The Spruce Row That Was Hers

Hannah walked down to the north row before she even carried her bag into the house. It was Sunday, a little past three, and the sky over the farm was clear and cold, the way it gets in Montcalm County in the first days of November. She had her volleyball duffel on one shoulder and her camp shirt still on.

I got out of the car and walked down to her. The ground there was wet and dark, and in the soft dirt I could see the shapes of tires, wide ones, the kind a tree truck wears. Thirty round holes ran off in three neat lines, each with a little pile of loose soil beside it, as if something had been picked clean.

“Mom,” she said. She did not turn around. “Where are they?”

She was fourteen years old. Six summers earlier she had planted every one of those trees with her own hands, a foot tall apiece, carried out to the row one at a time in a five-gallon bucket.

Her grandfather, Merle Whitaker, had walked her out to that row the spring she turned eight. He had a roll of baling twine in his back pocket and a spade over his shoulder, and he stood with his boots planted wide, like a man announcing something important.

“This row is yours, kiddo,” he told her. “Plant what you like.”

She picked blue spruce, because she liked the color. Merle grew mostly Fraser fir and Scotch pine for the Christmas lot, and the blue spruce were a sideline he kept for landscapers and the occasional customer who wanted one with a silver cast. He gave her thirty seedlings out of his own nursery bed and showed her how deep to dig.

“Give them six or seven years and each one’s worth a hundred dollars,” he said. “Thirty trees. That’s three thousand. That’s a first year at Michigan State, if you take care of them.”

She took it seriously from the first week. She bought a green spiral notebook at the dollar store with her babysitting money and numbered every tree, one through thirty. She measured them each June with a yardstick, wrote the inches in columns, and drew a little star beside any tree that grew more than a foot in a year.

The summer she turned nine she tied a loop of yellow baling twine on the third branch of every tree, so she could count them from the county road. She said you could see them from the stop sign, little yellow dots in a long blue line. She was right. You could.

Now, standing in front of thirty empty holes, she pressed her fingers to her lips. She did not cry. Hannah does not cry where people can see her. She went white around the lips and breathed in through her fingers.

“Maybe he moved them,” I said. It was a foolish thing to say, and I knew it as it left my mouth.

“They’re gone,” she said. “Look at the ruts.”

I put my arm around her, and for a moment she let me. Then she stepped out of it, which is also how Hannah is, and walked back toward the house with her duffel bumping against her hip.