Forty Four Stumps on the Back Forty

He followed me out to the farm in a flatbed older than I am.

He walked my father’s rows without hurrying. At some of the stumps he bent and laid his own steel rule across, checking my numbers, and each time he nodded and went on. He walked down to the draw and looked at the tops for a good while.

Then he came back up to the gate, to number one, and got down on both knees in the wet grass. That cannot have been easy at his age. He took out a pocketknife and began to count the rings, touching the point of the blade to every tenth one.

He was down there a long time.

When he stood up, his knees cracked, and his eyes were wet. He did not hide that from me.

“Your daddy pruned these,” he said. “Every winter, didn’t he? Clean to the trunk.”

“Every January.”

“I figured. I looked at those tops. The first limb on most of them is twenty feet off the ground. There was not a knot in the butt logs, not one.” He folded the knife. “What did your brother tell you he got?”

“Thirty-one thousand dollars. In cash.”

Virgil took off his hat and held it.

“Renee, sit down on that stump. I have two things to tell you, and I would rather you were sitting.”

I sat on my father’s tree.

“The first one is this. The nine logs he sold me were the tops and the small stuff. Sawlogs. That is what he brings a country mill. The butt logs off the big trees never came through my yard, because he knew what he had. A clear walnut butt log, twenty inches and better at the small end, straight as these were, goes to the veneer buyers. They slice it thin as paper for furniture and gun stocks, and they pay by the board foot, several dollars a foot for good ones. And these were as good as I have seen in this county.”

“Thirty-eight veneer trees, most of them with a second log above the first that would make good lumber. I have got your numbers and I have got my own eyes. I am not going to tell you to the dollar. But a fair buyer, bidding against other fair buyers, would have paid Arlene somewhere close to ninety-six thousand dollars for what stood on this hill.”

“He paid Doug a third,” I said.

“He paid Doug a third, in cash, in four days, while the owner was in the hospital. That is your answer about whether he knew. A straight man writes a contract with the name off the deed. He pays with a check that leaves a trail. And he does not cut an eleven-inch tree that is not worth the chain oil.” Virgil’s voice had gone flat and hard. “He knew. He found a man in a tight spot who was not the owner, and he made it easy for him.”

“What is the second thing?”

“The second thing is the law. I am not a lawyer, but every man in my business in Missouri knows this one by heart, because it is what keeps us careful. If you cut another person’s trees without that person’s say-so, the owner can go after you for three times what they were worth. Three times. It is written right into the statute.” He put his hat back on. “That is on the logger. And if she wanted it to be, it is on your brother too.”