Forty Four Stumps on the Back Forty
In April he drove to the state nursery and came home with fifty black walnut seedlings wrapped in wet burlap in the bed of the truck. Each one was no bigger around than a pencil.
He set them on the north slope of the back forty, above the creek branch, where the ground is deep and dark and holds water. Five rows of ten. He dug every hole with a tile spade, and Mama, who was twenty and had been married to him for six weeks, carried creek water up the hill in a galvanized bucket and held each seedling straight while he heeled the dirt in around it.
When the last one was in, he stood at the bottom of the slope with the spade over his shoulder and looked at fifty sticks in the ground and said, “Well. Those will be here when I’m not.”
Then he went in the house and slept fourteen hours.
Not all fifty lived. The drought of 1980 took some, and the deer took some, and one was struck by lightning the summer I was nine. But my parents never left a gap. When my brother was born, Daddy set a new walnut in an empty place in the third row, and that was Doug’s tree. When I came along, I got the fourth place in the second row. When the grandchildren came, each one got a tree: Doug’s two, Jeff and Kim, and then my Katie and my Ben.
Thirty-eight of the old ones, two for the children, four for the grandchildren. Forty-four.
Every January, when the sap was down, Daddy went back there with a pruning saw on a pole and took the low limbs off, clean against the trunk. I asked him once why he bothered. He said, “A walnut that has to carry limbs grows knots. A walnut that grows straight and clear is worth something to somebody someday.” I thought he meant money. I do not think that anymore.
Every October of my childhood we picked up walnuts back there with feed sacks and buckets, our hands stained brown for two weeks. We hauled them to the hulling station at the feed store and they paid by the hundred pounds. Mama put it in a coffee can and that was the Christmas money.
Daddy died nine years ago this past spring. Mama kept the farm in her own name. She rents the crop ground to a neighbor and keeps the back forty in pasture, and until this year she still walked back to the grove every fall with a bucket. She could stand at the gate and point. “That one is Jeff’s. That one is Katie’s. That big one by the gate post is your daddy’s, the first one he put in the ground.”
So when my brother said she would never miss them, he was wrong, and I believe that some part of him knew it.
I ran my route the next day, a Friday, because the mail does not stop when your family comes apart. I finished at ten minutes to three.
My husband Pete is a lineman for the electric co-op, and he was on call that weekend, which means he cannot be more than twenty minutes from the truck. He had heard the whole thing from me the night before. Pete is not a talker. He listened to all of it, and then he said, “I would like to drive over to your brother’s right now.”