Forty Four Stumps on the Back Forty
The logger, Randy Tolbert, was the harder part.
Mark sent him a letter with Virgil’s figures and the statute copied out, saying that Mrs. Arlene Kessler would rather settle this across her own kitchen table than in the county courthouse, and that he had two weeks to decide which.
He came on the ninth day, a man about forty with his cap in his hand, and he sat down at Mama’s table across from her and Virgil. Pete leaned in the doorway with his arms crossed and did not say a word the entire time.
Tolbert started to say that he had bought in good faith from a family member.
Mama let him get one sentence out.
“Mr. Tolbert, my son told you in September those trees belonged to his mother and that she would never sell. You wrote no contract. You paid in cash. You cut a tree that was planted for a child’s first birthday and you could not have gotten forty dollars out of it. I am seventy-eight years old and I have just come home from the hospital, and I do not have the time to listen to a story.”
“I will tell you what I told my own son,” Mama said. “You can make this right. The trees were worth ninety-six thousand dollars. You paid thirty-one. You owe me the difference, sixty-five thousand, and when it is paid I will sign that I am satisfied and I will not say your name again. Or you can let a jury look at Mr. Oakes’s numbers and that statute, and count it up three times over. I would rather not do that. I am giving you the choice.”
“I’ll need thirty days,” Tolbert said.
“You may have thirty days.”
The cashier’s check came on the twenty-sixth. Mama deposited it herself. She has not said his name since, and neither will I, after this.
The seedlings came from the state nursery in the first week of April, bare-root, in bundles, wrapped wet. The same nursery. Mama insisted on that.
We planted on a Saturday. The redbuds were just showing along the creek. Pete and Doug had spent two weekends clearing the tops out of the draw, and the ruts had been disked smooth and seeded. The stumps were still there, gray now. Mama did not want them pulled. “Set the new ones beside the old ones,” she said. “Let them see what they are supposed to turn into.”
We carried a lawn chair down to the end of the first row and put a quilt over her knees. She had my notebook in her lap, open to the drawing with the creek on the right side.
Doug dug every hole with Daddy’s tile spade. All forty-four. Nobody offered to spell him and he did not ask. His son Jeff brought the children, Emma, who is seven, and Caleb, who is four, and they carried creek water up the hill in a galvanized bucket, slopping half of it on their shoes.
“Why did the old trees get cut down, Grandpa?” Emma asked. I heard her from two rows over.
Doug stopped digging. He stood there with both hands on the spade handle.
“Because I sold them, and they were not mine to sell,” he said. “They were Grandma Arlene’s. I was in trouble over money, and I did a wrong thing instead of asking for help. So now I am putting them back.”