He sold trees all day.
He did not know what else to do. People came. They bought trees. Some of them looked at him in a way that made him think they knew something. Not one of them said a word about it.
By six o'clock, there were nine trees left on the lot. The rain had turned to a fine, cold mist. The bare light bulbs made halos in it.
At six-forty, his daughter Kristin pulled up in her car from Seattle.
"Kristin," Nils said. "What are you doing here?"
"I came to see you close, Dad," she said. She hugged him. She had been crying in the car. He could tell. "I wouldn't miss it."
"Did you know about this?" He held up the newspaper.
Kristin did not answer. She just squeezed his hand.
At seven o'clock, they started to come.
On foot, mostly. Down Front Street from both directions, under umbrellas and in rain jackets, in ones and twos and families. Old people with canes. Young parents with babies in carriers. Teenagers. Men in mill jackets and men in suits.
They did not crowd the lot. They lined up. Along the sidewalk on Front Street, past the hardware store, around the corner onto Pine, under the streetlights in the mist, quietly, the way people line up at a wake.
Nils stood at the entrance of his lot with his daughter and watched them come. The line kept getting longer.
He could not see the end of it.
The first person in line was a woman in her early sixties, small, in a green raincoat, with a clipboard. Nils knew her. It was Linda Larsen, the head librarian at the Skagit Falls Public Library.
"Mr. Berglund," she said. "Do you remember me?"
"You're the library lady."
"I'm one of the Larsen boys' little sister," she said. "December of 1975. Daddy had just been killed at the mill. Mama had four kids and fourteen dollars. We walked onto your lot in the rain, and Mama looked at the price tags and started to cry. You came over and picked out a noble fir. Eight feet. You tied it on top of our old Rambler and said, Pay me next year."
She swallowed.
"Mama tried to pay you every year until she died in 1996," she said. "You never let her. You always said, Next year, Mrs. Larsen."
"I remember her," Nils said slowly. "She brought me cookies."
"Every year," Linda said. "Every December twenty-third. For twenty-one years. That was the only way you'd let her."
"So I spent the last two months in the library," Linda said. "I went through sixty years of Christmas cards and church newsletters and old letters to the editor. I asked at every church in town. I put up a sign at the hardware store and the senior center. And I asked one question. Did Nils Berglund ever give your family a tree and tell you to pay him next year?"
She held up the clipboard.
"Four hundred and twelve families," she said. "That we found. There are more. People moved away. People died. People were too ashamed to say." She looked at the line stretching down Front Street. "But four hundred and twelve, so far."
Nils could not speak.
"And every one of them," Linda said, "said the same thing. We never paid him back."
They had decided among themselves, it turned out, that not one person would hand Nils money. Linda had been very firm about that. He would only try to give it back.
So instead, one at a time, they came onto the lot.
The first was an old man with a cane, who handed Nils a small wooden Christmas ornament, a tiny carved fir tree, and said, "Don Kowalczyk. 1967. I was laid off at the cannery. You gave us a seven-foot Douglas fir."
Then he walked to a big plastic bin at the back of the lot, under the light bulbs, and dropped an envelope through a slot in the lid.
The bin had a sign taped to it, in Linda's printing.
NEXT YEAR.
They kept coming for two hours.
Each one of them said their name and a year. Each one of them said something about the tree. Each one of them put an envelope in the bin marked NEXT YEAR.
Some of them gave him ornaments. Some gave him photographs of Christmas trees in living rooms going back sixty years, in black and white, then faded color, then bright new color. One woman gave him a loaf of Swedish rye bread, still warm, wrapped in a towel. A little boy of six gave him a drawing of a tree in crayon, and a man who must have been his grandfather said, "1977. That was me."
Nils stood at the entrance of his lot and shook every hand. His daughter stood beside him with an umbrella over his head and tears running down her face.
At a quarter after nine, the last person in line came onto the lot.
It was a young man, about thirty, in a work jacket, with a little girl of four on his shoulders. Nils did not know him.
"Mr. Berglund," he said. "My name's Matt Kowalczyk. Don's grandson. I'm the one who bought your farm. With my wife."
Nils looked at him.
"I didn't tell you, when we signed the papers," the young man said. "I didn't know how." He swallowed. "Grandpa told me the story my whole life. The tree in 1967. So when the farm came up for sale, I wanted it. I wanted to keep it going."
Linda Larsen came over with her clipboard.
"Mr. Berglund," she said. "There's sixty-one thousand dollars in that bin. We counted it this afternoon. And we already know you won't take it."
"No," Nils said. "I won't."
"We know," Linda said. "So we've done something else with it. We've put it in a fund at the community foundation. It's called the Next Year Fund. Every December, as long as it lasts, Matt will bring trees down from your farm to this corner. And any family in Skagit Falls who comes onto this lot and can't afford a tree will get one."
She looked at him.
"And they'll be told to pay it next year," she said.
Nils Berglund sold his last tree that night at nine-thirty.
He did not sell it, exactly. A young mother came onto the lot at the very end, after the line was gone, with a little boy in a stroller. She did not know anything about the newspaper or the line or the bin. She had just seen the lights on.
She walked slowly among the last few trees and looked at the price tags.
Nils watched her for a moment. Then he walked over and picked out the best one. A noble fir. Seven feet.
He did not say anything about the fund. He did not say anything about the town or the bin or the sixty years.
He just tied the tree on top of her car in the rain, the way he always had, and patted the roof twice.
"Pay me next year," he said.