The Buckets on Dad’s Road Row

Dad told me he looked at the envelope a long time.

“Corbin,” he said finally, “I don’t want your money. You need it worse than I do.”

“I know,” Corbin said. “I want you to have it anyway.”

So Dad took the envelope. And then he went into the pantry and brought out a quart of the first syrup, the batch I drew off, and he set it in Corbin’s hands.

“You come sugar with us next spring,” Dad said. “On buckets. Bring the boys. They ought to know how it was done.”

Corbin did not answer. Dad said he just nodded, and held the jar against his coat, and went back out to his truck.

That week Corbin came back with a trailer and pulled every inch of his tubing off the hill. All of it, mainline and droplines and fittings, coiled neat in the trailer bed. He did not leave a single spout or a single foot of line behind.

Dad watched him do it from the porch. He did not go down.

Jana says Corbin is selling one of the vacuum pumps. She says he is going to run a smaller system on his own land and not take on any more leases for a while. She says he went to church with her the Sunday after Easter for the first time in two years.

I don’t know what the bank will do. I hope they give him time. I mean that.

I put the $3,800 in an envelope in Dad’s desk. Dad says it is for new buckets, when the old ones finally go. He says it the way a man says something he means to see.

The hill came home to Dad in May. It looks the same. The trees do not know who leases them.

But the road row does.

On the last day of the run, before we pulled the buckets, I walked down the slope with Dad in the afternoon sun to get the last of the sap. Most of the snow was gone and the mud was showing through, and you could smell the ground waking up.

When we got to the stumps, Dad stopped.

He had two buckets with him, the last two from the porch, the spares. He did not say what they were for. He handed one to me and kept one himself, and then he went back up to the barn and came back with twelve more on his arm, one stack, the way he used to carry them when he was a young man.

I understood then what the nails were for.

He went from stump to stump. He hooked a bucket on the nail in the side of each one, and set a lid on top, and stepped back to look. It took him most of an hour. I did not help him. I knew better.

When he was done, all fourteen stumps had a bucket hanging from them, empty, with their peaked lids on, catching the sun.

“Why, Dad?” I asked him.

He stood with his hands in the pockets of his tan barn coat and looked at them.

“So nobody driving by forgets they were trees,” he said.

They are still there. It has been more than a year now, and I drive past them every day on my route, and every day somebody who does not know the story slows down to look.

The fourteen stumps are still there at the edge of the road, and Dad hung a bucket on the nail in each one.