The Walnuts on the Fence Line

Janet came and stood beside me at the window. She did not say anything. She put her hand on my arm.

“I keep waiting to feel better,” I said.

“I know.”

“I feel like I won a game I did not want to play.”

“You are not supposed to feel good about it, Steve.” She leaned her head against my shoulder. “You’re supposed to feel like you did the right thing and it cost you something. That’s what the right thing feels like.”

I thought about that for a long time afterward. I think she was right.

As for Leon: he started paying Vance Brannock, but not in thirty days. He sold his cattle at the sale barn in Spencer to cover most of it, every head, and the rest he is paying in monthly installments that Vance agreed to, out of what I think was his own pity.

No mill within sixty miles would buy a log from him after that. It was not a rule anybody made. It was just that every buyer knew. Word got around the loggers and the haulers and the feed store the way water finds the low spot in a field.

Haley and Jordan came home from their honeymoon on Sunday the twenty-fifth. I had not told her anything. I wanted to do it in person, and I wanted to have something in my hands.

They came for supper that Sunday, still brown from a week in the Smokies and holding hands like people who had only just discovered it was legal. Janet made her pot roast.

After the dishes, I took Haley out to the back porch and gave her the walnut slab.

She turned it over in her hands. She ran her thumb across the rings, and she saw the pencil dot, and she looked up at me with that crease between her eyebrows that she has had since she was three.

“Dad, where did this come from?”

So I told her. I told her all of it, starting with the stumps and ending with Vance Brannock’s check, and I did not leave out the part about the envelope I had been planning to give her.

She did not say anything for a long time. The porch light buzzed with moths. Somewhere out in the dark a coyote started up and then stopped.

“My loan money,” she said at last, very quietly.

“It was always going to be.”

“Dad.” She was crying now, quietly, the way she does. “You sold Granddad’s trees for me? I would never have asked you to do that.”

“I know, honey. That’s why I never asked.”

“They were my friends,” she said, and laughed in a wet, helpless way. “Mom told you that, didn’t she? I told her when I was five.”

“She told me.”

She put the slab down on the porch rail, and she put both her arms around my neck. She held on for a long time, her cheek against my shirt, and I could feel her shaking.

“The check is in my account,” I said into her hair. “Vance wrote it in my name, and I deposited it Tuesday. It is twenty-two thousand and ninety dollars. Your loans are twenty-one eight. The rest is a down payment on a porch swing.”

“A porch swing.”

“You and Jordan need something to sit on.”

She laughed again. I think we both felt it, that the ache and the gladness were the same size and sitting right next to each other.