The Trees He Never Sold

The truck ride I never forgot

There is one night I do remember. I have carried it for forty-two years without knowing what it was.

It was the twenty-third of December, 1984. I was thirteen. A cold rain had been coming down since noon, and my hands were so stiff I could barely work the twine.

Around four o’clock, a boy was standing at the fence outside the rail, in a jacket too thin for the weather. I could see him from the register. He might have been ten. He had been looking an hour at the biggest Noble on the lot, an eight-footer my father had been saving for the bank lobby. He was not looking at a price. He was looking at that tree the way you look at something you are trying to memorize.

My father walked out and stood beside him. They did not talk long, and I could not hear it over the rain.

Then Daddy came back to the shop, took his keys off the nail, and said, “Marnie, get your coat.”

I climbed into the cab, and Daddy loaded that eight-foot Noble into the bed by himself and tied it down with the knots.

We drove about five miles through the rain, down toward Mulino. I remember the wipers and the heater smelling like hot dust. My father did not say one word the whole way.

We stopped at a small gray rental house with a single porch light on. There was no car in the driveway and no light in the windows except one.

My father carried the tree up the steps on his shoulder. A woman opened the door. I could not see her face. I could see my father’s back and the shape of the tree, and I could see her put both hands over her mouth.

I stayed in the truck. I was thirteen and cold, and I thought, uncharitably, that my father had made me miss cocoa for a delivery.

When he came back, he got in and sat for a second with his hands on the wheel. His eyes were wet. I had never seen that, and I looked out the window so he would not know I had.

“Delivery,” he said, and started the truck.

On the way home he stopped at the Dairy Queen in Molalla, nearly closed, and bought me a hot chocolate. He did not buy himself anything.

I asked him in the parking lot who it was.

“Folks,” he said. “A child ought not wake up to a bare corner, Marnie. That’s all it is.”

That is the only thing he ever said to me about it in forty-two years. A child ought not wake up to a bare corner.

I put that night away with the Dairy Queen cocoa and the smell of the heater. I did not take it out again until the week after his funeral, when I opened his desk.