A Little Fruitcake Read online

  As we put on our coats, Scotty pointed out that I had no saw. This was true. I had ignored Mr. Carter’s instruction that we must bring tools from home because the school simply didn’t have a handy stash of a dozen hacksaws to hand out. (This was another era, a time before anyone ever imagined students passing their bags through metal detectors and facing pat downs by security guards.) I hadn’t exactly forgotten, but Mom didn’t have any tools, so I would have had to ask Grammy for a saw if I wanted one. And I knew where that would go, considering the miserable failure I had proven to be at helping her chop wood for the stove.

  Whereas she could stand a piece of hardwood up on its end, tap it once firmly with the head of her axe, then cleave the thing neatly in two with a mighty second swing that left its halves spinning on the ground, my feeble attempts always involved lopsided blows bouncing off untroubled lengths of sugar maple until my arms went numb. I consoled myself that chopping a log and sawing a tree were entirely different things, but it wasn’t worth asking Grammy’s opinion on this score, so I didn’t mention the saw to her at all.

  Scotty, agreeable as always, seemed to accept that we would have to take turns with his equipment, and we set off. Scotty was a whippet of a boy, with long slender legs, and I had to hurry to keep up with him. Except for my huffing and puffing, we were silent for a good part of the walk, all of it uphill. But I was not the quiet type. I was Mr. Conversation, wanting to chat, chat, chat all the day long. As soon as we got to the edge of the woods, where we could slow down and poke about looking for our immobile prey, I started up, talking about a budding interest of mine: politics.

  I had all kinds of newly hatched grievances involving President Reagan, not surprising for a boy living on welfare. I had even written him an angry letter to complain about his policies; to my surprise, the Gipper had ignored my sage advice and had instead responded with a hand-signed note praising me for my good attitude. This struck me as an outrage, but Scotty’s eyes just kind of glazed over as I ranted on. What he finally said was, “You’re funny, Dave.”

  To be fair to Scotty, I am guessing that not a lot of fifteen-year-olds in my town were obsessed with Reaganomics or much else political. The dominant passions of most rural kids my age—snowmobiling, for instance—left me cold. Every conversation like the one I was having with Scotty reminded me of my alien nature, so I thought it wise to remain mum for the rest of our hike.

  I was well lost in my own thoughts when Scotty stopped and said, “How about this one?”

  At first, I didn’t see what he was talking about. We had walked so long that the sky was already taking on the grey-gold tinge of dusk. Around us mostly were towering blue spruce trees with a smattering of firs nestled among them. If you are from the heart of the city or a bone-dry desert, the differences in evergreens might not be obvious to you. But I had some firm opinions on Christmas trees (which is not surprising, as I had firm opinions on just about everything). For one thing, firs and spruces were acceptable tree choices, but pines were out of the question. With their long, spindly needles, pine trees were clearly not intended by God to hold ornaments. And a pine’s pale green color is decidedly more fit for Saint Patrick’s Day than for Christmas. This seemed perfectly obvious to me, but year after year, a pine tree or two showed up in the fund-raiser anyway, and it was all I could do to keep from physically intervening and saving potential buyers from such lame holiday also-rans.

  Balsam firs were better. We always had balsams at home because they were cheap, but I didn’t mind because their color was Christmas perfect. Plus, they boasted enough tensile strength to bear the weight of all but the heaviest ornaments. The more costly blue spruces were even better in that regard, with luxurious bristles that could hold up anything short of a barbell. A good spruce was also likely to boast a flawless shape, like an illustration on a Christmas card. Such virtues made it a crying shame to me that blue spruces were, well, blue. Yes, only faintly, more a tinge than a true shade, but once I saw one covered with red and green, it struck me as inescapably blue, which everyone knows is not a Christmas color.

  That afternoon in the woods, the balsams before me were eight or nine feet tall, but all patchy, evergreen combs missing teeth. There was no way Scotty could want one of these gap-filled Charlie Brown specials. The blue spruces, on the other hand, were indeed majestic—too majestic. Towering fifty feet high or more, these monsters could’ve filled an entire room at their widest points, if a room that tall even existed. Trees like this were destined to stand in only one of three places: the White House lawn, Rockefeller Center, or right where they’d stood for a century already. Scotty couldn’t mean one of these.

  But that’s exactly what he meant. “Do you see?” he said, looking to the top of the massive tree directly in front of us. It was so enormous that I had to step backward to get a clear view of the whole thing. Only then did I understand what Scotty was saying. The top of this monster was perfect. I mean perfect. Nothing is worse than a Christmas tree that looks stunted because the highest branches rise above where the top trails off, leaving an indentation where there should be a peak. Conversely, a top that is too long is nearly as bad; if the branches stop more than a foot below the crown, the tree takes on an unfortunate resemblance to a toilet brush. What you want is a tree that resembles a perfectly pointed cone, remaining evenly round as it narrows on its way to a sharp arrowhead tip, neither stubby nor spaghetti-like. Scotty noted the sleek triangular crown of the tree before us and paid it a high compliment in Maine vernacular. “It’s wicked pointy!”

  It was also wicked far away. Scotty’s idea was to saw off just the flawless top eight feet of the tree. This poor spruce, having nobly endured decade after decade of Maine’s harsh climate, was about to go from pointy to stubby at the whim of an enterprising fourteen-year-old—and I thought it was the most brilliant plan I’d ever heard. No young tree, still close to the ground, would ever match the lush perfection of the top of a stately older tree like this. Scotty was going to bring back the most impressive tree anyone had ever seen, blue or not. If we hurried, I could follow suit and lop off the gorgeous top of some ancient wonder myself.

  First, Scotty had to climb the tree. He held the hacksaw in his teeth by the handle, which struck me as a smidge risky, but as he needed both hands to climb, he felt he had no choice. As he disappeared into the branches, it occurred to me that there was no way I felt like climbing several stories off the ground, with or without a saw. Since my two-story fall while snow-jumping years before, I had not climbed a thing. Chubby and perfectly able to envision my own horrible falling death, I realized I would not be replicating Scotty’s feat, no matter how badly I wanted to go home with the best tree.

  Scotty, on the other hand, was in his glory. He emerged, looking startlingly small and slight, less than ten feet from the treetop. With his legs wrapped around the trunk, and one hand holding on as well, he was finally able to take the hacksaw out of his mouth. He positioned the blade on the far side of the tree, then grabbed both ends, letting the teeth dig into the bark. This second grip on the trunk allowed him to lean back and ask for my opinion. “About here?” he shouted down, the wind in the trees not carrying his words very well. I gave him a thumbs-up and a big smile, hoping I didn’t look as envious I felt.

  As he set to work, it was getting colder by the minute. I stomped my feet a little to keep warm and started humming a song to amuse myself. The hum- ming turned to singing, softly at first, and then, because I couldn’t help myself, louder. My voice echoed through the trees around us, and I looked up to see whether Scotty was noticing. He was not. Even from a distance, it looked like he was sweating from the effort of sawing. Back and forth, back and forth. I was sure we were going to be there all night.

  Forty feet up, Scotty was making headway as I belted out a chorus down below. The blade was inching closer to him slice by slice. Closer . . . closer. . . . And then I stopped singing at the precise moment I registered what I was seeing: Scotty was sawing towards hi
mself, not away. And that meant, when the tree fell, it would take him with it.

  “Scotty,” I yelled, but he was too far above. The December wind ate my words, as I tried again. “Scotty!” I shouted, my voice getting hoarse. “You have to stop!”

  He looked down over his shoulder at me, raising his eyebrows questioningly. I saw the look on his face just about the time he, too, understood what was going to happen next. With a hard snap echoing in the cold like the crack of a gunshot, the treetop let go of the trunk and leaned into Scotty’s deeply startled embrace.

  It takes a surprisingly long time for a kid to plummet forty feet with his new tree. My mind was racing much faster than Scotty was falling. If he breaks his neck or his back, do I try to move him or leave him there, and will he end up in a wheelchair making paintings with a toothbrush held between his teeth? If he falls on the saw and it goes right through him, do I pull it out or leave it in? If he stops breathing, do I give him mouth to mouth, and if he wakes up right in the middle of it, will he misunderstand and punch me?

  The ground was too cold even to shudder with the impact of boy and tree, and the snow was too shallow to cushion their landing much. I didn’t cry out for help, and I didn’t even move for a moment. I just leaned forward, peering at the mass of blue-tipped branches for signs of motion. There was no movement in the pile of human and spruce limbs.

  Could he be dead?

  I became aware all at once that I was standing there in a daze, imagining the worst instead of actually helping. “Scotty,” I whispered, breaking my own spell. “Can you hear me?”

  No sound—not even easy wind and downy flake.

  “Scotty?” I was cold all the way through.

  I lifted the tree off him a little, startled to see his open eyes staring straight ahead. Whatever distant stars had filled his vision on impact, he finally registered me now. Still unmoving, he uttered one eloquent syllable: “Whoa.”

  I almost cried with relief, and I was irrationally tempted to kiss him. But I did neither. I just rolled the tree off and helped him sit up. I was still shaking, asking whether anything was hurt or broken, but his mellow Scotty-ness was already returning. “Did you see that?” he asked, laughing, as if I might have been doing something else.

  “I thought you were going to die,” I offered.

  This gave him new pause for a moment. He just shook his head in wonder at the notion.

  “Whoa.”

  With the tree hoisted onto our shoulders, branches slapping our faces, we began the trek back to the school. Our return journey felt a lot longer, burdened as we were, and we slowed considerably the closer we got to our destination. It was fully dark before we arrived. Thankfully, the light of the gymnasium revealed that the spruce was, indeed, still wicked pointy and not much dented by its tumble to earth. By the time his family came to collect him—and his prize tree—our adventure had become a tag team tale we could amuse people with, a funny bit about how far Scotty had gone to get the perfect specimen.

  A classmate’s family offered me a ride home, and I had them drop me off at the corner nearest my drab apartment building. I startled whistling “Sleigh Ride” as I made my way up the long dirt driveway, knowing that my mother always listened for my arrival. When I got inside and started stripping off my coat and boots, she greeted me, curious about my empty-handedness. “You didn’t find a tree?”

  “Nope,” I said with a big grin. “But I have a story. And it’s a good one.”

  12

  Another Christmas Carol

  In fifty-eight years of marriage, my grandparents had never moved beyond the sleepy Kennebec Valley in Maine. For thirty of those years, they’d lived in the same house a short stroll from the homes of other relatives spanning three generations. By the time she was forty, my mother had spent all but five years of her life living within a mile of Grampy and Grammy, and there was, even then, constant talk of her moving back in. This was the kind of close physical proximity that keeps family ties strong.

  It can also cause a young man to pack his bags.

  There comes a time in a boy’s life when he understands that the games and daydreams of his childhood have been telling him all along who he is meant to be as an adult. Sometimes, this realization only deepens his connection to the places and people surrounding him. But for me, it was clear: I couldn’t become the person I wanted to be if I stayed where I was.

  The first stop on my path forward was Union Springs Academy, a boarding school in upstate New York, perhaps a surprising choice as it was six hundred miles away from my hometown. But a handful of kids from Maine were enrolled there, and their families carpooled, so I knew I could overcome the obstacle of the vast distance. More importantly, the school offered “work study” jobs, which meant, at least in theory, that a diligent student could earn his own keep without asking for help from, say, his retired grandparents and mother. I was determined to spend my last two years of high school there.

  I hadn’t warned my mother that I was making any such arrangements but instead let her assume I’d finish my education a little closer to home, at least somewhere in my own state. Wanting to avoid a confrontation for as long as possible, I kept mum about my plans until a few weeks before classes were to start. When I finally broke the news, I phrased it as a statement, not a question open for discussion. This hit her like a cold front: she braced herself, then leaned away from the chilly blast.

  “What about me?” she asked, hurt and surprised. It was a fair question, but I already had a vision of myself as an academy boy living a whole new life and couldn’t be dissuaded.

  I didn’t actually realize that when I left home, I would be leaving for good. I would spend my summers working at sleepaway camps, then go to college in Massachusetts. This meant I’d never again spend more than a week or so in my mother’s house. I had prema- turely settled into the pattern of adulthood, making my home elsewhere and only returning to see my family for the holidays. Full of pride at my personal reinvention, I thought of those early visits home as a kind of retreat from my progress toward the future. As condescending a teen as ever lived, I thought of going back to Maine for Christmas as an obligation, a charitable act for my family’s sake more than my own.

  By Christmas 1984, I was just one term away from graduation. When a classmate’s family dropped me off in front of our apartment, I bore little outward resemblance to the kid who’d left home fifteen months before. Gone were my stiff Dickie work pants and arrow-front country-western shirts. My wardrobe now featured shiny black slacks and a half-dozen skinny ties. Standing in the dimly lit front yard, I was clad in my roommate’s Members Only jacket, its band collar and snap epaulets defining me as a cool seventeenyear-old of the 1980s.

  The internal changes were just as profound. Whereas I’d once listened to the same country music as my mom, I now preferred danceably suggestive pop songs like “Relax (Don’t Do It).” I was beginning to see Mom and Grammy as parochial, an unflattering word I’d learned in English class and had applied to them because they stuck so close to boring little Norridgewock, while I was living in a place where I could run off to the mall for an Orange Julius or the latest album by The Cars. I was sure I had outgrown my family.

  I hesitated before going inside. But I could only stand in the cold for so long. I pulled open the front door and stepped into the empty, unlit kitchen.

  One light in the living room was all that kept the apartment from total darkness. Just as I was thinking that Mom could have at least left the tree plugged in for my arrival, I realized that there was no tree at all. In fact, there was very little sign of Christmas, aside from one limp poinsettia and a few cards taped to the refrigerator.

  There was also no Mom, though her car was in the driveway. When she wasn’t waiting at the kitchen door, I expected she’d be ensconced in her usual seat in the living room watching television. But her easy chair was empty, save for a crocheted afghan. She wasn’t in the bathroom either. Her bedroom door was closed, with no sliv
er of light shining underneath. It wasn’t even eight o’clock, yet it appeared she’d already gone to bed. Her youngest son had just traveled hundreds of miles, and she hadn’t even bothered to wait up for him.

  Whatever, I thought.

  In my old room, I yanked the beaded metal cord that turned on the overhead light and laid my suitcase on my brother’s old bed. With me away at school and Ignacio in the Marines, the room no longer felt lived in. The same threadbare Indian blanket bedspreads covered our beds, but all the posters had been taken down, and Ignacio hadn’t left behind so much as his Frisbee or ball glove. I could have been unpacking my things in a motel, except a motel room would have at least had its own television and curtains.

  As I sorted my clothes, my mind was far away, mentally replaying scenes from academy life, especially my star turn in the school musical. Having been somewhat obsessed with A Christmas Carol since I was eight, I had often before daydreamed scenarios in which I might someday get to play old Ebenezer before an adoring crowd. My lifetime of Scrooge envy had finally been rewarded a week earlier at school when I’d gleefully hammed it up as the crotchety character, and though the production was low budget, it came with everything I had dreamed of: singing ghosts, an adorable Tiny Tim, and oodle-kaboodles of stage time for me. The only thing missing had been my family.

  In my heart of hearts, I had known it was unreasonable for me to expect Grammy, Grampy, and Mom to come so far. My grandparents were in their seventies, and Mom seemed stuck in a cycle of ill health. Beyond that, it wasn’t their fault I had so boldly decided to go to school three states away. And yet I’d held out hope that they would show up to surprise me anyway, the kind of happy twist you might see in an after-school special. When some of the other parents from Maine did show up, the absence of my family, fair or not, had stung.