At ten past four on the second Friday of December, with four hundred Christmas trees standing in rows on the corner of Main Street and Route 9 and six cars lined up at my cash hut, Walt pulled his truck across the lot entrance and shut off the engine.
He did not get out right away. A man who comes with good news hops out. A man who comes with the other kind sits a minute and gets his face ready.
A white sedan with a rental sticker pulled in behind him, and a young man in a quilted vest climbed out holding a clipboard against his chest like a shield. Walt climbed out after him, in his good canvas coat with the corduroy collar, carrying a single sheet of paper folded in thirds.
“Rance,” he said.
“Walt.”
“I need you to read this.”
I am forty-nine years old. My name is Rance Honaker, I run a hydraulic hose shop on the east end of Kettle Grove, Illinois, and for eleven years I have run the church Christmas tree lot on that corner. I did not need to read the paper to know what it said. I read it anyway, because Walt was watching me do it, and so were the six people in the line.
It said the lot had to be cleared by eight o’clock Saturday morning. It said a tenant’s crew would arrive at that hour to set up for the season. It said the property owner thanked the congregation for its many years of use.
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“Eight o’clock tomorrow,” I said. “That’s sixteen hours.”
“It’s what the lease calls for.”
“There’s no lease, Walt. There’s your daddy shaking my pastor’s hand in nineteen ninety-five.”
“Which is why I can end it.” He said it flatly, the way you read a number off a gauge. “This is a business matter. I’m not going to make it ugly.”
The young man with the clipboard cleared his throat. “Mr. Honaker, the company runs a seasonal garden center program, and this corner has exactly the traffic count we look for. We’ve offered the property owner a very fair rate.”
“How fair?” I asked.
Walt looked at his boots. The young man looked at Walt, and then, because he was twenty-six years old and had been taught to answer questions, he said, “Eleven thousand dollars for the month.”
Eleven thousand dollars, for a month of gravel.
Our lot had paid Walt’s family a dollar a year for thirty-one years. A real dollar, too. Every first Sunday in November the church treasurer slid a bill into an envelope and handed it across, and Walt’s father would hold it up to the window of the feed store like a man checking a twenty and say, “Paid in full, Reverend. The Lord owes me nothing.” Then he would drop it back in the offering plate. That was the whole lease.
I looked past Walt’s shoulder at four hundred trees, Fraser firs mostly, with a row of Scotch pines on the end for the folks who couldn’t spend the extra.
“Walt, those are the last four hundred. The first two hundred and fifty paid the grower for the whole season. Every tree you see is already free and clear. Every dollar from here to Christmas goes to one family.”
“I know whose.”
“Then you know they were burned out two weeks ago.”
“I know that, Rance. I’m sorry for them. That’s what insurance is for.”
I’d like to tell you I took that sentence in a Christian spirit.