The Forty Redbuds Along His Road

Beau was asleep under his lights with his little blindfold on. He weighed two pounds and nine ounces that morning.

He had been two pounds and eleven at birth and lost some, the way they all do, and was working his way back up an ounce at a time.

Megan was his nurse that day. She looked at me once and did not ask anything.

She just pulled the chair up close to the isolette and said, “You want to do his diaper? He’s due.”

So I did his diaper, through the little round portholes, with my hands still smelling faintly of cedar.

And that is when I cried, finally, with my arms inside that plastic box and my son asleep under my fingers.

I should back up and tell you how we got there.

Dustin and I bought those forty acres three years before, from an old couple who were moving to Mountain Home to be near their daughter.

It took every dime we had saved and a loan through the farm credit office in West Plains.

We bought it for the cedars, honestly. Dustin wanted the oaks for firewood and the bottom for a garden, but I wanted that slope.

I grew up in a trailer park in Joplin with one maple tree, and I had never in my life owned a hill.

Dustin is a lineman for the electric co-op. I am a dispatcher for the county 911 center.

We both work twelve-hour shifts, and between the two of us there was always somebody tired and somebody asleep, and we liked it fine.

We had been trying for a baby for two years when Beau came.

Then he came too early, at twenty-nine weeks, on a Tuesday night in October when I was at work with my headset on, taking a call about a cow on the highway.

I felt the first one and thought it was something I ate. By the third one I knew.

My supervisor took the headset off my head herself and walked me out to her car, and she drove me to the hospital in town faster than I have ever seen a woman drive.

They gave me the shots for his lungs and tried to hold him off, and they could not.

He was born before midnight, eleven weeks early, and the transport team took him up to Springfield in the ambulance while I lay there and watched the doors close behind him.

Dustin was on a pole outside Addie when they reached him. He got to Springfield before I did.

He was standing beside the isolette in his work boots and his co-op jacket when they finally wheeled me in the next morning, and he had not sat down all night.

I stayed up there in a family house across from the hospital that a charity runs for parents.

Dustin kept working, because somebody had to, and because the co-op does not stop for anybody when the weather turns. He drove up every night after his shift.

So that was why nobody was home. That was the window Wayne had.

We were gone, all day and most nights, for six weeks, and he knew it, because the whole family knew it. His own mother had put Beau on the prayer list at her church.