The Trees He Never Sold

The green book

My brother Nolan drove down from Beaverton the day of the service and went home that night, and he came again on Sunday, because there was the matter of the property.

Nolan sells commercial insurance. He is a good man and a careful one, and he had spent all week on the phone with the county and a man from a timber company.

“Marn, I’m not saying sell,” he said. “I’m saying look at the numbers.”

We were in Dad’s office, the cramped room behind the shop with the roll-top desk. The desk was a mess in the particular way of a man who knows where everything is. Seed catalogs, tax receipts, a coffee can of pencils.

The numbers were not good. The farm had broken even for a decade only because my father worked for free, and he was gone.

“Forty acres,” Nolan said, gentler. “It’s worth more cut up than it is planted.”

I could not answer him. I pulled open the bottom drawer to look for the insurance papers, and I found something else.

It was a green cloth account book, the old kind with red corners, the kind my grandfather kept feed bills in. The cover was soft from handling. On the front, in my father’s square pencil, it said only “Trees.”

I thought it was an inventory. I opened it.

On the first page, in blue ink gone faint, was a date. December 23, 1980. Under it, in the same square hand, a single line.

“Widow on Dickey Prairie. Two kids. Walked. One tree, Doug fir, 6 ft.”

That was it. No name and no price. In the price column, a dash.

I turned the page. The entries were short and none of them had a name. They said things like “Man with the bad knee, three girls,” and “Young couple, first baby, car with no heater.”

I read down page after page and felt something tilt under my feet. My father had written down every tree he gave away. Forty-six years of them, with a running total at the bottom of each year.

The last page with writing on it was from the previous December, in a hand that had gone shaky. The entry for the twenty-third ended in a line that I read three times.

“Thirty-one trees this year. Marnie ran the register and did not notice. Good.”

Nolan had been reading over my shoulder. I heard him sit down on the arm of the old chair.

“Thirty-one,” he said quietly.

I turned to the running totals and added them with the calculator from the desk. It took me twice, because my hands were not steady.

One thousand, one hundred and eighty-six trees.

At the very back of the book, I found one more thing. An envelope was taped to the inside of the back cover with a strip of yellowed masking tape. It was sealed. It had been there a long time, because the tape had gone brittle and the paper had a tan stain along the fold.

On the front, in my father’s pencil, it said one word.

“Dewey.”

My husband’s name.

Not mine. I was his only daughter, who had run his register for forty years, and the one thing in that book he had sealed, he had sealed for my husband.

When Dewey came to pick me up that evening, I put the book in his hands and said, “Dad left this for you. I didn’t open it.”

He took it and looked at the cover, and the color left his face so fast I put a hand out to him.

“Marn,” he said. “Not yet. Please.”

“What is it?”

“I’ll tell you,” he said. “I will. But I have to read it by myself first, and I don’t think I can do it this month.”

In twenty-eight years of marriage, Dewey Dowell had never asked me to wait for anything. I looked at him and I knew what it cost him to ask.

“All right,” I said.

He tucked the envelope inside his coat, against his chest, and drove us home without a word. It rode there for nine months.