“Mr. Prescott,” I said, “your toast was a kind one, and I am sorry to interrupt it.” The country club ballroom was a sea of linen and crystal, with a string trio in the corner and an ice sculpture of two swans on the buffet. Eighty people had gone silent with their champagne flutes in the air. Tyler stood at the head table in a navy blazer I had never seen, his mouth open and his face the color of the tablecloth. “I am Gene Kowalski, the grandfather. I did come in my good flannel shirt, because it is the only good one I have. I live in a trailer on a piece of woodland south of town. That much is true.”
I put my hand on the empty coffee can. “For twenty years, I sold firewood from a stack by the road. Ten dollars a face cord, on the honor system, in this can. In the last two years it has been empty. Hank, who has bought wood from me since 1999, told me two weeks ago that he had been paying my grandson eighty dollars a cord.” Hank, who had come with me in his good jacket and was sitting at the back by the door with his cap on his knee, raised a hand. “And my banker tells me that Tyler asked about opening an account in my name to handle money from what he called the solar thing.”
Mr. Prescott, an engineer with a trim gray beard, held the envelope from the solar company in his two hands. “Mr. Kowalski,” he said, gently, “this letter says the sale price was sixteen point four million dollars.” “For the back one hundred eighty acres,” I said. “I kept the trailer and twenty acres for the rest of my life, which suits me. I have not told a soul. Not Tyler. And I did not mean to tell you tonight, either. I meant to give my grandson a wedding present. But I heard that he had told you I was on food stamps. I have never been on food stamps in my life.”
An empty coffee can set on a country club head table revealed a firewood business that was never the grandson to claim.
Tyler found his voice at last. It came out high and cracked. “Grandpa, I was going to tell you. I was going to pay it all back. I just needed some money to get started with the channel, and the equipment, and the camera.” “How much did you take?” I asked. “Sixty two thousand,” he whispered. “Over two years. Selling the firewood, and the deliveries to the pizza places. I thought you would never need it.” Madison, his fiancée, a tall, quiet girl in a lilac dress, put down her napkin. She looked at Tyler for a long time, and her expression slowly changed from confusion to something much harder. “You told me you owned that business,” she said. “You told me you built it.”
“I did not say that to hurt you, Madison,” Tyler said. “I only wanted you to think well of me.” “You wanted my parents to think well of you,” she said. “And you told them your grandfather was poor, so that they would feel sorry for you, and for us. I would have married you in a trailer, Tyler. I would have married you without a dollar. But I cannot marry a man who lies about his own family.” She stood. She took the ring off her finger and laid it on the table, next to the swans. Then she turned to me. “Mr. Kowalski, I am so sorry. Your grandson did not deserve a grandfather like you.”
I did not stay long. I shook the hand of Mr. Prescott, who looked ashamed, and said that no harm had been done that could not be mended. I walked to the door with my cap in my fist, and Tyler came after me into the lobby, under the chandeliers. He was crying. He caught my arm and said, “Grandpa, please. Tell me what to do.” I looked at him a while, this tall, soft, lost young man with the eyes of Doris, and I said what I had decided in the car. “Tomorrow at six, in my yard, in work boots. Bring a pair of gloves. We will start by paying Hank.”
He was there at five forty five. We drove to the house of Hank first, and Tyler handed him an envelope of cash, the first four thousand of what he owed to the customers, in tens and twenties, borrowed against his phone and his camera. Hank counted it, looked up, and said, “Son, I forgive you. But you will be hearing this in this county for a while.” Tyler nodded. At the end of the week, we had visited eleven households, and made a list of the rest, and he had sold the camera, the lights, and the microphone to pay them. He did it without being asked.
We worked together for a year. Every Saturday, in all weather, we cut the dead trees on my twenty acres, and I taught him what I knew. How to read a lean. How to make a face cut. How to listen for the creak in a bad limb. His hands blistered, then toughened. He stopped checking his phone. One cold morning in February, as we split a fallen oak in the gray light, he said, without looking at me, “Grandpa, I never knew what you were. I thought you were just an old man.” I said, “That is what I let you think.” He laughed. We split the next log together.
In April, we planted trees. Six hundred of them, one for each elm I had taken down in the summer of 1975, when the disease came to Springfield. A young nursery owner in Peoria had developed a strain that resisted it, and we ordered every seedling he had. Madison came out on the third Saturday with a shovel and an apology and a bag of sandwiches, and she and Tyler sat on the tailgate and talked for an hour. But the next month there was a ring on her finger again, a plain one, and she wore it as if she had chosen it.
The elms are small yet, a row of thin green whips along the road, tied to stakes. But in twenty years they will make a tunnel of shade over the lane, and the people driving past on a summer afternoon will say, what a beautiful old road. The coffee can stands on the railing, empty and clean, and I have put a sign beside it. Firewood, ten dollars. Honor system. Doris would approve. She always said that trust is the first thing you plant.
