A light drizzle that seemed more to hang in the air than fall started around midday. It looked like Ireland, or at least that’s what the folks who’d come to see the property said. April didn’t know if that was true or not. She’d been out of those mountains only twice in her entire life.
Their names were Pat and Connie Lathan, and they were up from Atlanta. Pat had been a urologist and Connie had retired as the provost of the Savannah College of Art and Design, something she kept repeating as if her career had trumped her husband’s. Pat was stubby and had a wild swath of hair swept across his head. He wore a pair of tortoiseshell eyeglasses with thick frames that circled his eyes and didn’t seem to fit his style at all. Connie had undoubtedly picked them out. She was tall and lean and dressed to the nines with high-waist slacks and a thin silk blouse that made her figure stunning, even in her midsixties. Pat talked so fast that April had a hard time understanding what he said, while Connie’s words rolled out of her mouth in a low-country drawl. April had neither met nor seen people like the Lathans in all her life. Nothing about them made sense. It was like she was looking at aliens.
“Dr. Lathan wants to plant that hillside with Christmas trees,” Tom Rice said. He’d had the listing from the beginning and assured April that he could sell the property if she was patient and willing to negotiate. So far he’d only brought three people in a little over a year, but April was hopeful.
“Christmas trees, huh?” April ran her eyes over Pat as if she might have missed something, but she hadn’t. She turned to Tom Rice, who stood before her, just a pudgier, balder version of the boy she’d gone to high school with. Tom had never been much to look at and she would’ve laughed at him if he’d had the nerve to ask her out back then. But now he owned a real estate firm that had made a fortune during the boom, and he’d lived far enough below his means that he hadn’t lost his ass like all the others when the market tanked. She focused back on Dr. Lathan. “I think Christmas trees could do well here.”
“You do?” Mrs. Lathan squealed in horror. She eyed April with a sneering skepticism, then turned that expression toward her husband. “I personally think he’s gone batty.”
Pat stood silenced and Tom Rice’s eyes were wide like he hadn’t the foggiest idea how to break the tension.
“I think they’ll do just fine,” April said. “The Hoopers have made a lot of money through the years growing Fraser fir just over that ridge.” She nodded to someplace back behind the house that could’ve just as easily not existed at all for what the Lathans knew of this country. “You’ve got the Hoopers on that side and there are some Fowlers on up from there, and all of them got some of the prettiest trees in this country. Even had one in the White House one Christmas.”
“The White House,” Dr. Lathan said. “You hear that, hun? The Hoopers even had a tree in the White House.”
“You’re saying people have grown presidential trees on this property?” She stressed that word presidential as if to dismiss everything April said.
“Not on this property, no.” April stared at Connie and did everything in her power to keep a smile on her face. She’d gotten up early, put on her makeup, curled her hair, and slid into the nicest thing she had, a pretty cotton sundress that fit her perfectly, but it didn’t matter. There was nothing she could do to pass for anything more than backwoods to a woman like Mrs. Lathan. April was Kmart classy at best. “There hasn’t been trees grown on this property, but we’re right in the heart of some of the finest firs there are. That’s a fact. And it might even bode well that the land hasn’t been touched. The soil might be richer.”
“The soil will be richer,” Dr. Lathan repeated sternly.
April suddenly realized that they hadn’t made it off the front porch. “I have some coffee inside if you’d like to come in and see the house.”
“That’s okay, dear.” Mrs. Lathan squinted her eyes as if to get a better view through the mist. “And who owns that little trailer down there?”
“I do,” April said. “The property runs past that and then cuts over through those trees for a ways and back up to the top of this ridge, then it kind of takes an angle down to the road where you came in. But the trailer down there, it’s a part of the six acres. My son lives in it right now.”
“Someone lives there?” Mrs. Lathan looked absolutely appalled.
Dr. Lathan seemed to pay attention only to the property lines April had drawn, appearing satisfied with what he envisioned.
“We really should step on into the house,” April said. “There’s no sense in standing in the rain.”
“I kind of like the feel of it,” Dr. Lathan said. “And, besides, we don’t have any interest in the home.”
April cocked her head to the side thinking she’d misunderstood.
“That’s the thing I didn’t get a chance to tell you on the phone, April. The Lathans are interested in the property, but just the property,” Tom Rice tried to explain. “Not the house or the trailer. Just the land.”
“I don’t think I understand what you’re getting at.”
“We already own a home,” Mrs. Lathan said. “It’s in Wade Hampton.”
“I know a girl who does some housekeeping there.” April tried to make small talk, tried to say something that might make Mrs. Lathan look at her differently, but it didn’t work.
“We divide our time between there and Atlanta.”
“So I still don’t think I understand,” April said. “What interest do you have in this place, then?”
“Well, there’s no land in Cashiers,” Dr. Lathan interjected. “Our community is divided into small lots, see, and there’s certainly no room for Christmas trees.”
“I could die,” Mrs. Lathan screeched. “Like I said, he has absolutely gone batty.”
“What they’re saying, April, is that if they were to make an offer on the property it would be for the land, just the land.”
April stood there and tried to process everything that had been said. After a while, she pushed herself to grin and met eyes with Dr. Lathan. “Christmas trees, huh?”
“Yes, Fraser fir. Presidential trees in every direction.” Dr. Lathan opened his hands out over the land in front of him. “I can see it now.”
April laughed at his theatrics and it seemed to please him that she was amused. But really what she found amusing was what he thought he could do on this land. There was nothing simple about growing trees, and anybody with half a brain would’ve known that. Trying to farm trees on six acres was one of the stupidest things she’d ever heard. She certainly expected some highbrow doctor and his wife to have better sense than that.
Most of the families who raised trees in Jackson County had been cabbage farmers decades ago. When trees outpriced cabbage, they phased out their land year by year until the cabbage was gone and they had ten generations of tree stock, a transition that took a decade to make profitable and even then left them to scrape by. It was as if Dr. Lathan believed trees had to be easy work, a lot easier than, say, tomatoes or strawberries. After all, the woods were full of trees and no one toiled away to make them grow.
April was certain he’d roll a tractor onto himself or get bit by a rattlesnake, but she wasn’t entirely sure if that would be all that bad of an end. If he cleared all of the land this fall and managed to get trees in the ground, he’d be lucky if he ever got to see one tree wrapped in lights with an angel on top at Christmas before he killed off. The more April thought about it, Dr. Lathan’s old lady was right.
“He’s gone stark raving mad,” Mrs. Lathan said, and they all stood there and laughed for a minute longer.
When the rain poured down, the Lathans and Tom Rice hightailed it for his notchback sedan, hollering they’d be in touch. April wasn’t entirely certain whether that was something that pleased her or made her sad. She watched them drive past the trailer at the bottom of the hillside and she thought she saw Dr. Lathan wave at her. His wife beside him seemed to turn toward the trailer, where Aiden was still asleep, Mrs. Lathan probably questioning how the hell people could live like this. April thought about all of the time and money she’d dumped into the house. She and Aiden slaved away to turn this place into something nicer than it’d ever been. All of that work, and this place was nothing more than a joke to these people, a house to raze, a lot to clear-cut, and all for nothing more than shits and giggles, just a hobby. Dr. Lathan wanted to play farmer.
But April was over it. She didn’t care what the Lathans thought about her or her house or this land or her life. She’d suffered too long to care anymore. She’d been cussed and hit and spat on for so damn long and all she had to show for it was a house and a piece of land that other folks wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot stick. She was tired. And if those people wanted this mountain and they were willing to cut a check, then by God they could have it. She was sick of staying put and hoping for better. She’d been waiting on better her whole life, and better never came.
She was soaking wet and the rain was still coming and she no longer knew whether to go inside or just keep standing there. So she just stood there figuring why the hell not, and hoped to God they’d make her an offer, because if they did, she was done. She’d take the money and never look back.