The Trees He Never Sold

The twenty-seventh

Orpha Weddle came to the lot on the afternoon of the twenty-third.

She wore the same green wool coat and leaned on the same grandson’s arm, though he had a Ducks cap on now and carried a thermos. She was eighty-one years old. She had come from a care home in Silverton because she had promised herself she would see my face once more.

I sat her on a hay bale by the barrel fire and gave her cider. Dewey stood behind me, and Tobe stood by the shop door with his hat off.

“I owe you a story,” she said.

“You don’t owe me anything.”

“I do. I owe your father a good deal more, and he is gone, so I have to pay you.” She wrapped both hands around the cup. “It was nineteen seventy-nine. I was thirty-four years old. My husband had died that October, a tractor, and I had two children and a rented house and nothing in the bank.”

“We did not have a tree. I told the children Christmas was in your heart, the way mothers do. My daughter was six. She looked at me and did not argue, and that was the worst part.”

“The twenty-seventh of December, I walked by this lot. I had been to the store for milk. Behind the shop, by the gate, your father had a burn pile going. Dozens of trees. Good trees, whole ones, the ones he hadn’t sold, heaped up to burn. I stood in the road in the rain and looked at those trees.”

She was quiet for a moment.

“I climbed over the fence,” she said. “I took one. A scrawny little Douglas. It was two days too late and I did not care. I dragged it a mile and a quarter to my house in the rain, with the milk in my other hand. My daughter met me at the door and said, ‘Mama, it’s just like a real one.'”

She laughed, and it turned into something else, and her grandson handed her a handkerchief.

“I did not know your father was watching,” she said. “He was in the shop window. He saw me climb his fence. He saw me drag that tree down the road. He told me years later he watched me out of sight.”

“He never stopped you?” I could barely get it out.