Uses for Old Christmas Trees
Like every year, Lyle set up a stand to sell Christmas trees at the strip mall–his last fling at self-employment before he went to delivering for the oil company through winter. On the sidewalk that fronted the gift shop, the florist and the hardware, down by the supermarket’s display of corn stalks and half-frozen poinsettias, the Businessmen’s Association had set up a booth to collect for the victims of the disaster up in New York. The lady who manned the table had brought her boy with her for the morning and it was not long before the child, who looked to be in the first year or two of school, had gravitated to Lyle’s rows of Christmas trees. What had been a display of cut trees on a supermarket parking lot, suddenly became a forest with its first wild inhabitant. Lyle wasn’t great with kids, but he was okay with wild creatures, so he pretended not to see the shy deer flitting among the green columns. After a bit, he noticed a red Indian stalking his customers and himself, savage cunning sticking out like its ears. The brave had taken up a loose fir branch, which transformed, with a piece of binder twine, into a bow. When Lyle returned from loading a tree into the trunk of a customer’s car, the bow had gone to stabilize the dome of a native wickiup, additional twigs and branches miraculously sealing out a raging blizzard, while the parka-wearing inhabitant sat out the storm on thick skins, which still showed some resemblance to old burlap at the edges.
An inquisitive nose at his elbow nearly startled Lyle, as he made ready to pull a stump through the net-bailer. He said, "Watch this," to the boy, who raised his harpoon and lanced the whale as it passed his kayak and then assisted to haul it up on the beach. Lyle contributed a yard of the netting on spec and took the whale off to the customer’s boat. Later in the course of the morning, he noticed that giant spiders had strung their webs for the unwary between two trees. A spear-wielding warrior advanced to battle the monsters.
The supermarket drew a good crowd and Lyle was pretty busy, showing trees to householders intent on deciding which of two hundred pretty near identical trees was most perfect for them. He did have occasion to notice that the taller, more expensive row of trees had been transformed into rockets, which took off with amazing regularity. Lyle could hear the whoosh and roar of lift-offs on missions of military and diplomatic import among the stars and the whistling crash of vengeful destruction upon the heads of deserving enemies.
The morning wore away and it became time for a man from the supermarket, which was doubling the donations, to take over the collection booth from the boy’s mom, who seemed to work in one of the other shops. She had been keeping an eye on her son’s activity among the trees and had even come over once, just to be sure that Lyle didn’t mind being invaded like that. "Heck, no," he’d told her. "Just so long as he don’t shoot no spotted owls." She had smiled and gone back to her booth.
But she finally came and called to the boy, "Travis, c’mon! Time to go home."
From among the fat-bellied giants, who had been unable to catch him, the swift runner bounded to a halt in front of his mother. "Mom, we ought to get this one tree. C’mere, I’ll show you." He grabbed his mother’s hand and tugged her into the lane where the tallest of the forest giants resided. Lyle ignored some browsing customers and followed along.
"I don’t think so, honey," his mother told the boy after glancing at the price tag. "Let’s look at one of the ones on the other side. Lyle himself was always surprised at the price of trees.
"That’s a pretty tall tree," he said. "Think you’d be able to stand it up in your house?"
"Well...," the lady said.
"Sure!" her boy cried.
"Cause I was going to say, it got some deer damage here, around the middle and on the other side, and it looks to have been crowded in the plantation." He pointed expertly at the dense tree. "See how it died back where it touched the ones to either side in the row? Between the damage and the price, I’m not going to be able to sell this one, so I’d let you have it for what you’d pay for a decent tree over the other side." He jerked his thumb at the little trees by the entrance. The lady looked confused, but the boy latched possessively onto a branch.
"Really? You’re sure?" she asked uncertainly.
"I’m going to have half a load to haul back to the lot behind my place," Lyle told her. "Some I’ll sheer off and lay the branches over first-year cuttings of rhody and azalea. The rest I’ll eventually feed into the shredder and use the chips to mulch beds. You really would be doing me a favor by taking it off my hands." It never even occurred to Lyle to set one up in his house and decorate it. He reached in among the branches to grab the trunk.
"Besides, what do I need it for? To me it’s just another old tree."
appeared December, 2001