The Buckets on Dad’s Road Row

He did not answer right away. He took his cap off and looked into it, and put it back on, and then he looked down the slope at the stumps.

“No,” he said. “He did not ask.”

I sat down on the step below him. The boards were warm from the sun.

“They don’t fit his lines,” Dad said after a while. “That’s what he told Jana. The old trees are too far apart and too crooked, and they stand too close to the road for his mainline to come down right. He said they were in the way.”

“In the way of what?”

“Of the money, I suppose.”

He said it without any meanness. Dad does not have much meanness in him. He just said it the way he would tell you the price of hay.

I went inside and called Jana. I stood in Dad’s kitchen with the phone cord stretched across to the window so I could look at the stumps while I talked, because I wanted to keep seeing them. I wanted to be sure I was not dreaming.

Jana picked up on the fourth ring. She already knew why I was calling. I could hear it in the way she said hello, low and tired, like somebody who has been waiting for the other shoe all day.

“I didn’t know he was going to do it,” she said. “I swear to you, Kris. He told me last night after it was already done. He sold them to a man from over in Orleans County for firewood. Better than twenty cords, he said.”

“Firewood,” I said.

“I know.”

“Grandpa’s trees, Jana. The ones in the picture in the hall.”

“I know.” Her voice broke on it a little. “He owes sixty thousand dollars on that tubing and those vacuum pumps. Sixty thousand. He signed for it two years ago when the syrup price was up, and then the price came down and the bank did not. He says every tree on that hill has to pay its way or it has to go.”

I did not say anything for a while.

I understand owing money. I want to be fair about that, because I have been there. When Merritt and I were first married we owed on a skidder that nearly sank us, and I know what it does to a man to wake up at four in the morning doing figures in his head.

But those trees were not Corbin’s to sell. He leased the sap. He did not lease the wood.

“Is Dad all right?” Jana asked.

“He’s on the porch,” I said. “Looking at them.”

She was quiet. Then she said, “I can’t, Kris. I can’t fight Corbin over this right now. You don’t know what it’s like at our house.”

And I did not push her. I want that on the record too. She is my little sister, and she is the one who has to go home to him.

People have asked me since why we didn’t just get a lawyer. I’ll tell you what I told them. There was no paper. The lease was a handshake across Dad’s kitchen table two years ago, and Dad would not break his word to his own daughter’s husband. Not over trees, not over anything.

“I shook his hand,” Dad said, when I brought it up that evening at supper. “I told him the hill was his to tap through his third season. This is his third season. I’m not going to stand in front of a judge and say my handshake doesn’t count because the man who took it turned out to be careless.”