The first car up the hill was a gray Honda with a bank parking sticker on the windshield.
Megan Lail got out in jeans and a barn coat this time, with real boots. She had a clipboard under one arm and a thermos in her hand. Behind her, the line of cars filled the gravel lot and backed down the road as far as Clyde could see.
"Morning, Mr. Ashby," she said. "I'm sorry about yesterday. I asked everybody to come today instead. All at once. I figured it would mean more."
Clyde stood on his porch steps in his coat and slippers. He couldn't make his mouth work.
"I spent Saturday on the phone," Megan said. "I went through the names in my head from your book. The ones I could remember. Then I called the ones I knew, and they called the ones they knew." She looked back at the cars. "It kind of got away from me."
They came all day.
They came from Laurel Gap and Boone and Spruce Pine, and a few from as far as Knoxville. Grown men who'd been boys in the back of a pickup in 1985. Women who'd been little girls holding their daddy's hand while he asked how much the cheap tree was.
They walked up the rows in families, three generations together, and they cut their trees and carried them to the baler. And then they came to the table where Wade sat with the cash box and they paid for them.
Then they paid again.
"This is for this year," said a big man in a Carhartt jacket, setting down a fifty-dollar bill. "And this is for 1985." He set down another hundred. "I was eight. Daddy never forgot it. He told us about it every Christmas until he died."
"Ernest Hollifield," Clyde said slowly. "Six-foot tree. You had a little brother who wanted the crooked one."
The man stared at him. Then he laughed and wiped his eyes with his sleeve.
"He still picks the crooked one," he said.
Behind him, the little brother, fifty years old now, was already dragging a crooked six-footer down the row toward the baler. Wade ran the shaker until his arms gave out, and then two of the Hollifield grandsons took over.
Megan had brought the ledger with her. Clyde didn't know when she'd taken it off his table. She sat at a folding table beside Wade with the book open and a pen in her hand, and when people paid, she asked their name and their year.
Then she found their line in the book and wrote one word in the empty column.
Paid.
Some of them paid twenty dollars. Some paid five hundred.
A school bus driver from Spruce Pine paid in quarters out of a coffee can. One old woman paid with a check for exactly forty-two dollars and fifty cents, because she said that was what a seven-foot Fraser cost in 1993 and she'd looked it up in her old checkbook register.
Not everybody on the list came. Some had moved away.
Some had passed. Their lines stayed blank, and Megan left them that way.
"Those were gifts," she told Clyde. "They stay gifts."
By four in the afternoon, the field below the barn was a field of stumps. The cash box had been emptied twice into a feed sack. Clyde's church sent up two women to count it at the kitchen table so there would never be a question about it.
It came to twenty-six thousand, four hundred dollars.
It wasn't thirty-eight. Clyde knew it wasn't, and so did Megan.
"Here's the part I can actually help with," she said, sitting down across from him at Nell's table. "I'm not allowed to forgive a loan. That's not how banks work, and you wouldn't want me to. But I am allowed to take a large payment and recommend new terms on the rest. With this much down, I think the loan committee will say yes. Smaller payments. Spread out over five years."
"You think."
"I'm on the loan committee," Megan said. "So I'm pretty sure."
Clyde looked down at his hands on the table. They were rough and stained with pine sap, and they weren't steady.
"Why'd you do all this?" he asked.
Megan reached over and opened the ledger to 1991. She put her finger on the line. Lail, Laurel Gap.
7 ft Fraser. Three kids.
"My dad got laid off from the furniture plant that fall," she said. "Mom told me later that he came home from your farm that night and sat in the truck in the driveway for twenty minutes before he came in. She thought something was wrong. He was just sitting out there crying."
She closed the book.
"I was six. I don't remember the tree," she said. "But I remember that Christmas was all right."
On Monday morning, the man from Asheville called back about the cabins.
Clyde told him thank you, but the farm wasn't for sale, and it wasn't going to be. Then he went out with Wade and started marking the field of stumps for spring planting.
That evening, he sat down at the kitchen table with the ledger and a pen.
He turned past all the pages that were filled, past 1985 and 1991 and every year since, until he came to the first clean page at the back. At the top of it, in his square hand, he wrote PAY WHEN YOU CAN.
Underneath, he wrote 2026, and left the rest of the page blank for whoever came up the hill.