The Christmas Trees My Mother Planted

Rose said thank you. Then she poured the next cup and spilled half of it, and Lily took the ladle from her without a word.

Over and over, people told me about my mother. That she had given them a tree the year the plant closed. That she let their boy cut his own when he was five and stood there twenty minutes while he hacked at it. That she always asked about their mother by name.

I knew she had done some of that. I did not know she had done all of it.

About three in the afternoon, a couple from Lake City came to the table. The husband was a heavy man in a canvas coat, and he took his cider and said, to nobody in particular, “Strangest thing. We were down in Grand Rapids last weekend for the game.”

His wife put her hand on his arm, but he went on.

“Lot on the south side. Big Fraser firs, real nice ones, seventy-nine dollars apiece. And half of them still had a little piece of yellow tape on the top branch. I said to my wife, those look like Bonnie Pratt’s trees. Those look just like hers.”

The table went quiet. Lily stopped ladling.

“They were,” I said. “They were hers.”

The man looked at me, and at the sign, and at the girls. I watched him do the arithmetic in his head the way I had done it among the stumps. Seventy-nine dollars. Four hundred trees.

“Well,” he said. “I’ll be.”

He took out his wallet and put three twenties in the jar. He did not say anything else.

I did not look toward the house. I didn’t need to. I had seen out of the corner of my eye, a few minutes before, that Les had come out onto the porch with a cup of coffee, the way he had a dozen times that day. The porch was not thirty yards from the cider table.

He had heard all of it. He stood there with the cup in his hand, and then he set it down on the railing and went inside, and the door shut behind him. I did not feel good about that. I want to be honest. I felt sick.

Seventy-nine dollars apiece, and he had taken three. The whole county would know it by Monday, and he knew that too.

The afternoon went on. The light turned the color it turns up here in late November, low and gold and slanting, so that the snow on the trees shone and every shadow ran long across the hill. More cars came. Otis kept running the wagon.

Around four thirty, Lily counted the red tape still standing on the hill and came back down to report. “Eleven,” she said. “Eleven trees left.”

The sun went down behind the back hill a little after five. It got cold fast. There were still four or five families up in the rows, finding the last of the red tape, and their kids’ voices carried down the slope.

That was when the kitchen door opened.

Les came down the steps in his barn coat, no hat, and walked down the drive. He did not come to me. He walked past the cider table, past the girls, all the way to the end of the drive where the sign stood on its cedar post.