Nine Thousand Firs on the Hill He Cut

What Happened After

That was three springs ago.

Brody kept his word. The money comes into the boys’ land account on the first of every month, three hundred dollars, and it has not missed once. It is not thirty-one thousand yet. It will be someday.

He also went to the forestry office the week after and changed the plan on file so it shows the hill was replanted, and lists every acre. He brought me a copy without my asking.

He still lives in the little house in Coquille. He and his wife had a baby girl last year. The boys love her.

Tanner is eighteen now and works summers on a thinning crew. He wants to study forestry at the college in Corvallis. He says he wants to manage the land himself when he turns twenty-one, and he will.

Colby is fifteen, the age Tanner was the spring we planted. He still has Emmett’s little hoedad hanging in his bedroom.

Emmett is eighty-two. He does not climb the hill much anymore. But every March, one of the boys drives him up the skid road in the truck so he can sit by Grandpa’s stump and look.

He says those trees are the best planting he has seen in sixty years. He says it every time. He means it every time.

Dacey, the young faller’s wife, still brings the baby up some Sundays. The baby is walking now and likes to touch the little trees.

Counting

Here is the part I did not expect.

Every April, the Saturday after spring break, Brody drives up the skid road early in the morning, before anybody else is up there.

He walks the rows with a little clicker counter in his hand, the kind they use at the scale house. He walks every row on all twenty-two acres, slowly, and he counts every tree that made it through the winter.

The first year it was eight thousand four hundred and some. A few hundred lost to frost and deer, which Emmett said was very good.

Brody bought replacement seedlings himself that fall and planted them over Thanksgiving weekend with the boys. He did not ask anybody to help. He did not tell anybody he was doing it. I only found out because Colby told me.

The trees are as tall as Colby’s knee now. Some of the ones in the good soil near the bottom are up to his waist. The two white stakes at the top have faded, so the boys repaint them every spring.

Last April, I drove up on that Saturday on purpose. I did not tell anyone. I parked on the county road and walked up the skid road quietly.

Brody was at the top, standing by his grandfather’s stump with the clicker in his hand. He was looking at the little tree Colby had planted that last morning. It came up past his belt now, thick and green and healthy.

He did not see me. I did not call to him.

I just watched him stand there for a while, a grown man looking at one tree, and then I walked back down the hill and let him finish counting.