The Salt Orchard

The first tree died in March, which is the wrong month for anything to die.

My father walked out to it every morning for a week as if he could argue with it. He stood with his hands in his coat pockets and looked at the bare grey branches, then at the sea, then back at the tree, and came in for breakfast without saying anything. On the eighth morning he took the saw out of the barn.

We had forty-one trees then. My sister counted them every spring, out loud, the way other children counted stairs.