The Walnuts on the Fence Line

Now there was no envelope to hand anybody. There were nineteen orange circles in the frost and a set of tire tracks.

“Leon,” Janet said. It was not a question.

“Leon,” I said.

My uncle Leon Hollander is seventy-four years old. He is my father’s younger brother, and he has farmed the hundred and twenty acres north of us since the two of them split their father’s land in 1979.

He did not come to the wedding. He called Thursday night and told me his hip was out and he could not sit through a ceremony, and I said I understood. I even told him we would save him a plate.

His son Mitch came instead. Mitch drove down from Indianapolis, put on a tie, and sat in the third row where his father should have been, and hugged me at the reception with tears in his eyes.

I thought about that hug the whole walk up the hill.

Leon was on his back porch with a cane across his knees and a mug of coffee on the rail. He did not stand up when I came into the yard. He watched me come the way a man watches weather.

“Morning, Stevie,” he said.

“Leon, there are nineteen stumps on my side of the fence.”

“Are there.”

He took a slow sip of coffee. He did not smile. He looked tired, and he looked like a man who had practiced a speech in the dark and was now going to give it.

“That line was always fuzzy,” he said. “Dad told me the row of walnuts was the boundary. The wire came later. I had every right to those trees.”

“You had a logger cut them while I was at my daughter’s wedding.”

“I had a logger cut my trees on a weekday, when nobody would be fussing about the noise.”

“It was a Friday and a Saturday. You knew exactly where I was. I told you where I would be.”

He looked out at his pasture and not at me. For a minute neither of us said anything. A cow bawled somewhere down at the creek.

“Doreen’s memory care is fifty-eight hundred a month,” he said at last. “The farm is nineteen thousand behind with the bank. I did not have any other way, Steve. I want you to know that.”

I believed him. That is the part people never understand. I believed every word, and it did not change one thing about what he had done.

“You could have asked me,” I said. “I would have sat down at your table, and we would have figured something out together.”

“You would have said no.”

“I would have said let’s talk about it. Which is not the same thing, and you know it.”

He did not answer. He picked up his cane and set it back down across his knees.

I want to tell you I shouted. People like a story where the narrator shouts. But I have taught teenagers with table saws for twenty-six years, and the first thing I learned is that the loudest person in a room is almost never the one in control of it.

“Where did the logs go, Leon?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Randy Mullins’s skidder has been running up my fence line. Where did you send them?”