“It is mine, Pastor,” I said, quietly, so that the children would not hear the worst of it. “Ten weeks ago, I sold Ambrose Nursery and Landscape for eight million, three hundred thousand dollars. Every tree, every truck, every employee.” Brother Neal, a tall pastor with a kind, tired face, listened with his glasses in his hand. “The Kenworth behind the trailer in the parking lot is unit eleven. It is on line eleven of the equipment list, and it belongs to the buyer. Blake is selling it for two hundred ten thousand dollars. He has also taken a skid steer and two hundred rose bushes.” A mother at the edge of the lawn covered her mouth.
Russell lowered the microphone. His hand was shaking, and a faint hum of feedback rose and died. “Blake,” he said. “Is this true?” Blake, thirty three years old and as steady as a post in any other situation, stood at the foot of the steps with his arms at his sides. “Daddy, I thought the company was withering,” he said. “Uncle Floyd told me the big stores were taking all the business. I thought if I had one truck, I could save something for us.” “You could have asked,” I said. “I would have helped you start. I would have helped you the way your grandfather helped me.” Blake dropped his eyes to the sidewalk, where the Popsicle was melting.
Patricia climbed the steps in her flowered dress and stood beside me. She is a retired schoolteacher, a woman of great composure, and the whole lawn fell silent. “Russell,” she said, “for thirty eight years you have called my husband the yard man in this church. At every Easter. At every Christmas pageant. I have said nothing.” She turned to the children on the lawn, and then back to her brother. “Floyd Ambrose planted every live oak that shades this church. He planted the rose garden by the nursery door. Say his name.” Russell set down the microphone. “Floyd,” he said, in a husky voice. “I am ashamed.”
A sheet of paper laid on a church railing gave one nephew the weekend to bring his uncle back to the church lawn in Tyler.
I gave Blake my terms on the church steps, in front of the children, because he had been honored in front of the children. The Kenworth, the skid steer and the roses would be back at my nursery on Highway 155 by noon on Monday. Holland Garden and Grounds would be closed, and the white paint washed from the door. He would tell the lawyers of the buyer the whole truth. If he did all of it, I would not press charges, and I would ask the new owners to keep him on as a truck operator at the same pay, since he could still move a forty foot oak without losing a leaf.
On Monday morning, I stood at the gate of the nursery in the early heat. The skid steer arrived first. Then came two flatbed trucks, with the rose bushes in long rows in their black pots, each tagged with a variety. Tomas, my nursery manager, counted them twice and nodded. At nine, the green Kenworth rolled in with Blake at the wheel. Tomas walked around it, checking the spade, and called out, “Mr. Floyd, even the number eleven is on the door!” I put my hand on the cool hood of the truck and felt something loosen inside my chest, the way a root loosens when it finally finds water.
That Wednesday, Brother Neal asked me to come back to the church for the closing program of Vacation Bible School. I almost declined. But when I walked into the fellowship hall, four hundred children were seated on the floor in matching T shirts, and each of them held a single yellow rose. Brother Neal stood at the microphone. “Children, this man planted the trees you play under,” he said. “Let us thank Mister Floyd.” Four hundred small voices chanted my name, and four hundred small hands lifted roses. I stood there with my hat against my chest and could not say a word. A little boy in the front row asked, “Is he the yard man?” and his mother whispered, “No, honey. He is the tree man.”
Russell came to my house on Thursday evening, alone, in the rain. He stood on the porch in a wet jacket, holding a small potted rose bush, and he did not seem to know what to do with his hands. “Floyd, I gave you a Popsicle cooler and called it a favor,” he said. “I have been an elder for twenty years, and I have never once planted anything.” I took the rose bush from him. “Then come with me,” I said. We walked out to the garden in the rain, and I handed him a spade, and he dug his first hole at the age of sixty three.
The money consequences were fair. Blake repaid the buyer seventeen thousand dollars for the hauling, the fuel and a damaged hydraulic line, and he ran his old spade for a year without overtime. Russell sold a section of pasture to cover the legal fees. When he handed me a check for my trouble, I walked him to the church and asked him to give it to the Vacation Bible School fund. “Buy every child a tree to take home,” I said. He did, and the following June, four hundred oak seedlings left the parking lot in four hundred pairs of small hands.
In the name of my father, Elijah Ambrose, who passed twenty years ago and who planted the first rose bushes of my life along the fence of our rented farm, I started the Rose Fund. It pays for trees, rose gardens and a year of care for small churches, clinics and schools in East Texas that cannot afford a landscaper. In the first season, we planted forty seven gardens. At a clinic in Lindale, a nurse stood in the doorway with tears on her face, looking at a rose bush in bloom, and said, “No one has planted anything for us in thirty years.”
The following June, at the Vacation Bible School picnic, I stood by the swing set with a cooler of Popsicles, and I handed out four hundred of them in ninety eight degrees, because I wanted to. Russell stood at my elbow, holding the second cooler. Blake worked the line beside us, in a green T shirt, helping the smallest children unwrap the paper. A little girl looked up at me with orange stains on her chin. “Mister Floyd, you are good with the little ones,” she said. “So are you,” I said, and I gave her another one, and I did not charge a dime.
