The Buckets on Dad’s Road Row

By noon there was a line for syrup on snow that went from the sugarhouse door halfway down to the road.

And that was when I saw Corbin’s truck.

I knew it before it came all the way over the rise. You know the sound of every engine on your road when you carry the mail on it. I don’t know if somebody called him or if he just saw the steam.

The truck slowed when it came down the hill toward the road row. It slowed more when it reached the first of the buckets.

Then it slowed to a crawl. I watched it creep along the road beside the stone wall, past one tree and its bucket, and the next tree and its two buckets, and the next. Past Royal, with a full pail in each hand. Past the three boys from across the river, carrying sap up the slope. Past the steam rolling across the road in front of his windshield.

Past the fourteen stumps, each one with a nail in its side.

It stopped beside the last stump. Right in the road. Nobody was behind him to honk.

Everybody in the dooryard went quiet. Not all at once. It spread down the line like when the organ stops in church and people keep singing for half a beat before they notice. The Grange ladies stopped talking. The little boy stopped chewing. Royal stopped at the top of the slope with his pails.

Dad set down the bucket lid he was holding on the sawhorse table.

Then he started down the hill toward the road.

I moved to go with him and Merritt put his hand on my arm, gently. “Let him,” he said.

So I let him.

Dad went slowly, because that is the only way he can go anymore. He went down the slope with his hand out to the trees on the way, touching each trunk as he passed it. It took him a long time. Nobody said a word the whole while. You could hear the buckets plinking, and the arch roaring behind us in the sugarhouse, and the steam.

Corbin got out of the truck.

I will be honest about Corbin, because I want this to be fair. He is not a monster. He is a hardworking man of fifty. He is good to my nephews. He shoveled Dad’s roof two winters running without being asked. He is just a man who got in over his head and decided the old trees were the cheapest thing on the hill to lose.

He stood in the road beside his open door. He looked up at the sugarhouse, at the steam, at the line of people standing with forks in their hands, and I watched the color go up his neck.

Dad stopped at the stone wall, a few feet from him. He did not climb over it. He stood on his own side.

I could not hear all of it from where I was. I heard most of it later, from Royal, who had come down the slope behind Dad and stood a little ways off, close enough to hear and far enough to be polite.

“Afternoon, Corbin,” Dad said.

“Lyman.” Corbin swallowed. “I was going to tell you.”

“You did tell me,” Dad said. “You told Jana, and she told me. That’s not the same as asking.”

Corbin looked at the stumps. He looked down at the road. “I owe sixty thousand dollars on that system, Lyman. You know that. I’ve got two pumps and eleven miles of line and a note at the bank I can’t make. Those trees were in the way of my main. I figured, with the wood…”