The Christmas Trees My Mother Planted

He stood in front of it a long time with his hands at his sides. I knew he was reading the bottom line. I don’t think he had ever stood close enough either.

Then he turned around and walked back up the lane to where Otis had the wagon stopped, and without a word he took hold of the butt end of a fir and helped Otis’s next family heave it on.

He loaded trees until the last one was cut. Nobody said anything to him about it. Otis just nodded to him once, the way men up here do, and moved over on the wagon to make room.

When the last car pulled out it was nearly dark, a little after half past five. Les came to the cider table. The girls were scraping the kettle. He stood across from them with his hands in his coat pockets.

“Your grandmother,” he said, and stopped.

Nobody helped him. I didn’t, and the girls didn’t. We waited.

“Every morning I got up and looked out that window,” he said finally, “and there were her rows. And she wasn’t out in them. Every morning for eight months.” He looked at the ground. “I thought if they were gone I could stand to look out the window. That’s the truth. It wasn’t about the money. I told myself it was.”

“You told us we could borrow,” Lily said. Her voice was steady. I was proud of her.

“I did.” He looked up at her. “That was a wrong thing to say to you. It was a wrong thing to do. I’m sorry, Lily. I’m sorry, Rose.”

Then he took an envelope out of his coat and put it in the jar. It was the check from the lot. He had never cashed it. He had signed the back of it over to the girls in pencil.

We counted the jar the next morning at the kitchen table, in the sun from my mother’s window, the four of us. Les sorted the bills into piles by size. Rose wrote it down in the deposit book the way her grandmother had taught her.

Just over three hundred families had come. The jar held fourteen thousand, two hundred and sixty dollars in cash and checks, before Les’s twelve hundred.

Rose wrote both numbers in the book on separate lines. Then she drew a little tree next to them, the way my mother always had.

Les sat looking at the piles for a long time. “That’s more than the lot would have paid me for all two thousand,” he said quietly.

“It wasn’t for sale,” Rose said. “That’s why.”

He nodded. He did not argue.

In January he called me and asked how you go about ordering seedlings. I gave him the name of the nursery from my mother’s old receipts. He ordered five hundred Fraser fir.

They came in April, bare root, bundled in wet burlap. On a Saturday morning, with the sun up and the frost just off the ground, Les and the girls went out to the east hill among the stumps with a dibble bar and two buckets of water.

Les had sharpened a stake for the first one. Before they put that seedling in the ground, he took a carpenter’s pencil out of his shirt pocket, and in big careful letters, he wrote Bonnie on the stake.