The Forty Redbuds Along His Road

He stood in the kitchen in his long johns with the phone to his ear and closed his eyes.

“Go,” I told him. “That’s four hundred houses. Some of them have babies too.”

I bundled Beau up in his snowsuit and his hat and buckled him into his car seat.

I carried the tub of trees out and set it in the bed of our gray pickup, and I backed the truck up to the fence and let the tailgate down.

It was a gray, cold morning, overcast, with that wet in the air that does not quite turn to rain. The hills were still brown all the way around.

Behind the fence, the slope was all fresh cedar stumps, gone gray at the edges over the winter, and the skid trails were full of water.

I put on my old mint-green zip hoodie, the one I wore every day in the NICU, and pulled my hair up in a bun, and I set Beau’s car seat on the lowered tailgate where I could see him from every hole.

He was sound asleep before I got the first tree out of the tub.

At eight thirty, Megan and Kayla came walking up the gravel.

They were still in their navy scrubs, with fleece jackets zipped up over them against the cold.

They had worked the night shift together, seven to seven, and driven straight down without going home. Kayla had a thermos. Megan had work gloves still on the tag.

“We heard you needed hands,” Kayla said.

I could not say anything at all. I just stood there by the fence with a shovel in one hand.

Megan came over and hugged me, and then she went straight to the tailgate and looked at Beau, and I watched her look at his chest without meaning to. Counting breaths. Old habit.

“He’s perfect,” she said. “Let’s plant some trees.”

So we did. Megan held each sapling straight in the hole while I knelt and spread the roots out and shoveled the dirt back in around them.

Kayla knelt and tamped the dirt down with her gloved hands and poured water from the bucket.

Every few holes, one of them would walk back to the tailgate and check on Beau.

He slept through the whole morning in his car seat, in Kayla’s hat, with his fists up by his cheeks.

Once he sighed in his sleep, and all three of us stopped and turned around to look.

Kayla started counting the trees out loud as we went, the way she used to count his feedings. “Day eleven,” she would say, tamping. “Day twelve.” I knew what day twelve was. I think she knew too. She tamped that one a little harder.

The road started to notice around ten.

First it was Mr. Dean from up the hill, slowing down on his way to the feed store. He stopped and rolled his window down and asked what all the trees were for.

I told him one for every day Beau spent in the hospital. He looked at the stumps, and then at the nurses, and then at the tailgate.

“Good,” he said. That was all. “That’s good.” And he drove on.