The Early Posthumous Work

Christmas Tree Fort War

11 Christmas Tree Fort War The last thing we did every Christmas season was to build our annual Christmas tree fort. After holiday dinners and gift-giving were over, and with school still a week or, with any luck, two weeks away, the inevitable boredom set in and we got outside. It was cold the week after New Year’s, so we were usually wearing two or three shirts, and sweaters and heavy coats as we went around our southwest Houston area neighborhood and then into neighboring neighborhoods begging for their Christmas trees. At some houses, where the tree was still up and functional, we would secure a commitment for the tree once it was defrocked, agreeing to return in a day or two. It seems odd now that after being showered—sometimes only sprinkled—with toys and books and rain gauges and trains and whatnot that we so quickly abandoned all that to get out into the mind- and finger-numbing cold weather and collect from the neighbors their discarded Christmas trees. But that’s what we did. Several neighborhood boys made up our group but the principals were three of us, my two closest friends, whom I will call Curley and Moe, and me. We dragged the trees back to Curley’s front yard and then made our forts, engineering miracles of a sort, built on unsound principles often, but always creating a new, private space where none had existed before. Fortification 12 The Early Posthumous Work was a big concept of my and my friends’ childhood, I’m not sure why. It probably issued in part from the movies and TV shows we watched, things like Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone and Westerns about remote cavalry posts, but there was also probably something about the idea of keeping a wall between ourselves and other people, especially those most intrusive of other people—adults. Sometimes the trees were piled into rectangular walls, knit at the corners, like Lincoln Logs. But usually we didn’t have enough to do that, and the fort I remember best was the one we built and rebuilt one particular bitterly cold year, the year of the Christmas-tree fort war. The year we learned adult occupations like spying, duplicity, thievery, breaking and entering. It started out innocently enough. We wandered around going from house to house, knocking on doors, sometimes not even knocking, just dragging off an obviously discarded tree lying out for city pickup. When we had enough, we set about constructing our fort, which that year was designed as a sort of tepee, the Christmas trees upright leaning against a big pine tree, angled a little so as to create a diagonal space circling the base of the pine. It wasn’t a very tall space, but we weren’t very tall people, and anyway, we were used to crawling, crouching, and so on. The architectural principle was that of the snail shell. On the outside of this we piled more and more trees, until our walls reached a satisfactory density, too thick to see through. Our pleasure was all in the building of the fort, really, because once built, there wasn’t a lot to do with it. You could hide things—like new Christmas presents—in it, but other than that, the fort threatened to become boring, that intolerable state which, to a child, lurks around every corner, and in the backseat of every car trip. Happily, that year, having finished our Christmas tree fort, we were attacked. One morning the first week of January, Curley arrived at my door at some hour too horrible to contemplate, say 8:00 a.m., with the terrible news that our fort was gone. Gone, I said. What Steven Barthelme 13 do you mean, gone? Come look for yourself, he said. Somebody stole it. We knew who it was. Another group in the neighborhood had built their own pathetic, inept, tiny, ill-engineered, hopeless excuse for a Christmas tree fort in some kid’s yard a block down and a block over. They didn’t have enough trees and they had no know-how. It was a mess. Obviously, racked with envy, they had turned to crime. So we did too. First, we reconnoitered. We looked all over the neighborhood, starting with the site of their shabby fort, now empty. We checked out the homes of each member of the...