Nine Hundred Firs and a Forty Dollar Funnel

After

I want to tell you what happened with Kip, because people always ask. Nothing happened, really. Nothing a judge would care about.

He kept the shaker and the netter in his barn all that winter, and I never asked for them back.

But Ashe County is not a big place. By the next Sunday everybody at church knew about the funnel and the nine hundred trees and the truck that drove past and did not slow down.

Nobody said a word to Kip about it. Nobody had to.

His cousin quit calling about buying me out. The men at the feed store stopped talking when Kip came in, and started up again when he left.

That is all. In a place like ours that is more than enough, and it lasts longer than any court order.

I bought a powered netter of my own that January, used, from a grower over in Watauga County who was retiring. I paid cash for it out of the Florida money.

I never did buy another shaker. Aurelio’s men said they would rather bump the trees by hand than listen to that machine all day.

Opie’s funnel I took back up the road that same evening, before supper, with a check in an envelope. He would not take the check.

He tore it up right there in his packing shed and dropped the pieces in his stove, and he hung the cone back on its nail.

“Your daddy stacked my trees in 1983,” he said. “We are even now. Tell your mama I said she can count.”

My mother lived in her white farmhouse four more years after that, and walked to the mailbox every day she could.

She kept the count on every Florida load until the last fall, when her hand would not hold the pencil anymore, and then she told me the numbers and I wrote them down for her.

The Truck Goes Down

That November afternoon, though, she sat in her lawn chair at the edge of the landing with a blanket over her knees, and I stood beside her with my hand on her shoulder, and we watched Delmer pull his doors shut and pin them and seal them.

He climbed up in the cab and let his air brakes off with that long sigh they make.

Then he leaned out of his window and touched the brim of his cap to my mother, the way men of his age still do, and she lifted her hand off the blanket to him.

Aurelio and his men stood in a row along the gravel with their ruined gloves still on. Opie stood by his truck with his arms folded.

Thurston sat on his four-wheeler with the engine off. Nobody said anything. The sun was getting low over the far ridge, and the sky was still that hard, cold blue.

Delmer pulled out slow and swung wide and started down the switchbacks the way he always does, like a man carrying eggs.

The road runs back and forth across the face of the mountain, so you can watch a truck a long time going down it.

Every time he came around a switchback facing us, I could see the front of that white semi, and on the front of it, right in the middle of the grille, I could see the little crooked tree Aurelio had wired there.

I watched the truck go down the mountain with that little tree on the front.