Christmas with Tucker

by Greg Kincaid

  “Will we have school tomorrow?” I wondered aloud.

  The first person my grandfather called after dinner was Mr. Bangs, the principal at Crossing Trails. Mr. Bangs always followed my grandfather’s advice on whether or not the roads were safe for the school buses. Forget the person who could push some secret red button in the White House. As far as I was concerned, the most powerful individual in the world was my grandfather; he was the one man who could pick up the phone and say, “No school.”

  Even if I did have to do the morning milking by myself on a snow day, school closings and downed phone lines meant adventure and excitement for me. It was a fair trade. I would take Tucker to explore Mack’s Ground in the snow. It would be easier to read tracks and it would be far more fun than memorizing lines for a school play.

  “Grandpa,” I began, thinking that a little guidance from me could be helpful, “think about how bad it would be if a school bus got stuck in the snow. All of those poor little first-graders—they couldn’t walk through eighteen inches of snow without freezing to death.”

  He just grunted. “Appreciate your concern, George, but I said eight and not eighteen.”

  After reading and setting tomorrow’s clothes next to the heating grate to warm, I climbed into bed and tried to fall asleep. Tucker would join me when he was ready. Through the floor grate, I could hear my grandparents talking in the kitchen. If I concentrated, I could follow the gist of their conversation.

  “If it keeps up like this, there will be no ambulance or fire service for much of the county.”

  My grandmother’s voice was full of concern. “People might need medicine. There could be families without food or electricity for weeks on end. We could lose heat. And without heat, water lines will freeze.”

  “More is coming, Cora. It could be the worst snow in fifty years.”

  I was listening, as children at that age are still apt to do, hoping to catch a word or two about something else that was on my mind.

  For as long as my memory served, the biggest day of my life was Christmas. Although my mother had brought it up briefly on the phone, no one in this household had mentioned it to me and it was only two weeks away. I did not know how to feel about Christmas this year.

  What I wanted was going to be hard to bring down the chimney. It was an important conclusion I reached that night when thinking about a Christmas wish list. How do you ask for your old life back? Why couldn’t things be like they were when my father was with us and we all lived under the same roof?

  Christmas, it seemed to me, wouldn’t be any good this year. How could it be when you were thirteen years old and knew, just knew, you were not going to get what you wanted?

  This thinking about what I wanted and how I was not going to get it brought about an unpleasant realization. We all come to it eventually, and we forget about how much it hurts the first time it sinks in. As painful as it is, it’s probably the first and most important step in growing up.

  I remember very clearly that it came to me that night. Not getting what you want for Christmas is really an introduction to one of those facts of life that adults must face.

  There was this vague but growing conclusion settling in my young mind that life does not always bestow upon us everything we want or think we should have. We are forced to move away from hoping others will give us what we want, to a new place where we must discover how to find happiness on our own. Santa was the last vestige of youth where all of our wants are magically delivered by some other.

  Once again, a rule I considered inviolate had been disregarded. Christmas would be anything but the best day of the year for me.

  It was like being in the middle of a really great Zane Grey novel, and when I got to page 100, just as I victoriously led my mare over the top of a windswept hill after outwitting the bad guys, someone switched in fifty pages of the bleakest scenes by Charles Dickens and messed up my perfectly good life.

  Why couldn’t things just be the way they used to be? I’d reached that awkward moment when a child—on the brink of young adulthood—realizes that he is not the center of the universe and is entitled to very little in this life unless he goes out and gets it for himself. From my still childlike perspective, Christmas was doomed to failure because no one could give me what I wanted.

  Tucker finally decided to come upstairs. He whined and wagged his tail, and I coaxed him up onto the bed. He was fully capable of jumping up on his own, but he usually held out until I gave him permission. “Come on, Tucker, you can do it.”

  His warm body helped make me feel safe and secure. I pulled him close to me, buried my face in his coat, and realized that all I could do was hunker down and get through the winter. I would just have to accept that things did not always turn out the way they should. Maybe that was the new rule.

  We rested quietly, and right before I fell asleep, things got worse.

  “Cora.” I heard the words come up through the grate.

  “Yes?”

  “George has done a great job with Tucker.”

  “I know.”

  “I’m proud of him.”

  “So am I.”

  It was quiet and then my grandfather’s words came up like thick, dark smoke. “Tomorrow is Thorne’s hearing. Assuming he’s coming home, I suppose he’ll want the dog back.”

  Grandma let out an exasperated sigh. “I suppose so.”

  Yeah, that was the new rule. Things don’t always turn out the way they should. It made no sense to me that Frank Thorne—a man I still viewed as a loser—should have a great dog like Tucker, languishing on a chain, when I could give him a good home, where he would be loved and well cared for.

  A good home—I just didn’t know where it would be.

  Chapter 13

  THE NEXT morning I heard the maintainer fire up, but no one was rushing me out of bed, yelling “Snow day! Snow day!”

  This meant that my grandfather had decided that the roads were bad enough to necessitate school closing. I guess my concerned pitch for the first-graders of Cherokee County had found a receptive audience. Grandpa had no idea how long it would take to open up all of the side roads and county lanes. He just hoped that the snow would stop soon.

  Although McCray’s Dairy had been spared, power and phone lines were down elsewhere. Until the roads were cleared, service trucks could not make repairs.

  There were only a few road maintainers in those days. My grandfather was responsible for clearing the entire southwestern section of the county, and he had to make the most of the hours he could work the maintainer before even worse weather or total fatigue set in. Now more than ever, he had to “get at it.”

  I was fine with trading the drudgery of a school day for a few extra hours of laborious milking. Besides, my grandmother allowed me to start an hour later. Lying in bed till the genteel hour of 5:30 made the milking chores seem tolerable. Throughout the task, I couldn’t help but wonder how Thorne’s hearing would go, or if it would be delayed because of the snow.

  After the milking was finished, I came inside and tried practicing the lines from my play, with Tucker at my feet, and read my favorite books by the fire. The day passed quietly, though Grandma Cora and I listened anxiously for my grandfather’s return as the light began to fade. He’d been home for lunch, but we hadn’t seen him in several hours.

  Finally, he returned, with Tucker greeting him once more as if to say, “Where were you? We were worried!” Still, neither of my grandparents had said anything all day about Thorne’s hearing. At dinner, Grandpa announced that there would be several more snow days and at least another day, maybe two, of additional school closings. Ordinarily I would have rejoiced, but I was increasingly worried about Tucker’s fate.

  “Before you go to bed, George, I want to talk to you.” It was coming. My grandfather was not the type to orchestrate a conversation, so I assumed it could not be good. I tried to stall as I washed up and brushed my teeth, knowing that the subject matter of our talk was predictable. I w
ent downstairs near the warmth of the fire and waited for Grandpa to look up from his newspaper. He seemed to be stalling, too, and his eyes were pained.

  “George, you’ve done a good job with Tucker.”

  “Thanks, Grandpa.”

  “I spoke with Thorne today. They had the hearing, even with this rotten weather, and he’s out of jail and back home. He asked me to thank you and says he’ll come around and fetch Tucker tomorrow.”

  A fury gathered up inside me that I had not expected. “That’s not fair. Why should he get him back? He doesn’t even know how to take care of that dog.”

  “We both know you’re going to Minnesota. It’s been good for you having Tucker around, but it’s time to move on. You knew at the start he wasn’t yours to keep, remember?”

  “I could take him with me.”

  “It’s pretty simple, George. Tucker is Thorne’s dog.”

  With angry tears on my face, I stood up and walked out of the room. Once again, nothing seemed fair. Bit by bit, everything I loved was being taken away from me—Dad, my old life on the farm, Tucker. Bitterness and resentment rose up from some dark space in my mind and I did not know where to put it.

  Chapter 14

  THE FOLLOWING morning, after the milking was completed and with school still closed, I decided to spend the entire day with Tucker, back on Mack’s Ground. The idea of running away with Tucker, before Thorne could fetch him, had come to me the minute I woke up and now, as I was closing the barn doors, it gripped me.

  In my often still-childish mind, I envisioned fixing up Mack’s old log cabin, hunting and fishing for food, and fashioning clothes from animal hides. However unrealistic my dream was, I spent the morning cleaning up the cabin and making a mental list of what I would need for repairs to my new home. By late morning, the wind started to blow the snow and the absurdity of what I was planning finally sank in. For starters, there was one glaring omission from my plan of frontier survival: heat.

  By noon, I had given up on running away. I sat down to lunch with Grandma Cora and she asked me what I had been doing. Although I may not have had the courage to run away, I did muster the strength to talk about it.

  “I was wondering if I really have to go to Minnesota. Maybe I could move into Mack’s old cabin with Tucker and the two of us could live back there.”

  “How would that work?” she asked with no judgment in her voice.

  “With Tucker, I could hunt and fish for my own food.”

  My grandmother wisely ignored the limitations of my plan and tried to get at what she perceived to be bothering me. “Are you tired of living here with us?”

  “No. It’s not that.”

  “You’re at the age when young men start dreaming about being on their own. Do you think that’s it?”

  “Maybe.”

  “George, your grandfather and I love having you live here and we are going to miss you very much when you leave for Minnesota.”

  It surprised me the way it just came tumbling out like someone knocked over a glass of water. “I don’t want to move to Minnesota, but I don’t know where I want to go instead.”

  She was quiet for a long time and I knew she was carefully choosing her words. “Sometimes, all of us wake up and wish we were somewhere else. That’s natural, too.” She laughed and said, “When it’s cold like this, I usually think about Florida.”

  She took my hand. “George, you know something we all learn sooner or later?”

  “What?”

  She then told me something that I always remembered years later with a chuckle.

  “George, honey, you don’t have to run very far to run away.”

  She smiled and pulled her hand back. “You know someday this farm was going to be your dad’s place, and now, with him gone, it’ll be yours. Of course, it’s up to you to decide if you want it. No one is going to make you take it. And if you’re worried about what’ll happen to the McCray Dairy when you’re in Minnesota, now don’t you be. We’ll manage.”

  I didn’t say a thing, so she continued. “You love the dog, don’t you?” She found the missing voice for my thoughts that I could not locate on my own.

  “Yes.”

  “You’re mad about having to give him back and things just don’t seem very fair right now, do they?”

  “No.”

  “I remember when your grandfather first brought him home and asked you to be responsible for him. You resented it, didn’t you? It’s funny how things change. A few weeks ago you thought it was unfair that you had to take care of Tucker, and now you think it’s unfair that you can’t do it.”

  “That was before …”

  “Maybe you should talk to Frank Thorne. Maybe the two of you could work something out. Who knows, maybe he would let you keep Tucker until you left. It’s only a few weeks. He might not mind if you took him for walks after school. I bet there are options here you haven’t even thought about.”

  “You want me to talk to Frank Thorne?”

  “Sure, why not?”

  “I don’t like Frank Thorne.” That was my way of not saying that I was uneasy around the man. More than once, I’d heard my dad say, “Frank likes his privacy.” And, there were all of those stories about the Thorne family—how his grandfather had been little more than a horse thief, his dad a shiftless gambler.

  “Why, I’ve known Frank Thorne since he was a baby. Did you know that Frank and your dad used to be friends in high school?”

  “I guess.”

  “Just because he has a drinking problem, that doesn’t make him a bad man.”

  Before I could think much more about it, the subject of Christmas came up. She stood, walked over to the kitchen window, put her plate in the sink, and turned back to me.

  “George, what would you like for Christmas this year?”

  I squirmed a little and realized that I did not want to answer her question. “I don’t know, Grandma. What do you want?”

  “I’ve never known you to be without a Christmas wish list. Surely there’s something you want.”

  “I haven’t been thinking much about it.”

  “George, you and I are having the same problem. It’s been awfully hard getting into the Christmas spirit this year. What are we going to do about it?”

  She was right about that and we both knew it. “I don’t think I want to have Christmas this year. Christmas is for little kids.”

  She put her hands on her hips and scolded me ever so slightly. “I am not a little kid and I still like Christmas.”

  “I don’t know, Grandma.”

  “I know what will help us. Let’s you and me cut down a tree this afternoon.”

  “Sure,” I said halfheartedly, thinking how ruined this holiday already seemed. Why didn’t Grandma just give up on Christmas? Before I could ask her, we were interrupted by the ringing of the telephone.

  Grandma answered it. “Hello, Frank.… Sure, that’ll work just fine. I think George would like to talk to you about the dog, too.”

  She hung up the phone. “Frank will come by tonight to pick up Tucker.” I felt like someone had reached down my throat, grabbed my heart, and gave it a big yank. I went into the living room and just sat.

  Knowing that it was coming did not make it any easier.

  Chapter 15

  GRANDMA DID not tolerate my moping for long. She insisted that I bundle up and go with her to find a Christmas tree. In years past, this would have been fun. Today, it was a chore. Tucker tagged along for a while, but soon took out after a rabbit and decided to go on his own hunting expedition. He may have been a half mile off on Mack’s Ground, but I was sure he could smell or hear us tromping along and would come bounding back when he was ready.

  We pushed through the snow until we reached the woods that flank Kill Creek and where wild cedar trees grow like weeds after a summer rain.

  Though it was snowing, it was not particularly cold. I carried a handsaw and we trudged along, with Grandma rejecting most of the specimens as
too big, too small, or poorly shaped. She was ambling and enjoying the walk.

  “George, you know this is going to be a hard Christmas for all of us.”

  “I know.” Of course I knew.

  She kept making excuses to hug me. “I sure do like school closings. I am going to miss you when you have to go back.”

  “I’m going to miss you, too.”

  “Let me tell you one thing that makes Christmas fun for me.”

  She had a big smile on her face and looked different all bundled up and walking outdoors. I could see a side of her that was playful and young and sad all at the same time.

  “What’s that, Grandma?” I stood with my hands on my hips and tried to catch my breath. Trudging through the snow was hard work. It amazed me that she kept up with so little effort.

  “Thinking about that one special thing that someone might enjoy receiving that they did not even know they wanted. Like this Christmas tree, George; it might be just what you need—that one thing that gets you in the spirit.”

  She stopped and stared for a long awkward moment. Although I was not sure, I thought maybe she was trying not to cry. As she spoke, her words cracked in a few places. “I bet a perfect tree is just on the other side of the creek waiting on you.”

  “Do you think the ice is frozen enough for me to walk over?”

  “I’m sure it’ll be just fine. The water is shallow there. Go across and pick out the one you want. I’m getting a bit cold and may head back.”

  We had really not talked about how or why, but it seemed that Grandma Cora had led me right up to the west creek crossing. This was a place I had been avoiding.

  As I walked over the ice and through the clearing in the woods that led to the meadow on the other side, I realized I was now standing in the place where Dad’s accident occurred. I had been pushing the details out of my mind for months. Now, standing there in the meadow, I felt reality flowing over me and that day in June came blowing back in my face.

  My mother was cleaning the kitchen and my grandmother was quietly working at her puzzle table. I was sorting through baseball cards on the living-room floor. My sisters were in town, working at their summer jobs.