Piedmont Christmas

(This story is from The Point Guard, a novel-in-progress about the fictional town of Morgan, South Carolina.)

In the old days, the weekend before Christmas, we always rose early on Saturday and headed up to Aunt Nina and Uncle Tip's to get the tree. The year I was fifteen Connie's boyfriend Randy went with us. He drove Mama's car, the old Desoto, up Highway 176 past Landrum. The mountains off in North Carolina were ice blue, and the sky was almost white, with approaching clouds behind Hogback Mountain.

"Looks like snow clouds," Mama always said, pointing off to the west, toward Asheville.

It was so cold that year the leathery leaves of the mountain laurel curled against the stems of the plants crowding Uncle Tip's driveway. But soon we were through the laurel, and Uncle Tip's bare peach orchard stretched out in the cove all around us. The mountains were so close beyond the spidery peach trees they looked like they might crack if I tapped on the car glass with my finger.

Uncle Tip was standing on his front porch filling a bird feeder with seed from an old red coffee can as we drove up. He waved as we pulled up out front.

"Is that Connie's boy driving?" he asked, smiling, as Randy opened the door, pivoted out of the driver's seat.

We went in the old farm house, and Aunt Nina already had breakfast ready— beaten biscuits, hard scrambled eggs, yellow corn grits, slabs of fatback, fried apples, homemade peach jam, thick black coffee and milk.

"Merry Christmas, Nina," Mama said.

"Merry Christmas. Eggs are getting cold," Nina answered back to no one in particular.

We all sat down at the big walnut kitchen table. Bowls were passed in all directions. Uncle Tip kept things lively, mostly kidding Connie and Randy.

"Pass the love birds some grits," he said.

"Duncan, you remember that field right before the river? The one where you shot the rabbit last year? Well, there's a nice tree there," Uncle Tip said, pulling a piece of fat from between his teeth.

"Aren't you going?"

"I'm too old for walking my fields," Uncle Tip said. "You boys go get it."

"We'll get a good one, Mr. Brown," Randy said.

"I know you will."

"Yes sir."

"Might as well take the gun. There's plenty of squirrels this year. Fried squirrel would be good for lunch before y'all head back to town. Nina's still got some greens left the frost didn't get. Nina, you got some greens?"

"There's a mess or two." She answered, passing what was left of the eggs. "You two get us a squirrel or two and we'll fry them up with some greens and potatoes."

We left Connie and Mama to help Aunt Nina clean up the breakfast dishes, and Uncle Tip walked us out to the edge of the winter fields. I carried an old .410 shotgun borrowed from Uncle Tip. I had the gun over my shoulder as we walked out, my pockets full of green shells.

Randy and I meandered toward the river for half an hour through the broom sedge. Our breath trailed behind us, and I focused on the sound of our pants brushing along. My feet were cold, and I kept walking to stay warm. The sun was up, but the air was sharp and brittle with cold.

"Randy, we forgot the ax for the tree," I said, "We left it in the pump house."

"Oh, we'll just shoot one down," he said.

We found the cedar where Uncle Tip said it would be, in a field by the river. We could hear the river working over a stretch of rough rock through the oaks. It was a big cedar and a storm of finches left it as we walked up. Randy said they were eating the lavender berries. He circled around it and then said, "Give me that gun."

I handed him the shotgun, and he fired down at the base of the tree, loading and reloading four times, before the tree fell over. The whole field smelled like cedar. We each grabbed the base of the cedar and dragged it back toward Uncle Tip's house.

A year later when I was sixteen, Uncle Tip died and Nina sold the orchard. Connie broke up with Randy. Mama used her Top Value stamps to buy a silver aluminum tree and a rotating color wheel. It looked pretty, but when I watched that wheel rotate, and the colors spin, it always reminded me of the smell of cedar, walking in the woods at Uncle Tip's, and Nina's beaten biscuits.