The Spruce Row That Was Hers

I did not follow right away. I stood at the end of the row counting the holes, because it seemed like the only useful thing I could do. Thirty. Somebody had dug thirty trees out of my daughter’s field while she was three hours away learning to serve a volleyball, and somebody had known exactly when she would be gone.

Merle was on the porch of the old farmhouse with a cup of coffee, the way he is every afternoon from October to Christmas. He is seventy-one, broad through the shoulders, with a white mustache and hands like shovels. When he saw me crossing the yard he did not get up.

“Merle,” I said.

“Colleen.”

“Where are Hannah’s trees?”

He took his time. He turned the cup a quarter turn on the arm of the chair. “Ray Kowalski from Greenville came out Friday with his spade truck,” he said. “Landscaper. He took the whole row. Eighteen hundred dollars.”

“Sixty a tree.”

“That’s what he paid.”

“They were hers, Merle.”

“They’re my trees, Colleen. On my land.” He said it plainly, without heat, like a man reading a number off a gauge. “I own the ground, I own what grows on it. Always have.”

“You gave her that row. You stood out there and said it was hers.”

“I let her use it. She did a good job with them, and I’m obliged to her for the help.”

I have known this man for twenty years. He gave the toast at my wedding that made a whole room laugh and tear up in the same breath, and he taught my daughter to drive the old Ford tractor with his hands over hers. He is not a cruel man by habit. That made it harder, because he was not even sorry.

“She was at camp,” I said. “You waited until she was gone.”

“If I’d asked her, she’d have cried,” he said. “I wasn’t going to stand there and watch a kid cry.” He looked into the coffee. “Feed bill was twenty-four hundred dollars, due before the first of the month. Dry summer. Hay was short all through August. The bank wouldn’t carry me another thirty days, and I wasn’t going to take my hat in my hand to my own son.”

He had twelve beef cows and a barn full of equipment older than my marriage. I knew about the dry summer, because I had watched the pond go to cracked mud in July. What I did not know was that he had a twenty-four-hundred-dollar problem and an eighteen-hundred-dollar answer sitting in a fourteen-year-old’s field.

“Mike would have covered it,” I said. “In a day. You know he would.”

“I know it.”

“Then why?”

He did not answer that. I think the truth was that Merle Whitaker had never asked anyone for anything, and a man who cannot ask will sometimes take and call it something else. That was his reason, and it was a human one. It did not make the holes any smaller, and it did not explain why he had never once asked her.

I kept my voice down. Hannah was crossing the yard behind me and I could hear her boots on the gravel, and I did not want her to hear her mother shout at her grandfather. Whatever I did next, I wanted her to be able to look back on it later and not be ashamed.

“I’m going to take her to see Mr. Kowalski,” I said.

“He bought them fair.”

“I know he did. She’s going to ask him herself.”