The Walnuts on the Fence Line

I handed him the photographs. He went through them one at a time and set each one down on the survey. The men nearby had gone quiet, and I could feel them listening.

“Steve,” Vance said slowly, “I have bought timber from Leon Hollander for forty years. I have never had a ticket come back wrong on him. I am not going to take a man’s walnut off the yard because his nephew brought me a drawing.”

“I’m not asking you to take my word, Vance.”

“Then what are you asking?”

“I’m asking you to look at the logs. Look at the ends, look at the stumps, and tell me whether they match.”

That is something people outside the timber business do not know. A log is a fingerprint. Every tree is cut at a different height and lies at a different angle, and every butt end carries its own ring pattern, its own flaws, its own scars from the life the tree lived.

Vance knew it too. He set his coffee on the fender of my truck.

“Cyrus,” he called, to a man sitting in the cab of a hauler. “Go find Randy Mullins and tell him I need him at the yard. Right now.”

Randy Mullins was the logger. He came in about twenty minutes later, a thin man in his forties with a red beard and a cap with a feed store’s name worn off it, and he got out of his truck like a man walking into a dentist’s office.

“Vance?”

“Randy, where did you cut those walnuts?”

“Hollander’s. Off the north place, like he told me.” Randy looked at me then, and I watched his face change. “Steve, hey. I didn’t know. I’m sorry about the wedding, I heard it was real nice.”

“Where did Leon tell you the line was?”

Randy looked at the ground and then at Vance and then back at me. “He walked me out there Thursday evening. He showed me the walnut row. He said the wire fence was an old one that wandered, and the row was the real line. He said the county pulled the pins back in the eighties.”

“Did he say anything about when to cut?”

Randy swallowed. “He said it had to be Friday and Saturday. He said the owner down below was out of town and there’d be no fuss.” Then his shoulders dropped. “Oh, man. I should have asked for a survey. I did not ask for a survey.”

“Randy,” Vance said at last, and his voice had gone very flat. “Go sit in your truck.”

Vance walked back to me and rubbed his eyes. “Is there anything in your trees that only you would know about? Something nobody could fake.”

I thought for a second. The answer came all at once, the way an old memory does.

“Tree number seven,” I said. “The one with the tire swing. In the summer of 1979, after the survey, my dad strung a gate chain off it and drove a big galvanized fence staple into the trunk to hold it. The tree grew over the top of it.”

“A staple.”

“Four inches long, about forty inches up from the ground, on the creek side. I watched Dad drive it. I was four years old, standing there holding the hammer for him. The bark swallowed it, but the steel is still in there.”

Vance looked at me a long moment. Then he put his glasses back on.