The Christmas My Street Trimmed My Tree

The cards

I didn’t understand at first. Among the glass birds hung little white rectangles tied with kitchen twine, dozens of them. Index cards, each folded in half.

I found the closest one and unfolded it.

It was in Gil Hollenbeck’s square handwriting. I had not known he was there. He had been standing in the kitchen doorway for an hour, not trusting himself in the room. The card said:

“Dot, this is a Fraser, cut Saturday off the east field. Lee plowed my lane at four in the morning for twenty-two winters and I never paid him once. He wouldn’t take it. I figure I owe him a tree. Gil.”

I found another.

“Mrs. Hegge, when my truck wouldn’t start in 2021, Lee came over with jumper cables and stayed an hour and drank my terrible coffee. He never said a word about how I was a mess that winter. He just stayed. Ty Reinke.”

And another, from a woman I did not know, in cramped schoolteacher’s cursive.

“My husband died the winter of 1993. The next morning my driveway was plowed, and nobody ever told me who. Years later I found out. I want to thank him. Ruth Ann Eddy.”

There were thirty-one of them, from twenty-three households. On every card was one thing Lee had done, in the dark, with no one to thank him. A tire changed. A mower fixed. A casserole dropped at a door and the dish left on the step. Six were from men on the highway crew. Roy Dettmann, who ran the plow next to Lee’s for nineteen years, wrote only two lines.

“He never once talked about himself. Whole career. I’m sorry I never told him he was the best of us.”

On the lowest branch, where only a short person would see it, was a piece of construction paper that had been folded in thirds. It was a drawing of a very large orange truck with a very large blade, a very small man in the driver’s seat with a hat, and a yellow sun overhead. Across the top, in careful crayon, was a single line that I won’t copy out here, because it is hers.

I turned around, and Hattie Reinke was standing by her mother’s knee in her pink coat, not smiling, watching me the way a child watches somebody read what she wrote.

“I didn’t know what to put,” she said. “So I drew him.”

“It’s perfect,” I told her.

I had my hand over my mouth. At my shoulder, on a low branch where a child could knock it off, hung one of my mother’s glass birds. Beside me stood Delmar Kittleson, who had spent seventy-four years on a dairy farm and never once hung a glass ornament.

“That goes up high,” I said, in a voice that wasn’t mine. “It’s my mother’s.”

“I thought so,” said Delmar, mortified. “I wasn’t sure. Dot, I’m sorry. Tell me where.”

I took the bird down and hung it at the level of my eyes, near the middle, where the light would catch it. Then somebody laughed, a low surprised laugh, and then somebody else, and the whole room let out the breath it had been holding.

What Marv told me

When the room began to move again, and Bev pressed a cup of coffee into my hand, Marv came and stood next to me by the couch. He kept his voice low.

“I owe you one more thing, Dot. I ought to have told you years ago. He made me promise I wouldn’t.”

I looked at him.

“The first Christmas after Joanne,” he said. “December of 2019. I told everybody I was done. Told Pastor, told my boys on the phone, told the whole street. I took the tree out of the garage and put it back. I thought, what’s the use.” His jaw worked. “I went to church that Sunday, and I came home, and Lee’s truck was in my driveway.”

“I walked in my own front door, and there was a tree in my living room. Nine feet. Lights on it, ornaments on it, Joanne’s old stuff out of the attic. He’d gone in with the key I gave him. He stood there in the middle of my carpet with sawdust on his knees and he said, ‘I didn’t know what else to do, Marv.'”

“Marv,” I said.

“And the cord was laying on the floor by the wall, just like that.” He nodded at it. “He’d left it. He told me, ‘That one’s yours. I figured I had no business plugging that in.'”