The tops were lying where they fell, great heaps of limbs with the yellow leaves already curling. Hundreds of walnuts lay in the grass in their green jackets.
The trunks were gone. Tons of wood, just gone, and two deep ruts in the yard to show which way it went.
I heard the four-wheeler before I saw it. Darren lives at the foot of our lane, in the house where Ray’s mother used to live, and he must have been watching for our headlights. He parked by the barn and walked the rest of the way, slow.
He is forty-one, my only child. He has his grandfather’s shoulders and his father’s way of studying the ground when he’s cornered.
“I was gonna call you,” he said.
“When?”
He didn’t answer that.
Ray had come up behind me. He took his cap off, which he does at gravesides and not much else, and stood turning it in his hands and looking at the middle stump.
“Who cut them?” Ray said.
“I did. Tuesday.” Darren cleared his throat. “A fellow came by the house last week. Log buyer. Said he’d seen them from the road, said walnut’s bringing good money right now and he would pay cash. I dropped them and skidded them out to the lane, and he loaded them Wednesday morning with a boom truck.”
“How much?” I said.
“Twenty-seven hundred.”
I said the number back to him. I don’t know why. I think I needed to hear how it sounded in my own mouth.
“Twenty-seven hundred dollars.”
“Cash. Mom, I’m three payments behind on the skid steer. They were fixing to come get it. If I lose that machine I lose every job I’ve got lined up for spring.” He was talking fast now, the way he did at nine years old with a baseball through the henhouse window. “I didn’t know what else to do.”
“You could have asked me.”
“You’d have said no.”
“Yes,” I said. “I would have.”
That was when he said it. He looked at the stumps, not at me, and he lifted one shoulder.
“They were going to be mine someday anyway, Mom.”
Down by the creek a cow bawled for her calf. Nothing else made a sound.
I have turned that sentence over a good many times since. I don’t believe he meant it the way it landed. I think he had been saying it to himself all week, to get the saw started, and it fell out of him because it was the thing lying nearest the top.
But it landed how it landed. My sister was one day in the ground, and my son was standing in my father’s sawdust telling me that what was mine was only mine until he needed it.
I didn’t cry and I didn’t holler. I have never been a hollerer, and I was too tired to start.
“Your grandfather planted those the spring he came home from Korea,” I said. “Nineteen fifty-two. He was twenty-two years old.”
“I know that.”
“No,” I said. “I don’t think you do.”
Ray put his cap back on.
“Go on home, son,” he said. Not mean. Just finished. “Your mother buried her sister yesterday. This’ll keep till she’s slept.”
Darren stood there another few seconds. I could see he wanted to say something more and couldn’t find the handle on it. Then he walked back down to the four-wheeler, and we listened to it go the whole length of the lane.
Ray carried the ham in. I stayed out until it was full dark, with my hand flat on the middle stump. It was still damp. It was cold as a creek rock.
I had better tell you about those trees, or none of the rest will make sense.
My father’s name was Emil. He raised burley tobacco and milked a few cows on this same hundred and twelve acres outside Campbellsville. Before that he was a boy who had never been farther from home than Louisville, and in between he spent fourteen months in Korea with the infantry.
He came home in April of 1952. My mother said he got off the bus in town, walked the six miles out because he didn’t want to trouble anybody for a ride, ate two plates of supper, and slept until the next afternoon.
Three days later he took a spade and a feed sack down to the creek. There is a bend down there where walnuts have always come up wild along the bank. He dug three seedlings no taller than a yardstick, wrapped the roots in the wet sack, and carried them up to the house. He set them in a row along the lane fence, forty feet apart, because he said a walnut wants room.
My mother asked him why three.
He said, “I knew three fellows who’d have liked the shade.”
As far as I know, those are the only words he ever spoke about Korea, to her or to anybody.
He tended those trees like stock. Every winter of my childhood he was out there with a pole saw, taking the low limbs off clean and close so the trunks would grow straight and clear. Most yard walnuts are short, forked things, good for shade and squirrels. His went up like church columns, better than twelve feet to the first limb.
I asked him once why he bothered.
“A walnut’s a savings account, Barbie,” he said. “You don’t spend it. You just like knowing it’s there.”
In 1964, when I was two, he screwed a long iron hook into the middle tree and ran my mother’s clothesline from it to a post by the back porch. Joan and I learned to hang wash on that line. Joan was three years older, so she got the sheets. I did socks and dishrags, and I resented it.
Mama got an electric dryer in 1979. By then the tree had about swallowed that hook up to the eye. Daddy took the line down and said it was time to let her have it. A few years after I married Ray, you couldn’t have found that hook with a flashlight.
Every October we gathered walnuts in feed buckets and poured them out in the lane, and Daddy drove the truck back and forth over them to break the hulls. Our hands were brown until Christmas. The teacher said she could always pick out Emil’s girls by their fingers.
Joan was the last person alive who had hung wash on that line with me. I had stood at her grave on Thursday. On Friday I stood at the tree.
So when I say I stood at those stumps, I want you to know what I was standing at.
Ray asked me that night, in the kitchen, whether I wanted him to call the sheriff’s office. Cutting timber that isn’t yours is a thing they will come out for.
I told him no.
Darren was my son, and the trees were already on the ground. There wasn’t a deputy in Taylor County who could stand a walnut back up. I couldn’t see what I would have at the end of it but a boy with a record, and two grandchildren who knew their grandmother had done it to him.
“Then what do you want?” Ray said.
“I want him to know what he cut.”
Ray nodded. He has driven a milk truck for thirty-one years, and it has made him a patient man. Cows don’t care what day it is, and neither does a bulk tank. He was up at half past two the next morning the same as always. I lay there and listened to the truck go down the lane, past where the trees weren’t.
Saturday I didn’t do much. I unpacked. I set Joan’s Bible on the shelf beside Mama’s. I went out twice and looked, and came back in.
About ten o’clock Kim came up the lane on foot.
Kim is Darren’s wife. She works second shift as an aide at the hospital in town, and she is as steady a girl as I ever knew. She stood on my back step with her arms crossed tight, like she was cold.
“I didn’t know,” she said. “I want you to hear that from me. I was at work Tuesday, and I came home and they were down. I about got sick.”
“I believe you.”
“He hasn’t slept. I’m not telling you that so you’ll feel sorry for him.” She wiped her nose with the back of her wrist. “The loan people called the house three times last week. He’s had a wet year, and there’s a man over in Green County who still owes him for a building pad. He wouldn’t let me tell you and Ray. He said a grown man doesn’t go to his mother for a machine payment.”
“So he went to her trees instead.”
Kim shut her eyes. “Yes, ma’am.”
I made her come in and drink a cup of coffee. Being angry at Kim would have been like being angry at the mailbox.
We have had Sunday dinner at my table after church for as long as Darren has been married. Ray’s sister Linda and her husband Jeff come too.
“Are you all coming tomorrow?” I asked her.
“Do you want us?”
“I want the children. I want every one of you. And Kim, after church I am going to walk Mason and Lily out to those stumps and show them how to count the rings. I’m going to tell them about their great-grandfather. I won’t say one word against their daddy. I’m telling you first so you’ll know it.”
She looked at me a long moment.
“And if they ask?”
“Then it’s his to answer. Not mine.”
She turned her cup around on the saucer. “That’s fair,” she said. “That’s more than fair.”
Ray got in off the route about two. He ate standing up, and then he went out to the shop and came back with a drop cord and his belt sander.
“What are you doing?” I said.
“A chainsaw leaves a face like a washboard. You can’t read rings through that.” He was already walking. “If those young’uns are going to count, they ought to be able to see.”
He knelt at the middle stump and sanded a path about as wide as his hand, from the bark all the way in to the heart. It took him the better part of an hour and three grits of paper. When he was done he wiped it down with a wet rag, and the rings stood up out of that wood as clear as the lines on a ruled tablet. The outer two inches were pale, almost cream. Everything inside that was dark chocolate with a purple cast to it, and every year of it was there.
Ray sat back on his heels and looked at it a while.
“Your daddy never said ten words to me the first year I courted you,” he said. “Then one January he handed me that pole saw and pointed at these trees. I figured that was him saying yes.”
Forty-three years married, and I had never known that.
Sunday came up clear and cool, with frost in the low places. We go to a small Baptist church three miles up the road, the same one I was carried into as a baby. People had heard about Joan and they were kind. Nobody had heard about the trees yet, and I didn’t tell them. Darren and Kim sat in their usual pew with the children between them. Darren held the hymnal open and didn’t sing.
At home I changed my shoes, pulled my barn coat on over my church dress, and dropped a stick of white chalk from the kitchen drawer into the pocket.
“Mason. Lily. Come walk with Grandma.”
Mason is eleven, a serious boy, a noticer. Lily is eight and wears two braids her mother does every morning, and she has never walked anywhere she could skip.
They had seen the stumps already, of course. The school bus goes right past them. But children take a thing the way they find it.
“Daddy said they had to come down,” Lily told me.
“Did he?”
“Were they sick?” Mason said.
“No, honey. They weren’t sick.”
I left it there.
I sat them both on the middle stump, with room to spare, and I knelt in the sawdust beside Ray’s sanded strip.
“A tree keeps a diary,” I told them. “Every year it grows it puts on one ring. Pale wood in the spring when it’s growing fast, and a thin dark line in late summer when it slows down. One light and one dark is one year. We’ll start here at the bark, which is this year, and go to the middle. Mason, you count out loud. Lily, every time he gets to ten I’ll make a chalk mark and you put up a finger.”
Mason bent over and put his fingertip on the wood.
“One. Two. Three.”
I followed his finger with the chalk. It made a dry little scrape on the wood, like a teacher at a blackboard.
At eight I stopped him.
“Lily, that one is you. The summer you were born, this tree made that ring.”
She leaned down until one braid touched the stump. “It’s so little.”
“So were you.”
Mason found his own a few rings on without being told, and he tapped it twice and kept going.
“Seventeen.”
“Wait there.” I drew a small cross. “That’s the year your great-grandpa Emil died. He was seventy-nine. The week before, he was standing right where you’re sitting, leaning on a stick and looking up into these limbs.”
“What was he looking for?” Lily said.
“I don’t think he was looking for anything. I think he was just glad of them.”
They counted on. Twenty. Thirty. Somewhere in the thirties Mason’s finger stopped by itself.
“Grandma, why’s this one so skinny?”
It was no wider than a pencil line.
“That’s 1988,” I said. “It didn’t rain. The corn burned up in the field and the creek quit running in July, and your great-grandpa sold eleven cows he’d raised from calves because there wasn’t hay to feed them. The tree remembers. It hardly grew at all that year. Now look at the one beside it.”
“It’s fat.”
“It rained in eighty-nine.”
A few rings past that I made another mark.
“Right about here is the year your daddy was born.”
Mason’s head came up. “Dad’s in here?”
“Everybody’s in here.”
At sixty-four I wrote a small letter B, and Lily wanted to know if I had been little too, and I said I had been littler than her and twice as stubborn.
The rings ran tighter toward the heart and harder to see. Mason slowed down. He had his lip between his teeth.
“Seventy-two. Seventy-three. Seventy-four.”
His finger rested on a dark dot at the very center, no bigger than a pencil eraser.
“Seventy-four,” Lily announced to the whole yard, with seven fingers up and then four.
“That dot,” I said, “is a little tree about as tall as a yardstick. Your great-grandpa carried it up from the creek in a wet feed sack in the spring of 1952. He had been home from the war three days.”
I told them about my mother asking why three, and what he said back.
Mason didn’t say anything for a while. Then he laid his whole hand flat over the center of that stump, covering as many years as his palm would reach.
“It took seventy-four years to make this.”
“It did.”
“How long did it take to cut down?”
I had made Kim a promise.
“Not long,” I said.
He looked at the other two stumps, and at the tops lying in the grass, and I watched him add it up. He didn’t ask me another thing. He had decided who to ask.
Lily had already hopped down and was gathering walnuts into the lap of her skirt.
I have asked myself since whether I used those children. I have prayed over it, too. I don’t believe I did. I told them nothing but what their great-grandfather did and what a tree is. If I had wanted to turn them against their daddy, it would have taken one sentence, and I held that sentence behind my teeth.
There were eight of us at the table. I had a roast in, mashed potatoes, green beans cooked down with a ham hock, and Linda brought her yeast rolls. Ray said grace and thanked the Lord for Joan’s life. Darren sat across from me and had not said six words since he came in the door. Jeff, bless him, was carrying the whole table with the price of feeder calves.
Mason had not touched his plate.
“Dad?”
“Eat your dinner, bud.”
“Why are Great-Grandpa’s trees gone?”
Every fork at that table stopped. Linda had the gravy boat halfway to Jeff and she held it there.
Kim put her hands in her lap. I kept my eyes on my plate. I had said it was not mine to answer and I meant it.
“They had to come down, Mason,” Darren said.
“Grandma said they weren’t sick.”
Darren didn’t answer.
“We counted them,” Mason said. He wasn’t being smart. He was a boy laying out what he knew. “They were seventy-four years old. Great-Grandpa planted them when he got home from the war, for three men he knew. There’s a ring in there for the year you were born. I put my finger on it.”
Darren looked at me then. I will never forget it. It was not anger. It was a man looking for a door, and I was sitting in the only one.
“Darren,” I said, “if you’d rather, I’ll take the children out on the porch and you can say what you need to without them.”
His jaw worked. The kitchen clock ticked eight or ten times.
“No,” he said. “No. He asked me. He ought to get it from me.”
He set his fork down and put both hands flat on the tablecloth.
“I cut them down, Mason. Me. On Tuesday, while Grandma and Grandpa were at Aunt Joan’s funeral. I sold the logs to a man for twenty-seven hundred dollars, because I was behind on the payments for the skid steer and I was scared of losing it.”
“Did Grandma say you could?”
“No.”
“Did you ask her?”
“No, son. I did it while she was gone so I wouldn’t have to.”
Lily looked up from her potatoes.
“But that’s stealing,” she said, the way a child of eight says the sky is blue.
Kim made a small sound in her throat.
“Yes,” Darren said, and his voice cracked down the middle. “It is. They weren’t mine. I told myself they were going to be someday. That’s not the same thing, and I knew it wasn’t the same thing when I pulled the cord on the saw.”
He turned to me. His eyes were wet, and I had not seen that since we buried his grandfather.
“Mom, I’m sorry. I’m sorry for the trees, and I’m sorrier for what I said to you Friday. I heard it come out of me and I’d have given the machine to have it back.”
He took an envelope out of his shirt pocket.
“Three payments at eight-seventy is twenty-six ten. I paid that Wednesday. This is the ninety that’s left.”
He laid it beside my plate.
I didn’t pick it up, and I didn’t push it back.
“I can’t put them back,” he said. “Tell me what to do.”
I had thought about that for two days and I still had no list.
“I don’t know yet,” I said. “But you’ve done the first thing. You told your boy the truth out of your own mouth, at your mother’s table, with your aunt and uncle looking at you. That counts with me, Darren. It counts for a great deal.”
I slid the envelope back across to him.
“Hold on to that. You’ll know what it’s for.”
Mason reached over and put his hand on his father’s arm. He didn’t say anything. Boys of eleven don’t. He just left it there, and Darren covered it with his own, and Linda finally set the gravy boat down.
It was Ray who spoke next.
“I’m going to call Yoder,” he said.
Mr. Yoder is a Mennonite man from over toward Liberty who runs a small band mill behind his house. Ray has known him twenty years, because Yoder’s brother milks cows on Ray’s route. He saws barn siding and trailer decking, mostly, and a walnut slab now and then for people who want a mantel.
He came Monday evening after his mill shut down, in a flatbed truck, with a logger’s tape on his belt. He is not a talker.
He walked the stumps and measured across each one. Thirty inches, thirty-one, thirty-three. He waded into the tops and measured where the saw had taken the logs off. He picked up a round the buyer had trimmed off an end and left lying, turned it over in his hands, and smelled it.
“Who limbed these up when they were young?” he said.
“My father.”
“He knew what he was about. A yard tree is mostly worth nothing. Short, crooked, full of nails and fence staples, and no mill wants it. These were grown like timber.”
He turned to Darren. He was not unkind about it, and he was not gentle either.
“What did the man pay you?”
“Twenty-seven hundred.”
“Did he scale them in front of you? Write you a ticket?”
“No, sir. He walked around them and gave me a number.”
Yoder took a carpenter’s pencil from his shirt pocket and wrote on the back of a feed receipt against the hood of his truck. He talked while he wrote, slow, so we could follow.
“Three butt logs, twelve foot long, twenty-four inches at the little end. That is three hundred board foot apiece. Nine hundred foot. Clean veneer walnut has been bringing eight dollars a foot and better. That is seventy-two hundred dollars.”
He drew a line.
“Then the second cuts above them. Ten foot, about two hundred foot each. Six hundred foot of saw log at four dollars. Twenty-four hundred.”
He added it and turned the paper around.
“Ninety-six hundred dollars. And I am being careful.”
Nobody spoke.
“He made close to seven thousand dollars off you for one morning and a tank of diesel,” Yoder said. “These men drive the back roads looking for a walnut in the yard and a truck in the driveway that needs tires. They pay cash and they are in the next county by dark. He did nothing against the law. You said yes.”
Darren had gone the color of the sapwood.
“So I didn’t just take them,” he said. “I gave them away.”
“You sold your mother’s trees for twenty-eight cents on the dollar. I am not saying it to shame you. I am saying it because it is the number.”
That did what I could never have done. Coming from me, it would have been a mother’s grief, and a son can argue with grief. Coming from a sawyer with a pencil, it was arithmetic.
Darren sat down on the tailgate of Ray’s pickup and put his elbows on his knees. Ray sat down beside him. Neither one said a word, and I thought that was about right.
Yoder folded his tape.
“There is one more thing,” he said. “A buyer like that does not own a mill. He sells to a log yard, and the yard sorts and ships. Veneer logs go out on a container truck inside a week. But every log gets a metal detector run down it first.” He looked at me. “Was there ever iron in these trees? Nails? Wire? A hook?”
I felt it go through me like a hand laid on my back.
“A clothesline hook,” I said. “In the middle one. My father put it in the year I was two. The tree grew over it.”
It was the nearest I ever saw that man come to smiling.
“Then one of those butt logs is not veneer. No veneer mill will put a knife to a log with iron in it. It will be lying in a cull pile somewhere. May I use your telephone?”
He found it on the second call.
It was at a log yard outside Greensburg, twelve miles off. We went Wednesday. Ray took a half day, the first one I can remember, and I rode in the middle of the truck seat between my husband and my son.
The log lay by itself at the edge of the lot, twelve feet long and so big around I could not have reached halfway. Yoder said it would weigh better than a ton. Somebody had sprayed an orange ring on the bark a little over five feet from the butt end.
I laid my hand inside that ring. It was just about as high as a woman’s shoulder.
The yard man’s name was Dale, and he had no quarrel with any of us. “Wand went off on that one like a fire bell,” he said. “I paid good money for the other two, and they left here on a truck last Thursday. This one I got docked down to nothing. I’d take a dollar a foot to see it gone. Three hundred.”
Darren got out his billfold.
He had the envelope with the ninety dollars in it. The other two hundred and ten came out of his Friday paycheck from the stockyard, where he works the sale days. Kim told me later they ate beans and cornbread that whole week, and the children never noticed a thing.
He counted it into Dale’s hand himself.
Yoder hauled the log home on his flatbed. When Darren asked what he owed for the sawing, Yoder studied him a minute.
“I do not want your money,” he said. “My log yard is a mud hole from October to May. You own a machine. Give me two Saturdays, and I will buy the gravel, and we are square.”
So the skid steer that started all this spent two Saturdays over toward Liberty, spreading forty tons of creek gravel for a man who had told my son the truth. I thought that was about right too.
Yoder sawed the log on the last Saturday of October. We all went, the children too.
He ran his own detector down it and marked the spot with a lumber crayon. Then he started taking boards off that side, an inch and a quarter thick, one at a time, checking with the detector between cuts. The mill sang and the sawdust came off dark as coffee grounds. Darren and Mason carried each board away between them and stacked it on sticks to dry.
I had never seen the inside of one of my father’s trees laid open lengthwise. It looked like water. Long brown ripples with purple in them, running the whole twelve feet.
When the blade was within an inch of the iron, Yoder shut the mill down. He took a mallet and a chisel and worked the rest out by hand, slow, the way you’d take a splinter out of a child.
Then he walked over and put it in my palm.
It was the hook. It was rusted black and as long as my hand, with the threads still sharp on the screw end, and it was heavier than I expected. The wood it came out of was stained blue-black as ink for six inches up and down the grain, where iron and walnut had been keeping company for sixty-two years.
I closed my fingers on it and I cried, for the first time since we had turned in at the mailbox. For Joan. For the trees. For my mother with clothespins in her mouth and a basket on her hip.
Lily climbed straight up into my lap, big as she is, and patted my face with her brown-stained hand.
“Don’t cry, Grandma,” she said. “We found it.”
Darren was standing with a board across his arms and tears running into his collar, and he didn’t try to hide them. Ray went over and put a hand on the back of his neck, the way he used to when Darren was small enough to steer.
That same week the children and I gathered walnuts out of the tops, before Darren worked the limbs up into firewood for us. We hulled them in the lane the old way, with Ray’s pickup, and all three of us went to church with brown hands.
I showed them how to float the nuts in a washtub. The ones that bob are empty. The ones that sink are good. We planted sixty sinkers two inches deep in a bed at the end of my garden, and Ray laid hardware cloth over the top and weighted it with bricks, because a squirrel can smell a walnut through a foot of dirt. Mason wrote the date on a stake.
In May, thirty-four came up.
The boards spent the winter and the summer on sticks in Yoder’s shed, and three weeks that September in the little kiln he keeps for furniture wood. Then Darren started on the table.
He had never built a stick of furniture in his life. Ray showed him how to joint an edge and how to clamp a top so it wouldn’t cup, and then Ray left him alone, because that was the point. Every evening that fall there was a light on in the shop until nine or ten. Some nights Mason was out there with him, sweeping.
He carried it up to the house the Saturday before Thanksgiving, he and Ray, one on each end.
It is a plain farm table, seven feet long, four boards across the top. He put the board with the blue-black stain right down the middle, and he did not fill the hole where the hook had been. He left it. You can put your little finger in it.
“Turn it over,” Ray told me, so we did, the three of us.
On the underside, in carpenter’s pencil, in my son’s square hand, it says: From a tree Emil planted in 1952. Built by his grandson, who should have asked.
I ran my thumb over that last part a good while.
“You going to sand that off someday?” I asked him.
“No, ma’am,” Darren said. “I want Mason to find it when it’s his.”
We planted the seedlings that same afternoon. They were knee-high by then, with roots as long as their tops. Darren dug thirty holes along the lane, fifteen to a side, and he stepped off forty feet between them without anybody telling him to. Mason set each tree and held it straight. Lily watered them out of a coffee can and told every one of them good luck.
The four left over went to Mr. Yoder, two for his own lane and two for his brother’s.
When the last one was in, Mason stood looking down the row.
“How long till they’re as big as the old ones?”
“Seventy-four years,” I said.
He worked on that. “I’ll be eighty-six.”
“Then come see me in five or six winters,” Ray said. “I’ve got a pole saw with your name on it.”
I looked at my husband, and he looked off down the lane like he hadn’t said anything at all.
We ate Thanksgiving dinner on that table, all eight of us and Joan’s two girls up from Owensboro besides. The hook hangs on a nail by my back door, where I see it every time I carry out the wash.
The stumps are still in the yard. I asked Darren not to grind them. The chalk washed off in the first rain, but I know where every mark was, and so do two children.
I am sixty-five now. I will not live to see those thirty trees amount to anything, and neither will Ray, and likely neither will Darren. They are not for us. My father didn’t plant his for himself either. I understand that better now than I ever did while they were standing.
Some evenings I take my coffee out and sit on the middle stump and look down the lane at thirty sticks in wire cages, and it seems to me a fair amount of shade is on its way.
