The Trees He Never Sold

Tobe, and the jar

I did what the old woman in the green coat had told me to do. I asked Tobe.

Tobe Rademacher had worked at Quillen Trees since 1988. He was seventy-four, with a face like a split rail, and he did not volunteer a sentence if a nod would do. I found him in the shop on a Tuesday, sharpening saws, though the season was eight months away.

“The twenty-seventh,” I said. “A woman at the funeral said to ask you about the twenty-seventh. Something about a burn pile.”

Tobe put down the file. He looked at me for a long minute, and then he looked at the wall.

“Not mine to tell,” he said. “She’ll tell you herself, if she comes. Your daddy didn’t want a fuss, and I got sworn to it before I ever swung a saw for him.” He shrugged toward the lot and the forty acres behind. “But you ought to know what you’re choosing, Marnie. Come on.”

He took me out the back door and down a farm lane I had walked a thousand times, to the river fence at the very back of the property.

I had always thought the long double row of Nobles along that fence was a windbreak, trees at every stage of growth, from knee-high seedlings to ones standing twelve feet tall.

“Count them,” Tobe said.

I walked the row with my hand out, and I counted. Four hundred and twenty-seven.

“Your daddy called it the Dollar Row,” Tobe said. “Never told anybody but me, and your mother before she passed. Most folks he gave a tree to never offered a dime. But once in a while somebody could not stand to take it for nothing. They’d have their pride, and they’d dig out a dollar or some change and push it at him.”

“And he took it?”

“Always. Said a man who insists on paying is a man you ought to let. Refuse him and you take the dignity right out of it. He did it down by the fence with his back to the register, so you’d never see. Then the dollar went in a mason jar on the shelf in the shop. Come March, he’d buy that many seedling plugs from the nursery in Canby and plant them right here.”

“One for every dollar,” I said.

“Right. And when they got big enough to cut, those were the trees he gave away. Folks’ own dollars, come back around as somebody else’s Christmas.”

I stood at the fence and looked down four hundred and twenty-seven trees paid for by people who could not afford a Christmas tree and had refused to take one as charity. I understood the funeral then. A man in a Carhartt coat had held my hand and said, “I paid him a dollar,” because it was the one thing he got to keep. It was his proof that he had not been taken care of for nothing.

At the head of the row, standing a little apart from the rest, was a Noble fir better than forty feet tall, thick through the trunk, the oldest tree in the row by far. It was the only tree on the farm I had ever been told not to climb.

“What’s that one?” I asked.

“That one’s not mine to tell either,” Tobe said. “Ask your husband.”