Nine Thousand Firs on the Hill He Cut

What He Said

He did not make a speech. He was never a speech man.

He walked over and knelt down in the dirt next to Colby, right there by the stump, and put one hand on the back of his son’s neck.

“I’m sorry, bud,” he said. His voice cracked. “I’m sorry I did that to your trees.”

Colby looked at him for a long moment. “They were Grandpa’s trees too,” he said.

“I know,” Brody said. “I know they were.”

Then he stood up and turned to Tanner. Tanner is fifteen and has his father’s jaw, and it was set hard.

“You planted all this?” Brody asked him.

“We all did,” Tanner said. He pointed down the hill with his chin. “Them too. Every day. They took off work.”

Brody turned and looked down the slope at all of those people standing between the rows. He looked at them a long time. Then he took his cap off.

He did not say anything to them. He just held his cap in his hand and stood there with his head down, in front of the whole hill.

That was the consequence. Not a court. Not a lawyer. A man standing bareheaded in front of every logger he would ever ask for a job, on the hill he had sold out from under his own sons.

Making It Right

When he put his cap back on, he walked down to where I was standing.

“How much were the trees?” he asked.

“A little over five thousand with the trucking,” I said.

He nodded. “I’ll pay it back to you. All of it. I’ve got some unemployment left and I start at the shake mill in Myrtle Point next month.”

“Don’t pay it back to me,” I said. “Pay it back to them. Into their account, for the land. A little every month until the thirty-one is back.”

He looked at me like I had asked for the moon. Then he looked up the hill at Colby kneeling by the stump.

“Three hundred a month,” he said. “It’ll take years.”

“The trees will take forty,” I said. “You’ve got time.”

He held my eye for a long second. Then he said, “Okay.”

Emmett had come down behind him. The old man put one hand on Brody’s shoulder, hard, the way you hold onto a man so he does not slip.

“Your grandpa planted this hill in eighty-six,” Emmett said. “I helped him. I’ll tell you what he told me that day. You don’t own a forest. You just get to stand in it for a while.”

Brody nodded without looking up.

“You stood in it,” Emmett said. “Now you’re going to look after it.”

Then he let go and walked back up the hill to sit on Grandpa’s stump.

The Last Hour

Nobody left right away. Somebody opened a cooler, and somebody else started a little fire in an old burn barrel at the bottom of the skid road, more for comfort than warmth.

Brody took one of Emmett’s hoedads and walked the rows with the boys, filling gaps where a tree had been missed or a stump had been in the way. He did not talk much. But he planted maybe fifty trees that last hour, side by side with his sons.

Lorne’s wife handed him a cup of soup. He took it and said thank you. She did not say anything back, but she did not walk away either. She stood next to him while he drank it.

That is how it is in a logging town. You do not forget. But you do not run a man out, either. You let him work.

The scale house woman closed her notebook and held it up for everyone to see. “Nine thousand and twelve,” she said. “Counting Colby’s.”

Somebody clapped once. Then everybody clapped, standing there on the stump-covered hill in the gray light, the mist coming down soft over the ridge.

Colby turned red and hid behind his brother.