Forty Four Stumps on the Back Forty
“I am not telling you what Arlene ought to do,” Virgil said. “That is her land and her boy. I am telling you so she can decide with her eyes open. Walt would want that much from me.”
He started toward his truck, and then he stopped and turned around.
“There is one more thing, and I ought to have said it first. Come by the mill before you go to Kirksville.”
I followed him back. He walked me around behind the saw shed, to where a single log lay up off the ground on two timbers, apart from everything else in the yard.
It was the biggest log I had ever stood beside. In the middle of the bark, about four feet up, somebody had sprayed a ring of orange paint.
“I run a metal detector over every log before it goes on the carriage,” Virgil said. “One nail will take the teeth off a blade. This one sang out right here. I dug at it and found an old fence staple, grown in six inches deep. So I rolled it off to the side to deal with later.”
He put his short-fingered hand on the bark.
“Tolbert must have missed the staple until he had it loaded, and no veneer buyer will take a log with iron in it. So he threw it on my load with the small stuff. This morning I laid my rule on your daddy’s stump. Thirty-one by twenty-nine, same as you wrote. Same as this.” He patted the log. “And the saw kerf matches. He cut it on a slant and it pulled a strip of fiber on the low side. The strip is on this end and the notch is on that stump. They go together like a key in a lock.”
I could not say anything.
“This one is not going through my saw for anybody but Arlene,” he said. “You tell her that Virgil has got Walt’s tree, and it is safe.”
I put both hands on it and stood there until I could trust my voice.
Mama was sitting up when I got to the hospital that afternoon, off the oxygen, with her hair combed and her own pink bed jacket on.
“The doctor says tomorrow,” she told me. “After he makes his rounds.”
“I heard. That’s wonderful.”
She looked at me. My mother raised two children and taught Sunday school for thirty-one years, and nobody has ever gotten a thing past her.
“What is it, Renee?”
“Mama, I have to tell you something hard, and I am telling you because it is yours to know and yours to decide. I thought about waiting until you were home. But I would not want it kept from me, and I do not think you would either.”
“No,” she said. “I would not.”
So I told her, plain, sitting on the edge of the bed and holding her hand. The log trucks. The four days. Doug. The thirty-one thousand dollars.
She did not cry out. She turned her face toward the window, and she was quiet so long that I counted the cars in the parking lot to keep from talking. Twenty-two cars.
Then she said, “All of them?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“The children’s?”
“Yes.”
Her hand tightened on mine and let go.
“Hand me my reading glasses. They are in that drawer. And you said you wrote it down.”
I gave her the glasses and my route notebook.
She read it the way she reads her Bible, with one finger under the line. Every so often her lips moved.