Bootstrapper

by Mardi Jo Link

  Ever since we moved to the Big Valley when Owen and Luke were little, our tradition has been to cut our own Christmas tree fresh from our woods, the biggest one we can find that will still fit through the door, and then we put it up and decorate it together. But most of our tools were Mr. Wonderful’s, and I don’t think we have a handsaw big enough to do the job anymore. The hatchet is dull again from all the firewood chopping, and besides, even if we sharpened it, it still couldn’t make the clean cut required for a tree to fit in the stand. Then again, we don’t have a stand anymore, anyway, so what’s the point?

  I manage to explain all this to the boys, minus the tears. They look at me like they can’t believe I am getting so upset about something so minor. Because what I view as defeat, they consider just another problem to be solved. Not only that, but a problem that is actually far more enjoyable to work on than housecleaning.

  “We’ve got a whole woods right there,” Owen says, pointing out the picture window toward our little woodlot. “I’m sure we’ve got something that can cut down a tree.”

  “Yeah, like karate chopping!” Will suggests, offering an immediate example with his hands of how this could work. With sound effects.

  “Would you get real?” Owen says, though, like me, he can’t help laughing.

  Luke says nothing, but I can tell he’s thinking. Math and the space-time continuum might stymie him, but he’s all over practical problems like this one.

  I should have known that all I had to do was share this challenge with my sons, because leave it to them to come up with a solution. And once again I am reminded of that basic lesson: the one that says knowing how bad things are is better than not knowing.

  Except this time, in our clean house, on a snowy December afternoon, with Christmas bearing down on us, there’s a second lesson, too. Knowing how bad things are, and sharing that knowledge with my sons, is a lot better than shouldering it all alone.

  “Okay,” Luke says, “I got it. What we need is a really big bucket and some rocks.”

  Luke’s idea sends us first to the shop and then to the woods; and the boys, the dogs, and I bivouac through squeaky new snow to the far corner of our woodlot and pick out a tree. It’s huge. A white pine, tall and stout, with lacy blue-green needles and thick branches covered with pinecones.

  White pines produce a lot of sap, enough to gum up most tree stands, and their branches are too flexible to hold big ornaments or heavy lights, so they aren’t very popular as commercial Christmas trees. They are Michigan’s official state tree, though, and their delicate needles are the softest of any evergreen. That sap won’t matter to us because of what Luke has rigged up for a stand, and we don’t have many heavy ornaments anymore, anyway, so a white pine it is.

  The boys and I take turns hacking around the trunk with the dull hatchet, then Owen and Luke grip a branch halfway up on either side, bend the whole tree down this way and that until it finally breaks off near the frozen ground. The end of the trunk is all jagged and the bark is torn, but I already know that won’t even matter.

  It gets dark so early now, and the light is fading over the hill as we drag our prize back to the house with Will and the dogs in the lead.

  “I call putting on the star,” Will says as we pull the fat pine through the front door, dumping snow and dirt and pinecones all over our clean floor.

  In a snap it’s ready for its corner, where Luke has already set up our makeshift stand: a white, five-gallon bucket of joint compound he found in the shop, set up in the corner, and filled with fist-sized rocks we chipped out of the frozen ground.

  Will holds the bucket steady while his brothers and I grunt, lift the tree up, and jam its ragged trunk as straight down as we can into the rocks, then anxiously let go. We hold our breath and watch as the tree stands there steady for a moment, then slowly leans away from the staircase and out toward the center of the room, and mercifully stops before it tips over. The leaning tower of Christmas.

  Before any of us have time to think, Luke runs up to his bedroom and returns a second later with a handful of thick rope. What thirteen-year-old boy keeps a length of perfectly coiled purple climbing rope in his bedroom? I shake my head in wonder that my son does.

  He lassos a top branch and pulls the loop tight while we straighten the tree, and then he ties off the other end of his rope to a staircase bannister. It holds, the tree is straight, and we can’t help cheering.

  “Yeah, baby!” Owen says, standing back to admire our work. Luke has gone to the sink with a juice pitcher for water to fill our bucket tree stand, and Will is digging through the ornament box in search of the star for the top.

  Our tradition is intact, mostly. But no one is going to mistake this scene for something out of a magazine. The tree is so big, it takes up most of the room. The unfinished staircase reveals raw wood and torn plaster in the background. The purple climbing rope isn’t going anywhere and looks out of place next to all the red and green. Plus, we’ve put up our tree weeks later than we usually do.

  And yet, in spite of all this, as far as I’m concerned, it’s still the very best Christmas tree we’ve ever had. It might be the very best Christmas tree anybody has ever had.

  I have an early-December birthday, and so part of our tradition was to cut the tree and put it up on that day. My birthday was three weeks ago, though, and so it’s way too late for that part of our holiday tradition—an oversight that doesn’t bother the boys any, if they even remember it, but is something, even with everything else we’re struggling with, that I actually miss. For solace, I concoct a makeshift remedy.

  While the boys decorate our tree with our only set of lights, several strings of popcorn we’ve just made, old ribbons from my sewing box, and a few ornaments, I turn on the CD player. A little jolly music in the background, while Owen lifts Will to place the star, will make this holiday scene complete.

  There are two popular singers who share a birthday with me. Not the year, but the month and the day. Andy Williams and Ozzy Osbourne. Personality-wise, this fits. I’ve always thought that I fall about exactly in the middle of these two singers, and I load a CD by each man into the CD player, press the Shuffle button, then Play, so the machine will alternate back and forth between them.

  It’s the most wonderful time of the year, and I’m going off the rails on a crazy train. But that’s nothing to cry over, right? Not at Christmastime. And not here in front of our mighty tree.

  The boys and I spend Christmas Day together, just the four of us. In the years to come their father and I will cooperate and alternate holidays, but this year Christmas belongs to me. It belongs to the four of us. The boys spend the daylight hours putting the presents they made at school for me and for each other under our big pine tree, watching Christmas specials on TV, shoveling the walkways, making snowmen, and decorating holiday cookies while I finish cleaning. Late in the afternoon, as it is getting dark, I tell them to suit up, we’re having Christmas dinner outside this year.

  “We’ll need some firewood,” I tell the two older boys. “Grab a flashlight and meet us down in the valley.”

  For some reason I imagine the reaction such an announcement would invite in children not my own, and the images of generic but shocked-faced boys make me smile. My own sons aren’t even fazed. They are game for this excursion, even on Christmas. Even with the light fading and the temperature dropping they are game. Their official last name is not Link, they have their father’s last name, but in their hearts they are another generation of Links.

  “Keep your dobbers up!” was the last thing my dad said to me before the boys and I pulled out of my parents’ driveway, loaded down with all those presents.

  This is what my dad has always said to me whenever I’ve needed encouragement, from the time I was a little girl. When I got a bad grade on a test or dropped a fly ball or got dumped by my boyfriend. I don’t know what a dobber is exactly, but I do know that my sons are keeping theirs up. They get the job done right. They don’t comp
lain.

  Owen holds the flashlight for his brother while Luke collects another armful of kindling. Bundled in their snow pants and their puffy jackets, hoods up, making their way over an incandescent landscape with the black horizon behind, they look like teen astronauts collecting specimens on the moon.

  Tonight I am going to teach Will how to build a one-match fire. He and I head down to the bottom of the valley, where there’s no wind. We can hear his brothers crunching a path toward us through the high drifts. The woodpile is stacked next to our garage at the top of the hill, but our fire pit is down in a little clearing in our valley, surrounded by pine trees, dormant grass asleep under the heavy snow, and silence.

  Owen and Luke already know how to build a one-match fire, and I’ve sent them for the firewood so that Will can build his very first one without any “help” or observations from his older brothers. Loaded up with the wood, they are on their way back down.

  A crust has formed on top of the snow, and it is strong enough to support their teen bodies for only a moment, but then it gives way and their legs plunge down with a crunch and they are up to their knees again, first one leg, then the other.

  The beam of their flashlight bounces off the snow, rockets through the trees, and shines down toward earth, and us. The light syncopates in time with their laughing.

  “Get going, Little Red Riding Dork,” teases Owen, his laughter echoing.

  “Oh, that is snow funny,” Luke says, and I can hear the smile in his voice.

  Just for tonight I wish I could forget that they are covering the same ground that the real-estate appraiser did, but I can’t quite manage it.

  It snowed the day he was here. I know this because he left his footprints behind. After we arrived home from celebrating Christmas with my parents, the appraiser came back for a second visit, and I watched out the window while he walked all around the property in a flapping black coat and wing-tip shoes. The wind blew his hat off, blew the papers off his clipboard, blew the stringy wisps of his black hair off his bare scalp and straight up into the air.

  His first visit was December 21, the winter solstice, the shortest, darkest day of the year. Probably just a coincidence, I told myself, while I stood in front of our big picture window the next evening and watched him slip and fall on our iced-over driveway. Owen saw him, too, but neither one of us went outside to help the man.

  “Count Olaf is in our yard,” Owen said, referencing the villain from the story I’d been reading aloud in the evenings to his two younger brothers. It makes me smile to think of him, a teenager with a rock band, long hair, and driver’s ed, listening in from his bedroom.

  Night and snowfall and the booted feet of my firewood-carrying children have erased Count Olaf’s tracks completely, but I know that they are still there, smoldering like dry ice somewhere deep. While most people probably want their houses to be worth a lot of money, I do not. The more the Big Valley is worth, the more Mr. Wonderful’s half is also worth, and the less chance I have of being qualified for a mortgage on it.

  “You only have one chance, so you have to get everything just right before you light the match,” I tell Will.

  “Mom, you’ve got a whole box,” he says, looking at the cardboard container of stick matches in my hand.

  “I have a whole box right now,” I tell him. “But you never know when you might be down to your very last one.”

  A one-match fire is just that: a fire built using only a single match and what nature provides. No crumpled-up newspaper, no treated logs, no fire-starting sticks, no lighters, no gasoline from the lawn mower or lighter fluid. No second tries.

  Fires can be started without any matches at all, of course, with just friction and patience, but I’ve always figured that if you don’t have a single match and you’re stuck outside in the winter in Michigan, you’re pretty much done for, friction or no friction.

  Will accepts the seriousness of his task big-eyed and silent, bends down and makes a mound with his gloved hands out of the dead pine needles we’ve collected. His snowsuit rustles as I show him how to pile the needles on top of a raft of dry branches so that when the needles burn and heat up the frozen ground underneath, the melting snow won’t extinguish the fire before it even has a chance to get going.

  “Okay, now make the triangle like I showed you, overtop.”

  His brothers appear out of the dark and Luke drops his armful of logs and kindling while Owen stows the flashlight in his pocket. Stick by skinny stick Will builds the fire while we watch, until a symmetrical little pyramid of dry wood stands a foot and a half tall in the center of this area we’ve cleared in the snow.

  I reach in my pocket and pull out the single stick match and hand it to Will. He takes off his glove and gives it a solid scratch against the zipper of his coat. It lights and he touches it to the edge of his mound of pine needles, blows on them, and they catch fire, smoking, crackling, and curling a glowing red.

  “Mom! It’s working!” he says, and I don’t think he could be any more amazed if he had pointed a magic wand at the pile of sticks and they ignited. The pine needles catch the tiny twigs, the twigs catch the larger sticks around the pyramid, and then the whole pyramid begins to flame. Instinctively, the four of us are already standing in a circle, looking into the center, and soon heat and light spread to our fronts. The dark can have our backs, and does.

  I remember the bonfire I lit months ago in our front yard. All it did was kill the grass and leave a big scorch mark. At least the boys didn’t witness that one. This fire is something else, though, something unifying. This fire, small and under control, has a practical use and is more than just a lesson in match management and winter survival.

  My frayed red daypack hangs on a nearby tree branch. In it is our Christmas dinner: a package of Rocky hot dogs (my sons have forbidden me from ever calling them “wieners”), a Tofurky dog for Owen, a package of hot dog buns, ketchup, mustard, four small apples, all the ingredients for S’mores, and four metal roasting forks.

  We take turns adding bigger and bigger logs, until the fire burns so hot that we take off our jackets. Sparks float upward. Our woods, so loud with birdsong and squirrel chatter and road noise during the day, is absolutely silent tonight. The snow dripping off the trees like meringue muffles everything, even the sound of the fire and of our own breathing. We’re protected in this valley, this big valley, the namesake of our little farm, at least for tonight.

  I launch into a round of “Silent Night,” and the boys join in, but not for long. When we get to the part about the “round yon Virgin,” Owen starts snickering, Luke follows suit and Will asks what a virgin is anyway and what’s so funny, the infant with holes in it?, and the song falls apart. It must be time to eat.

  We made it through this year, I silently pray, barely—please let us make it through the next one, too.

  Around the circle are stumps cut flat long ago by someone else with a chain saw, and they are good stools. I make a show of pulling out our red-and-green, gold-flecked holiday tablecloth with a flourish, fold it in thirds, and drape it over the biggest stump. Our holiday table.

  As soon as there are coals I unpack our supplies and dole them out. Everyone gets a hot dog to roast, and I line up the buns on the stump table and set out the ketchup, mustard, and apples.

  “We’re like the hoboes,” Owen says, sliding his soy dog onto his roasting fork and holding it over the fire. “Just free and out on the land.”

  Will leans back on his stump and looks up at the night sky. I look where he is looking and so does Luke and we see the Milky Way. The Big Valley is far enough away from the lights of town that this celestial pathway is often visible on cloudless nights like this one, especially in the winter.

  It isn’t late, only dinnertime, probably seven or seven-thirty, but it has already been dark for what seems like hours. The heat has made pink circles on Will’s cheeks, he’s taken off his hat, and his blond hair is sticking out from the static. It isn’t the North Star
or any particular constellation or a satellite that he sees when he looks up, but an entirely different kind of celestial being.

  “Santa’s up there right now,” he says, his voice filled with the magic of this instant, of Christmas, and of the fire he built himself but that is feeding all of us. Anything should be possible on such a night, shouldn’t it? Even having your youngest son, who will turn nine years old in less than a week, still believe in Santa Claus.

  I hold my breath and wait for his brothers to laugh at him, or say something sarcastic, or in some other way break the spell, but there is only the crackling sound of the fire, and the colored lights decorating our porch up on the hill, and the faraway stars like sequins sprinkled on this purple velvet sky floating a million miles above our heads.

  I’ve hung the boys’ Christmas stockings on the fireplace mantel, but they are pretty empty. Gift cards I got for free from my bank by cashing in the points I’ve earned all year by paying for gas and groceries with my debit card, some candy, and a few music CDs I burned from my computer.

  “What’s a hobo again?” Luke asks. He’s eating his Rocky hot dog with his gloves on, and there is ketchup smeared on his nylon fingers.

  “You know, guys who are poor, but they don’t know they’re poor,” Owen says. “They don’t have cars or houses or jobs or anything, so they go around having adventures and camping out and stuff.”

  I look through the trees and up the hill toward our house. It seems so far away, but I know it’s right there. I’ve left the porch light on. Inside, the house smells wintery-good, like the pine cleaner from my mother and the pine needles from our fresh-cut tree.

  A few feet from the Christmas stockings, on top of a stack of bills on the sewing-machine table I use for a desk, is a legal-sized envelope addressed to me. The seal has been broken and there is a ten-page document inside. It looks harmless enough, but for all the destruction it contains, it might as well be a mail bomb.