Instead he rubbed one hand over his jaw.
“How much?”
“Just over three hundred for seedlings.”
His eyebrows rose.
“You’ve got three hundred dollars?”
“More.”
“From where?”
“Detassling.”
Dale shook his head.
Two summers.
Hot cornfields.
Long days.
Opal had saved almost every dollar.
“And you want to put it into trees?”
“Yes.”
He stared at her for another ten seconds.
Then:
“Fine.”
Opal’s breath stopped.
Dale lifted one finger.
“Don’t celebrate yet.”
She did not move.
“It’s yours to use.”
“I’m not financing it.”
“I’m not replanting it when half of them die.”
“I’m not explaining you to the men at the elevator.”
Opal smiled.
“You don’t have to explain me.”
Dale muttered:
“That’s what you think.”
The seedlings arrived in April 1981.
Cardboard boxes.
Wet burlap.
Thin bare-root bur oak whips not much taller than pencils.
Four thousand of them.
When Opal opened the first bundle, even she felt uncertain.
That was all?
She had imagined trees.
These looked like sticks with roots.
Ruth picked one up.
“Everything big starts embarrassing.”
Opal laughed.
“What does that mean?”
“I don’t know.”
Ruth examined the seedling.
“But it sounds true.”
They planted.
Eleven days.
Opal did most of the work herself.
Ruth helped in the afternoons.
A boy from down the road named Kurt Ostrander came on weekends.
Everyone except Opal seemed to understand that Kurt had been finding reasons to appear around the Vance farm for almost two years.
Opal believed he simply liked planting trees.
Kurt’s mother considered this interpretation proof that intelligence could fail selectively.
The rows curved across the slope.
Opal marked contours using simple leveling methods, stakes, string, and repeated measurements.
The work was slow.
Dig.
Place seedling.
Spread roots.
Pack soil.
Move twelve feet.
Repeat.
Snow fell lightly on the ninth day.
Kurt looked toward the sky.
“You want to quit?”
“No.”
“It’s snowing.”
“I noticed.”
“Trees know that?”
“They’ve been outside longer than you.”
Kurt laughed.
They kept working.
By the final afternoon, Opal’s hands had blistered, hardened, split, and hardened again.
Her shoulders ached.
Her lower back felt older than Dale’s.
But the field had changed.
Four thousand thin stems stood across it in long contour rows.
Between them, she seeded switchgrass and little bluestem.
From the county road, the result looked ridiculous.
The seedlings were too small to impress anyone.
The field remained mostly bare.
The rows made no agricultural sense to people accustomed to straight machinery passes.
The laughter began before the oaks fully leafed.
At the grain elevator, someone asked Dale:
“What’s your girl doing on the Flat?”
“Planting trees.”
“Trees?”
“Yes.”
“Christmas trees?”
“No.”
“What kind?”
“Oak.”
The man stared.
Then laughed.
“On the Flat?”
Dale paid for fertilizer.
Another man joined.
“Maybe she knows something we don’t.”
His voice made clear that he believed the opposite.