Credible Intent

by Kurt Vonnegut, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

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Listen:

There is a bur oak in a woodlot outside Pruitt, Indiana, that was already a good-sized tree when Indiana became a state. That was in 1816. The tree did not notice.

Bur oaks grow the biggest acorns of any oak in North America. Each acorn wears a cap with a fringe around the edge, like the hat of a woman going to church in 1955. The bark is so thick that a prairie fire can go right past a grown bur oak, and the oak will just stand there afterward, black on one side, waiting for somebody to tell it what all the fuss was about.

They can live four hundred years. This one was somewhere around two hundred and forty. Nobody knew exactly. The only way to know exactly how old a tree is, is to cut it down and count the rings, which is like finding out how old your grandmother is by sawing her in half.

So nobody knew.

The woodlot was forty acres, which is not much, as woods go. It belonged to a man named Wendell Haffner. His great-grandfather, Jakob Haffner, had bought the farm in 1871 from a man who was going to Kansas, and Jakob had cleared all of it for corn except those forty acres. A man has to have somewhere to get firewood, and somewhere to go when he cannot stand his relatives.

Nobody had logged the Haffner woods since. Not Jakob. Not his son Emil. Not Wendell's father, whose name was also Wendell. Not Wendell.

It was not a principle, exactly. It was a habit that had gone on so long it had turned into a principle while nobody was looking. The Haffners burned what the woods dropped on its own, and they let the rest stand.

The tree had no opinion about any of this.

---

In March of 2025, a letter came from a company called Canopy Ledger, Incorporated, of Boulder, Colorado. There was a picture of a fern on the envelope.

The letter said that the Haffner woods were eligible to be enrolled in a twenty-year deferred-harvest carbon program.

What that meant, once you took the fern off it, was this: Canopy Ledger would pay Wendell eleven dollars an acre every year for twenty years, and in return Wendell would not cut down his trees.

Forty acres. Four hundred and forty dollars a year.

Wendell was seventy-eight years old. He did the arithmetic on the back of the envelope. He would be ninety-eight at the end of the contract.

"They're optimists out there in Colorado," he said.

He took the letter into the kitchen and showed it to his wife.

Her name was Opal. They had been married fifty-six years. She had kept the books for the Carroll County grain cooperative for thirty-one of those years, and she could find a mistake in a column of figures the way a beagle finds a dropped hot dog.

"They want to pay me not to cut down the woods," Wendell said.

"Were you going to cut down the woods?"

"No."

"Then it's a good deal," said Opal.

---

I should explain how a thing like that works, because it took me a while to understand it myself, and I am not sure I do yet.

Trees are made mostly out of air. That is true. A tree takes carbon out of the air and builds itself out of it, and as long as the tree stands there, the carbon stays in the tree and not in the sky, where it makes the weather go crazy.

If you cut the tree down and burn it, or saw it into boards that rot in a landfill sixty years from now, the carbon goes back up.

So Canopy Ledger would pay Wendell not to cut his trees. Then Canopy Ledger would print up a certificate saying that the carbon in Wendell's trees had stayed put, and it would sell the certificate to a company somewhere that put smoke in the sky for a living. That company could then say that its smoke had been canceled out by Wendell Haffner's not doing anything.

I have been trying to think of anything else you can buy that is a piece of paper saying something did not happen. An alibi is one. A clean bill of health is another, more or less.

I will not go into who bought the certificate. It went through so many hands that by the end nobody could have told you. That is how a lot of things work now, including money.

Wendell signed the contract. In June a check came for four hundred and forty dollars. Opal deposited it at the bank in Delphi, and in October they spent it on a stainless-steel chimney liner for the woodstove, which was the stove they fed with what the woods dropped on its own.

The tree had no opinion.

---

Canopy Ledger kept an eye on the woods by satellite.

Every so often a satellite went over Pruitt, Indiana, a few hundred miles up, at about half past ten in the morning, when the light is good. It took a picture of the Haffner woods. A computer in Boulder counted the green. If the green was all there, the computer was satisfied, and nobody in Boulder had to think about Pruitt, Indiana, at all.

Wendell liked knowing about the satellite. He told the men at the Pruitt Feed and Seed about it.

"You want to watch yourselves," he told them. "They can see everything from up there."

"They can see you're bald," said Dale Weidner.

"They already knew that," said Wendell.

---

In August of 2026 a young man drove up to the farmhouse in a white Subaru with Colorado plates and a magnetic sign on the door with the fern on it.

His name was Corbin Mertz. He was twenty-six. He had grown up in Naperville, Illinois, and he had a degree in environmental studies from a college in Wisconsin, and he had a canvas bag with a steel tape measure in it and a tablet computer and a can of blue spray paint, in case he needed to mark anything.

He took his shoes off at the door without being asked. Opal decided right then she would give him pie.

He ate two pieces of it, peach, while he explained why he had come.

There had been some newspaper stories, he said. Some scientists had looked at a lot of these programs all over the country, and they had found that a great many of the trees people were being paid not to cut down were never going to be cut down anyway. They were in parks. They were on mountainsides where you couldn't get a truck. They belonged to people like the Haffners, who just didn't.

"So the carbon wasn't additional," Corbin said.

"Additional to what?" said Wendell.

"To what would have happened anyway," said Corbin. "If the trees were always going to stand there, then paying you not to cut them doesn't change anything. The company in—the buyer, I mean—they think they're canceling out their emissions, but they're not, because nothing changed. The trees were going to be there regardless. That's what the auditors are saying."

"The auditors are right," said Wendell.

"Yes, sir," said Corbin. "That's the problem."

---

Corbin walked the woods with Wendell that afternoon. It was ninety-one degrees in the shade, and the shade was the only reason it was not more. The cicadas sounded like somebody frying something enormous.

Corbin measured trees. You measure a tree four and a half feet off the ground, which foresters call breast height, though it is nowhere near the breast on most foresters I have known. He wrapped the steel tape around trunk after trunk and called out numbers, and the tablet wrote them down.

When they came to the bur oak, he stopped.

It stood in a sort of clearing it had made for itself, the way big trees do, by taking all the light. Its lowest limbs went out sideways farther than the farmhouse was wide. There was a fence staple in the bark on the north side, rusted to the color of dried blood, from some fence that had not been there in a hundred years.

Corbin had to walk all the way around the tree, holding one end of the tape against the bark with his thumb, while Wendell held the other.

"Fifty-one inches," Corbin said. He looked at the tablet. Then he looked up into the tree for a long time, with his mouth a little open, the way people look at a rocket going up.

"I've measured about six thousand trees," he said. "This is the biggest one."

"It's a good tree," said Wendell.

The tree said nothing.

---

Back in the kitchen, with a third piece of pie he had tried to refuse, Corbin explained what the auditors wanted.

The auditors wanted evidence of credible intent to harvest.

That meant two things. First, Wendell had to get a written bid for his timber from a licensed timber buyer, showing that the trees were worth money and that somebody would pay it. Second, Wendell had to sign a statement, on a form Canopy Ledger would send him, declaring that, but for the program, he would have cut them down.

If he did not, the contract would be voided. The payments would stop. There was some language about money already paid, too, but Corbin said he did not think anybody in Boulder would really come after a chimney liner.

"Let me be sure I've got this," said Wendell. "To get paid for not cutting down my trees, I have to show I was going to cut them down."

"Credible intent," said Corbin.

"I haven't got any."

"I know, sir," said Corbin. "Almost nobody does. That's why the auditors are so upset."

He looked miserable. He put his fork down.

"I'll be honest with you, Mr. Haffner," he said. "I took this job because I wanted to save the world. I've been doing it for two years, and as far as I can tell what I mostly do is drive around and tell old people their trees don't count."

"They count to me," said Wendell.

"Yes, sir," said Corbin. "I know they do. You just can't get a tape around it."

Opal wrapped up the rest of the pie in aluminum foil and made him take it to Indianapolis, where he had a motel room by the airport. He put his shoes on at the door and drove off in the white Subaru. They never saw him again.

---

"Get the bid," Opal said that night.

"I'm not going to cut the woods."

"Nobody asked you to cut the woods. They asked you to say you would."

"That's worse," said Wendell.

Opal did not argue. She had been married to him fifty-six years. She had learned that when Wendell said a thing was worse, it was best to let him go out and stand in the yard for a while, which he did.

It was a clear night. He looked up, in case the satellite was going over. It wasn't. It only came by day. But a lot of other things were up there, stars and planets and airplanes full of people going to Denver, and some of those were satellites too, probably, though nobody had told him what any of them were for.

The whole sky was a lot of things going around and around and nobody explaining.

He went back inside and went to bed.

---

The licensed timber buyer nearest to Pruitt was Lyle Gerkin, of Gerkin Hardwoods, in Delphi. He and Wendell had been in the same class at Delphi High School, the class of 1965. Lyle had played left tackle. Wendell had played the clarinet in the band, which marched at halftime while Lyle lay on the bench with ice on his knee.

Lyle had been buying and cutting timber in Carroll County for fifty-three years. He had both knees replaced now. He walked the Haffner woods with Wendell in September with a cane he did not use so much as point with.

He pointed at a black walnut. "That's money," he said.

He pointed at a stand of white oak. "That's money."

He pointed at a big sugar maple with a split in it. "That's firewood and a lawsuit."

When they got to the bur oak he stood and looked at it a long time, the way Corbin had, except that Lyle's mouth was shut, and he was not looking at a rocket. He was looking at board feet.

"There's two thousand feet in the butt log alone," he said. "If it's sound."

"Is it sound?"

"No way to know till you cut it." He poked the fence staple with the end of his cane. "And there's that. There'll be more of those inside it. Wire, nails, maybe a horseshoe. Somebody always hung something on a tree like this. You hit one with the head saw at the mill and it'll take the teeth right off. I've seen a man lose an eye that way. Leon Stutzman. Nineteen seventy-eight."

"So what's it worth?"

"Couple thousand standing. Maybe. To the right fool." Lyle turned around and looked at the rest of the woods. "The whole forty, I'd give you forty-one thousand. That's a fair price. That's more than fair. You know that."

"I know it," said Wendell.

Lyle looked at him.

"You ain't going to cut it," he said.

"No."

"Then what the hell am I doing out here with my new knees?"

So Wendell explained about Canopy Ledger, and the satellite, and the auditors, and additionality, and credible intent.

Lyle Gerkin laughed so hard he had to sit down on a stump. It was a stump the woods had made on its own, from a cherry that came down in an ice storm in 1991, and Wendell had sawed it up for the stove that winter. Lyle sat on it and laughed until he had to wipe his eyes on the back of his wrist.

"Fifty-three years," he said, "I've been paying people money to let me cut down their trees. Now some outfit's paying people not to. And I have to write a letter so they get paid."

"That's about the size of it."

"Well," said Lyle. "It's a free country."

He wrote the bid that afternoon on Gerkin Hardwoods letterhead, at the Haffners' kitchen table: forty acres, mixed hardwoods, forty-one thousand dollars, good for ninety days. He signed it. He would not take anything for it. He took a piece of Opal's apple cake instead, and on his way out he stopped at the screen door and looked back at the woods.

"Don't you ever sell me that tree," he said. "I'd hate to be the one."

---

The form from Canopy Ledger came in the mail at the end of September.

It said:

I, the undersigned landowner, hereby declare that in the absence of the Program I would have had a credible intent to harvest timber from the enrolled property within the crediting period.

There was a line for his signature and a line for the date.

Wendell put it on the kitchen table and looked at it for two days. He ate breakfast next to it. He ate supper next to it.

He had signed his name a great many times in his life. He had signed a marriage license, and two mortgages, and the papers when they sold the dairy herd in 1998, and a letter to the draft board, and three death certificates as next of kin. He had signed report cards for three children and a great many checks, some of which had been good.

As far as he knew, every one of those signatures had been true. That is more than most people can say about the things they have signed. It is more than I can say.

On the morning of the third day he signed the form.

Then he went out to the shed and got his bow saw.

---

Opal watched from the kitchen window. She saw him go across the yard and into the woods. She knew which way he was going. She dried her hands and went after him.

When she got to the bur oak, Wendell had his ladder against it, the old wooden one, and he was standing on the fourth rung with the bow saw. There was a dead limb on the east side, about as big around as a man's thigh, that had been dead since a lightning strike nobody remembered. Some of the bark had come off it. A woodpecker had been working on it.

"What are you doing?" said Opal.

"I signed it," said Wendell. "I said I had intent to harvest. So I'm harvesting."

He sawed. It was hard going. Bur oak is heavy and hard even when it is dead, and Wendell was seventy-nine. He had to rest twice. Opal held the ladder. She did not tell him to stop. She had been married to him fifty-six years.

The limb came down. It hit the ground and bounced once and lay there.

Wendell came down the ladder. He sat on the bottom rung and breathed for a while. Then he got up and sawed the limb into stove lengths, and Opal stacked them in the wheelbarrow.

It came to one wheelbarrow, not quite full.

"Is that it?" said Opal.

"That's the harvest," said Wendell.

---

He mailed the form and Lyle Gerkin's bid to Boulder, Colorado, the next day. He did not mention the limb. There was no line on the form for it.

The next morning was the first of October, and it was a nice morning, cool, with no wind. Wendell and Opal carried two lawn chairs out to the bur oak and sat in them, because there was nothing pressing to do and it seemed like the thing to do.

At about half past ten, the satellite went over.

It took a picture of the Haffner woods. A computer in Boulder counted the green. The green was all there, give or take one dead limb, which was too small to count.

The satellite took a picture of two old people in lawn chairs, too. They were also too small to count.

An acorn came down out of the tree and landed in Opal's lap. It was a big one, with its fringed hat still on.

She looked at it. Then she put it in the pocket of her cardigan, for no particular reason, and left it there.

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem sextum Nōnās Octōbrēs (2 October 2026), ā Curtō Vonnegutō per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Kurt Vonnegut, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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