The Porch Wood The Contractor Took

There it was. Burned into the underside corner, a plain WK. Walt’s mark. He branded every board he milled, the way his own father had.

Cal had laid them mark side down, every one, so no one would ever flip a deck board and see a dead man’s initials.

I set Walt’s ledger open on my knee. And I started to read.

Twelve foot board, I read. Eight and one quarter inches wide, one and one eighth thick. Eleven and a half board feet.

I read it in a plain voice, not loud, the way you read scripture at a graveside. The way Walt wrote it.

Ten foot board, I read. Six and three quarters wide. Five and six tenths board feet.

Cal had come in off the deck by then. He was standing on his own gravel saying my name. I kept reading.

Eight foot board, I read. Nine inches wide. The one with the little knot Walt said to put where it would not be stepped on.

That was in the ledger too. Walt had written, knot, keep to the rail side. In pencil. I read that out loud too.

My voice did not shake. I was surprised by that later. On the water behind me a loon called, and a boat went by somewhere, and I just kept reading.

There is a steadiness that comes to you when a thing is finally the simple size it always was. Not grief. Not rage. Just arithmetic, in my husband’s hand.

Every board I read matched a board under me. That was the whole of it. The numbers on the page were the numbers screwed to those joists, and both of us knew it.

Somewhere around the fifteenth board a man came out of the big house.

He was older than Cal, near my age, in a cardigan with a mug in his hand. This was Roger Haaland, whose lake house it was, and whose deck I was kneeling on.

He asked, not unkind, what was going on out here.

I stood up. I held Walt’s ledger against my chest. And I told that man the truth in as few words as I had.

I told him my name was Nadine Kessler. I told him my husband Walt died in February a year past. I told him my husband spent a summer milling a white oak that fell on our place, to build me a porch.

I told him the wood under his feet was that oak. That every board had my husband’s mark burned in the bottom, turned down so he would not see it. That the man who laid it had taken it off my place after my husband was in the ground.