The Field He Watches From His Sink
Arbor Day Morning
They came up my gravel lane before the dew was off the grass, carload after carload, forty children in green shirts with their folks and their coolers and their good work gloves.
The sun came up bright and clean over the black field, the kind of April morning that smells like cut grass and cold creek water, and the burned ground steamed a little as it warmed.
I had the seedlings staged in the shade of the barn in their bundles, roots wrapped wet in burlap, and I had the borrowed dibble bars laid out in a row, and the buckets filled and waiting.
Hannah and two of the other older girls ran the water station and kept a running count on a feed-sack tally, because a thing like this comes apart fast if nobody is counting.
I showed them all how, standing in the practice row by the lane.
Drive the bar, rock it back, slip the root down so the collar sits right at the ground line, pull the bar, step the slot shut with your heel.
Three big steps and do it again.
We ran one practice row along the lane until even the little ones had it, and then I turned and pointed them all out at the field.
“We start on the south line,” I told them. “Right along the fence there. We work our way north from the fence, and we fill every bit of it.”
And they spread out across that black ground like something out of a painting, little bent green backs in long rows, buckets of seedlings set between them, the whole field quiet.
You could hear the dibble bars going all down the line, chunk, and chunk, and chunk, forty of them, and the low talk of children working, and a meadowlark somewhere out past the creek.
I knelt at the south fence with the littlest ones, the eight- and nine-year-olds whose hands could not quite steady the bar alone.
I helped a small boy named Toby set his very first one.
His tongue was between his teeth the whole time, and when the little tree stood up on its own in the dirt he looked up at me so proud I had to look away a second.
The window over Len’s sink was maybe two hundred feet off, straight across the burned fence line, and I am not going to pretend to you that I did not look at it more than once.
The light was on in there. He was standing in it.
I knew the shape of him in that window the way you know the shape of a thing you have seen your whole life.
He stood at that sink with his coffee and watched forty children plant a forest in the ground he had burned and called an act of God, and he did not come out, and I did not wave.
The dibble bars just kept going, chunk, and chunk, and chunk, all down the south line, and the little pines stood up one after another in the black.
By ten o’clock we had the whole south third of it in.
Rows of them, six hundred to the acre, shortleaf pines no taller than a pencil standing up straight in the burned ground.
The kids were filthy and sunburned and happier than I had seen them all year, drinking warm water out of their bottles and arguing over who had planted the most.
I thought right then that this was the whole of the story.
Forty kids, two thousand trees, a man at a window who would not come down.
I thought that was enough, and more than enough.
But a screen door banged somewhere up the hill, and I looked, and somebody was coming down across Len’s side of the burned ground toward the fence, and it was not Len.