Mr. Sumrall turned the page over and back, and I saw the exact moment his face changed. He had been a car salesman before he was a developer, and the man could smell a number from across a parking lot. “Fecon FTX150,” he read, slowly. “Purchase price, thirteen million, seven hundred thousand dollars. Seller, Eugene Watts.” He stopped. In the silence a pelican dropped into the bay behind the tent, and a woman near the cake whispered something to her husband. “Gene,” said Sumrall, and his voice was an octave lower than before, “you sold the whole company?”
“In May,” I said. “Fourteen mulchers, eight dozers, and all the contracts. Seventy men and women kept their jobs, and not one of them took a pay cut.” I set my hand on the table to stop its shaking. It had nothing to do with fear. “I did not tell Tracy, because I was going to hand her a check at Thanksgiving. I did not tell Logan, because I was going to hand him the keys to a brand new machine, with a ribbon on it. I wanted to see what you would all do if you believed I was an old man with a tent to put up.”
Tracy had come out from behind the taco truck. She was crying, and she did not try to hide it. Jake, in his gown and Florida State cap, stood beside her with his hands in fists at his sides, twenty two years old and furious in the way only the young can be. “Dad,” Tracy said to her husband. “Tell me you did not.” Logan said nothing. He put the microphone down on the table very carefully, as if it had turned into something alive. “The mulcher is not yours,” I told him, “and the dozer is not yours, and the grapple truck is not yours. They belong to the buyer in Atlanta. And they have the serial numbers.”
A land clearing contract was read aloud under a rented tent and gave one old stump man the afternoon to bring his daughter and grandson back to the table.
Logan sat down. He looked suddenly smaller in his golf shirt, like a man shrinking inside it. “I thought it was going under,” he said. “You said so yourself, Gene. I thought, he is old, he is going to lose everything, and somebody ought to save something.” His voice cracked. “I owed the bank. On the condo. I have owed them since the hurricane. I never told Tracy.” Tracy turned her head. It was the way a person turns when a door opens in a house that was supposed to be empty. “How much?” she said. “Two hundred and ten thousand,” said Logan. “The same as the mulcher.”
Jake stepped forward. He took off his cap, with the gold tassel, and held it against his chest, and spoke to the whole tent. “Papa Gene taught me to run that mulcher when I was ten,” he said. “He said every stump is a lesson in patience. He paid for my first semester at Florida State, out of an envelope, and made me promise not to tell my father.” He turned to Logan. “You are my father, and I love you. But you let a man set up a tent in ninety four degrees for forty dollars. And you let your own dad call him a stump guy, in front of me, on the day of my graduation.” Nobody in that tent was looking at a plate.
I did not want a scene. I never have. So I took a breath, and I set the terms the way I would set the terms of a land clearing contract, plainly and in order. The equipment goes back to the yard on Highway 231 by Monday. Logan comes with it, and he tells Darnell, to his face, what he did. The debt on the Destin condo, two hundred and ten thousand dollars, I would pay, but not to Logan. Directly to the bank, with the paperwork going to Tracy. And Logan would work for the buyer, running a skid steer, at the bottom of the pay scale, until he had earned the right to a better machine.
Mr. Sumrall stood slowly. He took off his straw hat and looked into it, as if the answer might be written inside the band. “Gene,” he said, “I have called you the stump guy for eleven years, and I have never once cleared a stump in my life.” “After the storm, when my own crews could not get to the lots, your men came out for us for free. I knew that. I just did not say it.” He put the hat back on. “I would be honored if you would let me shake your hand.”
Tracy did not forgive her husband that day, and I would not have asked her to. But she took his arm, and she said to him, very low, “We are going home, and you are going to tell me everything.” I watched them cross the lawn together, her shoes in her hand, his head down. Jake stayed behind with me. He put his cap back on, crooked, and we stood together at the edge of the tent while the taco truck line slowly started to move again.
At dusk, the caterers took down the tent, and I helped them, because I would not have anyone else do it for me. When it was folded, Jake came up with a plate of tacos and two cold drinks, and we sat on the tailgate of my truck and watched the light go pink over the bay. “Papa Gene,” he said, with his mouth full, “what are you going to do with all that money?” I told him I did not rightly know. I had thought of a house, and a boat, and a place in the mountains. But what I could not stop thinking about was the faces of the men who cleared the roads after the storm.
In October, we launched the Michael Fund. It pays for tuition at the state college for the children of every worker in the Panhandle who ever swung a saw during the hurricane, and Jake runs it, from a desk in a bare office on Harrison Avenue. The first check went to a girl named Marisol, whose father lost a hand to a chipper. Logan drives a skid steer now, six days a week. On Saturdays, at my place, he and I pull stumps from the back lot, and we do not say much, and last week he said, “It is not so bad.” I said, “No, son. It is honest.”