As if he’d heard him, as if he understood, Arthur circled three times, squatted, and seemed to sigh.
Dave, meanwhile, began banging on the office door.
Eustache ignored Dave as he watched the deposit this dog was leaving in his yard.
Then he was watching two of the kids—the girl and the younger boy—start to hit each other. The other boy, the third boy, was taking notes, as if he were some kind of a reporter.
—
EUSTACHE PUT THEM in rooms six, seven, and eight. Tommy insisted on having a room for himself.
“Non,” said Eustache, as they left the office, “on na pas d’restaurant. Le restaurant est fermé.”
And no ice machine either.
So before they went to sleep, Dave put on his parka and boots and headed back into the storm. He opened the back of the car, worked the turkey out of the cooler, and set it down in the snow outside their bedroom door. He found a shovel leaning by the office door and covered the turkey with snow.
“It will be fine,” he said to Morley as he brushed the snow off his head. “No one will see it.”
—
WHEN THEY WOKE up the next morning—the morning of Christmas Eve—Morley and Dave went to the window together. They pulled open the curtains slowly and then looked at each other in horror. They could barely see the top of their car. As for the highway—the highway had disappeared. They weren’t going anywhere.
“We aren’t going anywhere,” said Dave, who had opened their bedroom door, then slammed it shut again—a drift as high as his knees was in danger of collapsing into their room.
Dave fought his way to the office and came back with some instant coffee powder in a paper cup.
“Coffee,” said Morley.
“And Cheezies,” said Dave proudly, holding up a large bag.
—
DAVE WENT TO the pay phone near the highway and managed to get through to his mother. He told her they weren’t going to make it for Christmas.
“She started to cry,” he said to Morley when he’d stomped back into the room. “She tried to put a brave face on it, but she was crying. I said she should go over to the Carvers’ or the MacDonnells’. She said she had told everyone we were coming. She said, ‘How can I possibly face them if you don’t bother to show up?’”
They spent the morning digging out the car, creating a mound of snow a good ten feet high in the process. Then they cleared a rough path to the highway. But the highway looked like a ski run.
Eustache joined them beside their snow pile and spat on the ground.
He peered down the road and muttered “Tabarnouche” before he scuffed back to his office.
—
BACK IN THE motel room, Dave rummaged through their luggage looking for something to eat. He was hungry. But there was nothing left, save a few salty crumbs in the bottom of the last chip bag. He imagined the motel office to be a place of plenty. A place with plenty of food and drink, with a fireplace and plenty of wood. At least we have the turkey, he thought sourly. And then he was seized by panic.
They had buried the turkey when they’d resurrected their car. The turkey was under the mountain of snow.
“Tabarnouche,” said Dave.
Dave retrieved the shovel and began to attack their snow pile—digging like a mountain guide after an avalanche.
It was Arthur who finally pawed his way through the far end of the mound and dragged the bird out. Arthur had bounced the bird fifty yards down the parking lot before Dave spotted him.
Eustache was watching the chase from the office window, a smile playing on his face for the first Christmas in years.
He appeared at their door twenty minutes later with a loaf of bread, a jar of peanut butter, and another bag of Cheezies.
“Thanks,” Dave said.
Tommy added Cheezies to his list of things he hated about this trip.
It was Sam, grade seven, the only person in the room still studying French, who looked up as Eustache was leaving. It was Sam who said, in a small but audible voice, “Merci.”
The old man looked at Sam sitting on the far side of the far bed and smiled for the second time in an hour.
An hour later, when he came back, it was Sam whom Eustache talked to.
“Si vous allez rester ici pour Noël, y’a des choses qu’il va vous falloir,” he said.
Sam nodded. Yes, if they were going to stay for Christmas, there were things they would need.
There was an awkward silence, then Sam screwed up his forehead.
“Peut-être un arbre?” he said.
“Alors,” said Eustache Boisclair, pointing at the door.
Sam stood up and put on his coat. He turned and looked at his parents.
“I’ll be back in a minute,” he said. “Monsieur Boisclair and I are going out to cut a Christmas tree.”
He was out the door before anyone could say anything.
They were gone an hour.
When Sam came back to the room he was beaming. His cheeks were red. “Come and see,” he said.
There was a pretty little fir tree leaning by the office door.
Sam ran past it and into the office. “Come on,” he said. “Come on.”
He led them around the reception desk and into the old dining room. The Formica tables were pushed against the walls. The chairs were stacked beside them. And Eustache Boisclair was on his hands and knees fiddling with the stove—an old propane affair that hadn’t been run for five years.
They never got it going.
But they had one of the great all-time Christmas dinners ever.
Everyone chipped in.
Tommy fetched wood from the woodlot behind the office.
Stephanie split the wood and built a fire in the dining-room fireplace.
Morley set up the dining room.
Sam stuck to Eustache like a shadow.
And Dave cooked the turkey.
He deep-fried it in corn oil in the motel’s backyard. He used a stockpot from the kitchen for the turkey and an industrial burner from Eustache’s shop to heat up the oil. Three minutes a pound. His first turkey boil.
Just before he lowered it into the oil, Dave asked Eustache, “What are we going to eat with it?”
Eustache looked at Sam and shrugged. “J’ai de quoi,” he said.
By the time they were ready to eat, the Formica tables Morley had pushed together were laden with food, miraculously produced from next to nothing. Eustache had unearthed a jar of Marie-Claire’s long-forgotten preserves, and in the absence of cranberries, Morley had fashioned a wild blueberry sauce.
They made a stuffing out of bread, bacon, and Beer Nuts.
There was a turnip they boiled and seasoned with orange soda. There was a big bowl of Cheezies. And, of course, the turkey, sitting on a platter at the head of the table, golden and crackling and strangely delicious.
They drank strong tea and Eustache’s homemade spruce beer.
For dessert, they passed around a plate of toffee that Tommy had boiled up using hundreds of little sugar packages.
At midnight everyone was still up. The trucker from Pisiquit had joined them. His name was Yvon and he spoke about as much English as Eustache. But they had moved well beyond language. Yvon had his feet up on the fireplace, playing a harmonica. Stephanie and Tommy were snuggled on the couch, their arms around each other, listening.
Out in the parking lot, Sam was sitting in the cab of Yvon’s truck, talking on his CB, a glass of Eustache’s homemade spruce beer resting on the dash.
And Eustache was sitting at the table with Dave and Morley, picking at the turkey, smiling.
At midnight Stephanie sat down beside her father.
“You look sad,” she said.
“I was thinking about your grandmother,” said Dave. “I feel like we let her down.”
Stephanie nodded.
“You wanted to make her happy,” said Stephanie. “That’s right,” said Dave. “And instead I made her sad.” Eustache Boisclair walked by
them and smiled at Stephanie. “Eh bien,” he said.
“We made him happy,” said Stephanie.
Dave shrugged. “It doesn’t count,” he said.
They sat quietly for a moment. And then Stephanie stood up. She said, “It should count. He was sad before we got here.”
“I guess you’re right,” said Dave.
Before he could say anything, Stephanie leaned over and kissed her father on the cheek. She said, “I’m going to bed.”
“I love you,” said Dave.
—
THEY MADE IT to Cape Breton the day after Boxing Day.
Margaret, Dave’s mother, greeted them at the door with cookies. They stayed four days. It was great fun. Like a second Christmas.
There was a steady stream of visitors through the house—neighbours and family. It was as if they had to see them with their own eyes, these hearty travellers.
“Yes,” Dave overheard Margaret saying to one of his cousins. “They drove. Through the worst blizzard in twenty years. Not one other car made it. I told them to turn back, but David wouldn’t hear of it.”
—
ON THEIR LAST night, while they were sitting watching the fire, Dave looked at Stephanie and said, “I wonder what Monsieur Boisclair is doing tonight.”
They were planning to stop by the motel on the way home, but it was late and they kept going.
“We’ll write,” said Dave.
And they will. Sam will send a postcard of the CN Tower, written in French, as soon as they get home. But Dave won’t write until June. Not until the sorry summer afternoon he opens the picnic cooler and finds what remains of the flattened rodent.
NO ONE IN God’s great creation gives themselves over to Christmas more than Morley’s neighbour Mary Turlington—to the season and the spirit behind it, to be sure, but not only to the season and the spirit: to the whole nine yards, to all the noise that surrounds Christmas.
“I’ve chosen my Christmas colour,” Mary announced triumphantly to her husband, Bert, one night last summer.
“I’m doing cinnamon this year.”
Notice it’s not “we.” Not “we are” doing cinnamon. For Mary Turlington, Christmas is a solo sport.
“We’ll need a copper tree,” she said to Bert a few days later.
And catch that shift: it’s an important distinction. Mary writes the score, but Mary expects her husband, Bert, to be in the band. By right of marriage, Bert is enlisted, inducted, and suited up.
Mary, who is taken up with and over by Christmas every year, became particularly focused on this Christmas at the end of November.
Until the end of November, Mary believed her mother and her sister and her sister’s husband and their four children and her brother and his kids were all coming to her house for Christmas.
But one by one her family had bailed. Her brother got a new job and couldn’t afford the time away. Her sister’s husband got sick. Her mother said, “I don’t know. I don’t know. If no one else is coming maybe I should stay home.”
Anyone else might have been disappointed. Anyone else so caught up in Christmas preparations might have fallen apart. What’s the point? they might have asked. I work so hard and no one cares.
Mary didn’t fall apart. Mary dug deeper.
“It means we can do things my way for a change,” she said to Bert.
Apparently, Mary, who had been all about commitment, had also been all about compromise.
“I thought I was going to have to do turkey again this year,” said Mary. “Emma’s so conservative on the question of turkey.”
On the question of turkey at Christmas, Bert felt pretty conservative himself. But he was conservative enough not to mention it.
Instead of being unsettled that her plans were unravelling, Mary was becoming unleashed. She was Mary, Unshackled.
“What do you think of henna?” she said to Bert one night.
“Who?” asked Bert.
“If we hennaed your hair,” said Mary, “think of how nice you would go with the copper tree.”
Mary had, apparently, shifted into some previously undiscovered Christmas gear. And Bert, who had always been delighted by his wife’s Christmas cheer, was beginning to feel something that was not delight. It was a bigger feeling than delight, a whirling sort of feeling.
Fear.
Bert was afraid Mary’s Christmas was about to overtake him. He felt like the Cadillac in that song about the little Nash Rambler.
“Beep, beep,” said Bert.
“What?” said Mary.
“Oh nothing,” said Bert.
—
AS CHRISTMAS GOT closer, Mary set out their collection of Christmas candles—a parade of little paraffin men and women in chipped red-and-yellow choir robes.
“I know they are cheesy,” she said, “but I love these more than anything.”
The candles had been in Mary’s family since before she was born. Mary’s parents had bought the choirmaster and his wife on their first Christmas together: a man and a woman singing their little paraffin hearts out. Mary’s mother added to the candle collection each time she had a child.
When her children married, Mary’s mother added wax figures for each new husband or wife. And then for each of the grandchildren. After fifty Christmases, there were now twenty-three candles that lived, eleven months of the year, wrapped in tissue at the bottom of a shoebox, and spent the holiday season marching along the mantel, the two original candles at the head of the paraffin parade.
Only one candle had ever been lit. When Mary’s sister’s first husband left her for his aerobics instructor, Mary’s mother removed his candle from the collection. She burned it in the front window on Halloween. Then she scraped what remained of the candle off the window frame, wrapped the little wax puddle in beautiful gold foil, and mailed it to the offending ex-husband the following Christmas.
Ever since then, the candles have assumed iconic status. Every Christmas, Mary’s mother picks up her candle and says, “Maybe, when I die, you could place mine on my coffin and light it.”
“We’ll never light them,” said Mary. “Never.”
—
MARY FOUND A local welder to make a copper tree. He came to the house to measure their living room in early December. “I’m going to use steel,” he said, “but it will be oxidized steel, so it will be copper-coloured. It will look sort of…sort of…” He was searching for the right word.
“Dead?” said Bert.
That was the night Mary told Bert she had settled on scallops for Christmas dinner.
“I am going to poach them in saffron,” she said, “so they will look nice with the tree.”
That was the moment that galvanized Bert. That was the moment he decided the time for action had arrived.
He was standing in his driveway when lightning struck. Not literally lightning, but close. There was a flash and a loud clap, and Bert jumped back, his hands flying up to protect his head. As he stood there, uncertain what had just happened, a giant set of fibreglass reindeer antlers fell out of the sky and planted themselves in the front lawn right beside him.
Bert stared at the vibrating antlers, thinking how ironic it would have been, given his current situation, to have been taken out by a giant Christmas decoration.
Then he looked up and spotted his neighbour Dave running down the sidewalk with his face covered in soot and his eyebrows singed.
“You’ll never believe what just happened,” said Dave, panting.
—
IT WAS OBVIOUS to Bert what had to be done. Mary needed to be distracted, or Christmas, as Bert knew and loved it, was going to be lost. If Mary’s family wasn’t going to show up and do the job, Bert needed someone else to take up the slack. Someone to preoccupy her. Someone who rubbed up against his wife a bit, the way her sister did.
“Hey,” said Bert. “Dave, good to see you.”
And that is why, two weeks later, at two o’clock on Christmas afternoon, Morley looked at her
husband across the mess of their living room and said, “If we’re going to get to the Turlingtons’ on time, we’d better start getting ready.”
Dave was standing by the couch in his pyjamas, knee-deep in wrapping paper. He was holding his present for Morley. It looked as if it had been wrapped by a small animal with no opposable thumbs.
“This is for you,” he said, holding out the package to Morley. He kicked his way toward her as if it was an October afternoon and he was kicking his way through a leaf-strewn park.
“I love you,” he said.
Sam, twelve years old and crawling through the paper toward the back of the tree like a caver, stopped dead and looked over his shoulder at his parents. “Will you two please stop talking like that in front of me? It’s inappropriate,” he said.
At two o’clock in the afternoon at Dave’s house, Christmas was still in full swing.
Next door, however, at the Turlingtons’ house, at Christmas Central, there was very little evidence that Christmas had ever happened.
The Turlington twins had already taken their presents back to their rooms and put things away in their drawers and cupboards. And while Sam dove under a pile of paper as if he was snorkelling, the Turlington twins, dressed in their matching Christmas sweaters, were at the dining-room table writing thank-you cards. Eighteen-year-old Adam was sitting on the sofa carefully folding wrapping paper and sorting it into two neatly labelled boxes: one marked RECYCLE and one marked REUSE. Mary was vacuuming, in a pair of gold kitten-heel shoes.
And now, these two different cultures were about to be brought under the same roof.
Dave and Morley, Sam and Stephanie, were heading up the Turlingtons’ walk.
—
AS THEY STOOD on the Turlingtons’ stoop, Morley turned and took Dave’s arm at the elbow.
“Best behaviour,” she said.
“Very best,” said Dave, nodding earnestly.
He meant it.
They were both thinking of other dinners at the Turlingtons’—of the competitive strain that seemed to hover between Dave and Mary, of the abrasive discussions, political and pedestrian.
Dave took a deep breath.
“Very best,” he said again as he reached out and rang the bell.
Mary opened the door. There was an uncomfortable beat before anyone said anything.
Christmas at the Vinyl Cafe Page 10