What My Grandfather Planted

At 84, my grandfather started planting walnut trees along the back fence of the farm. Twelve of them, one every weekend, in the spring I turned fifteen.

Walnut trees take about twenty years to bear real fruit. I’d looked it up, because I was the kind of fifteen-year-old who looked things up to win arguments.

“Grandpa,” I said, leaning on the fence while he dug, “you know you’re not going to see these grow, right?”

It was a cruel thing to say. I knew it as I said it. I was angry about having to spend my weekends on the farm instead of with my friends, and he was the nearest target.

He didn’t look up. He finished the hole, stood up slowly with one hand on his back, and handed me the shovel.

“Then you’d better learn how to do it properly,” he said.

I planted the last four myself. He sat on an upturned bucket and corrected me on everything — the depth, the angle, how to loosen the roots without tearing them, how much water was too much.

“Why bother?” I asked him, on the last one. Not cruel this time. I actually wanted to know.

He was quiet for a while.

“When I was a boy,” he said, “there was a big walnut tree behind my school. Somebody planted it before any of us were born. We climbed it, hid behind it, had our first kisses under it. In the war, when there was no food, the whole village lived on those walnuts for one winter. Nobody knew the name of the man who planted it. He fed us anyway.”

He tapped the soil with his boot.

“Most good things are like that. You do them for people you’ll never meet.”

He died three years later. I didn’t go back to the farm for a long time.

Last October I took my daughter there. She’s six. The farm belongs to someone else now, but they let us walk along the back fence.

The trees were enormous. Twelve of them, in a crooked row, the last four slightly more crooked than the rest. The ground under them was covered in walnuts.

My daughter filled her pockets, then her hat, then my hat. She asked who planted them.

“Your great-grandfather,” I said. “And me. A little.”

“Did he know I’d come?”

I thought about the man on the upturned bucket, telling a sulky teenager how deep to dig.

“Yes,” I said. “I think he knew exactly.”