The Walnuts on the Fence Line

“I love you, Dad.”

“I know it. I know it, baby.”

On the last Saturday of October, we planted.

I had gone to the nursery in Bloomington and bought nineteen black walnut seedlings, each one about as tall as a yardstick with a root ball wrapped in burlap. I had spoken to my principal, and he had agreed it counted as a lesson in forestry.

Haley and Jordan came too, in old jeans, and Janet brought two thermoses of hot chocolate and a bag of donut holes from the bakery.

We planted them in the same row, in the same twenty-two feet south of the line, each in the spot of a stump. I had asked Vance Brannock to pull the stumps with a tractor that week, and he had sent Randy out to do it for free.

Haley dug the first hole herself, at the spot where tree number seven had stood. She said she wanted to, so I let her. She put the seedling in with both hands and packed the dirt around it.

“It’ll be sixty years before this is worth anything,” she said, wiping her hands on her jeans.

“About that.”

“I’ll be eighty-four.”

“Probably a good age to sell a walnut,” I said.

She laughed. The students laughed. Somebody handed me a cup of hot chocolate.

From the hill to the north, I saw a figure standing at the edge of my uncle’s yard, small and stooped against the sky. He had a cane. He was watching us.

He stood there for a good long time. I raised my hand, once, not as a greeting and not as anything else, just as a man acknowledges that another man is there. He did not raise his.

After a while he turned and walked back toward the house.

I go and see Doreen every Sunday afternoon. I bring her a small bunch of whatever Janet has growing, and I sit with her for an hour and hold her hand. She does not know who I am. Sometimes she calls me Edgar, my father’s name, and I let her.

I do not tell her about the trees. I do not think she would want to hear it, and I do not think it would do her any good.

The slab hangs in Haley’s kitchen, over the table, on a little brass hook that Jordan screwed into the wall. There is a pencil dot on it, and she touches it sometimes when she walks past.

The porch swing is on order, and it is oak, which I thought was a fine joke.

As for the walnuts, the little ones, I walk the row every evening and count them. Nineteen bare sticks in the cold ground, each one with a ring of dark mulch around it, each one waiting for spring like it has somewhere to be.

My grandfather did not know any of us when he planted his row. He just dug the hole.

I think the survey said that too, if you read it right. It is a drawing of a line, and it is also a promise that somebody kept for the people who came after.

Dad would have understood, I think. He would not have said so. He would have looked at the little trees in the row and nodded once, and gone back to the barn.