The Trees He Never Sold

The tree by the post

We walked out to the Dollar Row in the dark, the two of us, with a flashlight, on the night of the twenty-third.

The rain had stopped. The sky over the river was clear for the first time in a week and thick with stars. The tree stood at the head of the row, black and enormous against it, its branches heavy and still.

Dewey put his hand against the trunk.

“I was sixteen when we planted it,” he said. “A seedling the length of my hand. Your dad put it in with a spade. He said, ‘Someday somebody is going to stand under this, Dewey, and not know who it was for.'”

“Somebody is standing under it,” I said.

“Somebody who knows.”

We stood there a long time, a man who walked five miles in the rain and a woman who sat in a truck cab, under the tree my father planted with one folded dollar.

I took the other dollars out of my coat pocket. Four of them, soft and warm, from four people who could not stand to take a tree for nothing. I laid them in my palm.

“Come March,” I said, “we call the nursery in Canby.”

“Four seedlings,” Dewey said.

On the morning of Christmas Eve, a child in a house I will never see woke up and ran to a corner of a room, and in that corner, sure as sunrise, was a tree.

I do not know all of their names. I never will. In the green book it is written as “Man with the little girl, Sadie, hauled it off the burn pile,” with a dash in the price column. The dollar he gave me is folded in a tight square in a mason jar on the shelf in the shop.

I added the last line to that page myself that night. It is in my own hand, under my father’s, in his square pencil, because it seemed the only right way to keep it.

“A child ought not wake up to a bare corner.”

I have a husband who carries the last trees to the cars in the rain, and I finally know why he never looks up to see who is watching. I have forty acres I thought I would sell. And I have a row of four hundred and twenty-seven trees, plus four more coming in March.

My father stood still for one minute in 1979, and he spent forty-six years making sure nobody around him ever had to.

The lot opens the day after Thanksgiving.

This story is a dramatization. Names, characters, and details are invented, and any resemblance to real people or events is coincidental.