Tidings. William Wharton
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and finger-winding the rubber-band-driven propeller, when Monsieur Boudine comes along the path up to us.
Actually, at that moment, I’m on a ladder trying to detach Ben’s airplane carefully from the high branches of an oak tree. As a result of bitter experience we always have a ladder and long stick up there with us. The stick has a forked V on the end of it to push gently up under the airplane and dislodge it. Trying to shake a fragile model plane out of a tree or pull it down through the branches can have disastrous effects.
In summer, we design and build our own, both gliders and power-driven. We’ve experimented with motor-driven planes, free-flight and U-control, but the noise, the smell of the gasoline, the thrust and speed of the machines weren’t what we wanted; our planes must be as much like birds as possible.
I’m up on our ladder with the stick, nudging the plane loose when Monsieur Boudine arrives. Ben is afraid of heights, so the really high hang-ups are usually for me. Finally I get just the right leverage and the plane comes fluttering down. Ben starts to run after it.
‘Wait a minute, Ben; let me down off this ladder first.’
Ben’s been holding the foot of our ladder so it won’t slip from the tree crotch where it’s wedged. I’m not too crazy about heights myself. I jump the last two rungs, walk over and shake hands with Monsieur Boudine.
I’m always uncomfortable with this man. Loretta is afraid of him and I understand why. There’s something wild there, something untamed, a slyness, secretiveness like a hunting animal. Loretta told me once he’s the archetype of what all women fear in all men, a genealogical throwback to a maleness which can’t be conditioned to society.
His family lives in the next village. He’s fathered nine children; seven girls and two sons. One of the sons, a really likable boy, would, every summer, give Ben and other children of the village, rides in an old-fashioned donkey cart. His name was Thierry but he was killed six months ago in a motorcycle accident.
When I first contacted Monsieur Boudine about our Christmas tree, I tried commiserating with him. The worst thing in the world I can think of is outliving any of our children. It’s ten times worse than what’s probably about to happen to us now.
Monsieur Boudine lifted his hat, a weather-beaten old-time brown felt hat with a light part where there was once a silk band. He wears it brim down, all the way round, so you can scarcely see his soft, deep-sunken, yellow-brown eyes. It’s as if he’s perpetually protecting himself from either the sun or a rainstorm.
He ran his hand over his full head of wavy gray hair and shook his head once, the way Pom Pom, his donkey, would shake off a single fly in his eye. Sometimes I think Monsieur Boudine’s feeble-minded, a fecund throwback of some kind. Lor might be right, she usually is. This head shake was his only response.
Mike claims Monsieur Boudine’s the original nature boy, knows every bush, tree, root, mushroom along all the paths through all the woods in the area. He spends entire days tromping alone through deserted countryside.
At this point, I can see Monsieur Boudine might know his plants, but he doesn’t have much idea what a Christmas tree’s all about. He’s dragging behind him a two-foot-high spindly pine spine that wouldn’t make a proper table ornament. He’s all smiles, for him. Most times his face is set in a passive, resistant mope, like a mule. He and Pom Pom are a natural pair.
I take the Christmas tree branch and try to act enthusiastic; Ben has turned away in total disgust. I try to give him some money but he declines because Pom Pom uses our fields. Uses is right. He ate the only sweet corn crop I’ve ever been able to grow and nibbled to bare sticks three young apple trees, two peach trees, an apricot and a cherry tree.
I take his olive branch of a tip to a pine tree. After all it is Christmas. But my mind is racing. Where can I get a genuine eight-to-ten-foot Christmas tree at this last moment? Can I con poor Ben on his birthday eve into a treenapping? It doesn’t seem fair, also he’s deathly afraid of the dark.
But, can I present a bush, a branch, a twig, as Christmas tree to our two daughters after transporting them six thousand miles, away from California and Arizona sunshine, their parties, their friends, their comfort and ease; dragging them unwillingly into this cold, winter-dark, lonesome valley in a stone-hard, wood-heavy, primitive mill beside a pond?
Something must be done! Monsieur Boudine clumps off into the woods, self-satisfied with his gift. I decide tonight’s the night and it’s probably best if I do it alone.
We are about a thousand feet above sea level here in the Morvan. About two-thirds of the hardwood forests, birch, ash, beech, has been cleared for pasturage; the rest, in steeper, less accessible sections, has been left intact. Formerly these woods were used as a source of wood for burning. Now, however, most of the people in the valley have shifted to oil for heat, very few still burn wood, even in the kitchen stove.
Recently, entrepreneurs, mostly Parisians, have been buying up the woods, bulldozing out the hardwood, selling it off to paper mills, or as firewood, then planting these woods with Douglas fir for Christmas trees. This had been going on for over fifteen years now.
Five years ago, to protect the area from this and other depredations, one of the first large parks in France was established. Le Parc Régionale du Morvan. Our mill is just included on the western edge. West of us, the forests are still being massacred. Young pines, five to ten years old, abound. The Morvan is becoming known as the Christmas-tree capital of France.
I’ve decided to snitch my tree from one of the Christmas-tree farms outside the protected park. I’ve worked up a whole rationale to defend my action; however, I don’t think it would hold in a French court.
But I’m desperate.
When I show our Monsieur Boudine ‘Christmas Tree’ to Lor she’s as disgusted as Ben and I are. Already we’d decided to trim our wings from the usual fourteen-foot monster we’ve always had jammed in the corner on the right side of the fireplace. It was impossible to trim, blocked the food cabinet, and overlapped the steps up to the toilet. This year we’ll have a smaller tree, maybe ten feet, and set it in the millstone on the other side. Right now, we’re not even close to ten feet.
Loretta says she’ll drive into Château Chinon and look for a tree. She also has some shopping to do. Fat chance, the French idea of a large tree almost reaches the navel. While she’s gone, Ben and I get out the decorations, wipe off the balls, unwind garlands, untangle electric lights. We’re preparing to decorate a giant tree no matter what. Irrational persistence can be a powerful force.
We also clean off and set up our crèche on the sill of the west window. I string one set of lights around it. Ben goes out to gather moss from trees and rocks for the inside and roof of the stable.
What we’re doing doesn’t have much to do with religion in a Christian sense. We’re playing dolls, acting out our husbanding, parenting impulse, making sure that baby is cozy and warm, surrounded by father and mother, warm breathing animals, the steam of urine and manure-soaked hay giving off the heat of fermentation. We live with it, this is not too far removed from the life all around us here.
When Lor comes back, no singing, humming; no skipping. No tree. There wasn’t a tree over three feet tall in the whole town. She says she almost stopped and gnawed down a tree beaver-style on the way home. I tell her I’m going out tonight to liberate a tree for us. She isn’t fighting me too hard. Loretta for all her seeming airs of gentility is a practical, pragmatic person when the going gets tough. It’s what makes her an effective first-grade teacher. It would also make her a good president or chairman of the Ford Motor Company.
That night we walk up to Madame Le Page’s for Ben’s dinner. It’s dark as it was when I went out to cut pine branches. All the better. On the way out from the mill our thermometer shows three degrees and there’s moisture in the air. I tell Ben it could easily snow again. He wants snow more than anything else for Christmas. I’m hoping it will hold off till the girls get down here. They’re driving our other car, a 1969 Ford Capri. This wreck makes my failing Fiat seem like a new Cadillac.
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