Nine Hundred Firs and a Forty Dollar Funnel

The Crew

Aurelio Sanchez came walking up from the bunkhouse with his crew behind him, all five of them in canvas coats with their breath smoking.

Aurelio has worked my trees for fifteen seasons. He comes up from Mexico every spring on a farm work visa.

The four men with him come from his same town, and three of them have been coming almost as long as he has.

They know my rows better than I do some years. They know which trees I have tagged for the Florida load by the ribbon color without asking.

Aurelio looked at the empty spot on the gravel where the trailer had been. He looked at me, and at the cold coffee, and he did not ask a single question.

He had heard Kip’s truck. Everybody on that side of the mountain had heard it.

“The shaker too?” he said quietly.

“The shaker too,” I said. “And the netter. And I have got a truck from Florida coming up the road in about five minutes, and I cannot send that man home empty, Aurelio. I just cannot do it.”

He stood there with his hands in his coat pockets and looked at the rows of cut trees, nine hundred of them, laid out on the frost like cordwood.

Then he said a thing I will not forget. He said, “Before the machine, how did your father do it?”

And I remembered. When I was a girl, before Daddy bought his first powered netter, he wrapped every tree by hand through a galvanized cone set up on a pair of sawhorses.

I used to stand on the far side and pull them through by the trunk.

Opie Greer still had one. Opie farms trees two miles up the road, and he had bought a hand funnel new for forty dollars back when he started out.

When he went to a powered netter he hung the old cone on a nail in his packing shed and never took it down.

I tried his house phone. It rang and rang. Opie does not carry a cell phone and does not come in from the field before dinner, and the signal on our side of the ridge drops out anyway if you so much as turn your head the wrong way.

So I sent a boy. Thurston was fifteen, a neighbor’s grandson who stacked trees for us on Saturdays in season for twelve dollars an hour.

He had just come up the road on his four-wheeler, and he was off again before I finished telling him what to say.

“Tell him Kip took the netter,” I called after him.

“Tell him I need his old funnel. Tell him I will bring it back tonight and I will pay him whatever he wants for the loan of it.”