The Row With His Name On It

The Pocket

I was sitting at the table and I put my hands in the coat pockets to warm them. I had not done that yet all day. I don’t know why. Maybe I was afraid of what was in there.

In the right pocket there was a pair of leather work gloves with a hole in the thumb, and a roll of electrical tape, and two Werther’s Originals. Erik always carried them. He gave them to the little kids who came with their parents.

In the left pocket there was a folded piece of paper.

It was graph paper, the kind from a spiral notebook, soft as cloth from being folded and unfolded so many times. I opened it on the card table and held the corners down with the cash box and my phone.

It was the planting map. The first one. April 2009.

Erik had drawn it in pencil, in his square careful printing. Twenty rows, numbered. At the top he had written the date and “500 Fraser, 2-2 transplants.” And next to each row number, he had written a name.

Row one said “Mom.” Row two said “Dad.” Rows three and four were my parents, by their first names. Row five said “Nicole.” Row six said “Me.”

Row seven said “Kurt.”

And next to it, smaller, squeezed in along the edge of the paper: “Kurt dug half of these. Don’t tell him I said so.”

I sat there with my hand flat on that paper and I cried for the first time all day. Not loud. Just tears running down, cold as soon as they left my eyes.

Rows eight through nineteen were grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins. And row twenty, at the very bottom, said “For the kids. Someday.”

Hannah was born two years later. Ben three years after that. He had planted their row before they existed.

Row Seven

Ben saw me crying and came running over from the shaker, and Hannah came behind him. I showed them the map. Hannah read it and put her hand over her mouth.

Ben read it twice. Then he looked up at me.

“Which row is seven?” he asked.

The 2009 rows were at the far east end of the farm, past the windbreak, where the oldest trees were. Most of them had been cut years ago. Erik always left a few in every row to grow big, the ones he said were too pretty to sell.

I folded the map and stood up.

“Kurt,” I said.

He was at the baler, tying down a tree on the roof of a minivan. He looked over.

“Come with us for a minute.”

He came. The four of us walked east on the mowed path, through the windbreak, out to the old rows. The snow was coming a little thicker now, catching on the branches.

Row seven had nine trees left in it. Big ones, ten and eleven feet tall, full and blue-green, the kind you see in a town square.

I handed Kurt the map without saying anything.

He read it. I watched him read the line along the edge. He read it, and then he read it again, and then he made a sound I had never heard a grown man make, and he put his forearm over his eyes and stood in the snow and shook.

Ben went over and stood next to him. Not in front of him. Next to him. His shoulder against his uncle’s arm.

After a while Kurt put his hand on Ben’s head, the way Erik used to.

“He never told me,” Kurt said. “He never said one word.”

“He wouldn’t have,” I said. “You know he wouldn’t have.”