by Hubert Furey
My next-door neighbour looked at me for a long time over the fence before resuming his own struggle with a timing chain in a small Toyota, but since we had tacitly agreed some years earlier to totally ignore each other’s strange behaviours, he never said anything about my plywood Christmas tree and I never said anything about his timing chain.
I tried not to watch him out of the corner of my eye as I continued my listing of specifications and dimensions for the benefit of my only daughter and the seventh definite hunk, concluding my exhortation with a grandiose movement of my arms as the final confirmation of the shape of the tree I wanted cut.
That’s when my next-door neighbour’s head disappeared from view under the hood of the Toyota, his body convulsing uncontrollably. I couldn’t make out if he was laughing or not, or I would have said something really nasty about his timing chain, so I chose to ignore the visibly shaking parts of his body as I continued, in my incredibly self-controlled manner—referring to the plywood shape one more time, just for emphasis.
With the seventh definite hunk now standing beside her, affectionately holding her hand and exchanging glances like those boy and cow moose in October, it is doubtful if the precision of the delivery was all that effective.
They were halfway across the marsh before they thought of the axe, and they had exhausted the third ice age before they even got to the big birch tree at the corner of the little river. As I watched them finally enter the grove, hand in hand, their slow steps intertwining, I hoped they wouldn’t be found swooned to death in a snowdrift by the Tout.
When they finally disappeared into the path that led to the grove, I wondered what would people say if I had to decorate the tree at Easter.
They were gone a long time, but in the fashion of that famous general who left the Philippines at the beginning of the Second World War, they did return . . . two hours after dark. They were both exhausted, and were dragging a huge black spruce tree, tall enough to reach the top storey of the St. John’s city hall, and thick enough at the base to hide it.
To make matters worse, they had lost my best axe.
They looked cold and wet, but exuberance at a job well done shone on both their tired faces, and I considered it prudent for the moment to make no comment on the considerable difference between what I had described, “what ought to be,” and what had been dragged home, what really “was.” If ever there was a contrast between the philosophic ideal and the philosophic real, it was lying there on my front lawn, and pretty well covering it from back to front.
Hypocritically hiding my feelings beneath a congratulatory smile, I motioned them into the warmth of the kitchen, where her mother had hot chocolate steaming in two big mugs. To loosely paraphrase Genesis, I gazed upon their handiwork, shook my head in disbelief, and went to bed.
The next day was Sunday, and, just after breakfast, my only daughter and I had “rings around,” which is a way Newfoundlander’s have of describing a great big fight. The seventh definite hunk hadn’t arrived yet, so I could indulge in my full parental authority without the fear of the human equivalent of an oversized Newfoundland bull moose interfering on the other side.
I must say that it wasn’t the calibre of the fights they used to have on the public wharf years ago, but it provided good entertainment for my next-door neighbour’s wife, who followed all the fights on television and who had no intentions of missing one that promised to be the best one on the block in years.
She could hear the racket through the walls of both houses, so she raced across and settled herself comfortably on the back steps, totally immune to the December cold in a thick down-filled parka and very expensive sealskin boots. She had missed the world championship heavyweight title fight in August, so feeling that this one would do just as well, she settled herself away, and cheered for my only daughter the whole way through.
As for my only daughter, since the big spruce was the first one she and the seventh definite hunk had cut together, and since they would “definitely” be going steady after Christmas, she wanted it decorated as “the” Christmas tree.
I countered that it was impossible to decorate a Christmas tree that stretched corner to corner across the living room. For once her mother did not quietly say “Now dear,” with its intimidating translation, but exited silently to the safety of the dining room, preferring the comfort and solace of the little corner television to the noise and racket of yet another father-daughter confrontation.
Armed as I was with physical size, advancing age, and the threat of never opening my wallet again, I slowly brought her around to my way of thinking, at least on the surface.
It took every bit of knowledge I had acquired from the three women I had dated in my lifetime to bring her around, but I must have done a pretty good job. She agreed that the spruce tree could become the outdoor tree. I approved of this, since, once it was up, it would do an immensely better job of hiding the peeling paint on the front of the house than prone and rammed butt-end into my newly carpeted front porch where she had defiantly vowed to leave it.
She didn’t even seem to make a fuss when I suggested buying an indoor tree from Bud Squires. How graciously she accepted defeat in the long run, however, was open to question. Bud gave us the best tree he had in his yard, and it came pretty close to filling my dimensions, but it seemed no amount of artistic or aesthetic form was going to replace the giant abnormality which lay sullen and rejected in my front entrance.
I put the newly acquired purchase in a bucket of sand and stood it in the corner, and she even offered to help me decorate it, although her tone was very suspicious. She just kept smiling sweetly and commenting on “my cute little varr” every time she thrust another ornament on a branch, and I knew that wasn’t going to be the end of it.
Just as she placed the little green angel on the top of the tree, our big black-and-white cat—named Sugar in obvious disregard for the way he prowled around the house all day long snarling like a polar bear on a March diet—did something which I am convinced he could not replicate to this day.
Whether he had a momentary regression to the kitten-hood that he had missed so desperately, or had simply been so inspired by all that television coverage of the Newfoundland summer games, I will never know. He leaped straight over the coffee table to smack a dangling ornament, landed snarling and spitting in the midst of all the icicles and decorations, and brought the whole works crashing down in the middle of the living room carpet, which, with my incredible efficiency, I had had the foresight to have thoroughly cleaned that very morning.
The little green angel came to earth headfirst, and I raised my eyes to heaven. How a cat that size ever mustered the energy and speed to make an Olympic-standard leap like that I will never know, but the way he winked at my only daughter as he exited flying through the back door, I swear she had him put up to it.
My wife appeared on the scene upon hearing the crash, and I looked to her for sympathy and understanding, given my chaotic plight. However, her only reaction was a threatening frown and the second utterance of an intimidating “Now dear,” which at this point could be roughly translated as “What are you doing now and don’t you dare raise your voice to that little girl and if I find one mark on this furniture or one tear in this new carpet . . .” Which of course didn’t speak well for the undying support of the traditional Newfoundland family in times of crisis.
Still, she pitched in, and between the three of us the little varr was set upright again. My only daughter helped, but I imagined I detected just the merest hint of a triumphant gleam in her eye from time to time. We then proceeded to extricate the big spruce from the front porch as a first step in having it erected on the lawn as the outdoor tree.
This action on our part suddenly transformed my only daughter into the equivalent of a world federation wrestler. She grabbed the tree by the top and, with a snatch that would have done credit to a Sibe
rian weightlifter, yanked it free of the porch door, darn near taking the door jamb with it.
She then dragged it and me down the front steps and across the patio to the hole I had prepared for it earlier in the fall, or at least toward a hole I had prepared for a much smaller tree. I had to do a lot of chopping on the butt end with a blunt axe and pour buckets of hot water into the frozen hole to make it small enough to fit, but we finally managed to force in the trunk and stand the behemoth up straight.
It took us a number of hours, a lot of lights, and a very long ladder to decorate our colossus, but we finally succeeded. Cars going up and down the harbour slowed down, and you could see faces gaping in amazement through the windows, but I couldn’t hear them laughing, so I didn’t mind.
Except for Bill Kearney.
He yelled something about getting a couple of Light and Power linesmen, but I couldn’t understand what he was talking about so I ignored him, which is what you got to do with Bill, anyway. I must say that when we flicked the outdoor switch and, as they say, “she” lit up, “she” didn’t look that bad. I mean, it was big, but what’s wrong with a big tree?
It wasn’t like that fellow in the ’States with the million Christmas lights and everybody complaining. It wasn’t like that at all. My next-door neighbour said that he bet it would look really good from the Lookout, which is over a mile away, but he’s not like Bill Kearney.
I did get one call, and the more I think about it, the madder I get. It was the next night, the night before Christmas, like in the poem. A very serious-sounding person called from Torbay airport—at least he said he was from Torbay airport—and he told me he had something very important to tell me and would I be prepared to give him my fullest co-operation.
Since he sounded very official, and since he told me he was over all the other air traffic controllers, I naturally listened to him and promised I would do what I could, like he asked. He said that according to his calculations, my outdoor Christmas tree was right under—that is directly under—the flight path of the big jets coming in from Gander.
“Mr. McCarthy,” he said very politely, “we just received a call from the pilot of flight 763 from Toronto, Ottawa, and Halifax. Your Christmas tree lights are obscuring his approach to runway five, and he would appreciate it if you would turn them off for a moment so he can land safely. Confirm with me, will you?” and he held the telephone.
Well, I didn’t want a big jumbo jet landing in my marsh just before Christmas—we only had one turkey and one dark fruitcake—so I went down right away and shut off all my outdoor lights.
Of course, I should have known that that pilot couldn’t call from all those places at the same time, and that Torbay airport had only three runways. Still, it didn’t strike me until I went back to the phone and heard someone tittering in the background that my cousin Bob Foley is ticket agent with that outfit and that, as they say in Newfoundland, they were having a game with me. No doubt he put them up to it all along, although he never admitted it.
You could say that we had the brightest Christmas ever that Christmas. We lit up both trees faithfully every evening, and I sat in the living room with my wife admiring my little varr, while my only teenage daughter and the seventh definite hunk would stand outside on the lawn admiring what my stepfather would have called “a noble spruce.”
And what’s wrong with having two trees, anyway?
“It’s not like having two women, is it?” I said to my wife jokingly.
She glowered and gave me that look which could be interpreted as “I’ll kill you first—then her,” and I rushed to get her a quick cup of tea.
At that point my next-door neighbour and his wife joined us for a first Christmas visit, and we all agreed that we would have a hot toddy to toast the holiday season. As if by some telepathic prior agreement, he didn’t mention my plywood shape and I didn’t mention his timing chain, and his wife didn’t mention the fight, although I heard after Christmas that she had spent a lot of time congratulating my daughter on the way in.
Women stick together like that.
We all agreed that smaller trees are better than bigger trees, anyway, and only somebody like Bill Kearney would have a big tree in his living room. My next-door neighbours are always on side when it comes to discussing the really important stuff.
With her seventh definite hunk and her very first Christmas tree together in the same spot, my only daughter forgot about our fight, and I made a mental note to forget about the snow down my back. So, to some degree, we both lived happily ever after.
Time and good feeling have a way of eradicating most bad memories, and making the present ones look downright appealing.
As for Bob Foley, he can’t fool me. I knew he was behind it all along.
ONE SMALL BOOK
Books to read—when I went to school—there was a woeful lack
Except the few you carried in a denim bag upon your back
There were no fancy libraries with rows of books stacked shelf by shelf
And lots of times you had no money to buy a book yourself
Oh, the teachers tried as best they could to teach a dozen grades
(I tried it once and I tell you, sir, they deserve their accolades)
But even when they did their best, books were hard to find
Ah, there was lots to do for the body back then, but precious little for the mind
But in this tale of dark and woe, there is a ray of light
It’s all about a book I got, a book that came one night
It was down among some well-packed clothes, beneath a pair of skates
A book that came from far away, in a barrel from the ’States
For in the town where I grew up, lots of folks had gone away
To climb steel in Boston and New York, to find a better day
And when things improved for them, when prosperity they’d find
They’d send back barrels of clothes and things to us who stayed behind
’Twas in one such barrel I found this book, from a cousin just as keen
As I was for reading, a boy I’d never seen
They’d buy lots of books for him, and when he’d read them through
He’d send them off to Harbour Main so I could read them, too
Well, you may depend I was the happiest boy you ever met
A brand new book, all mine to keep, you may say, sir, I was set
I stole away to a quiet spot, to escape the kitchen noise
To that mysterious house upon the cliff, with those sleuths, the Hardy Boys
Many a happy hour I spent with Frank and Joe, and their chubby buddy Chet
And except for the fact that life goes on I think I’d be there yet
Ah, the mystery—the excitement—with each chapter that I read
The dreams I had of solving crimes each night I went to bed
Well, I must have read that book a thousand times, deaf to the world outside
Then I took my precious book to school, to show it off with pride
You should have seen them gather ’round, begging for a look
I was the star of the classroom show with my brand new mystery book
At recess the teacher read the book to faces rapt in awe
There wasn’t a stir or movement, sir, the quietest class you ever saw
When the bell would ring and ’twas back to work, many a face would scowl perplexed
They’d have to wait another day to hear what happened next
Well, pretty soon that book was read by every girl and boy
Could you imagine that one small book could offer so much joy?
We searched for Bayport on a map (For us this fiction stuff was new
So convinced we were that the story of the Hardy Boys was true)
Our teacher was so impressed with our love for Frank and Joe and Chet
That she had a concert and raised some money and bought the entire set
When the girls complained of being left out—Well, they were readers, too
She promptly mailed a cheque away for—you guessed it—“Nancy Drew”
With all those books passed hand to hand the room was pretty quiet that year
Pages turned—sighs of delight—the only sounds you’d hear
Even the lads down in the back, who made most of the noise
As quiet as mice around the cat—when reading the Hardy Boys
They all left school and went their ways to begin their lives for real
The girls to be secretaries on the base, the boys to work at steel
I’d meet them and they’d talk of books and of how their school days really flew
How their love of reading and books began with the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew
I don’t guess my cousin will ever get thanks enough for the fantastic thing he’d done
The reading he brought into our lives, the excitement, the downright fun
No, he’ll never get thanks enough for that marvellous step he took
He got us reading night and day by sending . . . one small book
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Shelley Chase of Garrison Hill Entertainment for her technical direction and assistance; Joan Tubrett for her reading of the final manuscript and invaluable advice; all those storytellers over the years who have provided me with such inspirational material, notably my brother George Furey and my brother-in-law, Bill Whelan; and lastly my wife, Eleanor, for initial critiquing of my work and for her continued support and encouragement.