Break
Katherine Schaefer
Ben and I waited until after dark, which in mid-December arrived by late afternoon. It’s not like we were habitual thieves, but we knew what we were doing was wrong. Stealing. Still, it was fun, in a way—the two of us having this thing to do, just my brother and me. There was a grimness to our task, too, because of why we were driving around the countryside looking for a Christmas tree to chop down and bring home.
Ben drove the pickup, Dad’s turquoise GMC, which I guessed was Ben’s truck now, by default. He was the only person who drove it, anyway. At fifteen, Ben just had a learner’s permit, but since I was seventeen and a licensed driver riding with him, that part of it was legal, at least. Ben and I had never gotten along; the middle two kids of four siblings, always bickering, pushing off each other, sometimes out-and-out fighting. After the accident, everything else had changed. Maybe things could change between my brother and me too.
I thought I remembered some pine trees growing along the roadside just past Cedar Mills. There were none on our farm, or anywhere on the flat, plowed fields nearby. It got hilly around Cedar, and since I was pretty sure there were some evergreens on those slopes, we set out in that direction. The road to Cedar Mills was the same one we took to visit our grandparents, who lived in a little house in the village where they ran the municipal liquor store. We weren’t planning to stop in on them this time. They wouldn’t approve of our tree-stealing idea—not that we would ever have told them about it.
A couple miles south of town, we came to the intersection where our parents’ car had crashed in October. We’d driven through it many times in the past two months, since not only was it on the way to Cedar Mills, but also to the hospital in Litchfield where we’d traveled daily to visit Mom. She’d remained unconscious in intensive care for three weeks before she died. The only time we’d bypassed that fateful intersection had been the night of the crash when our grandparents had come to wake us up to tell us about our father’s death and then drive us to the hospital to see our mother. Grandpa and Grandma had been in the front seat. My younger siblings and I were in the back, Jeannie between Ben and me. We were crying, at least for the first mile of the drive, until our grandmother couldn’t bear it anymore and shushed us. I had reached across Jeannie, who was huddled close to me, and touched Ben’s shoulder. He let me touch him but turned his face away to look out the car window. After a minute, I removed my hand.
That first night on our way to the hospital, the most direct route would have taken us through this same intersection. Although I didn’t realize it until later, our grandfather took the long way around to avoid it. The wrecked cars would still have been there, pushed off to the side where they’d come to rest in the ditch. Bits of broken glass and metal on the road would have crunched under our tires.
As we drove through the intersection now, Ben and I fell silent. The plowed fields surrounding it were covered by snow, which failed to soften the harshness of this X imposed on a white plane. I knew time had passed since the accident—there was the presence of snow, the quest for a Christmas tree to prove it—but right there, in that place, I felt fixed in time, pinned to the spot by that X.
There was no cross by the side of the road, no plastic flowers, nothing at all to mark the scene. People out there didn’t do that kind of thing in those days. Four people had been killed there, not only our parents, but the wife and son of the other driver as well. No tears flowed as we drove past the crash site. Tears had become unpredictable after my father’s funeral in October and then again after my mother’s in November. I still cried—we all still cried—but when we did, we did it separately.
Maybe I should have said a silent prayer every time I passed through the intersection, but I didn’t. Instead I worked to empty my mind so that I would not imagine the scene—how it looked, sounded, or felt when the two cars collided. I stared straight ahead. My efforts were in vain: I saw it all in my mind’s eye as vividly as if I had been there with them in the car at the moment of impact. I agonized over whether my father had felt any fear or pain before he died. Whether my mother had ever had any conscious awareness of how not only her life, but all of our lives, had been shattered in that instant.
Ben, too, looked straight ahead as we drove through the crossroads. I had no idea what my brother was thinking. He and I had never communicated very well before the accident, and after it, we barely talked at all. Maybe it was just too hard for both of us.
Dad had always been the one to bring home the tree, hiding it in a shed until a few days before Christmas. Only after we kids started begging, worried that we’d have no tree at all, would he finally produce it. Voilà, he’d carry a fragrant evergreen into the house with the air of a magician pulling a rabbit from his hat. Our holiday hero.
This year, I thought maybe we’d skip having a tree altogether, but as Christmas drew closer, I changed my mind. Our older brother had come home from college for Dad’s funeral, and again three weeks later for Mom’s, but then he’d gone back to take his finals and salvage what he could of the semester. I figured the job of acquiring a Christmas tree fell to me. It was my turn to be the hero. But I needed Ben’s help: to cut it down, drag it to the truck, load it up. For this one night, this single task, we were a team.
I’m not sure why I thought we should steal one. It’s not like we couldn’t afford to buy a tree. There was a wad of bills stuffed in an envelope in Dad’s desk drawer. People had sent a little money along with the sympathy cards after the accident. My grandfather said to write a note inside each card saying how much the person gave, and then keep the cash somewhere safe. It had come to about eight hundred dollars all told, but I guessed there was only about half that much left by now. We kids used it for our school lunch tickets and other stuff we had no other means to pay for yet. Grandpa was handling the estate for us, but he said it was all such a mess it would be a while until he got the money thing straightened out. He and Grandma kept tabs on us by phone and occasional visits, but they hadn’t moved into our house on the farm. I’d turn eighteen in another couple of months, and then I’d be a legal adult and could be my younger brother and sister’s guardian. That’s how my grandparents explained it, anyway, which was fine by me. I didn’t want them moving in, sleeping in my parents’ bed, telling us what to do. As a matter of fact, I didn’t want anybody telling me what to do anymore. Maybe that’s why I came up with the tree-stealing plan; I was feeling kind of lawless these days.
On Highway 7, just north of Cedar Mills, the snowy hillsides were dotted with dark evergreens. “Let’s try here,” I said. Ben parked on the shoulder and we got out, grabbing an ax and a saw from the pickup bed. The snow was deeper than it looked, up to my knees, but I was hell bent. I tramped through it, heading for the nearest tree. The closer we got, the bigger and bushier it looked, more like an overgrown shrub than a real tree. True, it was basically conical in shape, but now I saw it wasn’t really like a Christmas tree at all.
“What do you think?” I said to Ben, suddenly doubtful. “This one?”
“Looks awful big to me,” Ben said. “Kind of bushy.”
“Yeah. I guess it’s not right.” It dawned on me there was more than one kind of evergreen. Words like spruce, pine, and fir popped into my head.
We trudged back to the pickup, matching our steps to the holes we’d made in the crusted snow on our way out. Back in the truck, I felt colder than I’d been outside, my jeans wet to the knees. But I wasn’t about to give up. “Let’s drive a little farther. Maybe there’s some more Christmassy trees down the road.”
But the farther we went, the more I saw that nothing was right. They were all too tall, too wide, too shrubby, too something that was not what a real Christmas tree should be. As we got closer to Hutchinson, the big town to the east, there were trees here and there that looked like possibilities, but those too were all wrong. For one thing, they looked like someone had planted them intentionally, either in long, straight rows, or intentionally placed at the end of a driveway. Some were even decorated with colored lights. I didn’t want to steal someone else’s Christmas tree. I’d just wanted to take one from the side of the road–a tree that didn’t really belong to anybody.
“This isn’t going to work,” I said. “What should we do? I don’t even know where they sell trees. Where did Dad ever get one?”
“I think there’s a place by the Hutch Bowl,” Ben said.
“Really? You think that’s where Dad used to go?”
“Probably.” Ben shrugged. “He always had league bowling in the winter.”
“I don’t even know where the bowling alley is,” I said. I’d gone there just once, on a date with a boy I liked named Kenny Lee. It hadn’t gone well. We didn’t even bowl, but only played a couple games of pool and foosball. I wasn’t good at either game—no snap of the wrist, Kenny said. On the pool table, he allowed me the first break, but I hit the cue ball so weakly that the stripes and solids barely moved. Kenny seemed disgusted, racked up the balls again and demonstrated how a break should be done, executing it with a cracking precision that sent the pool balls flying to every corner of the green surface. He never asked me out again.
Remembering how Kenny had struck those pool balls, sending them spinning away across the table, each in its own direction, I thought my siblings and I were like that too. Before the accident, we’d been racked up in formation, a single family unit, and then with one sharp blow, we’d broken, scattered into our own separate, spinning worlds. It wasn’t like I thought something so simple as a Christmas tree would bring us back together, but maybe it could be a start.
“I know where the bowling alley is,” Ben said now and drove us straight there. Right next to the Hutch Bowl was a tree lot. We picked one out, paid for it with some of the sympathy money and brought it home. I chose the biggest one they had. It was too tall to stand upright until Ben sawed off a foot of the trunk, and so wide it filled up half the living room. We had to push Dad’s recliner out of the way just to make room. It was the biggest tree we’d ever had and although it didn’t really succeed at filling the emptiness in our home that Christmas, it was better than nothing.
There was so much I didn’t know that year: the different varieties of conifers, the location of the Hutch Bowl, how to break pool balls to set up the table. Nor was I good at judging things: the depth of snow, the height of a ceiling, the length of time eight hundred dollars could last three teenagers. Most of all, I didn’t know how to talk to my brother or how to bridge the distance between us. Some of these things I have learned over the past forty years, some I have not. It’s been nearly a decade since I’ve seen or spoken to Ben; I guess that makes us officially estranged. Still, every year when I put up the Christmas tree, it is my brother I think of—Ben and me, together—driving Dad’s pickup down the dark, snowy road to Cedar Mills.
Katherine Schaefer
Katherine Schaefer writes creative nonfiction and fiction. Her essay “Ring,” published in Tampa Review 55/56, was named a Notable Essay in Best American Essays 2019, and her essay “Edna, With Her Mouth,” winner of the 2016 Hunger Mountain Creative Nonfiction Prize, was also a Notable Essay in Best American Essays 2018. Katherine’s writing also has appeared in Zone 3, Hot Flash Fiction, The Matador Review, The Talking Stick, and Minnetonka Review, and has received grants and awards from the Minnesota State Arts Board, Key West Literary Seminar, and Lighthouse Writers Workshop.