The Trees I Sold From the Crossroads

Dad’s fence

Sunday after church I drove out to my dad’s place. Cassie came along. Ty stayed home and said he had homework, which he did not.

My dad is Orrin Linder. He was seventy-two that fall.

He farmed potatoes and hay most of his life and drove a school bus for twenty-six years on top of it, and his left hip had finally given out the winter before.

He walks with a cane now. He hates it. He calls it his third leg and leans it against things and forgets it there, and then he has to holler for somebody to bring it.

When I was a girl, nine or ten, Dad started planting Christmas trees on the back five acres behind the house.

Scotch pine first, because that was what people bought then, and then spruce, and later fir.

He never made much off it. He sold a few dozen a year off the front porch to neighbors and people from church.

Mostly he liked planting them. He said it was the only crop that didn’t care about the price of anything.

When Ossie and I married, Dad deeded those five acres to me. It was a wedding present. He said every girl ought to own a piece of ground, even if it’s only sand and trees.

The spring after my divorce, Dad and I planted that ground solid. Eighteen hundred seedlings, Fraser and balsam fir and blue spruce, bare-root, out of the back of his truck in a cold April rain.

I remember asking him why. I was thirty-five and broke and sure I would never have time for a Christmas tree again in my life.

“For later,” he said. That was all he said about it. He kept planting.

Later

Every July after that, Dad sheared them. Then when his hip got bad, I sheared them, with the kids hauling the clippings and Dad sitting on an overturned bucket telling me I was doing it wrong.

You have to shear a fir every summer to get that tight cone shape people want.

Leave it alone and it grows like a weed tree, all leader and no body. Dad taught me that, and I taught Cassie.

That Sunday, Dad and Cassie and I walked out to the fence line behind his machine shed.

It was cold and bright, with a little old snow in the shade. Dad leaned his cane on a post and looked at my trees for a long time.

They were nine years old. Most of them stood six to eight feet, thick and blue-green and straight, and they ran in rows up the little rise until you couldn’t see the end of them.

“They’re ready,” I said. “Aren’t they.”

“They’ve been ready two years, honey,” Dad said. “I just didn’t want to say so. You were busy over there.”

He didn’t mean anything by it. But I heard it, and I understood that he had known what the farm was to me and had kept quiet about my own trees standing here in the cold.

“I’d have to sell them somewhere,” I said. “Nobody’s going to drive back here.”

Dad pointed his cane east, toward the county road, toward where you could just see the white steeple of the church at the crossroads over the bare oaks.

“Everybody in this township drives past that corner,” he said. “Every single one of them, going to that farm.”

Cassie looked at him, and then at me, and then she smiled for the first time in two days.

“Later’s here,” Dad said. He picked up his cane and started back to the house, slow, before either of us could argue with him.