The White Oak My Husband Sold

“Because you were sitting in that hospital holding Beth’s hair while she threw up,” he said, and his voice cracked right down the middle.

“What was I going to do, call you and say, by the way, we’re broke? You had enough. I thought I could fix it before you got home.”

He told me the rest standing there in the mud. His old truck threw a rod on Highway 5 two days after Christmas.

Two hundred and sixty thousand miles on it. He’d been bidding new work from the cab of a borrowed farm truck with no heater.

“I told myself nobody was going to hire a man who shows up in a junker,” he said.

“I told myself I needed a truck that looked like a going concern. I told myself a lot of things. The truth is I walked into that dealership and I wanted to feel like somebody who wasn’t sinking.”

“I met Lonnie at the feed store in Ava,” he said. “He was asking around about white oak. Stave mills are paying the best they have in years. And I thought about your grandpa’s forty sitting up here, and I thought, it’s family land, we’ll put it back right, she’ll understand.”

“You thought I’d sign,” I said.

“I thought I’d tell you when you got home and you’d sign,” he said.

“Then the first check came and the truck was right there, and I put it down before I could talk myself out of it. And then I still had payroll coming and nothing to make it with but the next check. That’s the whole thing. That’s all of it.”

Lonnie spoke up then, for the first time since Jeff started. He said Jeff had told him most of that at the feed store, about the school job and the men and the payroll.

“I’ve been where you are, son,” Lonnie told him. “In 1987 my sawmill burned to the ground with no insurance on it. I had two men and a wife and a baby and a mortgage, and I didn’t tell my wife for eleven days. I know exactly what that looks like from the inside.”

Then he turned to me, and he told me the thing he hadn’t said at the courthouse door.

“Your grandpa drove the bus I rode to school,” he said. “Brushy Knob route, fifth grade through eighth. After my sawmill burned, he came out to the ashes with a check for four hundred dollars and wouldn’t let me give it back. Said I could cut his timber someday and we’d call it square.”

He looked down the hollow at the orange ribbon.

“He never did let me cut it,” Lonnie said. “Every few years I’d ask, and every time he’d say, not yet, Lonnie, not yet. Then he’d walk me up to that spring and give me a drink out of that tin cup and send me home. So no, ma’am. I’m not cutting the spring trees. Not for any money. That one’s square now.”

I stood there between those two men with the deed in my hand and the mud over my boots, and for a minute I couldn’t see either one of them very well.

Part of me wanted to stay angry. Jeff had lied to me.

But I looked at my husband standing in that mud, unshaven, with his ears red and his patched jacket and his hands hanging at his sides like he didn’t know what to do with them, and I thought about what Beth said. He’s drowning in something. Go find out what it is.