Forty Four Stumps on the Back Forty

“I know you would.”

“But it is not my mother and it is not my ground.”

“No.”

“What do you need from me?”

I had been thinking about that. “I need to know exactly what is gone. Not a guess. Mama is going to ask me, and I am not going to tell her ‘a lot.'”

So before he left that Friday morning he went out to his truck and came back with his twenty-five foot tape, the yellow one, and set it on the kitchen table beside my lunch.

“Measure every stump twice,” he said. “The long way across and the short way. Write both. And count from a place you can find again, so that anybody who walks out there after you gets the same number you did.”

That was all. That is Pete. He kissed the top of my head and went to work.

I drove out to Mama’s with the tape in my coat pocket and my route notebook on the seat beside me. It is a little spiral notebook where I write forwarding orders, vacation holds, and which dog on which road will come through a car window. I turned to a clean page.

It was one of those gray November afternoons when the sky sits right down on the hills. I fed the cats, and then I walked back past the machine shed and down the lane.

The gate to the back forty was standing open.

The ruts ran a foot deep where the loaded trucks had come up out of the soft ground, and the grass between them was ground to mud and bark. Sawdust lay in pale drifts. They had shoved the tops down into the draw, a tangle of limbs as high as a house.

And where the grove had been there was nothing but sky.

All my life there had been a dark, tall shape on that slope. Now there was a row of bare woods along the fence, a clear view to the next ridge, and forty-four pale circles in the grass.

I stood at the gate for a while. Then I got out the tape.

I started with the stump at the gate post, because anybody could find that one again. I crouched down in my barn coat and hooked the tape on the bark and pulled it across.

Thirty-one inches the long way. Twenty-nine the short way.

I wrote it down. Number one.

That was Daddy’s tree. I knew it before I measured it. There was a rusty stain on the face of the stump where the saw had gone through something, and I thought of the summer he stapled the gate wire to that trunk because the post had rotted and he did not have time to set a new one before haying. He always meant to pull that staple. The tree grew around it instead.

I put my bare hand flat on the wood. It was cold and a little damp, and the rings were so close together in places that I could not have counted them.

Then I went down the row.

Number two, twenty-six by twenty-five. Number three, twenty-four by twenty-four. After the first row I just knelt in the mud and quit caring about my jeans.

Number fourteen was mine. Fourth place, second row. Nineteen inches by twenty. It was forty-six years old, same as me, and I had my picture taken against it on the first day of school every year until I was too proud to stand for it.