Nine Hundred Firs and a Forty Dollar Funnel

The Little Tree

While I was signing, Aurelio walked off down the end of the nearest row without saying anything.

He came back carrying the top three feet of a little Fraser fir, a cull with a forked leader that would never have made a lot tree.

He had a roll of tie wire in his coat pocket.

He walked to the front of Delmer’s truck and stood that little tree up against the grille, trunk down, right in the center, and wired it tight to the chrome so it would not blow off at sixty miles an hour.

My daddy did that on every load that ever left this mountain. Every single one. He said a truck should go down the road looking like what it was carrying.

When he died, I forgot to do it the first year, and I never did start again.

Aurelio remembered. He had stood at that landing and watched my daddy wire a little tree to the front of every truck for years, and he had never once said anything about my letting it go.

He just remembered, and on that day of all days, he did it.

I had not cried all day. Not when Kip pulled out, not when the cone jammed, not when my thumbs came through my gloves.

I cried then, standing in front of that semi, looking at that crooked little tree wired to the grille, and I did not try to hide it.

My mother saw it from her chair. She held out her hand to me and I went over and knelt down on the gravel beside her, and she put her hand on the back of my neck the way she did when I was small, and we did not say anything at all.

The Call

Delmer climbed up in his cab and called the man in Ocala. I could hear his side of it through the open door.

He told him the load was on, nine hundred count, shaken and netted and tight. Then he told him how it had gotten that way.

He told him all of it. About Kip and the hitch at twenty after seven, and the boy on the four-wheeler, and the forty-dollar funnel, and Opie Greer, and my mother with her clipboard.

He did not dress it up any more than I had.

He listened for a long while after that. Then he said, “Yes sir. I’ll tell her.”

And he hung up and climbed down out of the cab and walked over to where I was still kneeling on the gravel by my mother’s chair.

“He said to tell you he wants twelve hundred next year,” Delmer said.

“He said to tell you that if a grower can load nine hundred by hand in one day, he does not need to look at anybody else’s trees. He said you are his grower now, as long as you want to be.”

Twelve hundred trees. I did the arithmetic. It was forty-eight thousand dollars, if the price held.

It was the farm loan paid in full and a powered netter of my own bought and paid for, with my name on it and nobody else’s.

Opie Greer laughed out loud. I had not heard him laugh like that since my daddy’s funeral. Thurston whooped.

Aurelio’s men did not need anyone to translate twelve hundred, and they slapped each other on the back and went to find the sweet tea.