The Christmas My Street Trimmed My Tree

I remembered that December. Lee had gone out one Sunday to look at Marv’s gutters and been gone three hours. He came home with sawdust on his trousers and said Marv’s gutters were a mess. I’d been annoyed that he was late for dinner. I never asked a thing.

“He swore me to it,” Marv said. “Said it was between men and trees.”

And then Marv Schaller, who in forty-one years on my street had not been seen to cry at a funeral, a wedding, or the death of his own wife, pressed the back of his wrist against his eyes. His shoulders didn’t move. His face didn’t change at all. The water simply ran down both sides of his nose and fell on his good church shirt, and he let it.

Nobody else in that room was crying. Later Bev told me the women had agreed on it the night before. Shelby Reinke had said, “Dot is going to have enough people crying at her this year,” and the rest had nodded.

So it was just the one man, standing by my couch with his cap in his hand.

“I didn’t have anything to give you, Dot,” he said. “Only what he gave me.”

The plug

I put down my coffee.

I walked to the end of the couch and felt along the baseboard with my hand, because my eyes were not good just then. I found the cord. The plug was cool and a little greasy in my fingers, the way old cord gets.

My knee is no better than his was. I got down on it anyway.

I’d like to say that I said something. I had a whole speech, years of a speech, from sitting at the other end of that couch rolling my eyes. What came out was two words, and my voice cracked in the middle.

“Well, Lee.”

I pushed the plug into the wall.

The big bulbs do not come on all at once, if you’ve never seen them. They warm up. The reds come first, and then the greens, and the blues take longest, a slow ticking spread of color that works its way up the tree from the bottom to the tip like a kettle coming to heat. The room went from gray to gold. The glass birds lit. The tin star on top, crooked, took the light and threw it across the ceiling in a spray.

I stayed on my knee on the carpet with the cord in both my hands, watching the lights.

Behind me, I heard Delmar say quietly, “I’ll get the saw and take a foot off the top, Dot. It’s bent.”

“Leave it,” I said.

“It’s against the ceiling.”

“It’ll settle.”

Nobody laughed at that, and nobody spoke. Somebody put a hand on my shoulder, and I knew from the size of it that it was Marv.