The Trees I Sold From the Crossroads

Cutting

Thanksgiving was at Dad’s. Turkey and the potatoes my mother used to make, which nobody makes right anymore, and pie from the church bake sale. We went to bed early.

The bank was open the Friday after Thanksgiving, but I had used my vacation week every December for nine years to work the cash box.

This year I used it for my own trees, two days of it over Thanksgiving and the rest in December.

We started cutting at first light on Friday. Dad came out in his truck and sat in the cab with the heater going and the window down, calling out which rows to take first.

I ran the chainsaw. Cassie dragged. She was fifteen and strong as a calf, and she dragged trees out to the end of the rows two at a time, one in each hand, by the butts, the way Dad showed her.

Ty had one job, and he had asked for it. He tied every tree.

Dad had bought a big spool of baler twine at the feed store, the orange kind, and a smaller spool of plain jute.

He taught Ty the knot in the truck cab with the heater going.

It was the same knot Dad used on hay bales and calf ropes his whole life.

Around the butt, up the trunk in a spiral, pull it snug so the limbs fold up, and then a doubled hitch at the top that would not slip.

“Why doubled?” Ty asked him.

“So they ride home safe,” Dad said. “A tree comes loose on the highway, it’s in the ditch, and somebody’s Christmas is in the ditch with it.”

Ty took that very seriously. I watched him tie the first one and pull it, and pull it again, and then he looked over at Dad in the truck, and Dad gave him a thumbs-up through the windshield.

Three hundred

A woman at the bank who grew up on a dairy asked me later how I knew the number.

I knew because I had counted. That first Sunday after church, I walked every row and hung surveyor’s ribbon on the trees that were right.

Six feet or better, good shape, no bare side, no double leader. Three hundred and eleven of them.

I took off eleven for the church and for the kids and for Dad and for Waldo, and that left three hundred.

At forty dollars a tree, if I sold every one, that was twelve thousand dollars.

More than nine seasons of cash box wages put together. I tried not to think about it. I kept thinking about it.

Dad thought forty was right. Arvid charged sixty for choose-and-cut that year, and sixty-five for the big firs, and I didn’t want anybody saying I had come out to undercut him.

“Forty’s plenty,” Dad said. “Those seedlings cost me thirty-one cents apiece. The rest is just your sweat and mine.”

We cut a hundred and twenty over Thanksgiving weekend and laid them in the shade on the north side of Dad’s machine shed, where the cold would keep them fresh.

The next Saturday morning we loaded the flatbed shoulder high, butts all one way, tied, with a bale of straw on the corner for the kids to sit on.

Waldo came by with a thermos and checked the load and said it would ride. He didn’t say anything else. He just tightened one of my ratchet straps a click and drove off.