Nine Hundred Firs and a Forty Dollar Funnel

The Truck

Delmer Shatley came up the mountain at seven thirty-five in a white semi pulling a fifty-three-foot trailer. He has hauled my trees to Florida for nine seasons.

He is sixty years old and drives like a man carrying eggs on those switchbacks, and he has never once been late.

He swung wide at the top, backed that trailer to the edge of the landing on the first try, set his brakes, and climbed down with a thermos.

He walked over to me the way he always does, slow and friendly, already looking at the trees.

Then he looked at the empty gravel where the shaker and the netter always sat, and he looked at the bare tire tracks running off toward the road, and his face changed.

Delmer has been hauling trees out of these mountains a long time. He knew what he was looking at.

“Where’s your rig, Dovie?” he said.

I told him. I did not dress it up. I told him Kip had come at twenty after seven and hitched up and gone, and that I had sent a boy for a hand funnel, and that I meant to net every tree on that gravel by hand and load his trailer before dark.

Delmer took his cap off and rubbed his head and put it back on.

He looked at the trees and he looked at the sun, which was still low and pale over the far ridge. He did the arithmetic in his head the way any trucker would.

“I am supposed to be in Ocala Monday night,” he said.

“I can wait till dark and still make that, if I drive straight through tomorrow. After dark I have got to go, loaded or empty. I don’t own that load. He does.”

“I know it,” I said. “Dark is about ten after five this time of year. I am asking you to give me till four.”

“Then you have got till four,” he said, and he poured himself a cup of coffee out of the thermos and sat back down on his running board like a man who had nowhere better to be.

The Funnel

Opie Greer came up the farm road at five till eight, not on Thurston’s four-wheeler but in his own pickup, with the boy riding beside him and the old cone and a pair of wooden sawhorses tied down in the bed.

Opie is sixty-nine. He knew my daddy from the time they were boys, and they started their tree farms the same year, when everybody said nobody would ever pay money for a Christmas tree they could cut off a fence row for free.

He got out of the truck and did not say one word about Kip.

He just let the tailgate down and pulled the sawhorses out and started setting them up level on the gravel at the edge of the landing, knocking a rock out from under one leg with his boot.

The funnel was a galvanized steel cone, maybe thirty inches across at the mouth and narrowing to a twenty-two-inch throat.

It had a little rust at the seam and a dent where somebody had dropped it once, and it looked like the best thing I had ever seen.

“You’ll want it chained,” Opie said. “Otherwise it walks off the horses when you push.”

He had brought a length of log chain and a binder, and he cinched the cone down tight across the two sawhorses so it would not move.

“Opie,” I said, “you did not have to drive this over. I would have sent the boy back with the truck.”

“I know it,” he said. “I’m staying, too, if you will have me. I am too old to shake trees, but I can still stack them. Your daddy stacked mine in 1983 when my back went out, and I never did pay him back.”