of my family, too.

My mother’s parents lived in a grand house near Minneapolis that was not only equipped with a television but also filled with cousins and an endless parade of friends and neighbors. It was a wonderful place where we had spent several joy-filled summers. Now my mom deserved and needed that love and support. I just didn’t know about myself.

When she met my father after the war, moving to a farm had been a compromise for a city girl who’d fallen in love with a country boy. Though she went willingly, the farm no longer made sense, not for her. The McCray farm was now merely a painful collection of reminders. She agreed I could manage for a few months without her, safe in my grandparents’ care, while she resettled our family in Minnesota. After Christmas, which she and my sisters would spend on the farm, I would go back with her to start fresh, too.

For me, though, moving away from the farm seemed like a betrayal of my father. I thought perhaps I’d get over that feeling, but as the weeks and months passed, I could not let it go. There was part of me that hung on to a hope: if I just had
enough patience, my dad might still walk right through that back kitchen door. For after all, he had been doing it every day of my entire life. He would be laughing with Grandpa Bo. On his face would hang the outdoors, punctuated with little bits of grease, grass, and dust cemented to his face by sweat and sun. He would be tired, but it was farm-tired: sore muscles, sun-bleached hair, and the ever-present assortment of scrapes and bruises that marked one day of simple toil.

Through it all, over the years, no one ever looked more alive to me than my father when he came home at the end of the day. If it happened, if this was all just really one long, cruel dream, I wanted to be there when the screen door slammed shut and he walked back into our lives.

So I stayed and waited and pretended that maybe tomorrow would be that day. My mother made it clear that she had not wanted to leave me behind, but she understood and allowed that I needed a few more months on that farm. So, in early September and with my full approval, she packed the car and drove off.

With my father gone, my mother moved to start over, my sisters away at college, and my grandparents lost in each other’s arms, I was not sure where that left me, but I did know that I felt very much alone on top of that windswept hill.

Before long I could hear, like sand blowing hard against glass, the sound of little bits of snow and sleet tapping out a haunting rhythm on the windowpane. Tucker sneaked up from the foot of the bed and squeezed into the space between me and the wall. He felt warm and comforting.

Tucker’s ascent from the back porch and into our home was now complete, but my work was just beginning. Very soon, things would begin to change.

“TUCKER NEEDS
his breakfast, too,” my grandmother said as she set his bowl on the kitchen floor. He lapped up his food with vigor while we looked on.

“He eats more than George!”

“Very funny, Grandma.”

My grandfather stood near the kitchen window, surveying the yard. “All we got was a dusting.” He then turned his attention to a quick study of the dog. “He looks better. Food and a comb can do wonders for man and beast alike.”