Forty Four Stumps on the Back Forty
“Thirty-one thousand, Renee. Cash money. She will never miss them.”
My brother Doug said it in the hallway of the hospital in Kirksville, outside the room where our mother was sleeping with an oxygen line under her nose. He had a paper cup of vending machine coffee in one hand, and he kept turning it a quarter turn at a time, the way he used to turn his cap in his hands when Daddy caught him at something.
It was Mama’s eighth day in that bed. Pneumonia in both lungs. She was seventy-eight years old and she had driven herself to the clinic in Daddy’s old pickup because she did not want to bother anybody.
“Say that again,” I said.
“She’s seventy-eight. She has not been back in that grove since last fall. Those trees were just standing there, Renee. Going to waste. Somebody was going to get the good out of them, and it might as well be this family.”
“This family,” I said.
“I had a note due.”
I said, “Whose name is on that farm, Doug?”
“Mama’s.”
“Is yours on it anywhere? The deed, the tax bill, anything at all?”
“You know it’s not.”
He looked at the floor. He is fifty-two, six years older than I am, a big man with Daddy’s shoulders, and I have never in my life seen him look small until that minute.
“I was going to tell her when she was stronger,” he said. “I was going to make it right out of the bean check.”
“When did they cut?”
“Last week. Four days. They’re done.”
“All of them?”
He turned the cup again. “All the walnut.”
I had only found out that morning, and not from him. I carry the mail. I have had the same rural route for nineteen years, a hundred and twelve miles of gravel and blacktop through the hills of northern Missouri, and Lois Hartley, who is eighty-one and meets me at her box most days in her housecoat, had leaned in my window and said, “I saw the log trucks coming out of your mama’s place all last week. Did Arlene finally sell that walnut? I never thought she would.”
I told Lois I did not know anything about it. Then I drove the rest of my route with my stomach in a knot and went straight to the hospital, and there was my brother in the hallway with his coffee.
I did not raise my voice at him. A hospital hallway forty feet from your sick mother is no place to start.
I said, “Do not say one word of this to her tonight.”
“I wasn’t going to.”
“I know you weren’t. That is the trouble.”
Then I went in and sat with Mama until visiting hours were over. She woke up once and asked whether anybody had fed her barn cats. I told her I had. She patted my hand and said, “You are a good girl,” and went back to sleep, and I sat there in the dim light with my coat still on, looking at her hand on the blanket.
Those hands had held the seedlings.
I need to tell you about the grove, or none of the rest will mean what it should.
My father, Walt Kessler, came home from the Army in March of 1968. He was twenty-two years old. He had been gone two years, the last one of them in Vietnam, and Mama said that for the first few weeks he could not sleep in a bed. He would get up before light and walk every fence line, like a man checking that it was all still there.