Nine Hundred Firs and a Forty Dollar Funnel

She kept the count for Daddy every year for thirty years, sitting on an upturned bucket with a pencil and a feed store notepad.

Four strokes and a slash for every five trees. I gave her a clipboard out of the barn, and she started at one.

The first fifty were slow. We fumbled the netting and tore a sleeve and had to stop and cut it free.

The cone jammed once on a tree with a crooked butt, and Aurelio had to climb halfway in after it. By nine o’clock we had seventy-one on the tally.

I did the arithmetic in my head and did not like it. Nine hundred trees in less than eight hours is better than a hundred and fifteen an hour.

That is one tree every thirty-one seconds, shaken and pushed and pulled and tied and carried, all day, without stopping.

“We are behind,” I told Aurelio, between trees.

“We are learning,” he said. “The machine did not learn. We learn.”

And he was right, because by ten o’clock we had found a rhythm I did not know a body could hold. By ten the count was two hundred and two.

The Trailer

Delmer is not supposed to load. A trucker drives, and the grower loads, and the trucker stands by the doors and counts.

That is how it has worked every one of the nine years he has come up our mountain.

But about half past eight, Delmer finished his coffee and screwed the cap back on the thermos and set it on his step.

He pulled a pair of leather work gloves out of his coat pocket and climbed up into his own trailer.

“Hand them up,” he said. “I’ll lay them in. I’ve watched it done on a hundred loads. I reckon I know where a tree goes by now.”

You stack a tree load like you stack firewood, but tighter.

The butts go against the side walls of the trailer and the tops point in toward the middle, overlapping, so the tops lock each other down.

You lay row on row up to the ceiling and work toward the doors.

Opie stood at the tail of the trailer and handed trees up to Delmer as fast as the men brought them.

Opie is sixty-nine and has a bad back, and every netted tree weighs thirty-five or forty pounds. He did not slow down once that I saw.

Every so often Delmer would stop and lean out the back with his hands on his knees and holler down a number, and my mother would check it against her clipboard.

They agreed every single time but once, and that once, it was Delmer who had miscounted.