The Spruce Row That Was Hers

Then he looked across the road at the township hall, at the pickups and the people going in and out of the doors. A man waved at him from the lot. Merle did not wave back.

I had expected him to be angry. What I had not expected was how he looked, like a man who had come out to check a gauge and found it reading something he had not known was possible. His shoulders came down. He took off the feed cap and held it against his leg.

Mike got home late Wednesday night. He held onto me on the porch without a word, and then he went upstairs in his socks and stood in Hannah’s doorway a long time, looking at her sleeping.

Hannah came home from Ray’s lot at six-thirty with another forty-five dollars in her pocket. Merle and Marlene came up from the old house at seven. Marlene carried a pie, as though we were having company. Merle wore his good flannel shirt, the one he wears to church, and he had shaved. He stood in our kitchen doorway like a man who has forgotten the way in.

“Sit down, Dad,” Mike said.

Merle sat in the chair nearest the door and put his hands flat on the wood. Marlene sat beside him. Hannah took the chair across from her grandfather with the green notebook in front of her, and I sat beside Hannah. Mike stood behind his father’s chair a moment, then took the seat on the other side of his daughter.

Nobody spoke. The clock above the stove ticked. It was Hannah who began.

“Grandpa,” she said. “I want to read you something.”

She opened the notebook. She did not look at him. She read from the first page in a flat, careful voice, the way you read a list you have gone over many times.

“April twelfth, the year I was eight. Planted thirty blue spruce, north row. Grandpa showed me how deep. Average height eleven inches.” She turned the page. “June, the year I was nine. Tied twine on every tree so I can see them from the road. Average twenty-two inches.” She turned another page. “June, the year I was ten.”

I watched Merle’s face. It did not change. But his hands, flat on the table, had begun to curl a little at the fingertips.

“June, this year,” Hannah said. “Average fifty-two inches. Thirty trees. Thirty stars.” She closed the book. “I wrote the last page on Friday night, before I left for camp.”

“What did you write?” Merle asked. It was the first thing he had said.

“That I couldn’t wait to see how big they’d be next year.”

Nobody moved. Marlene had both hands folded hard against her chest.

Merle did not look away from his granddaughter, and that is the one thing I will give him. He sat with his big hands on the wood and let it land on him. He did not say the land was his. He did not say a word about the feed bill.

“I sold thirty of them to a man for eighteen hundred dollars,” he said finally. His voice was rough. “I know what I did.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Ray gave you ten back.”

“He gave me ten, and a job.”

“I heard about the job.” He looked down at the table. “I heard about the lane, too. Half the township stopped me at the feed store.”

“I didn’t tell them to,” Hannah said.