The Walnuts on the Fence Line

Janet had gone very quiet. I put the slab on the seat between us, and we drove home without turning on the radio.

Leon came down my driveway on Wednesday at about four in the afternoon.

I saw his truck from the kitchen window. It came slowly, with the rattle in the left front wheel that he had been promising to fix for two years, and it stopped at the foot of the porch steps.

He knocked. Janet looked at me, and I nodded, and she opened it.

“Steve,” he said from the porch. “I’d like a minute.”

“I’m right here, Leon.”

He held up an envelope. It was a long white business envelope with Brannock Hardwoods printed in the corner, and it was already torn open.

“Vance Brannock sent me this.”

“I know what it says.”

“Seventy-seven hundred and thirty-one dollars. It came by certified mail. Don’t you know I haven’t got that?” His voice cracked on the last word, and I will not pretend it did not reach me. “I never got a dime for those trees. Not one dime. And I owe seventy-seven hundred dollars for the privilege.”

“Yes.”

“Can’t you talk to him, Steve? He’ll listen to you.”

I put my coffee down on the counter. I looked at my uncle, who had taught me to drive a tractor when I was eleven years old, and who had once sat up all night with me in a barn when a heifer was calving wrong.

I did not hate him. I want to be clear about that, because it matters to me.

“Leon,” I said. “What would you have said to me if I had cut nineteen trees off your side of the fence while you were at Mitch’s wedding?”

He opened his mouth. He closed it.

“You would have come down this drive with that cane and you would not have knocked. And I would have deserved it.”

“I was desperate.”

“I believe that. I told you so on Monday. But being desperate does not mean you get to take it from somebody else.”

“Your father would be ashamed of you,” he said. It was the last card he had, and he played it the way a man throws a punch at the end of a long fight.

“My father had that survey made,” I said, “so you and he would never have to have this conversation. He knew you. He loved you, and he knew you. That is why it exists.”

Leon looked down at the envelope in his hand. For a minute he looked every one of his seventy-four years.

“Doreen doesn’t know,” he said, so low I almost lost it. “She doesn’t remember me most days. She doesn’t know about any of this.”

“I’m sorry about Doreen,” I said, and I meant it. “I’ll go see her Sunday. I always do. But I am not going to pay Randy Mullins’s share, Leon.”

“Not even a hundred, Steve?”

“Not a dollar.”

He stood there another long moment. Then he turned and went down the steps, one at a time, with the cane going in front of him. He got into his truck.

He did not look back. The truck rattled down the drive and turned north, and the dust hung in the air for a while after it was gone.