Forty Four Stumps on the Back Forty
“You told him they were mine.”
“I told him. He said plenty of families handle things for the old folks, and he could be in and out in a week. He said thirty-one thousand, cash, no paper to fuss with.” His voice cracked. “I told myself you had not been back there all year. I told myself they were going to waste. I told myself I would pay you back and you would be glad to have the money.”
“And did you believe yourself?”
He was a long time answering.
“No, ma’am.”
“Did you know which tree was your father’s?”
He put his face down in his hands, and his shoulders shook, a grown man of fifty-two in his good shirt.
“I did not go back there while they cut,” he said through his fingers. “I could not. I heard the saws from the road and I drove on by.”
Mama let him cry. She did not go to him and she did not turn away. When he had got hold of himself she said, “Look at me.”
He looked at her.
“You are my son. You were my son before you did this, and you will be my son when it is paid for. Nothing you do can change that, and I want you to carry that out of this room with you.”
“Mama.”
“I am not finished. You took what was not yours while I was too sick to stop you. You should have come to me about that combine. I would have helped you, Douglas. I would have sold you the walnuts off the ground for a dollar and signed a note at the bank with you. You did not give me the chance to be your mother. That is the part I am going to have trouble with.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“So here is what I want. Two things. Renee, write this down.”
I opened the notebook to a clean page.
“The first is that the thirty-one thousand dollars goes back into my account, every dollar, as you are able. I do not care if it takes you six years. You will bring it to me yourself, every month, and sit down and have a cup of coffee when you do.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“The second is that in April you are going to plant forty-four walnut trees on that hill. You, with a spade. Not a hired man and not a tractor auger. In the same rows, in the same places. And you are going to bring Jeff’s children with you, and you are going to tell them why.”
Doug nodded. He could not speak.
“Renee tells me the man who cut them cheated you as well as me. He will hear from me too, and he will get the same chance you are getting, to make it right without a judge. If he will not take it, that is his choice.” She smoothed the blanket. “Now come here and kiss your mother, and then go to church. You need it.”
He came around the bed and bent down, and she put her hand on the back of his neck and held him there a moment, the way she did when he was a boy.
They let her go home at two o’clock that afternoon, eleven days after she went in.
Virgil’s nephew Mark is a lawyer in town. Mama did not want a lawsuit, but she did want it in writing so that nobody could remember it differently later. Mark wrote it on one page at her kitchen table while she told him what to say. Doug signed it and she signed it.