The Trees I Sold From the Crossroads

Word

I have lived in that township my whole life. I know how word moves there. It does not move on a phone.

It moves in the feed store and the church parking lot and the post office line and at the window of the bank where I work.

By the end of that first Saturday, we had sold thirty-eight trees. Jubal came, with his wife, and paid me with a check, and it was good.

A man I didn’t know came because he had heard it at the feed store.

On Sunday the church let out at noon, and half the congregation walked straight across the gravel lot to the flatbed in their good coats.

We sold forty-four trees that afternoon. I put one up in the sanctuary for the pastor.

Leora, who runs the church kitchen, came out at two o’clock with a coffee urn on a little cart and a box of paper cups and set it up on the tailgate of my truck without asking anybody.

“It’s cold,” was all she said. She came back every Saturday and Sunday after that with the urn full, and a plate of something, bars or cookies, and she never once let me pay for it.

During the late service that Sunday, I could hear them singing inside the church.

It was “O Come, All Ye Faithful.” Cassie hummed along under her breath while she dragged trees up to the front of the flatbed.

Dad’s coffee can

Dad came out every afternoon. He sat in a folding lawn chair by the flatbed with a quilt over his knees and his cane hooked on the arm of the chair, and he kept the money in a coffee can.

The card reader I bought for forty dollars at the farm store worked fine, but Dad didn’t trust it. He liked the coffee can. He liked to look in it.

People came to talk to him. Old men he had sold seed potatoes to, women whose kids he had driven to school on the bus.

They stood around his lawn chair drinking Leora’s coffee and asked him how the hip was.

“Same as yours,” he would tell them. “Older than it ought to be.”

A lot of them had bought trees off his front porch thirty years ago. They remembered the Scotch pines.

One woman told him the one she bought from him in 1994 was the best tree she ever had.

“These are better,” Dad told her. “My girl sheared these.”

The second week

At the bank that Monday, three different customers asked me if I was the one selling trees at the crossroads.

One of them was a man who had been coming to Arvid’s farm since he was a boy.

“I drove right past his place to get to you,” he said, at my window, while I counted out his deposit. “Didn’t feel right not to.”

I didn’t know what to say to that. I said thank you. I said the trees were fresh. I gave him his receipt.

I want to be clear about something. I never once said a word against Arvid to anybody that season.

Not at the bank, not at the flatbed, not at church. If somebody started in on him, I changed the subject.

The kids didn’t either. I told them the first day. That’s your grandpa, I said.

He made a choice I don’t like, and that’s between him and me. You don’t run him down to anybody. And they didn’t.

But I heard things anyway. You can’t help hearing things in a town that size.

I heard that Brandon sold eleven trees at the farm the second Saturday of December.

I heard the baler jammed twice and nobody knew how to clear it. I heard Florene was running the box herself by Sunday.

I didn’t feel glad about any of it. I want to say that plainly too.

I thought about Arvid out there in the cold with his fir rows full and his lot half empty, and it made me sad more than anything.