I drove over to Charlie’s Truck Stop this past week to find Jake out in front of the store putting a sapling about five feet tall in the ground. He was planting it near the road on the south side of the store between the front overhang and the railroad tracks. The Reverend Johnson was sitting on one of the benches by the front door watching Jake finishing up his chore. When I pulled up and climbed out of the car, Jake looked up to ask if I needed any gas. I told him I still had over half a tank, so I did not think I would be getting any gas this day. Jake went back to patting down the fresh dirt around the base of the new sapling. I wandered over beside Jake and asked why he was planting the tree.
“It’s an American Elm,” he told me proudly. “There used to be one just about right here when I was a kid, a big old tree that provided shade in the summer, but it died from the blight along with just about every other American Elm in the country. Everybody was pretty sure they were gone for good, but a group of forestry folks with a bee in their bonnets have been looking around for years to find any American Elm trees that survived the blight and they finally found a few that have a natural resistance. Maureen heard on a Public Radio news broadcast that the Park Service in Washington is planting a bunch of this new blight resistant American Elm trees around the White House in Washington and she told me about what she had heard. We decided it might be nice to order up a tree to replace the one that used to stand here back when Charlie Biggers ran the place. I remember coming here back then in the summer and seeing a bunch of farmers sitting out under that old tree talking about their crops. It was a nice sight. Of course, I won’t be around to see this tree grow to full size, but I like the idea of someday having a big old American Elm in front of the store like it once was.”
The American Elm sapling had come by UPS just a little past noon and Jake had decided to get the tree planted so as to surprise Maureen when she came in. She was over in Corinth getting her hair fixed and spending money. Jake did not expect her back until near sundown. I had heard of the American Elm from my mother. I don’t remember exactly why the tree was important to her. Maybe there were a few around her house when she was a child. Whatever the reason she remembered them, she told me about the tree being killed off by something called Dutch Elm Disease, a blight that was brought into this country from Europe. It seems the blight is some kind of fungus that attacks the circulatory system of the tree and blocks it up so the tree dies. In Asia, from where the blight was originally imported, the fungus and the trees get along just fine because the trees have built up a resistance over the years. The blight takes out the older and the weaker trees, but the stronger trees get along just fine in spite of the blight. The problem was that the blight, spread by an infected beetle that feeds off the American Elm, was new to this country and the American Elm did not have any natural resistance to the blight. The consequence was the blight spread across this country unchecked in the thirties and forties and fifties and American Elm died by the thousands.
Because the American Elm was such a pretty tree and made a nice summer shade, there were many a town that had them lining the downtown streets. In that manner, when they began to die out, it was a major event in many cities and small towns across the country to have all the trees along main street suddenly dying. Unlike if the tree had only been scattered out through the forest with other trees, seeing all those trees suddenly dead on main street made a right big impression on folks across the country.
Jake had finished up with his planting and he was thumbing through the little pamphlet that had come with the tree. He was noticing that deer had a special taste for the new shoots of the American Elm. “That’s gonna be something of a problem,” he was saying. “What with all the deer in the area, it looks like I’m going to be expected to stand guard over my new tree all night with a shotgun. That ain't gonna happen. Used to be, seeing a deer around these parts was an event. You’d call the kids to see a deer out the window. Mostly the only place you could reliably find a deer was in the Memphis Zoo. Now the deer have gotten to be a pest. They are in the garden and a hazard to driving. Never can tell when one of the things will dart out in front of you as you are going down the highway minding your own business. Now it looks like I’ll have to find a way to keep the fool things away from my new American Elm tree.”
It was about then a car came down the road and turned into the drive across the road. Maureen stopped the car and jumped out and came running across to where Jake and the Reverend and I stood beside the new planted sapling. Maureen looked at the tree from one side and then another as she walked around it. She was getting mud on her dress up pumps, but she didn’t seem to notice. “Isn’t it just darling!” she exclaimed. “It will look so nice when it begins to grow. But why did you plant it so close to the road? One of the county road people was by just last week and he was saying the county is planning to make this road wider this summer to handle the increase in traffic. Shouldn’t you have planted it farther back? And isn’t it too close to the store? I know it’s just a little tree now, but I’ve read these trees grow to be really big. I wish you’d have waited until I got home so we could have done this the right way.”
Jake responded that was the exact reason he had not waited for Maureen to get home. He wanted to get it planted and not spend all afternoon arguing about where to plant it. It was about that time Dolly Ledbedder drove up and asked Jake for some fresh cut pork chops. As Jake went into the store, Maureen looked at the sapling and said, “Isn’t it cute?”
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