The Trees He Never Sold

“My dad came out of the woods in November,” he said. “A log rolled on him. His back. He was in the hospital in Oregon City, and then he was home in a brace and could not work, and my mother was working nights at the cannery. We had two other kids at home, and we’d stopped talking about Christmas.”

“I was ten. I thought, if I could see the biggest tree in the world, I could go home and tell my little sister what it looked like, and it would be almost like having one.” He rubbed his thumb along the edge of the bucket. “I walked five miles in the rain that day, Marn. I stood at your father’s fence for an hour and a half.”

“I remember you,” I said. My voice would not work right. “I saw you from the register. I thought, there’s a boy who wants that tree.”

“Your dad came over and stood next to me. He did not say anything for a while. Then he said, ‘It’s too big for most people’s rooms. I’ve been trying to place it.’ I said, ‘We’d never fit it.’ He said, ‘Well. I could cut a little off the bottom.'”

“He did. He cut two feet off that tree at our kitchen table. My mother held the lamp. My dad was in his chair with his brace on, watching, and he never said a word, and I saw him wipe his face with the back of his hand.”

“That was Christmas,” Dewey said. “I had a tree.”

“But you came to work for him.”

“When I was sixteen. I walked up that driveway with my hat in my hand. Your father looked up from the saw and said, ‘I wondered when you’d come.’ That’s all. We never said another word about it in thirty-six years.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?” I whispered. “When we were dating. When we got married.”

My husband looked at his hands for a long time.

“Because you looked at me like I was just Dewey,” he said. “Not the boy at the fence. I had been that boy my whole childhood, Marn. Every teacher, every church lady. I wanted to be a man you picked, not a story you owed something to. And your father agreed it was mine to tell. He said I’d know when.”

He held up the envelope.

“I couldn’t open it for nine months. I thought it would say he’d told you I was a charity case. It doesn’t. Do you want to hear what it says?”

I nodded.

He unfolded a single page in my father’s hand and read it aloud, in a voice that was not steady.

“Dewey. I am writing this in case I go before you tell her. The tree was never the gift, son. You were. You walked five miles in the rain to look at something you thought you could not have, and you stood there an hour and a half too proud to ask. I had stood at a window once for one minute and watched a woman carry off my trash. I swore I would never stand still again. You made me keep the promise. Every tree in that row after the first is because of you. When you tried to pay me at sixteen, with your first check, I took a dollar. It was the best dollar I ever earned. I planted the first tree of the row with it. It is by the post. Do not let Marnie cut it.”

Dewey stopped reading. He could not go on.

“The first tree in the Dollar Row,” I said.

“Mine. The one by the post.”

“Better than forty feet tall,” I whispered.

“He never let anybody near it.”

I went around the bucket and put my arms around my husband, and I held him the way you hold something you nearly did not know you had.

“I have been carrying the last trees to people’s cars for thirty-six years,” he said into my shoulder. “I never knew how to say why. I just knew I could not let anybody be me, and stand there, and not get one.”

“There’s one more line,” he said, after a while. “On the back.”

He turned the page over. Under my father’s signature, in pencil, smaller, was a last sentence.

“Marnie will want to keep the lot. Let her. Tell her she may take the dollars too.”