The Spruce Row That Was Hers

“Say yes,” I told her.

“Yes,” she said. “Thank you, Mr. Kowalski.”

“Ray,” he said. “And thank me when you’ve worked a Saturday.”

He wrote her name on a pad and pushed a form across the desk. I signed where he pointed, and my hand was not entirely steady. Fifteen dollars an hour was more than the state minimum, and he knew it, and he never mentioned it. She would start Wednesday. Before then, there was the matter of ten trees.

We walked the row. Hannah took her time. She did not pick the biggest. She picked the ten she had drawn stars beside in the notebook, tree nineteen first, the one that had grown sixteen inches in a year. Ray’s yard man, a quiet fellow named Dewey with a long gray ponytail, followed behind with a roll of orange tape and tied a strip on each of the ten.

Then she took out her pocketknife and cut every yellow loop of twine off the twenty trees she was leaving behind. She did it slowly, tree by tree. I did not stop her. I think it was the way she said goodbye. When she was done, she folded the twine into her coat pocket and did not look back.

“Where do you want them?” Ray asked when we were out by the truck.

“At the farm,” I said. “Along the lane. Out front, by the stand.”

He looked at me, a long, level look, and I could see him understand. Merle’s farm stand sits where the lane meets the county road, a red shed with a plank counter that opens the weekend after Thanksgiving for cut trees and wreaths. Every car that comes to the farm passes it.

“I’ll bring them out myself,” Ray said. “This afternoon. I’ve got the skid steer and the auger on the trailer.”

We were back at the farm by one o’clock with a thermos and two pairs of leather gloves. Ray’s flatbed came up the lane at two, Dewey driving, the ten blue spruce standing in their wire baskets with their strips of orange tape.

Hannah met the truck at the end of the lane with her notebook, as serious as a foreman. She had decided where they should go: five on each side along the grass shoulder, starting at the road, fifteen feet apart.

Ray ran the auger himself, and by half past three there were ten square, clean holes in the ground. Hannah and I set the root balls straight, cut the wire, folded back the burlap, and shoveled in the dirt until my back ached and my gloves were soaked.

Marlene came up the lane at four, in her cardigan and her good boots, carrying two cups of coffee and a small paper sack under her arm. She stopped at the first tree on the left and looked up at it for a long time.

“That one’s for you, Grandma,” Hannah said. “Tree nineteen. It stays here this winter so it can settle in. In April, when the ground is soft, we’ll move it to your window.”

Marlene put the coffee down on the gravel. She was quiet a moment. Then she knelt in the dirt, bad knee and all, and laid her palm on the burlap.

“It’s the most beautiful thing I ever saw,” she said.

“It’s got a nice taper,” Hannah said.