The Forty Redbuds Along His Road

On the twelfth day Beau was in the NICU, I drove home from Springfield for clean clothes and a real shower, and I came around the bend on our gravel road and had to pull over.

For a second I thought I had taken the wrong road. I had driven it a thousand times, and I sat there with the engine running and could not make the hill in front of me look like ours.

Our forty acres had been cedar and oak since before either of us was born.

Thick green cedar on the slope, the oaks scattered up top, the kind of cover deer bed down in and cardinals sit in all winter.

Now there was nothing on that slope but stumps. Hundreds of them, pale and fresh, the cut faces still red in the middle.

Tire ruts and skid trails ran through the red clay like somebody had dragged a plow through it drunk.

I got out of the truck and stood at the fence. The whole hill smelled like the inside of a pencil sharpener, that sweet, sharp cedar smell, so strong it made my eyes water before anything else did.

There was only one man on our road with a skidder and a crew and a reason to be on that slope.

I knew it before I took my phone out of my pocket. I think I knew it at the bend.

I called Wayne. He is my husband’s uncle, his daddy’s younger brother, and he has run a small logging outfit out of the hollow past our place for as long as Dustin can remember.

He answered on the second ring, cheerful, a saw running somewhere behind him. “Brianna. How’s that little man doing up there? Mama says he’s gaining.”

“Wayne,” I said, “where are our cedars?”

There was a pause, and then he laughed, a short easy laugh, like I had asked him where he left the truck keys.

“Well, I did you a favor, hon. Cleared that whole slope for you. Saved you a dozer bill.”

“We didn’t want it cleared.”

“Nobody wants cedar,” he said. “It’s a weed tree. It eats a pasture alive. You two’ll want grass on that hill someday, and now you’ve got a head start on it. You can thank me at Christmas.”

I asked him what he did with them. He told me, plain as anything, that he hauled them to a post mill down past Gainesville and they paid him four thousand dollars for the load.

“Four thousand dollars,” I said.

“That’s about what it’s worth, cedar like that. Some of it was hollow.”

Then somebody yelled at him over the saw and he said he had to go, and he told me to kiss the baby for him, and he hung up.

I stood at the fence for a long time after that. A neighbor drove by and lifted two fingers off the steering wheel the way people do out here, and I lifted mine back, and I do not think he saw my face.

Then I got back in the truck, and I did not get clean clothes, and I did not take the shower.

I drove the hour back to Springfield and went straight up to the third floor and washed my hands at the sink outside the unit.