The Tree Lot the Landlord Evicted

“Eight o’clock,” he said, when I walked over.

“It’s eight o’clock.”

“I said eight.”

“I know what you said. We’re loading the last of them now. Check your property.”

He looked at the empty corner. For half a second I thought I saw something move behind his eyes. Then he looked at the hut the men’s Bible study had built in nineteen ninety-eight, with a hand-lettered sign over the window: Kettle Grove Church Christmas Trees. All proceeds to a family in need.

“That goes too.”

“It’s coming.”

“It’s coming now.”

His men had already lifted the sign off its nail and tossed it into the bed of Walt’s truck. It landed face-up on a coil of chain. I looked at it lying there in the sun and felt everything I’d said at the altar rail come rolling up my throat.

I want you to know what I did. I did not say it.

I stood with my fists at my sides and thought about a hand-drawn house with a friendly chimney. And Walt? Carlisle had said. Tell them to pray for Walt, too.

“We’ll have the hut out in ten minutes,” I said evenly. “Thank you for the notice.”

I turned and walked back to the men. Behind me I heard the clank of steel panels going down.

The first car at the field came at ten to nine. It was a little blue Buick with a dented fender, and the old man driving it said, “Radio says you’ve got trees for the family that burned out on Cedar Street,” and I sold him a six-foot Fraser for forty dollars. He folded the bill into my hand twice, as if I might lose it, and said, “God bless that family.”

By ten there were forty cars in the field. By noon they lined the shoulder of Route 9 for a quarter mile, and a sheriff’s deputy had come out, not to stop us but to wave traffic by. The Methodist women opened a hot-chocolate table. The football boys ran trees to cars on hand trucks.

Here is what I did not expect. People kept putting extra in the box.

A woman who bought a thirty-five-dollar Scotch pine handed me a hundred and said, “Keep it.” A little girl came up with an envelope that said For Dani in crayon, and inside it were eleven dollars and a Lincoln penny, and her mother stood behind her looking at her shoes and nodded. We had set out two mason jars on the cash table. By noon we needed a cooler.

Marcus carried trees. I had expected him to hang back. Instead he took off his jacket by eleven and carried every tree to every car, tying each down with his own rope. Every time, he looked the buyer in the eye and said, “Thank you for coming out.” Every time, I watched the buyer’s face change.

Pipp wandered the rows with his bundle of tags, soft at the corners by then. He never did let go of them.

And a little after nine, not long after we opened, a car I did not recognize had come down the gravel lane slowly and parked by the flagpole.

It was a tan Buick. The woman who got out was eighty-three years old, small and straight as a yardstick, in a quilted green coat and a knitted cap pulled down to her eyebrows. I had known her all my life. She carried a folding lawn chair across the gravel and set it up beside the gate, sat down, and took an old green metal cash box out of her purse.