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.
Lila Hart is a dedicated Digital Archivist and Research Specialist with a keen eye for preserving and curating meaningful content. At TheArchivists, she specializes in organizing and managing digital archives, ensuring that valuable stories and historical moments are accessible for generations to come.
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