“They were going to be mine someday anyway, Mom.”
My son said that to me in my own yard at dusk on a Friday, with his hands shoved in his jacket pockets and walnut sawdust still caked in the laces of his boots.
I had been home eleven minutes.
Ray and I had driven back from Owensboro that afternoon. We had buried my sister Joan there on Thursday. It is two and a half hours of parkway, and neither of us said much. I rode with Joan’s Bible in my lap and a foil pan of somebody’s funeral ham on the floorboard, and all I wanted in this world was my own kitchen and my own bed.
We turned in at the mailbox and Ray took his foot off the gas.
He didn’t brake. He just quit driving, and the truck rolled a few feet in the gravel and stopped by itself.
“Barb,” he said.
I looked up.
A place looks a certain way when something big has gone out of it, and at first I couldn’t work out what I was seeing. The house was there. The barn was there. But there was too much sky. The whole west side of the yard stood open, and the last of the light was coming straight across the grass and hitting the kitchen windows, which it had not done at that hour in my lifetime.
Then I saw the stumps.
Three of them, in a row along the lane fence, cut low and flat. They were pale around the rim and dark as coffee in the middle, and every one was better than two and a half feet across. The grass around them was chewed to mud. A drift of sawdust the color of cocoa lay against the fence posts.
I got out of the truck with the Bible still in my hand.
The smell reached me before I got there. If you’ve never smelled fresh-cut black walnut, it is sharp and sweet at once, a little like the green hulls and a little like something baking. I have known it all my life, off my father’s hands and out of his shop. I had never smelled that much of it in one place.
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.