The Wood I Ricked Against Her Porch

What Dale Sold

My brother Dale is two years older than me and he has always been able to find the easy dollar in a thing other people only saw the work in.

When we were kids he sold our grandfather’s scrap iron to the junkman and kept the money, and when Grandpa found out, Dale cried so hard and apologized so sweet that Grandpa gave him half of it back for honesty. That is the kind of thing Dale is. He can turn getting caught into a profit.

So when Grandma said Dale handled the wood, I did not have to ask much. I made myself ask anyway, because I wanted to be wrong.

“Handled it how?”

“He cut it,” she said. “Off the back forty, like always. Said he’d take care of his grandma this year, said I shouldn’t be paying anybody to do what family ought to do.”

“And then what?”

She was quiet a long time.

“He sold most of it,” she said, finally. “In town. He’s got that truck, and he put an ad up on the Facebook, firewood for sale, seasoned oak, and people came out and he loaded them up right off the landing. I watched him do it from the window.”

I knew the prices. Everybody in the hills knows the prices. Seasoned oak, split and delivered, was running two hundred and forty, two hundred and sixty a cord that fall, more if you wanted it stacked. Dale had cut Grandma’s own trees, off Grandma’s own ground, with the saw Grandpa left, and he had sold cord after cord of it to strangers at town prices and driven off with the money in his pocket.

And he had left his grandmother six thin splits in a wood box and a damper she was afraid to open.

“How much did he leave you?” I asked.

“A little. A rick, maybe. He said he’d bring more.”

“When did he say that?”

“August,” she said.

It was the eighteenth of October.

Grandma Will Not Hear It

I called Denny from the end of her driveway, standing by the mailbox because her phone was a wall phone and I did not want her to hear me.

Denny is my husband. He is a quiet man who runs a bulldozer for the county three days a week and does small engine repair out of our shed the other days, and he does not say ten words where one will do. I told him all of it in the cold, with my breath smoking, and when I was done he was quiet for a second and then he said, “How cold is she keeping it?”

That is the thing I married him for. Not “that no good brother of yours.” Not “I always said.” Just the one question that mattered.

“Fifty-eight in the kitchen,” I said. “Colder in the back rooms.”

“I’ll load the saw,” he said. “And the splitter. We’ll go Saturday.”

I went back inside. Grandma had moved to the front room to be near what little fire there was, and I sat down next to her and I took her gloved hand in both of mine, and I said what I had already decided in the driveway.