The Forty Redbuds Along His Road

When I told Dustin about the cedars that night, he did not say anything at all.

He was sitting in the recliner by the isolette with Beau on his chest, skin to skin, the wires running out from under the blanket. He just looked at the ceiling for a while.

“Every one?” he said finally.

“I didn’t see one left on the slope.”

He nodded slowly. Beau shifted against him and made a sound like a kitten, and Dustin put one big hand over his back, which covered nearly all of him. “Okay,” he said. “Okay. Not tonight.”

The next morning he drove home early and went up the hollow to Wayne’s place before his shift.

I did not hear about it until that night. He told me in pieces, the way Dustin tells everything.

Wayne’s skidder was parked in the yard with mud still on the tires.

Wayne came out on the porch in his sock feet with a cup of coffee and said, “Before you start,” and Dustin said he was not there to start anything, he only wanted to understand.

And Wayne told him. He was three months behind on the payment for that skidder. The bank in Addie had sent the last letter, the one with the date on it.

Without the skidder he did not have an outfit, and without the outfit he did not have anything.

“He said he figured we’d never miss them,” Dustin told me. “He said everybody calls cedar a weed tree. He said he told himself he was doing us a favor until he believed it.”

“Do you believe him?”

Dustin thought about it a long time. “I believe he’s scared,” he said. “I believe he talked himself into it. I don’t believe he thinks it was right. He couldn’t look at me.”

“What did you tell him?”

“I told him those were Beau’s trees,” Dustin said. “That’s all I could think of to say. Then I left before I said something else.”

The next morning, at six, Grandma June called me.

June is eighty-two. She is Wayne’s mother and Dustin’s grandmother, and she buried her husband nine years ago and her older son, Dustin’s daddy, four years before that.

She lives alone in the old farmhouse at the head of the hollow, and Wayne is the only child she has left.

She was crying before I even said hello. She had heard from Wayne, and she had heard from somebody at church who saw the log trucks, and she had put it all together, and she was ashamed clear down to her shoes.

“Honey, I know what he did,” she said. “I know it was wrong. I raised him better and I know it. But I am begging you. Please don’t put my boy in jail. I can’t watch that. I’ve buried enough.”

I want to explain this part, because people have asked me since why we did not just call the sheriff, or sue him.

I am a 911 dispatcher. I know exactly how that call would have gone.

I know every deputy on that shift by voice. I know the one who would have taken the report, and I know he goes to the same church as June.

I know Missouri has a law about cutting another man’s timber, and I know what the damages can come to.