The Christmas Trees My Mother Planted

That summer, Les did not shear. I noticed it in August when I came out to check his blood pressure, which I did every couple of weeks because he would not go to a doctor. The tops were running wild. The rows needed mowing.

“You want me to send the girls out to mow?” I asked him.

“Leave it,” he said.

I left it. Grief does strange things to people, and I have seen enough of it at work to know you do not push a man in his first summer alone. I thought he would come back around.

Instead, in November, he called a man from Grand Rapids.

I told the girls that night at supper, at our little table in town. I did not dress it up. They were sixteen and they had loved their grandmother, and they deserved to hear it straight.

Lily put her fork down and went red from the collar up, the way she does. She is the one who says the thing out loud. Rose is the one who goes quiet and then, three days later, does something about it.

“He can’t do that,” Lily said. “Those were Grandma’s. She planted them for us. She said so, like, every Christmas.”

“He can, honey,” I said. “It’s his land now. They’re his trees.”

“Then we call somebody. We get a lawyer.”

“No,” I said. “We’re not doing that.”

“Why not?”

I had been asking myself the same thing all the way home in the truck, and I had my answer by the time I turned onto our street. It was not a legal answer. It was the only one I had.

“Because that is your grandmother’s house,” I said. “She left it to him. He’s the man she chose and he’s living in her kitchen by himself. I am not going to drag him into a lawyer’s office over trees she would have given away to anybody who asked.”

Lily stared at me. Rose was looking at her plate.

“And because we’d lose,” I said, more gently. “It’s his. Even if we won, what would we win? Four hundred stumps.”

Nobody said anything for a while. The furnace kicked on.

Then Rose said, “How many are left?”

“Three hundred and six,” I said. “Mostly the ones the crew didn’t want.”

“The honest trees,” Rose said, and I looked at her, because I did not know she had ever heard my mother say that.

“Grandma called them that,” she said. “The crooked ones. She said they were the honest ones because they didn’t pretend.”

That was all she said. But I saw her start thinking.

The next afternoon I drove back out to the farm alone. Les was in the pole barn changing the oil in his truck. I stood in the doorway in the sunlight, and he looked up from under the hood and wiped his hands on a red shop rag and waited.

“I’m not here to fight,” I said. “I just want to ask you one thing.”

“Go ahead.”

“What about the trees that are left? On the back hill.”

He looked at me a long moment. Then he went back under the hood.

“Do what you want with them,” he said. “Nobody’s going to pay for the runts.”

“So if the girls and I wanted to open the gate the Saturday after Thanksgiving. The way Mom did.”

“I said do what you want.” He tightened something with a wrench. “Just don’t ask me to stand out there.”