The Judge read the letterhead, and the line, and then the line again, with the patience of a man who has spent forty years studying exhibits. He did not look up for a long while. The string quartet had lowered their bows. Fifty gold balloons stirred above the lawn in the warm Mississippi air, and a hundred guests held their glasses at half mast. Finally he said, in the courtroom voice that had once silenced a jury, “Mr. Bell, I am looking at a bill of sale. For Bell Tree Service. Seven million six hundred thousand dollars.” I said, “Yes, Your Honor. It closed in March.” He took off his glasses. “And I handed you a hundred dollars to cut a dead limb.”
“It was a fair price for the limb,” I said. “I enjoyed the climb.” There was a small sound from my mother in law, a kind of strangled gasp, and her pearls trembled against her collarbone. MJ stood very still beside the cake table. He was thirty five, broad shouldered, with the eyes of his mother and my chin. “Dad,” he said, “you could have told me.” I said, “I could have. And you could have told me you took my bucket truck from the yard.” I held up my phone with the photograph. “I found it in front of your house this afternoon. With a sign in the window.”
MJ said, “I thought you were shutting down. I thought the bank would take everything.” I said, “You thought wrong, son.” Denise, my wife, had come to stand at my elbow. She is a quiet woman, trained all her life to avoid scenes, and she held my arm so tightly I could feel her pulse. “Marcus Junior,” she said, in a voice I had never heard from her, “the Altec boom. The chipper. The stump grinder. You took all of it?” MJ said, “Mama, I was starting Fairchild Arbor.” She said, “With the equipment of your father.” And the garden grew very still.
A dried pecan limb and a bucket truck in the street led a tree man from an anniversary lawn to the head table, and gave him the evening to bring his son back up the ladder.
The Judge removed his napkin from his collar, folded it in quarters, and laid it on the table with the precision of a man putting a verdict to bed. “Marcus,” he said, “I want to say something, and I want everyone to hear it.” He turned to the guests. “For thirty one years, I have called this man the tree man. I did it as a joke. I did it because I was a snob. And all the while, he was carrying more weight than any of us in this room.” His voice cracked on the last word. “I am ashamed of myself, and I apologize.”
The lawn was perfectly silent. A mockingbird sang in the pecan tree, the same tree from which I had cut the limb, and the notes dropped into the hush like pebbles into a pond. My mother in law began to cry quietly. The Judge lowered himself back into his chair and gripped the arms of it. “And now,” he said, “my grandson.” MJ flinched. “MJ, I put your name on a company that did not exist. I put it in my toast. I told this family you were starting a business. I did not even ask how you had gotten the truck.” He closed his eyes. “That, too, is on me.”
MJ fell to his knees on the grass. It was not theatrical. His legs simply gave way. “Dad,” he said. “Dad, I am so sorry. I wanted so badly to be a Fairchild. To be somebody in this family. I thought you would never see it if I just asked.” I knelt in front of him, in my good slacks, in the grass. “MJ, I was born a Bell. So were you. There is no better name for a man who works.” He wept into my shoulder. I held him the way I held him when he was four and afraid of thunder, and the whole garden watched.
I set the terms in the morning, over coffee, at the kitchen table. The bucket truck, the chipper, and the stump grinder would be returned to the yard on Highway 80 by noon. MJ would write a full statement for the buyer. He would pay for the paint he had stripped from the truck door. And he would take the position I had arranged, a crew foreman at the utility contractor, at the bottom of the ladder. “They will start you on the ground,” I said. “Like I started. You will learn to climb with a rope before you ever touch a boom.” He nodded, unsmiling. “Yes, Dad.”
His first week, he came home with blistered palms and a bleeding knuckle. His second week, he fell out of a sweet gum, six feet, onto a pile of mulch, and lay laughing on his back until his foreman came running. By the end of the month, he could climb a pecan in his sleep. The crew took to him. They called him Junior Bell, which he pretended to hate. One Friday, I stopped at the job site and found him high in an oak, strapped in, with a saw at his hip, working the limb with careful hands. He saw me, and he lifted one gloved hand.
The Judge came to the yard on a Saturday, alone, in a seersucker jacket and a straw hat, and asked if he might see the trucks. I showed him the line. He ran his hand along the fender of the International, and when he reached the door, he stopped. The white paint was thin there. You could still see the old outline of the words. Bell Tree Service. “Marcus,” he said, “would you teach me to climb?” I laughed so hard I had to sit down on a stump. He was seventy eight. I said, “Judge, we will start with the ladder.”
That fall, at the foot of the pecan tree, the Judge and I sat in two lawn chairs with glasses of sweet tea. MJ was up in the branches, trimming the dead wood. The sun was low and gold. The old man watched his grandson with a look I had never seen on his face. “Marcus,” he said, “I have sat in judgment all my life. I never saw anyone do honest work so well.” I said, “It is only a tree.” He shook his head slowly. “No. It is a good deal more than that.” Overhead, a limb fell, and MJ called down, “Clear!”