We dug by flashlight, Ashley and I, on Christmas night, at the top of the hill above the farmhouse. The ground was frozen at the surface and soft beneath, and the shovel rang when it struck. The oldest tree on the farm stood over us, a great dark evergreen that Clyde had refused to cut for forty years, because, he said, every farm needed one tree that nobody owned. Under its roots lay a coffee can, wrapped in a feed sack and sealed with tape. Ashley lifted it out. Her breath showed white in the cold. She looked at me. I nodded.
In the kitchen, with the stove warm and the kettle on, we opened it together. There was a bundle of letters tied with a ribbon. There was a thick envelope of legal papers, and a photograph of a young man with a mustache, standing proudly beside a logging truck. And there was a letter in the handwriting of Clyde, three pages long, in blue ink. Ashley picked it up, but her hands shook so hard that she gave it back to me. I took a breath, and I read the whole thing aloud, in a voice that did not sound like mine.
Clyde wrote that in 1987 he had adopted Ashley. She had been five years old. Her father, my first husband, Daniel Reese, died in the fall of 1984, when a log truck rolled on a mountain road. I was thirty two, with a toddler, and no money. Clyde, a friend of Daniel from the church, brought groceries every week for two years without being asked. In 1986 he asked me to marry him. In 1987 a judge in Watauga County signed the papers that made Ashley his daughter. I had thought it the happiest day of my life.
He wrote, My dear Ashley, you were five years old and had a gap in your teeth and you wanted to know if I could fix a bicycle. I said I could. I never fixed a thing so well in my life. Your mother and I agreed that we would tell you when you were older, and then you were older, and we were afraid. I am more your father than anyone. I want you to hear that from me before you hear anything else. A father is the man who stays.
Blood can give a child a name, but a father is the man who stays, who learns to fix the bicycle and shows up every morning for the rest of his life.
Ashley was weeping so hard that she could not speak. I got up from my chair and knelt beside her on the kitchen floor, which at seventy three is not something I do lightly. “I should have told you,” I said. “I was afraid you would stop calling him Daddy. And he was afraid too. He wanted so badly to be your father that he could not bear for anyone to name him anything else.” She put her arms around my neck. I could feel her heart going like a rabbit.
She wanted to ask whether he had ever felt any different, and she could not form the words. I told her that Clyde never once, in forty years, treated her any differently than if she were his own blood. I told her about the nights he walked the floor when she had croup. I told her how he cried at her wedding, and then pretended it was the cider. I told her he kept her school pictures in his wallet until the leather wore through. She laughed at that, a wet and broken laugh, and wiped her face on her sleeve.
We looked at the rest together. The photograph was Daniel, her first father, a laughing young man with her very smile. The bundle of letters came from his mother, a woman named Mae, who lived in Johnson City, Tennessee. She had written to Clyde every Christmas for thirty eight years. Clyde had written back every year too, with photographs of Ashley, school pictures, a graduation, a wedding, a baby. He had never told us. Mae wanted nothing, only to know that the girl was well. The last letter was dated the week before his death. It held a single request. Please bring her to me while I am still alive.
Mae Reese was ninety three. We called her on the telephone at nine that night, with the snow coming down outside, and Ashley held the phone in both hands. The voice that answered was thin and sweet, with a Tennessee drawl that stretched every word. “Hello, baby,” she said. “I have been waiting a long, long time.” Ashley sat down on the floor of my kitchen again and cried so hard she could not answer. So I took the phone and told Mae that we were coming on the first day of the new year.
We drove down through the mountains, Ashley and I and her two children, in a gray rain. Mae lived in a tidy brick house with a porch full of ferns. She stood in the doorway in a blue housecoat, leaning on a walker, and when she saw Ashley, she let go of it, and for a moment I thought she would fall. Ashley caught her. They stood in the doorway holding each other while the rain dripped off the roof, and the children, who did not understand, held hands and waited.
She told Ashley everything about Daniel. How he sang bass in the church choir. How he once drove two hundred miles to bring a lost dog home. How he held his baby daughter on his knee on the morning of the day he died. She showed her a quilt she had made from his shirts. She said she had never held a grudge against me or against Clyde, that a mother who had lost a son was grateful that a good man had been there for his child. Ashley slept that night under the quilt.
The next December we opened the tree lot together at the church on King Street, Ashley and her husband and I, with hot cider and strings of lights. On the sign above the booth, Ashley painted her own words. THE TREE FARM OF CLYDE. A FATHER IS THE MAN WHO STAYS. At the top of the hill, the great old evergreen stands as it always has. We hung a small tag on the lowest branch, in red letters. It reads, Not for sale. On the back, in smaller letters, are two names. Clyde. Daniel. Both fathers of Ashley.