About halfway through he picked one up and stopped. He turned it in his hands the way Hallie had, a slow full circle. He looked at the leader for a long time.
“These aren’t seconds,” he said quietly.
Then he looked up the hill, at the white farmhouse where Joanne’s Buick was parked by the porch, and he didn’t say anything else. He laid the tree on the trailer and went back for the next one.
When we were done, Hallie thanked him. He touched the brim of his cap to her, which I had never seen him do for anybody.
We strapped them down with ratchet straps and drove home slow, forty trees on the trailer behind us, the tops all pointing back toward the farm like they were watching it go.
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Hallie had already figured it out by then. She just hadn’t told me.
On Sunday after church she called the director at Maple Ridge. Her name is Pam, and she has run the place for eleven years. Hallie made the call herself, in the kitchen, with the phone pressed to her ear.
“Hi, this is Hallie Kowalski. Irene Kowalski’s great-granddaughter,” she said. “I was wondering. Could we set some trees on the front lawn for the residents? Christmas trees, with lights? I have forty of them.”
“Yes, ma’am. Next Saturday. Yes. Thank you.” She hung up and looked at me. “She said yes before I finished asking.”
“Forty trees on the lawn,” I said.
“In rows,” she said. “The way they grew. Right under Grandma’s window.”
I didn’t say anything for a minute. I had to look out at the yard for a while before I could.
It took us all of the next Saturday.
Matt borrowed a post driver from his buddy Jeff. He and Cole loaded forty steel T-posts in the back of the truck, along with two rolls of galvanized wire and a pair of fencing pliers.
The ground at Maple Ridge was half frozen. The top two inches were hard as a road and the rest was still soft, so every post started with Matt standing on the driver and Cole hanging off the handles with him, the two of them bouncing it down through the crust.
Matt counted them in. Forty posts in five rows of eight, the same spacing Grandpa Walt used, so you could walk between the rows. Cole held each tree upright while Matt wired its trunk to a post in two places, top and bottom, twisted tight.
Hallie did the lights. She had bought warm white mini lights with her fall babysitting money at the Fleet Farm in Antigo. Strings of a hundred, three strings to a tree. She wrapped every tree from the bottom up, in a spiral, so the light would sit inside the branches and not just on them.
I ran cords. Pam came out in her parka and showed me the outdoor outlets along the front of the building, four of them, on their own breakers so we wouldn’t blow anything the nurses needed. We used heavy outdoor extension cords and taped every connection with electrical tape and set them on scraps of plywood so the snow wouldn’t get in.
Around three the light started going. By four-thirty it was almost dark, and we were done.
Forty trees across the front lawn of Maple Ridge, in five rows of eight, the way they grew on the farm.