Going back in time and forward too, they drove across the western edge of the Eastern Time Zone and lost an hour. A carol recording played too loudly into the landscape at a Christmas tree farm in 2006. It was almost dark. The scent of hot spiced cider and gingerbread cookies came down from the barn where two matronly Midwesterners sat on folding chairs selling wreaths and centerpieces.
In the parking lot the Watsons’ dog Squally ran ahead into the rows of evergreen trees, rummaging with her snout, discovering everything she could about the farm’s firs and pines as the temperature continued to drop. A frozen crust of what hadn’t melted during the warm part of the week covered rutted rows. Dan stopped at the edge of the lane and leaned against a post. “Damn.” One boot sole was separating from the leather.
Marie moved on with her head bent down into the wind, following Squally’s caprices. She had told him not to wear the boots. She stopped again and folded her arms across her chest. Her red turtleneck sweater and down vest weren’t quite warm enough. She should have worn another layer. “Come on, honey.” And she really wished she had a hat.
“But the boots. What about Dad’s boots?” Catching up to her, whistling sharply for Squally to come back and stay closer, Dan fished through the pockets of his canvas coat and found an old black stocking hat. He handed it to his wife. “They’re falling apart.”
She did not think to thank him for the hat but held a bright-colored nylon leash, dingy from a year of use, in her hand and decided not to use it. She watched Squally bound off into the trees with pricked ears.
“Why aren’t you saying anything? Didn’t you hear me?”
Dan held a handsaw at arm’s length and swung it in wide arcs almost like the pendulum dips of an amusement park’s Viking ship ride which swings back and forth, up and down, hesitating at the heights before plunging down, releasing joyous screams of terror.
Marie looked at her husband who was walking awkwardly, trying to prevent more mud from getting inside his sock. “Those boots are probably forty years old! You’re surprised they’re falling apart?” She pulled the hat over the tops of her ears and looked at her own boots. Three hundred muddy dollars.
They got away from the tinny carol.
It was the eighth year of their marriage. Five years before Dan might have said, “Why didn’t you put Squally on the leash? They don’t want our dog running wild out here.” But he just kept walking between the trees, swinging the handsaw and whistling fweeeet! when Squally got too far away.
The smell of gingerbread was gone.
Dan could not resist. “The kids should be here.”
“They’re too little and they’re both sick, Dan. Why make sick kids ride three hours back in the car, cold, dirty, and wet?”
“Don’t you believe in tradition?”
She shook her head. “It was a tradition for your family, Dan. Not mine.”
Christmas trees ran in different-sized rows in all directions.
He whistled for Squally again and grabbed the leash out of Marie’s gloved hand. He knew what she was probably thinking—that an artificial tree like her mom’s would be fine. But her mother’s tree looked like a department store display. It was an eyesore of enormous bows, doves, angels. “Shake that self-righteous head all you want, Marie. But there will be no fake trees in my house. Ever.”
She watched him clip Squally’s collar and wrap most of the length around his hand. “Fine. But who was seven months pregnant last Christmas on the floor with the watering can getting needles in my eyes trying to keep that twelve-foot monstrosity alive, Dan? That thing drank a gallon of water a day. It filled two vacuum bags with needles in the first week. And was it you under that tree trying to keep it alive for six weeks? No, it was not.”
“You always exaggerate.” Dan kept Squally close, swung the old oiled saw absentmindedly from his other hand, and walked into one of the rows of blue spruce. “That was not a twelve-foot tree. We don’t even have twelve-foot ceilings.”
Marie waited in the lane until Dan was a good twenty feet ahead. She watched the distance increasing between them.
Squally barked, calling Marie forward into the row. It was that familiar friendly yip, the same sweet, clipped bark Squally used to announce that the baby’s bottle had fallen out of the stroller, clattery plastic on concrete, rolling down the sidewalk. Still irritated with her husband, Marie picked her steps carefully in his footprints, keeping her boots as clean as possible.
They moved silently between the trees.
Marie could stop, scream, demand the keys, cry, insist on leaving, go sit in the car, take the dog off the leash again. But she didn’t. She caught up to him. “Well, it was nine feet anyway. A nine-foot freaking monstrosity that put me into debt just to decorate.” She pulled Squally’s leash back into her possession.
The dog meandered along the full demonstrable generosity of leash length.
Dan’s left foot was soaked inside the boot. He lifted his toes to protect them from the worst. This compensation added complexity to his gait. “Well, nobody died and made you Martha Stewart, Marie. You could have just spread out the decorations we had instead of drenching every single branch and then filling up the whole storage space with that overpriced tacky-ass shit.”
“It’s not tacky. It’s Radko.” She kept following Dan, giving Squally a tug. “Isn’t there a Christmas tree farm closer to Chicago, Dan? Driving three hours is ridiculous.”
“Every tree my whole life has come from this farm. I don’t care if I have to drive ten hours; every year, every tree, as long as I can manage it, will come from this tree farm.”
“And I’m self-righteous?” She tried not to think permanently-disabling thoughts about her husband. Why did they go through this every year? For what? For a Christmas tree? It was fine before the kids were born, kind of quaint, but now? They worked overtime all week. They still had a ton of shopping to finish, mostly to keep from hearing some litany of dissatisfaction from his mother. The old boots? The traditional tree farm? He was unbearable when he got like this—a nostalgic romantic who just would not let things go.
Marie unclipped Squally and watched the dog’s silky coat ripple as she ran full force after a cardinal. “All this back-to-your-roots stuff gets old. There is no reason for us to drive all the way down here every year when the trees they sell right by us come from a bunch of farms just like this one. Your hick-ass, Puritanical bullshit only goes so far, Dan.”
Dan shouted toward the sunset. “Squally!”
The dog disappeared into the darkening evening.
Marie pulled off a glove and felt the nearest branches.
An old man in insulated coveralls walked up to them from an adjacent row. “Finding everything, folks?” He kept a straight face and noticed Marie touching the trees. He forgave her unconsciously.
She winced and did not look at him. “You have any that don’t drop needles?” It was caustic but not quite rude.
He ignored the tone. “We sure do. Scotch pine will do pretty good that way. I salvaged a few during the blight. Care if we drive out to the rows? It’s too far for me to walk anymore.”
Dan nodded his interest in the man’s suggestion and ostentatiously took his wife by the hand.
They followed the old man to his truck, which was parked at an angle on a nearby rise.
He turned to Dan. “My eyes aren’t so great with the light this low. Mind if I ride and you drive? It’s a four-on-the-floor.” He was not asking. He had already walked around to the passenger side and was helping Marie up into the truck. He closed the passenger side door and settled himself against it.
“It’s been a while since I drove a stick.” Dan put the saw in the bed of the truck, lowered the tailgate, and whistled.
“This old beast has had more clutches than I’ve had chicken dinners. Don’t worry about grinding the gears. She can take it.”
Squally came running and jumped up into the bed of the truck, an old pro at a new trick. She settled down to drowse on a tarp between the spare tire and the saw. Dan got into the driver’s seat.
The old man watched Marie struggling to get comfortable between the two men and with the gearshift rising out of the floor of the truck. He said, “Now, I’m sorry, I didn’t catch your name.”
“Marie.”
Slowly, emphasizing every single word, the old man said, “Okay. Now, Marie. I realize that this may not be the way you are used to riding. But I will tell you that most hick-ass women are not as Puritanical as you might think.”
Marie flushed. “Excuse me?”
“There’s not a one of them that doesn’t know how to ride in the middle of a pickup.”
Marie was nervous but trusted the laugh lines rooted deep at the edge of the old man’s eyes. “I don’t understand.”
The old man looked out to the horizon and gave his instructions casually to the window. Letting his words make fog on the glass, he said, “Well, and I mean this with the utmost respect, dear. But you have got to straddle that thing and lean up against your husband so he can get to that shifter.”
Marie’s head snapped. She looked at Dan with wide eyes.
Dan shrugged, mouthing the words, “I don’t know. It’s his truck.”
Marie managed to convince her designer jeans and her yes-I’ve-had-two-babies legs to straddle the gearshift. She let her left thigh rest against Dan’s. She kept her right thigh from ever touching the old man’s coveralls.
“Good. Now, Dan—wasn’t it Dan?—just ease her back off this little embankment and take us up this lane about two hundred yards.”
Dan put his hand over Marie’s, who tried to hold onto his fingers with her gloves. He squeezed and let go. In the bed of the truck, Squally stood up, turned around twice, and lay back down again, contented by the truck’s motion.
The old man looked at Marie and said, “You got any kids, Marie?”
Of course she had kids. Who doesn’t have kids? She pressed her thigh against Dan’s, encouraging him to relax and stop grinding the gears. “Two. The oldest is twenty-seven months. And the baby was born at the end of February.”
“Good thing you didn’t bring them. They’d catch their death out here today at those ages.”
Marie leaped to the defensive. “Well, it was a tradition in Dan’s family. So we would have brought them if we lived any closer.”
“Bring them in a few years after they know all about Santie Claus. Then they’ll never forget it.” The old man nodded, agreeing with himself. “Go ahead and put it in third, Dan. Nothing to worry about out here. If you hit a deer, you won’t even feel it. Truck’s high-gauge steel. A regular tank. Drive as fast as you want. Hell. Open her up. We’ll come back for the tree. Take us up to my property line at that strip of oaks.”
Dan pressed his forearm against Marie’s thigh while dropping the truck down into third and then fourth.
They passed well-maintained signage: Norway Spruce, Serbian Spruce, Concolor Fir, West Coast Noble Fir. The old man wasn’t looking at the signs that marked the rows. He scrutinized the fence line as they bumped past it. Then all three—and Squally probably, too—watched the rushing fence posts. Keeping a keen eye out for any having fallen.
The old man turned back to Marie. “What tradition?”
Marie looked to Dan for approval to tell his story. Dan nodded, paying attention to the drive, loving the speed, loving the sound of frozen grasses shattering under the chassis.
“Dan used to come here, to your farm, every year when he was little. With his dad.”
“Wasn’t my farm then. I got this place five years ago in a foreclosure settlement.”
Dan looked over. “Foreclosure? I thought you worked for the Loftons.”
“Nope. At the worst of the blight this place just about got bulldozed for a housing development. Instead the Loftons held on as long as they could. Let the developers fish someone else’s place over on 114. By the time they’d fought that fight they were so overextended that they couldn’t make the property taxes. I got the place real cheap from the bank.”
“But you always farmed around here?”
“No, ma’am. Not me. I was in real estate in Dayton for thirty-four years. I was married right after I got back from Korea. We had three kids: one smart one who can’t keep a job for all his politics; one dumb one who can’t keep her mouth shut but to say yes to any man dumber than her who comes along; and one who drives an old school bus from one art fair to another every summer and somehow manages to make a living painting hearts, flowers, and smiley faces on tiny wooden beads. Could have been a god-damned surgeon with steady hands like that—but nope, has to paint blessed beads.”
Marie looked back into the bed of the truck to check on Squally. The happy mutt gave a cinnamon wag while watching the fence posts zip by under the dark blue broken clouds.
“Don’t ask me why I did any of it.” The man in coveralls rubbed the inside of the windshield with his sleeve and turned on the defrost blowers. “After I retired I had a charter-fishing boat business in Florida.
“But even in a subdivided paradise my wife hated me and made my life a living hell for as long as she walked this earth. No American Dream for me, Marie. Not for me. Even though I edged my sidewalks clean and pretty in three damn states.”
The oak trees held onto dry brown leaves. They all stared into the darkening woods. Dan downshifted and the truck stopped at the property line.
The old man cracked the window again. “I guess I could have divorced her somewhere along the line. Or she could have divorced me. Or something. But that’s not what we did. We stuck it out. Did the best we could.”
Marie said, “Sounds like you did great.”
The old man laughed. “Some old milk slogan used to say, ‘Good as any, better than some.’ That was us. Good as any, better than some.”
Marie was worried. “So you’re all alone now? You’re way out here by yourself?”
“No, no, no, sweetie. I moved up here with my girlfriend. Buying this place was her idea.”
Dan sort of snorted. “Girlfriend?”
“Sure. In Florida, after my wife died, I’d get real bored. Go down to the marina and tinker around on that damned charter boat and end up at that little bar they had there. Me and the other geezers all afternoon. Talking about mangled manatees. What to do about oil leaking into the channel. Whether to charge fathers for little puking kids losing rods overboard—shit like that.”
Marie reminded him. “But what about this girlfriend?”
“Elaine? She never lost a rod. She wears a fishing belt. She’s no fool.”
“I mean, how’d you meet her?”
“Oh, she ran a bait shop on the landing and sold beer and candy and cigarettes, too. She ran the deliveries to the bar in a motorboat. Somehow, I got to helping her unload that motorboat on her runs.” The old man sat up straight.
The light was gone. The day was over.
After a long silence, the old man said, “Guess I didn’t know about me hating my wife and my wife hating me while she was alive. Guess I thought all that antagonism, all that animosity, all that manipulation and the rest was love. How could I have known different? All those years should’ve meant something, right?”
“You didn’t love your wife?” Marie folded her hands in her lap smoothing the finger of the glove over her wedding ring.
“Not like I love Elaine. Not like that.”
The tradition was to implement a pattern that was a kind of suffering self-loathing to which any good person gets humbly indoctrinated. The tradition was to keep doing what you had always known how to do, to give up certain hopes for the someone whose role model said to love you. So what if you’d sacrificed almost everything on a little cross around your neck pulled side to side for years on end?
Marie turned to the old man. “What would you have done different?” She wasn’t really asking to know.
“Nothing.”
Dan said, “Nothing?” Dan looked back to be sure Squally was still there and not too cold. The dog was asleep.
The old man countered, “Good as any, better than some.” He realized how late it was getting. “It’s pretty dark to be picking Christmas trees now.” But the old man wasn’t sentimental. He wasn’t a traditionalist. To him it was neither here nor there. He was a businessman. He motioned toward the darkness. “Well, you saw this place. Rows upon rows upon rows. And they’re all the same anyway. Hell, we even spend the whole spring pruning so they’re every one the damned same, exactly the same. I’ll give you one of the precut Scotch pines half-price. No needles in the carpet this year, Marie. There’s a six-foot beauty up there if Elaine hasn’t sold it. It’s plenty fresh.”
Marie nodded, holding back tears. The tradition, Dan’s tradition which kept the old man’s heat on, was to walk into the unknown if familiar rows and pick your own tree, cut it down, carry it out any way you knew how, and call it yours until it died, until it was time, until it was time to let it go.
Throughout the evening the symmetric snowdrifts against the barbed wire fence changed from white to pink to lavender to purple-shadowed hillocks to blue to black and then back to white in the headlight beams.
The truck started up and Dan finally remembered how to drive in the country. He handled the old tank with surety. Marie watched him shifting gears between her legs. Squally must have woken up as they bounced and lurched over the frozen ruts.