The hardest part is the leader. That is the single straight shoot at the very top of the tree, the one the star sits on. You cut it back to about ten or twelve inches, at an angle, just above a bud, so next year’s growth comes in full and not spindly.
Cut it too long and the tree grows tall and gappy. Cut it too short and you take away a year of height. Joanne taught Hallie on the Fourth of July, out in the north block, standing next to a six-footer with her own knife.
“Hand span and a half,” Joanne said, and laid her hand against the leader to show her. “Right above the bud. Clean cut. Don’t saw at it.”
Hallie did one while Joanne watched. Then another. Joanne walked around the second tree twice and nodded.
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“That’s it,” she said. “That’s how Grandpa Walt did them.”
She started at six every morning, before the heat came up off the sand. Matt dropped her at the farm on his way to the paper mill, and I picked her up at two, when the sun got too high to be safe with a knife.
She sharpened that knife every night on our back porch with a whetstone and a coffee can of water. Cole, who is thirteen, sat on the step and watched her, because a sixteen-year-old sister with a blade that long is the most interesting thing in the world to a thirteen-year-old boy.
She came home with sap in her hair so thick I had to work it out with butter. She came home with deer flies chewing the back of her neck and cuts on her wrists where the gloves ended. She slept like a felled tree.
And every night at supper she counted the rows out loud. “Twenty-two today. That’s three blocks done. The south slope is harder because of the rocks.” She kept a tally on the back of a feed store calendar taped to her bedroom door.
Four thousand trees. Five weeks. She did not miss a day, not even the Saturday it rained, when she came home with water running out of her boots and said Duane had told her to go home and she hadn’t.
I drove out there twice to bring her lunch, and both times I walked the rows she had finished. But I grew up in Langlade County and I have bought a Fraser fir off a lot every December of my life, and what I saw were good trees. Full, even cones, every leader standing straight.
Duane was out there both times, on the old Ford tractor, mowing between rows. The second time he shut it off and came over to where I was standing with the lunch cooler.
“She’s good,” he said. He wasn’t a talker. “Better than the last one.”
That was all he said. I didn’t think anything of it until November.
Matt came home from the mill at four that afternoon. I told him in the driveway. Then he went into the house and found Hallie in her room.
I heard him through the door. “Show me how you cut the leaders, honey.”
She showed him with her hand against the air. Hand span and a half. Right above the bud.
“That’s what she showed you?”
“That’s what she showed me.”
He came back out and got his keys off the hook. I asked if he wanted me to come, and he said no, he wanted to talk to his aunt by himself. He was quiet, the way his dad used to be quiet.