The Forty Redbuds Along His Road

There were bad nights. I will not pretend there were not. Day twenty-two he had a spell where his oxygen dropped and would not come back up, and the room filled with people, and I stood against the wall with my hand over my mouth.

Kayla was the one who stood beside me. She did not tell me it would be fine.

She just held my elbow and said, “Watch his chest. Watch how hard he’s working. He’s a fighter. Watch.” And I watched, and he came back up.

He gained, and he lost, and he gained. He came off the breathing support and onto the little nose tubes and then off those.

He learned to take a bottle, which took longer than anything. On day thirty-eight he finished one all by himself and the whole nurses’ station clapped.

On day forty, the second of December, we took him home. He weighed four pounds and fifteen ounces.

Megan carried him down to the truck herself and buckled him into his car seat and checked the straps three times.

We drove home slow, the whole hour, with me in the back seat beside him.

When we came around the bend on our road, I put my hand over his eyes without thinking, like he could see anything, like a baby that size could be hurt by a field of stumps.

Wayne drove past our place every morning. His log landing is up the road past us, and there is no other way in or out.

Every morning about six thirty, his old diesel came down the hill, and every evening it went back up.

He never slowed down. Not one time. He did not send a card. He did not call.

At Christmas at June’s house he sat in the far chair by the window with a plate on his knees and talked to the other men about deer season and did not come near the baby.

June held Beau most of the afternoon. She rocked him by the woodstove and sang to him under her breath, and every once in a while she looked across the room at her son, and then she looked down at Beau, and her mouth would get tight.

It was in January that I got the idea. I was up at two in the morning with a bottle, sitting at the kitchen table in the dark with Beau in the crook of my arm, and I was looking out the window at the fence line along the road.

And I thought, I could plant something there. Something Wayne would have to see.

Not a sign, not anything ugly, nothing he could call spite. Just something growing where he could not miss it, every single day.

I thought about it for a week before I said anything. I thought about what would grow on that red clay, and what would bloom, and what would mean something.

And I kept coming back to redbuds, because they are the first thing to bloom in the Ozarks every spring, pink all over the brown hills before anything else has leafed.

When I told Dustin, he was eating cereal at the counter before his shift. He listened to the whole thing without saying a word. Then he said, “How many?”

“Forty,” I said. “One for every day he was up there.”

He put his spoon down. He looked out at the fence for a while. “Along the road,” he said.