The Tree Lot the Landlord Evicted

He walked past me then, to Marcus, who stood at the edge of the Fraser rows with Pipp on his arm and a seven-foot tree leaning on his shoulder.

“Marcus.”

“Walt.”

“I’m sorry about your house. I’m sorrier than I know how to say about what I said.”

Marcus didn’t answer for a long moment. The whole field waited for him. Then he put out his free hand, and Walt took it, and they stood like that in the low sun.

“I forgive you,” Marcus said. “I don’t think I’d have gotten there by myself. But I forgive you.”

Walt nodded. He wiped his eyes with the back of his wrist and looked down at the little boy.

“Son, what’s your name?”

“Pipp.”

“Pipp, would you let me carry that tree for you?”

“It’s got a hole for the star,” Pipp said gravely.

“I see that,” said Walt.

He took the tree from Marcus, hoisted it onto his shoulder, and carried it past his mother’s lawn chair to Marcus’s truck. In front of four hundred people, the owner of the corner of Main and Route 9 tied a church-lot Christmas tree down with his own two hands and checked the knot twice.

Then I took the last tree off the back row, the crooked Scotch pine with the missing branch, and sold it to Miss Dot for twelve dollars. She counted the bills out of the green box with her own fingers and handed them to me and said, “Four hundred, Rance. Write it down.”

I wrote it down. I have the page still.

There is a little more to tell, because Walt was not done.

He stayed while the light went, and while we counted the cash on the hood of Miss Dot’s Buick under work lights Pastor Carlisle had run off a generator, with Elowen writing in a ledger.

The four hundred trees, sold in one day from the church field, came to seventeen thousand two hundred dollars. The jars and the cooler and the envelopes added three thousand three hundred and ten. Add the sixteen hundred and fifty we’d had on Friday afternoon, standing in a gravel lot with a deadline nailed to the hut, and the Kettle Grove Christmas Fund for that year came to twenty-two thousand one hundred and sixty dollars.

Marcus read the figure three times. Then he looked at Tasha, and neither of them said anything. Tasha put her hand over her mouth.

It was then that Walt cleared his throat.

“I own two houses on Maple Street,” he said. “The yellow one’s been empty since September. Three bedrooms and a fenced yard. I’d like Marcus and Tasha and the kids to have it, rent free through the end of June, and after that whatever they can pay, as long as they like. That money in the ledger is theirs for beds and coats and a Christmas. Not a cent of it goes to rent.” He looked at me. “And I owe the chain’s people a phone call. They paid me a deposit. I’ll mail it back Monday. The corner goes back to the church, Rance, the way it was. A dollar a year.”

“Walt,” I said.

“Don’t make me say it twice. I’m not sure I could.”