The White Oak My Husband Sold

He brought me the ten thousand in a cashier’s check and set it on the kitchen counter next to the coffee pot. “Two thousand short,” he said. “I’ll make it up.”

And he did, a few hundred at a time, out of every job that spring, and the seventy-four hundred after it, all of it paid back by the Fourth of July.

He needed something to drive, so he and Logan went to the salvage yard outside Cabool and found a used engine for his old truck.

Eighteen hundred dollars. They pulled the old one and dropped the new one in over two weekends in our pole barn.

Beth went home to her own bed at the end of that week. She had two more rounds to go, and I drove her to every one of them.

Jeff drove her to one himself, in that old truck with the new engine, when I had to work.

He sat with her the whole six hours. He brought her a strawberry milkshake she couldn’t drink and set it on the windowsill, because Logan had told him about that.

“You keep that one,” Beth told me on the phone that night. “He’s a fool, but he’s your fool, and he knows it now. That’s the best kind.”

Lonnie finished the cut by the middle of February. He stopped at the orange ribbon just like he said he would.

Then he did the thing he wrote into the contract in his own handwriting. He brought a little dozer back in and smoothed the skid trails.

He put in water bars across every slope so the rain wouldn’t wash the hill down into the creek. He seeded and strawed every bare patch.

At the landing he handed me the last check, twelve thousand dollars, made out to Renee Albrecht.

I tried to talk to him about the trees he’d left standing, what they would have brought him. He waved me off with his cap.

“Your grandpa gave me four hundred dollars when four hundred dollars was all the money in the world,” he said.

“I figure we’re about even now. Maybe I still owe him a little. Tell him that next time you’re up at the spring.”

It was Logan who found the initials.

He came home for a weekend at the end of February, and on Sunday afternoon he walked up to the spring by himself.

He said later he just wanted to see what was left. He was gone so long that I started to worry and went up after him.

I found him standing at the big oak with the nail in it, the one Grandpa used to hang the tin cup on.

He had his hand flat on the bark on the uphill side, and he didn’t hear me come up through the leaves until I was right behind him.

“Mom,” he said. “Come look at this.”

Under his hand, about as high as a man’s shoulder, there were letters cut into the trunk.

Seventy-some years of growing had stretched them wide and rounded off the edges, and the bark had half closed over them, but you could still read them if you knew to look.

R.H. + M.H. 1951.

Ray Hollis and Mary Hollis. The year he bought the forty. The year they married.

I had walked up to that spring a thousand times in my life, and I had drunk out of that tin cup sitting right underneath those letters, and I had never once seen them.

I put my hand on the bark next to Logan’s and I just stood there and cried. Not pretty crying, either.