The Trees I Sold From the Crossroads

The first afternoon

We pulled onto the gravel at the crossroads a little after one o’clock on the first Saturday of December.

It was a bright cold December afternoon, with snow lying white over the fields and the gravel lot and the church roof.

I had on my red knit hat and my green canvas barn coat, the one with the corduroy collar that Dad gave me years ago.

Cassie had on her gray coat. Ty had gone back to the truck for more twine.

I had made a sign out of a piece of plywood and stuck it in the snowbank by the road.

It said Trees 40 in black spray paint. That was the whole sign. Cassie said it looked like a ransom note.

The first car that stopped was a young family I didn’t know. A father about thirty in a blue coat, and two little ones in puffy winter coats, a girl and a boy, maybe five and three.

“Are these real?” the boy asked, which made their dad laugh.

I pulled a fir off the flatbed and stood it up in the snow and turned it slow so they could see all the way around it.

The little boy clapped his mittens together. I will never forget that sound.

“That one,” the father said. “That’s the one.”

Cassie tied it up for them while he counted out two twenties.

She did it the way Ty had shown her that morning, doubled at the top, and he lifted it onto his car roof and said thank you twice.

When they pulled out, Cassie looked at me and grinned. “One,” she said.

“Two ninety-nine to go,” I said.

Cleta

The second car was Cleta.

Cleta is seventy-eight. She had bought a tree from Arvid’s farm every year for twenty-one years, the first Saturday of December, a seven-foot balsam because her late husband liked the smell. I had rung her up for nine of them.

She parked crooked on the shoulder and got out slow, and walked over to the flatbed in her church boots, and looked at me for a long minute.

“We heard,” Cleta said.

That was all she said about it. She didn’t say anything about Arvid, or Florene, or Brandon.

She picked a balsam, a seven-footer, and paid me forty dollars, and then she reached over and squeezed my hand in her glove.

Ty came back from the truck about then with the twine. He tied up Cleta’s tree without being asked, around and up and doubled at the top, and pulled it, and pulled it again.

“Your grandpa’s knot,” Cleta said to him. “I’d know it anywhere. He tied our hay with that knot for thirty years.”

Ty went red to his ears. He didn’t say a word.

But I saw him stand up straighter, and he tied every single tree after that one himself, all day, and wouldn’t let Cassie touch the twine.