The Spruce Row That Was Hers

“It’s got a star in your book.”

“It’s got the biggest star.”

Marlene laughed then and wiped her eye with her knuckle. She handed me my coffee and a cinnamon roll out of the sack, and she stood with us, a small woman in a cardigan with her hand on a tree, and watched the last hole filled.

Ray left at five. He would not take money for the delivery or the digging, and he shook Hannah’s hand like she was a grown woman.

“Your father-in-law’s going to drive past those in the morning,” he told me quietly.

“He knows what he did,” I said.

It was Tuesday, the third of November, Election Day, and I had not thought about that until the morning.

The township hall sits directly across the county road from the farm, a plain cinder-block building with a flagpole and a gravel lot. By seven there were pickups lined up on the shoulder, and every one of them drove past the end of our lane.

I would like to tell you I planned it, but I was standing at my kitchen window with a cup of coffee when the first pickup slowed and stopped in the road. The driver leaned out to look. A woman in a minivan pulled to the shoulder, rolled her window down, and pointed.

Ten blue spruce stood along the lane, five to a side, in a clean line, with a strip of orange tape still fluttering on the tip of each one. And at the far end of the line, with a bucket of water, stood my fourteen-year-old daughter, before school, with her hands in her coat pockets, looking at the road.

I watched the neighbors come and go for an hour. Gladys Okerlund, who has run the church bake sale for thirty years, stopped her Buick and sat with her window down and her mouth slightly open. Vance Jessup, who drives the milk truck, rolled by at five miles an hour and lifted two fingers off the wheel at Hannah.

By nine, three people had stopped to ask Hannah what she had planted. She told them in a clear, polite voice, with her feet set in the dirt. She said they were blue spruce she had grown from seedlings, six summers’ worth, and that ten of them had come home.

“Where are the rest?” asked Gladys Okerlund.

“Sold,” Hannah said. “To a man in Greenville.”

“Who sold them?”

I saw her hesitate. Then she lifted her chin, and something moved across her face that was not anger. It was closer to dignity.

“My grandpa did,” she said. “He had a feed bill. He didn’t ask me. I asked the man who bought them if I could have some back, and he said yes.”

Gladys closed her mouth. She looked at Hannah for a long moment, and then she looked up the lane toward the old farmhouse, and she said, “Well, honey, that took some nerve.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Good for you.”

I stood at the kitchen window and did not say a word.

Merle came out of the barn a little after ten, in his coveralls and a feed cap, slow and stiff, with a seed catalog in his hand that he was carrying without knowing it. He stopped at the first tree on the right and stood there a long time.