The Walnuts on the Fence Line

The stumps were still wet. That is the first thing I noticed, before I understood what I was looking at. Nineteen circles of bright orange wood, cut flat and clean, in a row along the fence.

It was a little after six on Monday morning, the nineteenth of October, and the frost had not burned off the pasture yet. I stood there in my barn coat with my coffee going cold in my hand.

Janet came up behind me in her slippers. She had followed me out the back door without a word, the way she does when she can tell something is wrong before I can.

“Steve,” she said quietly. “Where are the trees?”

I did not answer her. I walked down the row and counted them with my boot, touching each stump. Nineteen. I counted a second time, because a man wants to be wrong about a number like that.

Sawdust lay in tan drifts around every stump, still damp, smelling sweet and sharp like a cut apple. Deep tire ruts ran through the grass from the row toward the north, toward the barn at the top of my uncle’s hill.

We had been gone since Thursday afternoon. Our daughter Haley got married Saturday at a little brick church outside Indianapolis, and we had stayed on for the Sunday brunch and driven home in the dark.

All of it had happened while I stood in a rented gray suit with my daughter’s hand on my arm. A man had stood in my woods with a chainsaw while I was walking her down the aisle.

“Those were Granddad’s walnuts,” I said. My voice sounded strange to me, like somebody reading off a card.

“I know,” Janet said.

“He planted them the spring after the big ice storm. Nineteen sixty-two. I could take you to the exact spot where he stood and showed Dad how deep to dig.”

She put her hand flat on my back. She did not tell me it would be all right. She is not a woman who says things she cannot back up.

I will tell you what those trees were, because the number matters, and because it is the reason I did what I did.

They were black walnuts, the straight, clear kind that grow up tall in a woods without a limb for thirty feet. Veneer buyers will pay more for a single good butt log than most people pay for a used truck.

I have taught high school shop in Owen County for twenty-six years. I know wood. I knew those nineteen trees the way a farmer knows his cows, one by one, and I knew roughly what they were worth. About twenty-two thousand dollars, if you sold them right.

I had never planned to sell them. Not until Haley was finishing her nursing degree and came home one weekend with a number written on the back of her hand, the way she did when she was little and afraid she would forget something.

Twenty-one thousand eight hundred dollars. That was what she owed on her student loans. I looked at her number, and then I looked out the kitchen window at the woods, and I did the math on a napkin that night.

I never told her. I was going to hand her an envelope on her wedding day with a note inside. The note said her great-grandfather had planted something for whoever came next, and that this was her turn.