Christmas with Tucker (7 page)

I tried not to notice.

IT WAS
9:00
P.M
. before my grandfather parked the maintainer in the barnyard after going over the roads one last time and came inside for a belated dinner. With Grandma Cora’s help, I’d finished the evening milking. Tucker detested being left behind, tied up on the back porch or left in the kitchen, but he had no choice in the matter. Dogs and dairy cattle don’t mix.

“Still snowing,” Grandpa substituted for a greeting, stating the obvious. Tucker met him at the kitchen entrance, tail wagging as if he was happy my grandfather had made it home safely. Grandpa bent down and drove his cold hands deep into Tucker’s fur and pulled him close, allowing Tucker to nuzzle into the gray stubble that grew on his neck.

“How much snow?” I asked.

My grandfather stood up and looked across the room at me. His eyes seemed tired. “Eight inches total for the last two days, drifting deeper. How did the milking go?”

My grandmother answered for me. “Don’t worry, Bo, George has it under control.”

Because my grandfather was not a talker, starting a conversation with him was no easy feat. Saying something like, “How ’bout them Yankees?” would get you little, if any, response. With my father gone, he talked even less. The good thing was that when Grandpa Bo did talk, he usually had something to say, and everyone in the room would drop what they were doing and listen carefully.

Now he said nothing for a long time. Finally, he just nodded his head up and down real slowly and said, “Good.”

“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.

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 went 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.

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.