Nine Thousand Firs on the Hill He Cut

Sunday

Sunday morning was soft and gray, with the mist hanging low on the far ridges and the light coming through pale and silver. We went to early church again. The pastor prayed for the hill by name, and three pews of loggers said amen.

When we got to the skid road, there were already eight pickups parked along it. Nobody had been asked to come that last morning. They had just come.

We had about three hundred seedlings left. The boys took the last two boxes and started working the top strip with Emmett, while the rest of us stood along the slope and watched, or planted a few here and there to fill gaps where the frost might take a tree.

It was a little after ten when I heard a truck coming up the county road.

Everybody heard it. Nobody said anything. The swinging slowed and then stopped, all along the hill.

Brody’s pickup came around the last bend and up the skid road. He parked at the end of the line of trucks and sat there behind the wheel for what felt like a whole minute.

Then he got out.

He stood at the bottom of the hill and looked up.

I have tried a hundred times since to imagine what he saw. Twenty-two acres he had sold, stump and slash and bare dirt when he last saw it. And now, nine thousand little firs in neat rows from the skid road to the ridge, every one of them green.

At the very top, two white stakes beside his grandfather’s stump. His sons’ names on them.

And along the slope, eighteen or twenty people he had known his whole life, standing with hoedads in their hands, not saying one word.

Nobody jeered at him. Nobody turned their back. They just stood there, the way you stand at a graveside, and let him look.

The Walk Up

Brody started up the skid road.

It is steep ground. He had not been up that slope on foot in a long time, and he was breathing hard by the halfway point. He walked between the rows carefully, the way you walk between graves.

He passed Lorne and gave him a little nod. Lorne nodded back. He passed the scale house woman and her husband. He passed the young faller with his wife and baby.

He passed me. He did not stop. I did not say anything to him. I just stood with my hands in the pockets of my orange vest and let him go by.

When he got to the top, Colby was kneeling next to Grandpa’s mossy old stump with one last seedling in his hand.

Emmett was standing a few steps back. Tanner was beside his brother, holding the empty bag.

Brody stopped about ten feet away. He looked at the stakes with his boys’ names on them for a long time.

Colby did not look up at first. He finished making the hole the way Emmett taught him, rocking the hoedad back, opening the dirt. Then he set the last seedling in, roots straight down, right beside Grandpa’s stump.

He closed the hole and stepped it firm with his boot heel. Then he gave the little tree a gentle tug with two fingers, the way he had been taught. It held.

“That one’s for Grandpa,” Colby said quietly. “So he has company.”

I watched Brody’s face. I have known him since we were seventeen. I had seen him cry twice in all that time, once when Tanner was born and once at his grandfather’s funeral.

That was the third time.