The Walnuts on the Fence Line

Vance was standing on the scale house steps with a check in his hand. He had not gone inside. He stood there where everyone could see him, the way a man does when he wants a thing to be known.

“Steve Hollander,” he said, loud enough to carry. “Come up here.”

I climbed the steps. Janet stayed down at the bottom with her purse.

“I buy logs in this county,” Vance said. “I have bought them for thirty-eight years. The one rule I have is that I only pay the man who owns the tree. Yesterday I found out I almost broke that rule. I am sorry, and I am glad you came.”

He held out the check. It was a plain business check on the Brannock account, written in black ink in his own hand. The amount was twenty-two thousand and ninety dollars.

“Leon will get the bill for what I advanced Randy,” he said. “Seventy-seven hundred and thirty-one dollars. He has thirty days to square it with me.”

“Thank you, Vance.”

“Don’t thank me. Take it before I think about it.”

I took it. My hands were not steady. I stood there with that slip of paper in my fingers and felt the whole yard watching, and I understood something that I had not understood the day before.

“I appreciate every one of you being fair about this,” I told the yard. “I did not want a fight. I wanted my family’s trees. I will not say another word about my uncle on this yard or anywhere else.”

I climbed down the steps. Janet took my arm. Behind me, I heard Cyrus start the loader, and then another man’s engine, and then the yard went back to being a yard.

Vance came down after me. He stopped by my truck, and he was holding something under his arm that I had not seen him carrying.

“Steve. Hold on a minute.”

It was a round of walnut, about three inches thick and the size of a dinner plate, sawn clean from the butt of the biggest tree. The heartwood was the color of dark chocolate and the sapwood a pale cream around the edge, and the rings were so tight I could not count them without squinting.

“I cut this off the end of your big one yesterday evening,” he said. “I thought you might want it. Come here.”

He took a carpenter’s pencil from behind his ear and laid the slab flat on the tailgate. Then he began counting rings from the center, touching each one, his lips moving.

“Sixty-four,” he said. “She went in the ground in ’62 and came down this month. That tracks.”

He moved the pencil to the outer edge and counted back, slowly. He stopped at a ring that looked no different from the others and made a small dot.

“Your daughter was born in 2002, right? Haley?”

“May of 2002.”

“That’s her ring.” He tapped it. “Everything outside that dot grew while she was growing up. That’s all her wood.”

I could not say anything. I looked at that little pencil dot, and then I looked away across the yard because there was something wrong with my eyes.

“Put it on a wall somewhere,” Vance said, and handed it to me. He cleared his throat and turned away fast, like a man who had said more than he meant to.