The Trees He Never Sold

“He did not move,” Orpha said. “That is the thing, dear. He did not move. He stood in that window with a cup of coffee in his hand and watched a widow carry off his trash, because he was too ashamed to walk out and say, ‘Take two.’ He was thirty-four years old, with a wife and a little girl of his own, and he did not know how to give a thing to somebody without hurting her. So he stood there.”

“The next year, on the twenty-third, he knocked on my door with a six-foot Douglas on his shoulder,” Orpha said. “He said, ‘Ma’am, I couldn’t sell this one. It’s got a crooked top.’ It did not have a crooked top. It was the best tree on the lot.”

“He told me what it was, years later, at a Grange supper. He said, ‘I stood in that window for one minute, Orpha. One minute. That is the whole reason. I figure I owe the county a minute, and I have been paying it back ever since.'”

“That’s what he never told you,” she said. “He was not a saint, dear. He was a young man who stood still for one minute when he should have walked, and it haunted him for forty-six years. And he spent every one of them walking.”

“What did you do with the tree?” I asked. “The one you dragged home.”

“We stood it in a coffee can with some rocks. My daughter made paper chains out of a catalog.” She smiled, and it was an astonishing smile for a woman of eighty-one. “She is fifty-three now. She teaches third grade in Albany. Her classroom has a tree every December. A real one.”

I loaded her grandson’s truck myself, with the best Noble on the lot, and tied it down with my father’s knots.

“I can pay,” the young man said, not meanly, reaching for his wallet.

“You’d be doing me a favor,” I said.

He looked at me. His grandmother, from the cab, gave a short, satisfied nod. He put a dollar in my hand.

The envelope

On the evening of the twenty-third, after the last tree was gone and the gravel was swept and the bulbs were still lit, Dewey found me in the back of the shop.

I was alone with the green book. I had written my first entry in it, in my own handwriting, under my father’s. It said, “Thirty-eight trees. Four of them wanted to pay. I took the dollars.”

My husband stood in the doorway a while with his hat in his hands.

“I think I can tell you now,” he said.

He took out the envelope. It had been in his coat, against his chest, since March, and the paper had gone soft at the corners from being carried. He had not opened it until the night before, he said, when he could not sleep and went out to the truck and read it by the dome light.

He sat down on an overturned bucket across from me. He was fifty-two and he looked about ten.

“You remember the night in eighty-four?” he said. “When your dad took you in the truck down toward Mulino?”

I stared at him.

“There was a boy at the fence,” I said slowly. “In the rain. In a jacket too thin.”

“There was.”

“Dewey.”