The White Oak My Husband Sold

There were two phone calls anybody would tell me to make, and I thought about both of them hard. The first was the sheriff.

A man selling timber off land that isn’t his can land in real trouble in this state, and I knew the sheriff by his first name.

But Jeff is my son’s father. I was not going to watch him put in the back of a patrol car in front of the feed store where everybody in town would see it.

Whatever he had done, I could not do that to Logan, and I did not want to do it to Jeff.

The second call was a lawyer. A lawyer could stop the cutting with one letter.

But I had stood on that landing and seen what half a timber sale looks like: oaks already felled and lying in the brush, ruts everywhere, tops piled up, nothing paid for any of it.

So I sat in that garage until midnight and decided I would do the thing I know how to do, which is paperwork.

Then I went upstairs and slept in the recliner, and Beth woke up at three and was sick, and I held the bucket and didn’t say a word about any of it.

Friday morning Beth’s nurse said she had a quiet day ahead, mostly sleep and fluids, so I drove the hour and a half back down to Ava and went in to work like it was any other Friday in January.

The Douglas County courthouse is an old brick building on the square, with radiators that knock and a hallway floor that has been waxed so many times it shines like a creek.

Marlene at the recorder’s counter looked up when I came in and said, “Morning, Renee. How’s your sister?” I told her Beth was holding on, and asked for a certified copy of the deed on the Hollis forty.

She pulled it up, printed it, stamped it, and slid it across the counter, and I paid her the fee out of my own wallet like anybody else.

Renee Albrecht, it said, with the legal description underneath: the southwest quarter of the northeast quarter of the section, forty acres more or less.

My name. Only mine. I folded it in thirds and put it in my coat pocket.

Then I walked back down the hall to my desk in the assessor’s office and called the number printed on the top of Lonnie’s contract.

I had taken a picture of it with my phone the day before, standing in the mud, without really knowing why.

He answered on the fourth ring. I could hear a chainsaw idling somewhere behind him, then going quiet as he walked away from it.

“This is Lonnie,” he said, and I could tell from his voice that he knew exactly who was calling.

“Mr. Lonnie, this is Renee Albrecht,” I said. “I want to tell you something plainly, and I’m not calling to yell at you. The forty you’re cutting is in my name alone. My grandfather left it to me. Jeff isn’t on the deed.”

Then I heard him let out a long breath, the way a man does when he’s set down something heavy.

“Ma’am,” he said finally, “a man not on the deed can’t sell a stick of timber off it. I’ve been cutting for forty years and I know that better than anybody. I should have waited for your name on that line. That’s on me.”

“Jeff told you I’d sign when I got back,” I said. It wasn’t a question.