The Christmas My Street Trimmed My Tree

Marv

Marv Schaller is eighty years old and built like a fence post, with a white crew cut and a face that has never in my memory done anything it did not intend to do. He worked forty years on the power lines for the electric co-op. He and his wife Joanne lived four doors up from us for forty-one years. She died in October of 2019, of a cancer she’d kept quiet.

He took his cap off. It was in both of his hands.

“Nobody asked you, Dot,” he said. “That’s right. I’ll own that. Nobody did.”

“You had no right.”

“I know it.”

“I said I wasn’t doing Christmas.”

“I know you did. Little Hattie told her mother, and her mother told Bev at the mailboxes, and Bev told me.” He turned his cap a quarter turn in his hands. “And I thought, if we asked her, she’d say no. And she’d be within her rights to say no. And she would sit in that recliner till the middle of January with the drapes shut, and we would all stand at our windows and watch it happen.”

“I’ve got a key to your back door,” he said. “Lee gave it to me in 1998 when you two went to his brother’s funeral in Iowa. I’ve had it on a nail in my garage for twenty-seven years. I never gave it back and he never asked.”

I had forgotten that key completely.

“Come here a minute,” he said. “I want to show you something. Then if you want us out, we’re out.”

He walked me across the room, through the people, who stepped aside without being asked, and he stopped by the couch. I looked at the lights wrapped around the tree, bottom to top, every loop the same distance from the last. Then I looked at the base, where the cord ran down along the baseboard.

The cord was lying on the floor, loose, with the plug on the end of it, three inches from the wall socket.

“Delmar wanted to plug it in to test it,” Marv said. “We said no. Not one of us has touched it. Not one of us has so much as looked at that wall socket. We wrapped it the way we remembered he wrapped it, and we put it up, and we left it.” He cleared his throat. “That one’s yours. That’s the one thing we figured we had no business doing.”

I could not say anything.

“Before you do,” he said. “Read the tree.”