The Tree Lot the Landlord Evicted

Elowen sat at our kitchen table calling the families of her third graders, and had sixty-three names on the back of a bank envelope by nine o’clock. When I called Marcus at the duplex, he was quiet a long time. “I’ll be there at six,” he said. “I’ll bring the tags.”

I did not sleep. At a quarter to six, with the sky just starting to gray behind the grain elevator, I parked on the corner of my own lot for what I assumed was the last time. It was nineteen degrees, and the trees were stiff with frost.

And then I heard the engines.

They came from two directions at once. From the east, down Route 9, a long line of headlights: a grain truck, a flatbed, a pickup with a stock trailer, and another, and another, until the lights ran back farther than I could see. From the south came Cal’s hay wagon behind a tractor with one working headlight.

They climbed out in barn coats and insulated bibs and church-supper cardigans, blowing on their hands. Then a retired schoolteacher named Dwight walked up to me with his gloves on and said, “Where do you want me?”

We worked the way a crew works that has never worked together and doesn’t need to. The tall men carried. The strong women lifted the butts. Twelve boys from the high school football team, who had heard it on the radio in their kitchens and come in four pickups, netted every tree and handed it up like feed sacks. A long-haul driver I had never seen, home for the weekend, backed an empty trailer to the curb and said, “I’ve got forty feet of nothing. Fill it.”

By the time the sky went the color of the inside of a shell, the first loaded trucks were pulling out onto Route 9 with their hazard lights blinking. I rode in the cab of the lead flatbed, and at the long curve past the elevator I looked back and saw a quarter mile of green rolling out behind us.

At the field I saw what else the Chain had done.

Someone had run a tractor blade through the frozen lane and pulled the ruts straight. Helen’s daughter had a folding table of coffee and cinnamon rolls. Pastor Carlisle was up a ladder at the highway edge, nailing a sign to the post. Under the flagpole, a row of fourth-graders waved cardboard arrows at the passing cars, with their mothers behind them in lawn chairs.

The big sign said Trees for the Fire Fund. Beside it was a smaller one, painted by a different hand. Dani had made it at midnight at her aunt’s kitchen table, they told me later, with a blue marker from the art kit Elowen’s class had pressed on her. It said, in careful nine-year-old printing, Please come. My family needs a house. She had drawn a house with a chimney, and smoke curling up from the chimney in a friendly line. It was not smoke from a fire.

By seven-forty, three hundred and sixty trees stood in the church field, and forty were still on the corner.

Dwight drove me back to Main Street to fetch my own truck and trailer. Frost was already melting off the gravel where the trees had stood, leaving dark rectangles in neat rows, like the outlines of something that wasn’t there anymore. Marcus and the football boys were strapping down the last forty.

At exactly eight o’clock, Walt’s truck came around the bank.

He didn’t look at me. He let two men in matching jackets climb out of the bed, and they began unloading rolled steel fence panels. Walt stood by his bumper with a coffee cup, looking at his watch.