In the backseat of the Cavalier, he and Christopher played the old game, finding shapes in the clouds. Once they were explained, Christopher’s choices inevitably surprised him: a sleeping dragon with its tail coiled around its head; a sack of marbles, a thin contrail forming the string around the bag’s neck.
It was Thanksgiving and earlier in the day Christopher had presented Winkler with one of his poster-sized drawings. In the background stretched the airport, huge and soaring, its facade broken by a hundred little windows, and the white space around it was peppered with the small T shapes of airplanes. Out front, beside a yellow oval that must have been a taxicab, a man held a golf club. On the curb beside him, a stick boy with yellow hair that Winkler knew to be Christopher held hands with a second man wearing enormous eyeglasses.
“That’s Herman?”
“Yes,” Christopher answered, madly shy. His fingertip roved to the man with the glasses. “And that’s you.” Winkler told him it was the greatest picture he had ever seen and that he would keep it forever, or if not forever then as long as he could.
Grace was driving, in a generous mood—even smiling once in a while in the mirror at Winkler. Her bicycle, clamped to the roof rack, cut the wind. Winkler rode in a baseball cap and Christopher wore his orange construction-paper crown, decorated with stickers and newly reinforced with cardboard. In the backseat between them was a brand-new square-bladed Rittenhouse spade.
They drove out the Glenn Highway, past the army base, past Eagle River, and the landfill, mist breaking across the car’s grille. By the time they were alongside the Heavenly Gates Perpetual Care Necropolis a light drizzle had started.
Grace parked at the gate. She pulled on her riding shoes and laced them one after the other by placing them on the dash and hauling down on the laces. There was a bruise on her shin, and the skin there was shiny from her having shaved it so close, and when she shifted, the smell of old sweat came off her biking shorts.
Behind her Christopher and Winkler sat as if waiting out the rain. Grace opened her door and threw a heel onto the hood and leaned over her knee to stretch. Through the open door came the wind, damp and cool. Christopher rested his chin on the sill and peered out his window.
“Rain is always worse hearing it on the roof,” Winkler said. “But once you’re out in it, moving around, it’ll feel kind of good. You’ll see.” The boy’s eyes turned up, as if calculating whether or not the rain would feel good.
Grace unclipped her bike from the roof and fit the front wheel’s axle into the fork ends. She spun it until the tire was true and clamped the quick-release and affixed the front brake. “You guys have fun,” she said, and leaned in and looked at Christopher, still in the backseat, and rested her bike against the car. She climbed into her seat and reached over the back.
“You’ll be warm enough?”
He nodded.
She pulled his collar up and brought it around his neck. “Your crown will get wet,” she said.
Christopher shook his head. They compromised by pulling up the hood. She tugged on his drawstrings, and looked at Winkler beside him, holding the boy’s fingers with one hand and the spade with the other, and then she shook her head and said, “I love you, Chris,” and smiled at them both.
Then she pedaled off, starting on the big hill, her legs moving easily and efficiently on the pedals, her back bowed over the crossbar. They watched until she was nearly at the top of the hill, rounding a bend, and the mist closed over her.
Winkler squeezed Christopher’s hand. “You ready?”
The boy shrugged. Winkler walked around the back of the car with the spade and opened the door and took the boy’s hand and they set out, climbing toward the cemetery gates with the Cavalier at their backs.
There was a backhoe pulled up behind the office, its arm folded. Inside, the same grizzled attendant pulled back the door, picking his teeth with the cap of a pen.
“We want to buy a tree,” Winkler said. The attendant nodded and pulled up the hood of his poncho and the three of them walked out into the rain. There were maybe two dozen saplings leaning against the back of the office, all with their root-balls wrapped in globes of burlap.
From the other side of the house the big old Newfoundland came loping toward them and Christopher reeled back behind Winkler’s legs but the dog pushed forward and lacquered the boy’s face with drool.
“What kind of tree you guys want?”
Winkler looked down at Christopher. “What kind of tree?”
But the boy was reaching, gently, for the huge wet dog. “What’s his name?”
“Her name,” the attendant said. “Lucy. Lucy Blue.”
Christopher stood for a moment, then reached up and took the big patient dog around the neck, and hugged her. She panted over his shoulder. “Good girl,” the boy said, patting her head. “Good Lucy.”
“Let’s pick the tree, okay, Christopher?”
They walked among the saplings looking at each and Christopher spoke softly to Lucy as if consulting her. At last he pointed to the biggest one, an aspen, maybe half of its leaves lying curled around its base. The remaining hundred or so clung to the branches, bright and yellow, flapping slowly in the rain. “That one?”
The boy nodded, his attention on the tree, a diminutive arborist.
Inside the office the attendant rang it up. Winkler asked, “You’re sure it’s not too late in the season?”
“The ground won’t be frozen?”
“Not yet.”
“And we can put it anywhere?”
“Anywhere within six feet of the plot.”
Winkler paid him and handed the boy the spade and together with the attendant managed to wrestle the big sapling into a wheelbarrow the graveyard loaned out for just such purpose.
“Pails,” the attendant said. He disappeared into the office, reemerged with two five-gallon buckets, one stacked inside the other, and hung them on a handle of the wheelbarrow.
Then the two of them started off down the rows, the boy jogging out in front with the big shovel dragging behind him, Winkler driving the barrow over the stones in the makeshift path and the branches of the tree bouncing and the big dog following them both.
Halfway up, Christopher stopped and pulled back his hood. He hugged the dog and took off his crown and pinned it into the fur on the dog’s head. “Here,” he said, and patted her ribs. “You can wear this a minute. While I help dig.”
They wheeled the tree to Sandy’s grave. From up there they could see, far off, the rain falling on the high flanks of the Talkeetnas, falling as snow. Winker stood a moment. The boy offered up the spade. Her plot was maybe six by six, the size of a king mattress. Winkler raised the shovel and drove the blade in.
The smell that came up was of turned earth, moss and ferns. Severed worms flailed in the cuts. The soil was pebbly but the digging was not hard and in ten minutes Winkler had made a sizable crater. Once he finished, he heaved the tree out of the wheelbarrow, rolled it to the edge of the hole, and hacked off the burlap. The boy helped him push it over the lip. Winkler grabbed the sapling’s trunk. “Is it straight?”
“I think so.”
“Put some dirt around it then.”
The boy lifted the spade. They filled the hole, and tamped it down. The Newfoundland sat placidly by, the boy’s crown cocked between her ears. Rain flecked the lenses of Winkler’s glasses. Christopher stood back and appraised their work. “That’s it?”
“That’s it. Now we water it.”
They walked back down through the graves to a spigot beside the office and filled their buckets. Christopher at first filled his too much and Winkler had to pour some out until he was able to drag it. Water sloshed over the rims and dampened their boots. They hauled up the pails and poured them over the base of the tree and went back again, hauling up the water, pouring it out, watching it soak through the soil, big Lucy following them both.
“What do you think?” Winkler asked, when they were done.
“It’s okay,” the boy said. His hair was soaked, and his pants were muddy to the knees. The wind came up, and moved the highest branches and sent droplets of rain flying through the air. “I like it. I think it will make it.”
“Happy Thanksgiving, Sandy,” Winkler said.
“Happy Thanksgiving,” Christopher said.
On the way down, moving back toward the gates, toward the car, the boy began to run, his hood down and his boots splashing, calling, “Go, Lucy, go, Lucy!” and the dog ran along beside him, barking with joy, the crown still somehow clinging to her ears, and Winkler turned once to look back at the tree, standing thin and mostly naked beside Sandy’s grave, holding its branches up. Then he hurried on, through the headstones, after the boy.