Forty Four Stumps on the Back Forty
“Number one. Thirty-one inches.” She shook her head a little. “He could put both arms around that tree the day we were married, with room to spare. I could not reach around it by the time he died.”
She went down the page.
“Fourteen. That is you.” She touched the number. “You were three days old. He would not wait for spring. He set it in November with frost on the ground and I told him it would never take, and he said, ‘It is a Kessler. It will take.'”
“I never knew that.”
“There are a good many things you never knew.” She turned the page. “Twenty-three. That is Douglas.”
She stayed on that line a long while.
Then she read every one of the others, all forty-four, and when she got to my little drawing of the rows she studied it and said, “You have got the creek on the wrong side,” and fixed it with the pen from her bedside table.
That was when I told her what Virgil had said. The ninety-six thousand. The man from two counties over. What the law in Missouri allows.
“Three times,” she said.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“From the logger.”
“From the logger. And from Doug, if you wanted it.”
She took her glasses off and folded them.
“I do not want my son in a courtroom,” she said. “I did not raise him for that, and your father did not plant those trees for that. I want that understood before anybody says another word.”
“All right.”
“But I am not going to pat his hand and tell him it is fine, either. It is not fine.” She looked at me, and her eyes were dry and very clear. “Call your brother. Tell him his mother wants to see him in the morning, before church, and to come by himself.”
Then I told her about the log behind Virgil’s saw shed, with the orange ring and the staple grown into it.
That was when she cried, quietly, with her hand over her mouth. I got up on the bed beside her like I was six years old, and we sat there together until the supper trays came.
Doug came at eight the next morning. I was already there. Mama had told me to stay, and to keep still.
He had on his church clothes, and he had not slept. He stood at the foot of the bed with his cap in both hands.
“Sit down, Douglas,” Mama said.
He sat in the chair by the window.
“Your sister has told me what she knows. Now I want to hear it from you. All of it, and do not dress it up.”
It took him a minute to start.
“I was behind on the combine,” he said. “Two payments. Twenty-eight thousand with the interest, due the first of the month, and the bank was done giving me time. Beans did not make what I figured on. I had been lying awake since August, Mama. I did not tell Connie how bad it was. I did not tell anybody.”
“Go on.”
“This fellow stopped at my place in September. He had seen the walnut from the road. I told him it was not mine, it was my mother’s. He said was she likely to sell, and I said no, not ever. He left his card.” Doug swallowed. “Then you went in the hospital, and the bank called on the same day. I got his card out of the truck.”