The Forty Redbuds Along His Road

“Along the road.”

He nodded once. “I’ll dig the holes,” he said. That was all. Then he went to work.

But that night he came home with a tape measure and walked the fence line in the dark with a flashlight, figuring how far apart they would have to go.

I called around and found a tree farm two counties over that sells bare-root redbuds.

The man there was old and patient on the phone and asked me what I wanted them for, and when I told him, he did not say anything for a second.

He said he could give me whips four or five feet tall, two years in the bed, twelve dollars apiece.

He said that size would take, planted right, and if I watered them the first summer and was patient, I would see bloom on most of them the spring after next.

Forty trees at twelve dollars was four hundred and eighty dollars. That was a lot for us that winter, with me on unpaid leave and the hospital bills starting to come.

Dustin picked up two extra storm shifts in February and did not tell me it was for the trees, but I knew.

In February I took Beau back up to Springfield for his follow-up.

Afterward I carried him up to the third floor to show him off, the way I had promised, and Megan was on, and Kayla had just come in early for nights.

They passed him back and forth and fussed over how big he was. He was eight pounds by then, in his hat that finally fit.

Kayla made him squeeze her finger and said he had a grip like a lineman, and I told her she did not know how right she was.

Then Megan asked, the way people do, how things were at home. And I do not know why, but I told them.

All of it. The cedars, the four thousand dollars, June’s phone call, the redbuds coming in March.

Kayla did not say anything at first. She just looked at Megan. Then she said, “When?”

“Whenever they come in. The first or second weekend of March, probably.”

“Text me the day,” she said. “I’m off that weekend. I’ll come straight off shift.”

Megan said she would too. I told them they did not have to do that, that it was an hour each way, that they had their own families.

Megan just took her reading glasses off and looked at me over them and said, “Honey, we raised that baby for forty days too.”

The trees came the first week of March, in a long cardboard box, the roots packed in wet shredded paper and wrapped in plastic.

I kept them in the cool shed with the roots in a tub of water like the old man said.

Dustin dug the holes that Saturday. Forty of them, every eight paces along the fence, a good foot and a half deep and twice as wide as the roots.

That red clay is half rock, and he went through it with a spade and a digging bar, and he did not quit until dark.

At five the next morning, his phone went off. A storm had come through overnight past Addie and put a tree on a line, and four hundred houses were dark, and the co-op needed every lineman it had.