Christmas with Tucker (8 page)

In my often still-childish mind, I envisioned fixing up Mack’s old log cabin, hunting and fishing for food, and fashioning clothes from animal hides. However unrealistic my dream was, I spent the morning cleaning up the cabin and making a mental list of what I would need for repairs to my new home. By late morning, the wind started to blow the snow and the absurdity of what I was planning finally sank in. For starters, there was one glaring omission from my plan of frontier survival: heat.

By noon, I had given up on running away. I sat down to lunch with Grandma Cora and she asked me what I had been doing. Although I may not have had the courage to run away, I did muster the strength to talk about it.

“I was wondering if I really have to go to Minnesota. Maybe I could move into Mack’s old cabin with Tucker and the two of us could live back there.”

“How would that work?” she asked with no judgment in her voice.

“With Tucker, I could hunt and fish for my own food.”

My grandmother wisely ignored the limitations of my plan and tried to get at what she perceived to be bothering me. “Are you tired of living here with us?”

“No. It’s not that.”

“You’re at the age when young men start dreaming about being on their own. Do you think that’s it?”

“Maybe.”

“George, your grandfather and I love having you live here and we are going to miss you very much when you leave for Minnesota.”

It surprised me the way it just came tumbling out like someone knocked over a glass of water. “I don’t want to move to Minnesota, but I don’t know where I want to go instead.”

She was quiet for a long time and I knew she was carefully choosing her words. “Sometimes, all of us wake up and wish we were somewhere else. That’s natural, too.” She laughed and said, “When it’s cold like this, I usually think about Florida.”

She took my hand. “George, you know something we all learn sooner or later?”

“What?”

She then told me something that I always remembered years later with a chuckle.

“George, honey, you don’t have to run very far to run away.”

She smiled and pulled her hand back. “You know someday
this farm was going to be your dad’s place, and now, with him gone, it’ll be yours. Of course, it’s up to you to decide if you want it. No one is going to make you take it. And if you’re worried about what’ll happen to the McCray Dairy when you’re in Minnesota, now don’t you be. We’ll manage.”

I didn’t say a thing, so she continued. “You love the dog, don’t you?” She found the missing voice for my thoughts that I could not locate on my own.

“Yes.”

“You’re mad about having to give him back and things just don’t seem very fair right now, do they?”

“No.”

“I remember when your grandfather first brought him home and asked you to be responsible for him. You resented it, didn’t you? It’s funny how things change. A few weeks ago you thought it was unfair that you had to take care of Tucker, and now you think it’s unfair that you can’t do it.”

“That was before …”

“Maybe you should talk to Frank Thorne. Maybe the two of you could work something out. Who knows, maybe he would let you keep Tucker until you left. It’s only a few weeks. He might not mind if you took him for walks after school. I bet there are options here you haven’t even thought about.”

“You want me to talk to Frank Thorne?”

“Sure, why not?”

“I don’t like Frank Thorne.” That was my way of
not
saying that I was uneasy around the man. More than once, I’d heard my dad say, “Frank likes his privacy.” And, there were all of those stories about the Thorne family—how his grandfather had been little more than a horse thief, his dad a shiftless gambler.

“Why, I’ve known Frank Thorne since he was a baby. Did you know that Frank and your dad used to be friends in high school?”

“I guess.”

“Just because he has a drinking problem, that doesn’t make him a bad man.”

Before I could think much more about it, the subject of Christmas came up. She stood, walked over to the kitchen window, put her plate in the sink, and turned back to me.

“George, what would you like for Christmas this year?”

I squirmed a little and realized that I did not want to answer her question. “I don’t know, Grandma. What do you want?”

“I’ve never known you to be without a Christmas wish list. Surely there’s something you want.”

“I haven’t been thinking much about it.”

“George, you and I are having the same problem. It’s been awfully hard getting into the Christmas spirit this year. What are we going to do about it?”

She was right about that and we both knew it. “I don’t think I want to have Christmas this year. Christmas is for little kids.”

She put her hands on her hips and scolded me ever so slightly. “I am not a little kid and I still like Christmas.”

“I don’t know, Grandma.”

“I know what will help us. Let’s you and me cut down a tree this afternoon.”

“Sure,” I said halfheartedly, thinking how ruined this holiday already seemed. Why didn’t Grandma just give up on Christmas? Before I could ask her, we were interrupted by the ringing of the telephone.

Grandma answered it. “Hello, Frank.… Sure, that’ll work
just fine. I think George would like to talk to you about the dog, too.”

She hung up the phone. “Frank will come by tonight to pick up Tucker.” I felt like someone had reached down my throat, grabbed my heart, and gave it a big yank. I went into the living room and just sat.

Knowing that it was coming did not make it any easier.

GRANDMA DID
not tolerate my moping for long. She insisted that I bundle up and go with her to find a Christmas tree. In years past, this would have been fun. Today, it was a chore. Tucker tagged along for a while, but soon took out after a rabbit and decided to go on his own hunting expedition. He may have been a half mile off on Mack’s Ground, but I was sure he could smell or hear us tromping along and would come bounding back when he was ready.

We pushed through the snow until we reached the woods that flank Kill Creek and where wild cedar trees grow like weeds after a summer rain.

Though it was snowing, it was not particularly cold. I carried a handsaw and we trudged along, with Grandma rejecting most of the specimens as too big, too small, or poorly shaped. She was ambling and enjoying the walk.

“George, you know this is going to be a hard Christmas for all of us.”

“I know.” Of course I knew.

She kept making excuses to hug me. “I sure do like school closings. I am going to miss you when you have to go back.”

“I’m going to miss you, too.”

“Let me tell you one thing that makes Christmas fun for me.”

She had a big smile on her face and looked different all bundled up and walking outdoors. I could see a side of her that was playful and young and sad all at the same time.

“What’s that, Grandma?” I stood with my hands on my hips and tried to catch my breath. Trudging through the snow was hard work. It amazed me that she kept up with so little effort.

“Thinking about that one special thing that someone might enjoy receiving that they did not even know they wanted. Like this Christmas tree, George; it might be just what you need—that one thing that gets you in the spirit.”

She stopped and stared for a long awkward moment. Although I was not sure, I thought maybe she was trying not to cry. As she spoke, her words cracked in a few places. “I bet a perfect tree is just on the other side of the creek waiting on you.”

“Do you think the ice is frozen enough for me to walk over?”

“I’m sure it’ll be just fine. The water is shallow there. Go across and pick out the one you want. I’m getting a bit cold and may head back.”

We had really not talked about how or why, but it seemed that Grandma Cora had led me right up to the west creek crossing. This was a place I had been avoiding.

As I walked over the ice and through the clearing in the woods that led to the meadow on the other side, I realized I was now standing in the place where Dad’s accident occurred. I had been pushing the details out of my mind for months. Now,
standing there in the meadow, I felt reality flowing over me and that day in June came blowing back in my face.

My mother was cleaning the kitchen and my grandmother was quietly working at her puzzle table. I was sorting through baseball cards on the living-room floor. My sisters were in town, working at their summer jobs.

Grandma Cora complained to me, “This one is the worst. The pieces are so small and the shapes irregular. I think your mom and your sisters have given up on it.”

My mother yelled to us from the kitchen. “George, Cora, come in here. They’re at it again!”

We had seen the hummingbird acrobatics many times before, but we wouldn’t deny the combatants an audience.

Grandma and I joined my mother by the sink. Two male hummingbirds were fiercely attacking a third in an effort to drive him away from the flowers. They hovered, darted, dashed, and generally moved—horizontally and vertically—through the air with astonishing speed. Theirs was a well-thought-out battle plan. And as with all good plans, position on the battlefield was everything.

As we watched them zooming in and out of view, we saw my grandfather running up to the house, his face white. Instantly, we all knew that something was terribly wrong. When he threw open the back kitchen door, he hung his head as if he were pained to the bone, breathing hard. My grandmother took one look at him and ran to his arms. “What is it, Bo?”

He shook his head back and forth, as if to say no. “I’m so sorry, it’s John, he’s, he’s …”

“What is it? What happened?” my mother pleaded, rapidly losing control.

My grandfather faced them both, his legendary strength
drained away. “There’s been an accident. The tractor flipped. John was killed—”

My grandmother screamed, and my mom buried her face in her hands, crying over and over again, “Oh, my God, no, not John!”

It was the worst day of my life in that house. It was as if the walls of our home, our lives, our very souls, just collapsed.

My father was cutting a field of alfalfa when it happened. The purple flowers attract bumblebees. He had been mowing near the bank of the creek when the tractor kicked up an entire nest. There were bites all over his body. He must have been fighting them off when he lost control of the tractor, which went over the creek embankment. He was thrown from the cab and hit his head on some rocks. He tumbled into the creek, and the tractor rolled over him, pinning him under the water.

My grandfather, wondering why the tractor had been quiet for so long, set out to check on his son. Good partners have a way of watching out for each other. It must have been terrible for him to have a vague worry change instantly into an unspeakable truth.

Six months after that day in June, I found myself standing in the same place my grandfather had found my father’s body. It was a place I pretended did not exist—the place where all the rules were broken.

That running-away feeling came over me again. Suddenly hating everything about the farm that stole John McCray from me, I never wanted to see another field of hay, milk another cow, or touch another tractor. If I could, I would just get on the first bus for Minnesota and never look back. No one would blame me. The absolute finality of death was sinking into my young mind.

As much as it hurt, I accepted that my father was never
going to walk through the back kitchen door again, no matter how long I hung around the McCray farm. There was no reason for me to stay here for another minute, thinking that he would.

Using the saw, I cut down the first tree I focused on, angrily hacking away at the trunk. When I finished, I grabbed the tree by the trunk and started to walk back toward the creek.

As quickly as the bitter resentment had welled up, it vanished. It was as if someone just pulled a plug and it all drained out onto the ground. In its place, there was nothing but loneliness.

Dropping the tree and plopping down in the snow, I had a long-overdue conversation with my dad. It was time to sort things out and tell him how I felt.

I love you, Dad, so much, and I miss you every minute of the day. I have this dog, Tucker, and he’s been helping me out a lot. Well, he’s not really mine but I sure wish he were. You’d like him, I bet. And I’m so grateful to have Grandma and Grandpa helping me out, too. But no matter how hard I try to stop feeling sad and lonely, I just can’t help it. I try to stay busy—I’m doing the milking by myself on snow days, and I’m even in this stupid school play. But I don’t know how to go about it all without you here. And I don’t know if I should stay here or go to Minnesota. I miss you giving me advice. I miss you reading to me. And I’m really sorry for not doing all those chores when you asked
.

“What are things like where you are, Dad?” I said out loud, with tears on my face. “Do you think I’ll ever see you again? I sure hope so.”

How I wanted his strong but gentle hand on my shoulder to tell me it would be all right and that all of these unbearable feelings would pass, and the world would operate by the rules again.