The Alpine Christmas by Mary Daheim Read Free Book Online

since we were kids,” he said in response to my invitation. “The parish council meets tonight. I wonder if I should prepare for it.”
    “Why? It’s not your parish.” Exasperation tainted my voice.
    “True.” He hesitated. “Father Fitz probably doesn’t hear half of what goes on anyway. He’s pretty deaf. Do you want me to bring the axe from the rectory woodshed?”
    “I’ve got Dad’s old Swede saw already in the trunk,” I said. “And some ropes and clippers, in case we see any good greens for a swatch.”
    Ben emitted a little sigh. “Dad’s old Swede … I didn’t know you kept that, Emma.”
    I knew Ben was picturing our dad sawing up the cord of wood we had delivered every fall to our home in Seattle’s Wallingford district. Dad never started cutting the wood until it had stayed on the parking strip for at least three days. Mom would nag at him, insisting that it would rain, or that somebody would trip over it and sue us, or that kids would steal it. I still remembered the smell of the freshly cut wood, usually hemlock with just enough cedar to provide some snap, fourteen-inch chunks, to fit our small fireplace.
    “I wonder if the big maple is still there,” I said, my mind staying in a tree mode. “We used to rake leaves until we dropped.”
    “Mom and Dad made us take down our tree house,” recalled Ben. “We never should have dropped water balloons on Mr. and Mrs. Peabody.”
    “That wasn’t so bad,” I noted. “What really riled Mom and Dad was when we threw Brewster Baxter out of the tree.”
    “It was Baxter Brewster,” corrected Ben. “Hell, he landed in one of those big piles of leaves. He wasn’t hurt—just rustled around and got dog poop in his hair.”
    We both laughed. I wondered if Teresa McHale was lurking in the rectory, listening to our reminiscences. I told Ben I’d pick him up in fifteen minutes. Nostalgia is best when shared, but it’s sometimes painful. The memories Ben and I had of our parents were wonderful, but there weren’t enough of them. They had died together, when a semitrailer jackknifed in front of them on the way home from Ben’s ordination. Dad was fifty-two; Mom was forty-nine. In the usual scheme of life expectancy, we could have had another thirty years to make memories.
    After lunch at the Burger Barn, it took us only five minutes to get to Alpine Falls, which is just up the highway from the town. The tree I had selected was about twenty yards from the river’s final cascade—far enough not to get drenched,though close enough to impair our hearing. The snow had stopped, but the air was chill and damp. I struggled over the rough ground in my boots, gesturing for Ben to watch his footing.
    “Here!” I yelled, pointing at the stately Douglas fir I’d adopted half a year ago.
    Ben sawed, while I clutched the trunk. When he finished, I sniffed euphorically at the cut he’d made. But before he could hoist the fir and carry it up the bank to the car, I motioned at a couple of small cedars. Ben waited while I attacked them with my clippers. There was no pine in sight, but I could pick up a couple of branches off the Christmas tree lot in town. Maybe some holly, too, I decided, and even a bit of blue spruce. That always made a cheery combination for a swatch.
    Gathering up a half-dozen branches, I saw Ben at the river’s edge. The waters roiled past him, the churning falls at his left, the snow-covered ground under foot, the great stands of evergreen marching up the mountainside. How different this must be for him from the hot, dry plateau in Arizona. Or the humid, lethargic delta of the Mississippi. How much did Ben really miss his roots here in the Pacific Northwest? My brother and I were city children, but never far from the forests and mountains and rivers and sea.
    Ben was bending over, presumably digging around in the rocks at the river’s edge. I smiled fondly. When we were young, he was always looking for a flat pebble that he could