The Oaks on My Side of the Creek

What Floyd Did

That should have been the end of it, but it wasn’t, because there was still the matter of Floyd’s money.

By the line, only sixteen of the sixty marked trees were Wade’s. Floyd figured those sixteen at maybe five thousand dollars. He had already paid Wade nine. Wade owed him four thousand dollars he did not have, and there was nothing in the bank and a barn full of hay to show for it.

I watched Wade do that arithmetic in his head. I watched it go across his face.

Floyd let him stand there with it for a while. Then he said, “You ever run equipment, Ellison?”

Wade looked up. “Forklift. Twenty-six years. And a backhoe some.”

“My nephew’s going back to school in January,” Floyd said. “I need a man on the skidder this winter. It’s cold and it’s wet and it’s six days a week. I’ll take the four thousand out of your wages a little at a time.”

Wade just looked at him.

“It’s not a favor,” Floyd said. “You’ll earn every dollar. And you’ll learn where a line is.”

Wade put out his hand, and Floyd shook it. Henry, sitting in the side-by-side with his cane across his knees, said, “Well, that’s how it ought to go,” like a man at a ballgame when somebody finally bunts.

The New Posts

The Saturday after Thanksgiving, we walked the line.

Mark was home by then. He had driven straight through from North Dakota when his job broke for the holiday, and he got in at two in the morning and was up at six with his post-hole digger in the truck. He shook Floyd’s hand like they were old friends, which I suppose they were.

A surveyor from Salem came out the week before and found the stone and the pin and set new flags right down the old line, along the dry slough, just exactly where Henry had said it would be. His bill was eighteen hundred dollars. Wade’s twelve hundred covered most of it, and I paid the rest myself. I did not mind.

Wade brought the posts. He insisted. Treated pine, eight of them, in the back of his truck. Floyd brought a skid-steer with an auger on it. Mark brought the wire and the stretcher. I brought the coffee and the lawn chair, mostly so Henry would have a place to sit.

Henry came out in his flannel shirt and his good wool hat, and Wade drove him down to the stone in the side-by-side, and Henry supervised. He made Wade redo one post because it wasn’t plumb. Wade redid it without a word.

It was cold and clear, with a little skiff of snow in the shadows. My daughter came out with the grandkids at noon. Emma wanted to know why the men were building a fence in the tall woods.

“So everybody knows where the line is,” I told her.

“Doesn’t everybody already know?” she said.

Henry laughed so hard he had to take his hat off.