The Trees He Never Sold

The rule I never understood

Quillen Trees sits on forty acres of river-bottom ground off Dickey Prairie Road, about six miles south of Molalla. We grew Nobles and Douglas firs, in rows my grandfather planted and my father kept straight with a string line and a stubborn jaw.

The retail lot was a half acre of gravel out front beside the shop, strung with bulbs and rimmed with a split-rail fence my mother whitewashed every fall. We ran a barrel fire, a cider urn, and a hand-lettered price board that never changed.

December in the Willamette Valley is not snow. It is rain, and mud, and a cold that gets into the wet wool of your gloves, and every car that pulls in has a child in the back seat pressing a nose to the glass.

My father had one rule, and he repeated it so often that Tobe Rademacher and I could say it along with him.

“After the twenty-second, a tree that’s still standing isn’t a tree. It’s firewood. And I don’t sell firewood in December.”

He would say it around three o’clock on the twenty-second, in the flat voice he used for weather. Then he would go stand at the edge of the lot, near the gate, with his hands in his coat pockets, and watch.

For years I thought he was a poor businessman. Our neighbors ran their lots until Christmas Eve and sold every last tree at full price to the panicked fathers who showed up at dusk. By the evening of the twenty-third, ours was empty, and I would sweep chips off the gravel thinking about the money we had left on the table.

I asked him once, when I was about twelve.

“Daddy, we could have sold those last thirty on Christmas Eve.”

He kept sweeping.

“Folks who stand at the fence are doing arithmetic, Marnie,” he said. “I’d rather they didn’t have to finish it.”

That was all I got, and I did not understand it. I was twelve. I thought arithmetic was homework.

What I watched, year after year, without seeing it, was this. A woman would walk the rows slowly, touching the needles, look at the price board, and walk the rows again. A man would stand at the split-rail fence with two small kids and say, in a voice carefully full of cheer, that they were just looking.

And my father, who did not like talking to anybody, would drift over.

“That one’s got a crooked top,” he would say, pointing at a tree that did not have a crooked top. “Can’t sell it like that. I’d be doing myself a favor if you hauled it off.”

Then he would carry the tree to the car himself and tie it down with twine, in knots he did not let anybody else touch. And he would be back at the barrel fire before they finished thanking him.

I saw that a hundred times. I thought it was a soft spot of his, like the way he fed every barn cat in the county. I did not know it was the whole point of the lot.