The White Oak My Husband Sold

“Mrs. Albrecht,” he said. He didn’t call me ma’am that time. “Come here. I want to show you something before anything else happens today.”

He walked me to the far side of the landing, where you could look down the hollow toward the head of the creek.

The cut was a mess the way all cuts are a mess, tops and limbs everywhere, but there were still trees standing down there. More than I’d let myself hope.

“I flagged a line Friday afternoon,” he said, pointing. “See that orange ribbon? Runs along the creek from the bend up to the spring and around. Everything above that line stays. I’m not cutting a tree inside it.”

I looked down the hollow and saw the spring oaks. All of them.

The big one with the nail in it, and the two beside it, and the whole stand around the head of the creek where Grandpa used to fill the tin cup and hand it to me first.

“That’s near a third of your best timber,” Lonnie said. “The biggest trees on the place are inside that ribbon. Leaving them costs me eight or nine thousand at the mill. Your contract still says thirty-six, and you’ll get thirty-six. I wanted you to know that before you said one word.”

I couldn’t say anything at all for a minute. I had the deed copy in my gloved hand, and I just stood there holding it in the cold while he went on talking about the creek and the slope and where he meant to stop.

That was when I heard the truck. That new diesel engine has a sound to it, and I knew it before I turned around.

Jeff got out and shut the door, and then he just stood there beside it with one hand on the mirror for a long time, the way a man stands at a graveside before he can make himself walk up to it.

He was wearing his old brown contractor’s jacket, the canvas one with the torn pocket that I’ve patched twice. He hadn’t shaved.

He didn’t look like a man who had bought himself a treat. He looked at Lonnie, and then at me, and then at the paper in my hand.

Then he started across the landing toward us, his boots sucking in the mud with every step.

Lonnie took off his hard hat and held it against his leg. He didn’t look at me. He looked straight at Jeff.

“Jeff,” he said, “you tell her, or I will. I’m not standing on this woman’s land one more day with her not knowing.”

Jeff stopped about six feet from us. His ears had gone red.

“Renee,” he said. “I lost the school job.”

I didn’t understand him at first. The school job was the addition at the elementary in the next county over, two classrooms and a covered walkway.

Jeff had been working it as a subcontractor since August. It was the biggest job he’d ever had.

“The general contractor went under,” he said. “The outfit out of Joplin. They folded the week before Christmas. They owed me forty-one thousand dollars for framing and finish work, and they’re never going to pay it. I talked to three people. It’s gone.”

“I had Tony and Mike and the Carter kid on payroll,” he said.

“Tony’s got four kids. Mike’s wife just had the baby. I’ve never missed a payroll in nineteen years, Renee. Not once. Payroll was three weeks out and I had about nine hundred dollars in the business account.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked. It came out quieter than I meant it to.