The Oaks on My Side of the Creek

The Line the Old Man Walked

When we pulled down Wade’s lane, Floyd was back, sitting on the step of his skidder eating the last of a sausage biscuit. Wade was in his pickup with the engine running for the heater. My lawn chair was right where I had left it.

Henry could not walk the bottom. His knees would not have made it fifty feet in that sand. I stood there trying to figure out what to do, and then Wade Ellison did something I did not expect.

He got out of his truck and went to his barn, and he came back driving a little green side-by-side. He pulled it right up to my car door.

“Mr. Bauer,” he said. “I’ll drive you. Wherever you want to go.”

Henry looked at him a long minute. “You’re the one bought my place.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You keeping the fences up?”

Wade looked at the ground. “Trying to, sir.”

“Well,” Henry said. “Let’s go see one.”

Wade helped him in. I rode on the back with Belle in my lap. Floyd walked behind us with his hands in his coat pockets. We went up the bottom slow, Wade steering around the stumps and the roots, and Henry pointed with his cane. Left. Little more. Up that bench. There.

Henry knew that bottom the way I know my route. He had not set foot on it in four years, and he did not hesitate once. He pointed past the new channel, past the painted oaks, up to the foot of the hill on Wade’s side of the water, where a big limestone shelf came out of the leaves.

“There,” he said. “Up under that shelf. Dig about a foot east.”

Floyd had a short shovel on the skidder. He went and got it. He dug where Henry said, and he scraped leaves and black dirt off the top of something gray and flat. He knelt, which I could see cost him something, and brushed it with his glove.

A cross. Chiseled in the top of a square-cut stone. Worn soft at the edges, the way old gravestones go. And right beside it, a rusty iron pin some surveyor had driven in long after.

Nobody said anything.

Floyd got out his compass and my map and stood over the stone and took a reading. He looked down the line, along the old slough, toward the creek. Every painted oak on the bottom side of that line, and all three of the trees lying in the sand, were on my side of it. My side of the old creek. My grandfather’s side.

“Well,” Floyd said quietly. “There it is.”

The Wire

Henry wanted to see the wire. Wade drove him down along the line toward the creek, slow, with Henry looking at every tree.

“Stop,” Henry said.

It was a white oak. Not the biggest, but a good one, maybe twenty-four inches through, with no orange paint on it. Coming out of the bark on one side, at about the height of a man’s waist, were four rusted strands of barbed wire. On the other side of the trunk, the same four strands came back out and ran a few feet and disappeared in the leaves.

The tree had grown right around them. Sixty-some years of rings had closed over that fence like a hand closing over a coin.

Henry got himself out of the side-by-side. Wade and I both went to grab his arms, and he let us. He went the three steps to that oak on his cane, and then he hung the cane on a strand of the wire, and he put his hand flat on the bark between the strands.

He didn’t say anything at first. He just stood there with his hand on the tree. His hand was spotted and thin and it shook a little, and the bark was rough and gray, and his fingers spread out on it like he was feeling for a heartbeat.

“Ray stretched this end,” he said. “I had the post-driver. He made me redo a post because it wasn’t plumb. Said he wasn’t going to have his granddaughter look at a crooked fence.”

He laughed, and then he didn’t.

“You weren’t born yet,” he said to me. “You weren’t even thought of. Your mother was a little girl. But he said that. His granddaughter.”

I had to turn away. I looked at the creek. Belle came and leaned her whole weight on my leg, the way she does.

Floyd cleared his throat. “That tree there,” he said, very gently, “is why I’d never have cut this line even if Wade was right. That wire’s inside the log. Mill would have hit it with a bandsaw and lost a blade and maybe a man.”

“That tree’s not going to any mill,” Henry said, without taking his hand off it.

“No, sir,” Floyd said. “It isn’t.”