Lydie met us out front and invited us inside for cookies and chocolate milk. “Too warm for hot chocolate,” she said. Joe grabbed two cookies and started for the stairs. The two Hughes boys were already thumping around overhead.
“Sit down and eat those,” I told him, “or leave them here. I won’t have you getting crumbs in the carpets.”
But Lydie waved him off. “Let him go play. He won’t do any harm that hasn’t already been done.” She looked at Joe, and he ran off to find Bobby and Gene. Debbie watched him go, trying to decide whether to chase after him or not. The thought of those boys was too much for her, though, and she sat down at the table while Lydie poured her some chocolate milk. “Make yourself comfy,” Lydie said, and pushed the plate of cookies my way.
I took a pinwheel for myself and let Debbie choose a big sugar cookie in the shape of a snowman. It was clear that the treats had been arranged on this Christmas platter especially for us, but instead of appreciating the gesture I felt a stab of resentment that Lydie’s life was collected enough that she could remember to do such things, whereas mine was so full of money concerns and worry that I hadn’t even remembered we’d need a Christmas tree.
“You and your brother both like those sugar cookies, huh?” Lydie said, watching Debbie. My daughter looked back at her with big eyes, like she’d never seen her before. She set the cookie down on the table and put her hands around the glass of milk. Lydie gave a big sigh and turned to me. “The trees don’t look too good this year, Hazel. I’m almost embarrassed to have you take one. It’s this odd weather. The needles are going brown, not sure what season it is.”
“Doesn’t matter,” I told her. “I’m just grateful for your thinking of us. If you hadn’t called, I don’t know. I guess we would’ve put some tinsel on a lamp and called it a tree.”
Debbie gave me a horrified look.
“Your mother’s just joking,” Lydie said, pushing the cookie plate toward her.
I looked down at the one still on the plate in front of me. I felt sick to my stomach, afraid Lydie was going to say something about how awful it must be, the first Christmas alone. People kept saying things like that—How terrible, and, Oh, you poor thing. Or: Oh, those poor dears—talking about Joe and Debbie. The poor fatherless dears. I hadn’t once cried in front of them, not even at the funeral. I didn’t want to start now.
But Lydie only talked about the weather for as long as it took for Debbie to eat a second cookie, and when we went outside again, George was waiting. He held a saw at his side, its teeth dull in the cloudy light. In his other hand was a cigarette smoked halfway down to the filter. He stubbed it out on the sole of his shoe as soon as he heard the door, and I was surprised by the good balance he had, swinging his foot up to put out the cigarette without needing to lean against anything. There was a natural grace about it, like a squirrel leaping from one tree to another and immediately falling still.
Joe came charging through the door, cheeks flushed, and the three of us followed George toward the hill slanting up behind the house. As soon as we’d gone a dozen yards, Joe was running. Debbie went chasing after him, her legs kicking out to the sides and her arms flying in that awkward way she ran when she was a child, like she had never quite gotten a handle on it.
That left George and me to walk alone over the grass. For a long minute, the only sound was our feet pressing into the earth. There weren’t any birds. Joe and Debbie shouted something to each other, and then it was silent again. At last the quiet got too heavy, and I said, “It’s kind of you to help us out. I bet Lydie didn’t give you much of a choice in the matter.”
He shrugged. “It’s not any bother. You’ve got enough else to take care of, this time of year.” He squinted at my son and daughter running over the grass. “They’re doing all right.”
“Yes,” I agreed.
We walked on in silence another few minutes. Joe called out that they’d found a good one, and we went over that way. When we got up close, I saw that it had an uneven top and a big empty patch on one side.
“It’s kind of ugly,” Joe said, “but the rest are, too.”
“Joseph Wisniewski,” I said sharply.
George was standing with the saw dangling at his side. “We can find you a better-looking tree than that,” he said. “Not that you chose a bad one, son, but you’re right. These trees here, they’re Scotch pines, and they haven’t been good this year.”
“Have you got better ones?” Joe asked.
George gestured at a stand of trees behind the barn. “There’s some young white pines growing back there. They’re doing better than the farmed ones. It’s shadier, so they’re about the only ones that don’t look ready to keel over.” He glanced at me right after he said that and gave a short nod. It was to acknowledge his mistake in speaking lightly of death. But he didn’t go rigid with embarrassment or try to apologize, and I was relieved to have the moment pass by.
“So we can go cut down one of those trees?” Debbie asked, sensing adventure.
“Sure you can.”
Turning to George, I said, “Won’t it bother Lydie? I don’t know how I’d feel about someone poaching my woods.”
“I don’t see why it should bother her any, since it was my idea. Might be different if you went in there with an ax in the middle of the night.”
I bit my lip and looked at Joe and Debbie, considering whether or not to accept the offer. It didn’t seem quite right—like pulling the boards off the front of someone’s house for firewood. But Joe was antsy, ready to tear off into what must have looked like a forest to him, and Debbie had her hands clasped like she was getting ready to beg God for the greatest gift of her life. They knew there was something just a bit outside the law in the idea, and that made it all the more appealing. “All right,” I said at last. “But you will wait for Mr. Hughes to point out the tree he has in mind.”
The four of us set off down the rows of brown trees. Now that we’d decided to search for something better, the Scotch pines looked even worse, patchy and skinny. I didn’t want one of them standing in my living room. My children had gone through enough in the last few months and the least they deserved, I reasoned, was a good-looking tree, one with soft green needles and sturdy branches and a nice straight top to set the angel on.
We walked in the direction of the barn. It looked the same as ours from the outside, a faded red gone to gray around the bottom, with a corrugated tin roof and a big door that slid open on the side. I could picture what was inside, too: the tractors and combine, the harrow and the cultivator and the manure spreader. There would be bales of hay, bags of seed and fertilizer, rakes and shovels, a Pincor push lawn mower.
I hadn’t once been in our barn since Karol’s funeral, not since the day the transport trucks came and took away all the livestock. Slowly, the children and I had been reclaiming the house, reconfiguring its space for a family of three. But I feared the dark interior of the barn, the crater that was left in Karol’s absence.
Now here we were with George Hughes, and if anyone had seen us, they’d have thought we were a family, normal as could be. We trekked back into the little woods and picked out a tree, and George lay down on the ground to work at it with the saw. I was standing above, holding the trunk still, when my glance fell on him and then darted away. But I looked again, at his eyes this time, a long look that held while the children stood dancing around. Something was suddenly different; we recognized it and they didn’t. Like burying a seed in the ground and not knowing what kind it is, but knowing for certain that it will grow.
The winter after Karol died was the longest I’d ever known. In the mornings, I’d stand on the porch watching Joe and Debbie as they went down the lane to catch the bus. It was so cold that I could see my breath, but I’d stay out there, anyway, watching them turn onto the road and then disappear from view. A few minutes passed and then I’d see the bus drive by. Even still, I remained there until my teeth were chattering and my toes and fingers had lost all
feeling. I liked being on the porch because it was a summer place, a spring and autumn place—standing there in the winter, it was stripped of memory.
Eventually, I’d go in and warm my hands in the dishwater as I cleaned up the breakfast mess. I’d collect dirty laundry from the bedrooms, sweep and vacuum, get some ironing done. I was trying to keep busy because I knew that unless I called Rena or somebody else, I’d be surrounded by silence until the afternoon. Some days, I did call my sister and either she would come down or I’d drive up to her place. Every week or so, we went into town together and that was enough to keep the day from collapsing in on me, to keep the weight of the house settled firmly on its foundations rather than on my chest, as it often felt.
The problem was that winter was always a slow time on the farm, and you had to work to fill the hours. Karol and I hadn’t had this time to ourselves for a long while—until this year, I’d always had either Debbie or Joe at home. But we’d still found more hours alone during the winter than in any other season, and so the cold weather had always done for our marriage what spring did for the earth: it renewed us. When the children were young enough to still take naps, Karol and I would find ourselves going to bed at the same time, undressing quickly and jumping under the covers, climbing our feet up each other’s legs, the toes frozen under the chilly flannel. We’d make love quickly and then lie together in the warm bed, making use of the hour or two before naptime was over.
We also spent time doing other things we didn’t do much in the busier seasons. For my part, I socialized: Rena would come by, or Lydie, or any of the other neighbors, and we would piece together quilts or embroider pillowcases. Karol took up a hobby. One day during the third or fourth year of our marriage, he came home from a trip into town with a set of watercolors he’d purchased. I didn’t know what to think. It was spring when he got them and they sat unused for months in a desk drawer, but the next winter, he took them out and began teaching himself to paint. It became a routine: after feeding the cows and hogs, he’d wrap himself up in scarves and don another sweater and then retreat upstairs with his paints and paper. On the coldest days, he’d come down every half hour or so to let his fingers thaw out. Then he’d go back upstairs to continue this work that no one had asked for, work that he did only because there was a part of him that was tuned to the frequency of beauty rather than of usefulness, and this was the only way he had of working it out.
I was interested in his paintings and I wanted to love them, but I never did. He painted only landscapes, and those landscapes were too recognizable for my taste: they were the same views I had out the windows of the house, or standing in the yard looking south or east. I could appreciate the way he captured clouds and weak winter light, but I would have rather seen something less familiar. “Why don’t you paint the sea?” I asked him. “Why don’t you paint a castle on a hill?” He just shook his head irritably. “I don’t know those places,” he’d reply. “I can’t picture them, Hazel.”
Of course he didn’t know them, and I didn’t, either. But I wanted to see how he’d imagine a place he had never seen, and probably never would. Viewing his latest painting of our farm in winter, I’d feel myself growing impatient at the idea that he didn’t use those lonely hours upstairs for some greater purpose. I didn’t have any talent for painting or music or anything more creative than needlework, but I was certain that if I did, I wouldn’t have wasted it contemplating the same cloudy sky, the same bleached barn, all those things I’d been seeing every day through every year of my life.
The truth was that I was disappointed in Karol’s paintings. They were windows into his soul, yet it turned out that what they revealed was completely familiar. I’d asked him about his earlier life, and he always said it wasn’t all that different from ours—he’d grown up on a dairy farm in southern Wisconsin, where his mother worked as both dairymaid and cook in the household of a cousin or second cousin, I was never sure which. Karol’s Polish father had died after being pitched from a horse. Karol had gone out to work when he was thirteen years old and kept moving for years, doing the same work as he did now, he said—the only difference was that he’d never before owned the land he plowed. To me, it didn’t seem the same at all. He’d moved all over Wisconsin and Illinois, and I knew he’d picked up odd jobs in other industries as well. He’d even lived in Chicago for short stretches. Surely his past offered up more exotic things than he was painting.
But if he had images stored up from this previous period, they didn’t come out in his pictures. All those hours upstairs, and he managed to produce only a perfect mirror of the view outside the window, just as gray and flat, just as limited. I was in some of them, a tiny figure standing in a bottom corner with her back turned, a vague small shape walking down the road in the middle distance.
One morning at the end of winter, George stopped by. It was laundry day, and I had a basket of sheets and towels to hang up on the line. I’d woken Joe and Debbie early that morning to make sure they’d have time to strip the bedding and take it down to the cellar before running off to catch the bus to school. Debbie dumped her clothes by the door on the porch floor and came into the kitchen, where I was frying some eggs. “I can’t lift it,” she whined, and then Joe ran in complaining that she had taken his Flash comic book, which she declared wasn’t true. I hadn’t gotten any plates on the table or put the bread in to toast; I had lunches to gather, and we were out of wax paper; Debbie couldn’t find the sweater she wanted to wear, the green-and-white one that didn’t itch, the one Iris had given her for Christmas. I was near screaming, and it wasn’t yet eight in the morning. “Joe, you help your sister,” I told him. “I’ve got a full day of washing ahead of me, and you’ll do your part if you want to have any sheets to sleep on tonight.” They went off, grumbling. I slid the eggs onto a plate. I pulled two thin towels from a kitchen drawer and wrapped up the bologna sandwiches. Somehow they caught the bus and I got through the morning.
By the time George peeled off the main road in his truck and came rolling up the lane, I’d already washed the sheets and was hanging them on the line. It was mid-February and somewhere about ten degrees above freezing. The snow that remained in the elbows of trees was melting, leaving darkened streaks down the trunks. No green had emerged, but that melt was the first indication of spring, and it was sunny enough and there was a good enough breeze that I thought most of the laundry would be dry by sundown. In other words, I was feeling good—happier than I had been in months. All the cold days of winter, the silence of the house had been like my mother when she would go into her dark periods; I’d felt as if I were tiptoeing around it, trying not to get noticed in case it turned its anger upon me. Now the silence was something different, and that difference was good.
George and Lydie lived a half mile away down Sumner, on the other side of a small hill with their barn and the stand of trees in between, so even in the winter, their house wasn’t clearly visible. But the truck was coming from the direction of town, and I didn’t expect it to turn up my lane. When it did, I dropped a pillowcase in the basket and started across the grass.
A moment later George stepped down out of the driver’s seat and pulled a cigarette from behind his ear. “Laundry day, is it?”
My hands were cold from handling the wet sheets. I tucked them under my arms and stood back on my heels. “First good-weather day we’ve had in a while, so I thought I’d make use of it.”
“Lydie’s telling me we need to take down the storm windows and put up the screens. I told her let’s wait and see.”
“It’s early yet.”
“That’s right.”
We stood quietly for a moment, and I waited for George to tell me his business. I’d seen him several times during the winter, but the two of us had never once been alone since the day we cut down the tree. Once a week or so, Lydie would bring her stitching to my house and we’d work together as we chatted. Or I might go to their place and we’d eat dinner together while the children were at sc
hool, and then Lydie and I would watch As the World Turns and afterward maybe play a few hands of gin rummy. If Rena was there, she’d talk George into sitting down to play euchre, but he often seemed to have business elsewhere, outside or in the barn. Sometimes the memory of that afternoon in December would come to me, but it was like the flash of light off a mirror when a person’s playing tricks, brilliant and bewildering: Joe and Debbie skipping around; the stillness of the woods; the sharp smell of pine resin when the saw’s teeth bit into the trunk. If George ever thought about that moment, he didn’t let it show.
Now, he felt around in his pocket for matches. “I was driving back from town,” he said, and finding the matches, he pulled one from the box and lit it. “Saw you out here from down the road and thought I’d come by and see how you’re doing.”
So he had no reason for stopping by, after all. I was happy for it, in spite of myself. “Doing all right,” I said. “Glad that spring’s finally coming.”
He nodded. I watched him shake the box of matches and look around, having run out of things to say. The matchbox was dark blue and had the white outline of a running horse, the same kind we had in the house, the same kind that Karol had always kept in his pocket. Watching George tuck it back into his jacket, I saw my husband in his place, saw him pausing for the few minutes it took to smoke a cigarette before heading out for the morning’s work, saw myself watching from the kitchen window and wondering what he was thinking about just then, what he thought about all day as he rode the tractor back and forth in even rows over the fields.
“It’s been a spell since we’ve heard from you,” George said.
I didn’t mention that I’d seen Lydie only a few days before. She’d called ahead—she always called ahead—and then come over in the morning with a plate of cinnamon rolls. We’d talked about Joe’s third-grade teacher, a stern and weather-beaten old woman Gene had had a few years before. I was getting notes sent home about Joe acting up in class, and Lydie assured me that it was nothing to get worked up about, that Mrs. Toddy ran a tight ship. I’d been happy in Lydie’s company, grateful that she’d pushed all the silence out of the house. I hadn’t thought about George at all.
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