The Trees I Sold From the Crossroads

The third Saturday

The third Saturday was the nineteenth of December. It was clear and still, about twenty degrees, with a light dusting of snow that had fallen in the morning and was just lying there on everything, sparkling.

We had forty trees left on the flatbed. Mostly big ones, the eight-footers that are hard to sell because they won’t fit under a farmhouse ceiling.

Dad said they’d go. Dad said they always go in the last week.

There was a line at two o’clock. Jubal was in it, back for a second tree for his daughter.

Cleta was there, not to buy anything, just drinking Leora’s coffee by Dad’s lawn chair, telling him about her grandson in the Navy.

I was holding up an eight-foot fir for a couple from down by the lake when Dad set his coffee cup down on the arm of his chair.

“Jody,” he said, quietly.

A pickup was slowing on the county road from the north.

I knew the sound of that engine before I turned around. I had heard it pull up to the warming shed every December morning for nine years. A big diesel with a lifter that ticked.

Arvid’s truck pulled off onto the crossroads shoulder and stopped behind the line of cars.

He sat in the cab a long time with both hands on the wheel.

Long enough that the couple I was helping turned around to look. Long enough that Ty stopped tying, with his hands still on the twine.

Then the door opened, and Arvid got out.

Arvid

He walked over slow across the gravel. He was in his barn coat and his good cap, the one he wore to church.

He looked older than he had in November. He looked like a man who had not been sleeping.

The line didn’t say anything. Jubal looked at him. Cleta looked at him.

Leora stopped pouring coffee with a cup half full in her hand. Nobody said a word. They just looked at him, and let him walk.

He walked past all of them and stopped at the end of the line, behind Jubal. He stood there and waited his turn like anybody else.

I sold the eight-footer to the lake couple. Cassie tied it up. I sold a spruce to a man from the bank.

Jubal bought his daughter’s tree and paid me with a check and walked past Arvid without looking at him, which for Jubal is as hard as a slap.

Then Arvid was standing in front of me, at the end of the flatbed, with the snow on the trees between us.

“Jody,” he said.

“Arvid.”

He looked at Dad in his lawn chair. Dad looked back at him. Those two had known each other since grade school.

Dad sold Arvid his first fir seedlings, forty years ago, out of the back of a truck, when Arvid was just starting out on that hill.

“Orrin,” Arvid said.

“Arvid,” Dad said. He didn’t get up. He didn’t have to.

Arvid turned back to me. He took off his good cap and held it in front of him in both hands, the way he had in the warming shed, except this time he looked me straight in the face.