A Christmas Tale

A Christmas Tale

Most kids in my Driver’s Ed. Class don’t believe me when, cruising on the old Stage Road, I watch and wait and finally point to a scarred track that served as a driveway and say, “We used to live up there.” They keep their eyes on the road – no demerits there – and nod, driving on, through Mountain Meadows and to the narrowing of the road that marks the Barnard – Royalton line. They turn around in the space cut out by countless town trucks and head back towards Woodstock.

“Slow down here, and pull over – by those mailboxes, there.” I say. I point again. “We lived up there for five years. We used to snowmobile down to the car every morning in the winter, and back up every night after school.”

The kids all look at the hill and squint, trying to see what I see. They can’t, of course, see the A-frame where my wife and I and an assortment of eight dogs and cats lived. Once in a while, one of them will say, “Oh yeah, I see it, not a bad place,” but I know they’re humoring me.

I see it though, and watch memory-movies of innumerable small adventures played out there. The clearest of these are winter stories, and the clearest of all took place one Christmas before we had the house fixed up to live in permanently.

We bought the place with some money my wife’s father left her; she wanted to but something he would have liked, and she found and bought a run-down A-frame hunting camp on three acres, “more or less”, as the realtor said. The plusses were the structural soundness, the presence of electric lines already in place, and the snug insulation. The minuses would fill enough paper to be three times the length of our warranty deed.

We began spending weekends there, camping out with a roof over our heads. Naturally, we began bringing our dog with us; Phoebe loved the chance to run free and bark and not bother any neighbors. She would frollick around us as we very seriously walked the property lines, marking our corners with orange spray paint.

We’d left our puppy home on these occasions; she was a stray dog when we took her in, and we’d only had her a few months, so we didn’t want to bring her to a place where she might get loose in the unfamiliar and unbounded acres. One Christmas Eve, however, we decided to bring her along.. We’d spent the morning packing the car with food, blankets, clothes, and, in a concession to modern life, a small black and white TV. “I’ll carry it’” my wife said, “and you can walk the puppy up on the leash.”

We parked next to the mailboxes and started out trek up the hill. Surprisingly, there were no snowmobile tracks and we had to make our way through knee deep and then waist deep snow. Phoebe scampered and barked as usual; the puppy, Tarso, strained at her leash and barked back. My wife, being younger and, I observed while catching my breath, the beneficiary of being a non-smoker, was making much better progress than I. Tarso finally pulled me up the last few yards of driveway and right into a snow-covered stump. Over I went and she was gone, her leash trailing behind. “Oh no,” I heard from the porch, as my wife put down the TV. “The dogs, both of them, just took off!”

After a few useless minutes of calling for them, we gave up and opened up the house, started a fire in the woodstove, and went through the motions of having dinner. I plugged in the TV; we ate hamburgers and watched “The Snow Goose” on PBS channel 41 and felt very sad for three reasons, two of them loose in the woods.

My wife went out into clear, cold night and called the dogs’ names over and over: “Phoebe-Tarse, Phoebe-Tarse, come on…”

Finally we buttoned up the stove for the night and signed off with channel 41. Christmas Eve wasn’t very merry for us without the dogs lying next to the stove, making doggy-dreaming sounds.

Suddenly we heard something out on the porch. “It’s Feebles,” my wife said, and so it was; she was exhausted, covered with wet snow, and shivering uncontrollably. We let her in, dried her off, fed her, and were ready to call it a night when I got an idea. “What does Phoebe usually do when we tie her up?” I asked. Phoebe barked, answering my question. Out we went, and sure enough, it wasn’t long before she was making enough noise to wake up everyone in Barnard.

“How long are you going to leave her out there?” my wife asked, pulling the covers over her ears. “As long as it takes,” I answered. “Takes for what?” “You’ll see, or rather you’ll hear.”

I don’t know when Christmas arrived for anyone else that year, but for us it came just after midnight, almost right on schedule. Phoebe stopped barking, and soon there was scratching on the door. “I don’t think that’s Santa,” said my wife. “Nope, just your Christmas present,” I replied, and in came a very cold puppy. “Phoebe barked her in like radar,” I said. “Now I can get them both in here and we can all finally get some sleep.”

“Merry Christmas,” she said into the puppy’s ear, “and don’t you ever do that again!”

The house is gone now – it burned down about a year after we sold it, and we now live in relative civilization – a paved driveway, carport, and a four-wheel drive vehicle. The dogs are still around, but we all miss something about our life up on the hill.

“Put your signal on and pull back onto the road. Let’s get back before the period’s over,” I say to my student driver. “Okay, Mr. Jude,” they answer. “Okay.”