The Trees I Sold From the Crossroads

Ty by the truck

It was a bright cold morning, the first real cold of the year. The sun was up over the fir rows and the frost was still white in the tractor ruts.

Brandon was out by the baler, feeding a tree through the netting chute for practice.

He lifted a hand to me. I lifted one back.

He was a soft heavy boy with a new pair of work gloves, and he looked about as happy to be there as a cat in a bathtub.

Ty was waiting by my truck. He was twelve that year, all elbows and ears, and he had brought his good leather gloves because Arvid always let him help load trees onto the customers’ cars.

“Are we staying?” he asked.

“Not today, bud,” I said. “Get in. It’s cold.”

I told him on the drive home. Eleven miles of county road between the farm and our place, past the gravel pit and the dairy and the white church at the crossroads, and I told him all of it in the first mile.

He didn’t say anything. He looked out his window at the bare maples and the snow fence for the other ten miles. When we turned into our drive he finally spoke.

“Grandpa Arvid said I could run the baler this year,” he said. “He said twelve was old enough.”

“I know he did.”

“Does Brandon even know how to tie off a tree?”

“He’ll learn,” I said, and I meant it kindly, but Ty heard what I didn’t say, and he got out and shut the truck door harder than he needed to.

What the farm was to them

People have asked me since why I kept going back after the divorce. It is a fair question.

Ossie and I split when Cassie was six and Ty was three, and it was not a friendly split, not at first.

But the farm was not Ossie’s. It was his father’s, and his grandfather’s before that, forty acres of Fraser fir and blue spruce on a sandy hill north of town.

My kids had ridden the hay wagon out to the rows every December of their lives.

Ossie works a pipeline crew out of North Dakota. He is gone three weeks at a time, home one, and most Decembers he was not home at all.

The farm was how my kids kept their father’s side of the family.

So the first season after the divorce, when Arvid called and asked if I would still run the cash box, I said yes.

I told myself it was for the kids. It was. It was also for me, if I’m honest.

I liked it out there. I liked the smell of the stove and the fresh cut stumps.

I liked knowing the regulars, the families who came the same Saturday every year and argued about the same things.

I liked Arvid too. He was a better grandfather than he had been a father, which is true of a lot of men, and he never once said a word against me to my children. I owed him that.

The phone call

Ossie called that Sunday, the way he does, from a motel room somewhere west of Williston. The kids talked to him first. Then Cassie handed me the phone with a face like a closed door.

“I called Dad,” Ossie said. “I’m sorry, Jode. He says it’s done. Florene’s got him by the ear and he can’t see around her.”

“It’s his farm,” I said. “It’s his to decide.”

“It’s still wrong,” Ossie said. He was quiet a minute. “I’m two states away. I can’t fix this from here.”

“I didn’t ask you to.”

“I know you didn’t.” He sighed. “I’ll send something extra for the kids’ Christmas. Tell Ty I said he’s a good hand.”

He did send it, two hundred dollars, the week after. I have never once said Ossie was a bad father.

He is a man who works hard a long way from home, and he did what he could from there.

But it was his father’s farm and my seasonal cash job, and there was nothing to fight.

I could not call anybody. There was nobody to call. Arvid had every right to hire whoever he wanted.

What I could not stand was Ty’s face at the window.