Nine Thousand Firs on the Hill He Cut

The first thing I saw was the light. There had never been light on that side of the hill, not in my whole married life, and now the sun came straight through.

I stopped my pickup at the bottom of the skid road and sat with both hands on the wheel. Colby was asleep in the back seat. Tanner had his earbuds in and was looking at his phone.

Then Tanner looked up, and he pulled one earbud out, and he did not say anything for a long time.

“Mom,” he finally said. “Where did the trees go?”

Twenty-two acres of Douglas fir were gone from the face of the ridge. What was left was stumps, raw and pale, and slash piled in long brown windrows, and ruts where the yarder had dragged the logs down.

Those were Grandpa’s trees. More than that, they were the boys’ trees, because Grandpa had left all eighty acres to Tanner and Colby when he died two winters before.

Grandpa was Brody’s grandfather, not mine, but I had loved him like my own. He was the one who walked the boys up that hill every summer and told them the name of every tree they passed.

He had planted that stand himself after the old growth was logged off in the eighties. He used to say those firs were his savings account and his church at the same time.

In his will he left the land to his great-grandsons, and he named Brody to manage it until they were grown. It made sense on paper. Brody was their father. Brody knew timber.

I had not thought for one minute that Brody would cut it.

I woke Colby gently, and the three of us walked up the skid road in the drizzle. Nobody talked. The ground smelled like cut sap and wet bark, a smell I knew from twenty years in the timber business.

Colby was twelve. He walked straight to the big old stump near the top, the one Grandpa used to sit on, the leftover from the first logging, gray and soft with moss.

It was the only thing on that hill that looked the same.

“He would hate this,” Colby said quietly. “Grandpa would hate this so much.”

The Phone Call

I called Brody from the bottom of the hill with the boys still sitting in the pickup. I kept my voice calm because Colby was listening through the cracked window.

“You cut the woods,” I said.

“I harvested twenty-two acres,” Brody said. “That is what timber is for, Rae. It’s a crop.”

“It’s the boys’ crop,” I said. “Where is the money?”

There was a long pause on the line. I could hear a television in the background, and a door shutting, and I knew he had stepped outside so his new wife would not hear him.

“The check was thirty-one thousand,” he said. “It went to the house.”

I closed my eyes. Brody had lost his job when the mill closed the summer before, after nineteen years on the green chain and then the forklift. I knew that. Everybody in town knew that.

He had remarried in the fall and bought a little house on the edge of Coquille with a payment he could not make on unemployment. I knew that too.

“So you sold their trees to make your house payment,” I said.

“I am their father,” he said. “I’m keeping a roof over my family. When they’re grown they’ll understand that. And the rest of the land is still standing.”

“It was worth more than thirty-one thousand dollars,” I said.

“Not to the guy who would write the check that week,” he said. “Market’s in the ditch since the mill shut. I took what I could get.”

He was not cruel about it. That almost made it worse. He said it like a man reporting the weather, as if the trees had simply been in the way of a problem.

“Did you file a plan to replant?” I asked him.

“It’s on the notification,” he said. “I’ve got two years. I’ll get to it.”

I knew what “I’ll get to it” meant from Brody. It meant the garage door that stayed broken for six years of our marriage.