The Trees I Sold From the Crossroads

Arvid Pruess came into the warming shed on the Saturday before Thanksgiving, stamped the mud off his boots, and stood by the wood stove for a long time without saying anything at all.

I was counting the starting cash for the season. Two hundred dollars in small bills, the same as every year, laid out in the gray metal cash box on the plywood counter he had built the year Ossie and I got married.

“Jody,” he said finally. He said it to the stovepipe, not to me. “Brandon’s going to take the box this year.”

I finished counting the fives before I looked up. I don’t know why. Nine years of habit, I suppose.

You don’t leave a stack half counted, not at a bank window and not in a tree shed.

“All right,” I said. “Is he working with me, or instead of me?”

Arvid took his cap off and turned it in his hands.

He was seventy that fall, a big slow man with a farmer’s red neck and hands like split firewood. I had never once seen him nervous until that morning.

“Instead,” he said. “Florene wants him to have something. He got laid off from the plant in October, and he’s been on her couch since. She thinks if he learns the cash side, he could take on more of it.”

Brandon was twenty-eight. Florene was Arvid’s new wife, married two years that summer, a widow from down near Cadillac who had come up to buy a wreath and stayed.

I had nothing against either one of them. I still don’t, mostly.

“And you’ve got the bank,” Arvid said. “You don’t need it the way he does.”

That was the part that sat in me. Not the job. The job was thirteen dollars an hour, cash, five weekends and a couple of weeknights before Christmas.

It was the way he said I didn’t need it, as if that settled whose it was.

I closed the cash box and slid it across the counter to him. I took the little brass key off my own ring, the one I had carried nine Decembers, and set it on top.

“The tape in the register is new,” I said. “The card reader needs charging Friday night. Jubal pays with a check, and it’s always good.”

“Jody,” he said again, and he sounded like he wanted me to help him say something. I didn’t know what it was, so I didn’t help.

“Tell Florene I hope it goes well for him,” I said, and I picked up my thermos and went out.