The Walnuts on the Fence Line

The first pin was beside the road, under a hedge apple, with a red plastic cap worn pale by forty summers. It had a name stamped into the cap in tiny letters. Frey.

The second pin was four hundred feet down. The third, in the weeds above the creek bank, took us twenty minutes to find, because a cow had pushed it over and the leaves had covered it.

We took photographs of every one. We took a photograph of the tape stretched from the pin to the nearest stump, and the number on the tape said twenty-two feet and four inches.

Then I did something I had not planned. I went up to the attic and got the shoebox.

Every family has one. Mine held thirty years of prints, from the days before everybody kept pictures on a phone, and a good half of them showed those walnuts.

Haley at five, sitting at the base of the biggest one with a juice box. Haley at ten, on the tire swing I hung from tree number seven. Haley at sixteen in her prom dress, standing between two trunks with her date and a very obvious look of impatience.

Janet picked up the one of Haley at five and held it a long time.

“She sat right there and ate a whole sleeve of crackers,” she said. “She told me those trees were her friends.”

“I know.”

“She doesn’t know yet,” Janet said. “About any of this.”

“No. And she won’t, until I have something to hand her.”

I drove to Brannock Hardwoods at ten that morning with the survey in a folder on the seat and the shoebox beside it.

The yard sits off State Road 46, behind a long tin building that smells of cut oak from a quarter mile away. There were stacks of logs everywhere, taller than my truck, each one with a number spray-painted on the end.

Vance Brannock was standing at the scale house door with a clipboard. He is sixty-three, wide as a door, with a gray mustache and reading glasses in his vest pocket, and he has run that mill since his father handed it to him.

“Steve Hollander,” he said. “Lynette said you were coming. She said you sounded sick on the phone.”

“I’m not sick, Vance.”

“Come on in the office.”

“I’d like to do this out here, if you don’t mind.”

“Out here, then,” he said.

I opened the folder on the hood of my truck, took out the survey, and held it open in both hands where he could read it.

“Twenty-four walnut logs came in under Leon Hollander’s name,” I said. “I think they came off my land. I think the stumps are twenty-two feet south of my property line. I would like you to look at this.”

Vance did not say a word. He picked up the survey and read it all the way down to the bottom, the way a careful man does, and then he read the plat stamp.

“Alton Frey,” he said. “I knew Alton. He surveyed for my father.”

“He set pins every four hundred feet. I found three of them this morning. I’ve got pictures of all of them, and a tape on the stumps.”