The Porch Wood The Contractor Took

Quartersawn. The way the light stands up in it. I had not known the word a year and a half ago, and now it was ringing in my ears like a bell.

I asked Dewey whose crew was out there. He said he believed it was Cal Brandt’s trailer parked on the gravel.

I drove home and I did not sleep much. In the morning I did two things.

First I went out to the shop and found Walt’s mill ledger, the spiral notebook he kept in the drawer under the bench, where he wrote down every board he ever cut off that tree.

Walt measured everything twice and wrote it all down in pencil. Length, width, thickness, board feet, one line per board. Four pages of his handwriting.

Four hundred and eleven board feet of white oak, written in my husband’s hand. I put that notebook on the seat of my car.

The second thing I did was put on a clean blouse and comb my hair, because I was not going out there looking like a woman who had been beaten. I was going out there to read.

Clearwater Lake is about forty minutes from my place. I had not been out that way in years. The old lake is ringed with new houses now, big ones, the kind with more roof than a family could ever need.

The Haaland place was easy to find. It was the one with a contractor’s trailer on the gravel and a man out on the deck frame, running oak boards across the joists and driving the screws down with a cordless driver.

And it was the one with a brand new deck of pale oak wrapping the whole lakeside, glowing in the morning sun like something lit from under.

I knew it before I was out of the car. I would have known that wood in the dark.

I parked. I did not slam the door. I took Walt’s ledger off the seat and I walked down toward the lake across that beautiful stolen deck.

Cal Brandt saw me from out on the deck frame. I watched his whole body understand who I was. The driver went quiet.

He started in right away, loud and fast, the way guilty men do. Nadine, he said, I can explain, this is not what it looks like, let me come down.

I did not answer him. I knelt down at the edge of that deck, where the last boards ran off into open air over the water. The two or three at the very end were only laid across the joists, not screwed down yet, and I turned one up.