The Trees He Never Sold

What I decided

Nolan and I argued at the kitchen table for the better part of April. Not angrily. We are not that kind of family. But both of us were right.

“Marn, we’re not a charity,” he said, the third night. “Dad had no mortgage and he worked the lot for free. I’ve got two kids in college. Who pays for the thirty trees?”

“Dad did.”

“And Dad’s gone.”

“He never called it charity, Nolan. He called it a crooked top.”

My brother put his face in his hands and laughed, the way you do after funerals. Then he sat there a long time.

I told him what I wanted. Not forever. One season. I would open the lot the day after Thanksgiving, keep the books honest, and run it exactly the way Dad ran it. If the numbers were a disaster, I would sell in January and not argue.

Nolan took a pencil from the coffee can, wrote a number on the back of an envelope, and slid it across the table. It was exactly what the lot’s taxes would be.

“I’ll cover the taxes,” he said. “One season. Don’t tell my wife I said it this fast.”

The season

The lot opened on a gray, wet Friday, and I was frightened the entire day. By Saturday noon I was not, because my husband had been beside me both days and neither of us had sat down.

Dewey works road crew for Clackamas County, and every December he takes his vacation days and works the lot. He has done it since he was sixteen. I had never once asked myself why a man would spend thirty-six years of days off standing in the mud for a father-in-law who said barely ten words to him a day.

The people came in pickups and station wagons and one yellow school bus, and at the register, one after another, the stories started. A woman told me she had been eleven when my father put a tree on her mother’s porch with no note. A teenage boy, nervous, asked if the old man still worked here. When I told him no, he nodded for a long moment and said, “Tell him thanks anyway.”

Then the twenty-second came, and I had to do the thing I had been dreading. Tobe gave me the rules from the shop doorway, in his usual number of words.

“Watch the fence. Folks standing too long. Never ask. Never say the word. He says it’s a crooked top, you say it’s a crooked top.”

The first tree I tried to give away, I did badly. A man in a work jacket had been standing at the rail with a little girl for twenty minutes. He looked at the price board and looked away. He put his hand on the top of a tree and took it off again.

I went over and said, “That one’s got a crooked top. I can’t sell it.”

He looked at me. Then he looked at the tree, which was a perfect six-foot Douglas fir with a top as straight as a pencil.

I watched the shame come over his face like a shadow. I had said it like a person lying, and he heard it.

“Ma’am, I can pay,” he said stiffly. “I’m not asking for anything.”

“I know. I just meant…”

“Come on, Sadie,” he said, and took the little girl’s hand and walked toward his truck.

I stood there with my face burning. Dewey came across the gravel and stood beside me with his hands in his pockets, the way my father used to.

“Don’t tell him it’s a gift,” he said quietly. “Tell him he’s helping you. That’s the trick. Your dad never gave anybody a thing. He asked them to take something off his hands.”

“He’s already at his truck.”

“Then run,” my husband said.

I ran across the gravel and caught the man as he opened his door.

“Sir,” I said, out of breath, “I’m sorry. I said that wrong. I’m new at this. My father ran this lot for forty-seven years and he died in March, and he left me thirty trees I can’t sell, and I don’t know what to do with firewood in December. You’d be doing me a favor. Otherwise I’m hauling them to the burn pile.”

The man held his truck door open a long time.

“Burn pile,” he said.

“Yes, sir.”

He looked at the little girl, Sadie, who was watching him from the passenger seat.

“I’ll haul it,” he said. “I don’t have a lot of room in the truck, but I’ll haul it.”

I carried that tree to his truck myself and tied it down with my father’s knots. When I stepped back, the man put something small in my hand. It was a dollar bill, folded into a tight, soft square, like it had lived in a wallet a very long time.

“I know I don’t have to,” he said. “I want to.”

I looked at that dollar for a long time. Then I put it in my coat pocket, and I understood exactly why my father had taken every one of them.