Nine Hundred Firs and a Forty Dollar Funnel

The Farm

My name is Dovie Testerman. I was fifty-one that November.

I have grown Fraser firs on thirty steep acres in Ashe County, North Carolina, since my daddy died, and I helped him grow them for twenty years before that.

Our ground runs up a north slope above the New River, so steep in places that a tractor will not hold on it.

We plant by hand, shear by hand all summer with long knives, and in November we carry the cut trees out of the rows on our shoulders.

It takes eight to ten years to grow a Fraser fir to seven feet in these mountains.

You lose some to drought and some to root rot and some to deer, and you shear every one of them every July so it comes out shaped like a tree on a card.

Every November, for nine seasons now, a man who runs a Christmas tree lot outside Ocala, Florida, has sent a semi up our mountain for a wholesale load.

Southern lots open the day after Thanksgiving, and his trees have to be standing in their stands that morning.

That year he had ordered nine hundred trees, six and seven footers, at forty dollars apiece. That is thirty-six thousand dollars.

It is most of what my farm makes in a year, and it is what keeps the lights on in two houses on this mountain.

The second house is my mother’s. Mae Testerman is seventy-eight, and she lives in the white farmhouse below the landing where she raised me.

She had a stroke two springs ago, and she walks with a cane now, slowly, but she still walks to the mailbox every day.

That house is the only home she has ever had as a married woman. My daddy carried her over that doorsill in 1967.

She told me once she meant to be carried out of it the same way, feet first, and not one day before the Lord called her.

Kip knew all of that. He ate at her table for twenty-two years.

He knew she would not leave that house unless somebody made her, and he knew exactly what a missed truck could do to a small grower in a bad year.

Here is what I mean. If the Florida truck went home empty, that buyer would have to fill his lot from somebody else in a hurry.

He would not come back to a grower who had failed him on loading day. Nobody in the business would blame him for it, either.

Lose that buyer and I lose the year. Lose the year and the farm loan comes due in March with nothing to pay it.

Kip had already offered, through a cousin of his, to buy me out cheap. He had never once stopped believing the farm was half his.

I know what folks will say. Call the sheriff. I did think about it, standing there.

But a deputy had already told me once, the spring before, that who owned that shaker was a civil matter between me and Kip, and he was not going to referee it.

And no judge in North Carolina was going to rule on a tree shaker before Thanksgiving. The truck was coming that morning.

The lot in Florida opened in two weeks. Whatever I was going to do, I had to do with my own hands, and I had to do it before dark.