Nine Thousand Firs on the Hill He Cut

Day Two

On Sunday we went to church first, the early service, all three of us still stiff from Saturday. The pastor prayed for spring rain and good planting, the way he did every March.

Colby squeezed my hand during that prayer. I do not think he knew I noticed.

Then we drove straight up to the hill in our work clothes. Emmett was already there.

That second day is the one I think about most, because that is the day in the photograph Emmett took with his phone, propped against a stump.

It was still misty, a soft gray daylight that made the far hills look like they were drawn in pencil. I had my brown hair pulled back in a low bun so it would stay out of my face.

I was wearing my old faded orange hi-vis vest from the log yard over a gray hoodie. It was the warmest thing I owned that I did not care about ruining.

Tanner was in his yellow rain jacket and Colby was in his blue one. They each had a canvas seedling bag slung at the hip and one of Emmett’s hoedads.

I was kneeling on that steep slope, pressing one small fir into the dirt with both hands, and the boys were planting right beside me in their rows. Behind us, the little green seedlings were already lined up across the stumps, row after row, running down toward the skid road.

At the edge of the cut, the standing forest went up dark into the mist. Down below, two pickups were parked on the skid road, mine and Emmett’s.

We planted about nine hundred that day. Better, but it was still not going to be enough.

That night Tanner fell asleep at the kitchen table before he finished his soup.

Day Three

On Monday morning I drove up a little before seven and there were five pickups parked on the skid road instead of one.

My first thought was that Brody had sent someone to stop us. My stomach dropped all the way into my boots.

Then I saw who was standing there.

It was Lorne, one of my oldest drivers, a big quiet man with a gray beard who has hauled logs for thirty years. He had his wife with him, and both of his teenage daughters, all four with planting bags.

Behind them were three more families from the log yard. A loader operator and his son. A woman who runs the scale house and her husband, a retired choker setter. A young faller I dispatch to almost every week, and his wife, who had their baby in a carrier on her back.

Every one of them had a hoedad or a shovel.

I did not know what to say. I got out of my pickup and just stood there with my mouth open.

“Emmett called around,” Lorne said simply. “Said you had nine thousand trees and nine days.”

“You’ve all got work,” I said.

“Spring breakup on the high ground,” he said. “Half the landings are shut for mud anyway. And the girls are off school.”

The young faller’s wife spoke up. “We heard what happened,” she said. “We’d want somebody to do it for our kids.”

That was all anybody said about it. Nobody gave a speech. Nobody said a bad word about Brody, not in front of the boys.

Emmett came down off the hill, walked along the line of them, and gave each one a short, firm nod, the way old loggers do.

Then they went up the hill and went to work.