The Christmas My Street Trimmed My Tree

How it came together

I got the rest of it that evening, from Bev, after most of the cars were gone. She sat with me at the kitchen table and told me how it happened.

Hattie had told Shelby. Shelby had told Bev at the mailboxes on Thursday evening. “I stood in my kitchen at midnight with the light off,” Bev said, “and I thought, if Joanne were still on this street, she’d already have done something.”

So she called Marv at six the next morning, because she knew he’d be up. Marv said he had a key. Bev said, “Marv, I’m not asking you to do anything wrong.” And Marv said, quite calmly, “Bev, I’ve been waiting two months for somebody to say it.”

By noon on Friday, eleven households had said yes. Gil Hollenbeck was called that night, and he said before Bev could finish the sentence, “Which one do you want. I’ll pick it myself. Don’t tell her I’m doing it.”

He cut a Fraser on Saturday off the east field. It was eleven feet tall. “We told him it was too tall,” Bev said. “He said, ‘It was always the tallest one on the lot. Lee never bought less.'”

The hard part was getting me out of the house, and Pastor Nygaard volunteered before Bev had finished explaining. He said it would be the first lie he had ever told in the church office, and he expected to pay for it. He called her twice from the hall to ask if I had forgiven him yet.

“I’ll forgive him,” I said. “I’ll make him count the envelopes again.”

The county crew came the minute my car pulled out, six men in Carhartts with their own ladders, and hung the outside lights. Roy Dettmann stood on my porch roof at eight degrees with a staple gun and told Bev that Lee once pulled him out of a ditch near Mineral Point, and that he would have hung lights on the moon.

Delmar carried the tree in on his shoulder with Ty at the base. He sawed it down in my front room, a foot and then another foot and then a third, kneeling on newspaper, and he said later that every time he sawed, he heard Lee in his head saying a little more.

Marv went down to the basement for the boxes alone. He read every label before he lifted it, and he came up the stairs and told Bev in a very quiet voice that the labels were in Lee’s block capitals and he had to stand in the hall a minute.

He did the lights himself, too. He sat on the floor of my front room with the string over his arm and wrapped the tree from the bottom to the top, every loop the same distance from the last, because he had watched Lee do it at his own house in 2019.

Beth had driven up from Dubuque that morning and parked on the next street over until my car pulled out of the driveway. She had stood against the back wall of the front room, white-faced and silent, the whole time I read the cards. She stepped forward when I got up from my knee, and she took my arm.

“Mom, I asked you. You said no.”

“I did say no.”

“Bev asked me, and I said do it.” She was shaking. “Was it wrong?”

I looked at my daughter, who has her father’s jaw and his way of holding on to a thing too tight. I pulled her against me by the elbow.

“I’d have said no till spring,” I told her. “Don’t you ever ask me again.”