The Field He Watches From His Sink

The Numbers That Worked

The Missouri Department of Conservation runs a state nursery that sells bare-root seedlings to landowners by the bundle, and they are cheap, far cheaper than most folks believe.

Shortleaf pine, the very same tree Grandpa planted, ran about thirty-four cents a seedling in bundles of twenty-five.

For a replant on open ground you want them close, around six hundred to the acre.

Ten acres came out to right at two thousand trees.

Two thousand seedlings from the state nursery was a little under seven hundred dollars, delivered bare-root in the first week of April.

Seven hundred dollars. I sat there and read it twice.

I had been staring at a nine-thousand-dollar fence I could not collect, and the thing I actually wanted, the trees, cost less than a used chest freezer.

Dale read the order form over my shoulder, and he did not say one more word about lawyers. He pushed his glasses up and said, “We’ll need more dibble bars than the two we got.”

A dibble bar is a straight steel spade you drive into the ground with your boot and rock back to open a slot in the dirt.

You tuck the seedling root down in it and close the slot with your heel.

One child can plant two hundred trees in a morning if somebody older keeps the buckets full and the roots wet.

I did the math on that too, pacing the kitchen.

Forty kids. Two thousand trees. Fifty trees apiece. One good morning of work. It would fit. It would actually fit.

I called the extension office and borrowed a crate of dibble bars from three neighboring clubs, and I ordered the seedlings for delivery the first week of April.

The first Friday in April is Arbor Day in Missouri.

I am not above a little poetry when the calendar hands it to me free, so Arbor Day it would be.

I filled in the form and clicked it through and sat back with the confirmation on the screen.

Then I let myself think about the one thing I had been circling all week. On ten acres of black ground, where exactly do you start the first row?

And I knew the answer the second I let the question in. You start at the south fence.

You start along the line in full view of the one kitchen window on Len’s place.

The window over his sink.

The one where he stands every single morning of his life with his coffee and looks south across the draw, out over the ground he burned.

I am not a spiteful woman.

My mother raised me in the Baptist church and I still sit in the third pew most Sundays.

But I will tell you the honest truth of my heart that night.

I wanted him to watch them grow.