The Tree Lot the Landlord Evicted

Behind me, at the side of the cash hut, a man named Marcus was holding the hand of a four-year-old boy in a coat two sizes too big. The coat had come out of the church clothes closet. The boy’s name was Pipp, and he was holding a bundle of orange price tags with a rubber band around them, because his father had told him he was in charge of tags. He looked up at Walt the way a kid looks at a big dog he isn’t sure about.

“They were renting,” I said. “They had a hundred and forty dollars of renter’s coverage and a policy that ran out the first of the month. This whole town knows what that family has left, and it’s what’s in that boy’s coat pocket.”

“Rance.”

“You’d put a chain-store tent on this corner and sell a stranger’s tree for twice the price, with that child standing eight feet from you.”

“It’s not personal.”

“It’s personal to him.”

“A Christmas tree lot,” Walt said, and I will remember the exact tone of it until I die, “is a church hobby. Your church can have its hobby somewhere else.”

I heard myself say something then. I won’t write it here. I said it loud enough that two of the six people in line got back in their cars. It had my father’s temper in it, and it had something about Walt’s father in it, and Walt’s face did something small and hard.

He turned to the young man. “Tell your people eight o’clock,” he said. Then he got into his truck and backed it out of the entrance slowly, the way you back out of a funeral, and drove up Main Street.

I stood there until the light left the bank roof.

I should tell you why that corner mattered.

The lot started in nineteen ninety-five, when Walt’s father, Clyde, a big shy man who ran the feed store, called the church office and said he had a vacant corner and a conscience. We would sell trees for the month of December, and every dollar over the grower’s invoice would go to one household in Kettle Grove that needed it, chosen by the deacons by prayer, not by vote. A widow’s furnace. A hospital bill. In thirty-one Decembers we had never missed a year.

This year the deacons had not needed to pray very long.

On the Saturday after Thanksgiving, the day after our lot opened, a fire started in the wall of a rented house on Cedar Street. Old wiring behind the kitchen, the fire marshal said. The family was at Marcus’s mother’s place eating leftover turkey, and they came home to a ladder truck in the yard.

Nobody was hurt. I want to say that first, because for the first hour after I heard, it was all I could say.

But there was nothing left. Marcus, who drove a feed truck for the co-op and had never missed a day, lost his work boots and a hand-carved cradle that had been in his family five generations. Tasha, who worked the school lunch line, lost the winter coats. Dani, nine, lost the stuffed horse she slept with. Josh, seven, lost his baseball cards. Pipp, who was four, lost the only room he had ever known.

And they had hidden the Christmas presents in the bedroom closet, because that is where parents hide them.