Nine Thousand Firs on the Hill He Cut

The Stakes

On Thursday, Emmett brought up a bundle of wooden lath stakes and a can of white paint.

“In the old days,” he said, “a planter would set a stake at the top of every unit with the date. So the next man would know when it went in and who did it.”

He painted the year on the first one. Then he handed the brush to Tanner.

“Put your names on them,” he said. “Yours and your brother’s. It’s your ground.”

Tanner painted his name on one stake in careful block letters. Colby painted his name on the other, and the letters ran a little, so he went over them twice.

We set the two stakes at the very top of the cut, side by side, right next to Grandpa’s mossy stump, where anybody standing on the skid road below could look up and see them.

I did not say anything about why Emmett wanted them there. I did not have to.

Brody Hears

By Thursday, everybody in town had heard. The log yard talks, the feed store talks, and the church talks loudest of all.

Brody called me Thursday night.

“I hear you’ve got half the county up on my hill,” he said.

“It’s not your hill,” I said. “It’s the boys’ hill. You manage it. That’s all.”

“You’re making me look bad,” he said.

I took a breath before I answered. I wanted to be careful, because I could hear something in his voice I had not heard before. It was not anger. It was shame.

“Brody, I’m not making you look like anything,” I said. “I’m planting trees. Nobody up there has said one word about you. Not one. Not in front of the boys or anywhere else.”

He was quiet.

“The state says you have two years to replant,” I said. “We’re doing it in nine days. We’ll be done Sunday. You can come see it if you want.”

He hung up without answering. But he did not tell me to stop.

Friday and Saturday

Friday and Saturday the crowd was the biggest yet. There were eleven pickups on the skid road on Saturday morning, parked nose to tail all the way down to the county road.

The last boxes of seedlings were opened on Saturday afternoon. The scale house woman counted out loud as she marked her notebook. The whole hill was planted except a strip along the very top, under the stakes.

We left that last strip for Sunday. Emmett said it was right that the boys should finish it.

Saturday afternoon, as people packed up their tools, Lorne came over to where I was loading hoedads into my truck bed.

“Brody called me,” he said.

I froze.

“Asked me what time we’d be up there tomorrow,” Lorne said. “I told him nine. After early church.”

“What did he sound like?” I asked.

Lorne thought about it. “Like a man trying to figure out how to walk up a hill,” he said.