The pond tree
My father’s name was Chet Collier. He farmed a hundred and sixty acres of fescue and cows outside Buffalo, Missouri, and he did finish carpentry in the winters when the cattle could take care of themselves.
He was the kind of man who could not walk past a downed tree without wanting to know what was in it. Hedge for fence posts. Cedar for closets. Oak for anything. And walnut, which he said was the only wood in Missouri worth crying over.
The pond tree was a black walnut that stood on the dam of the stock pond behind our house. It was there when Dad’s grandfather bought the place. When I was little I used to pick up the green hulls under it every October and sell them at the Hammons buying station in town.
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In the summer of 2006 a straight line wind came across the county at two in the morning and laid that tree down across the dam like somebody had pushed it. I was twelve years old.
Dad stood in the rain the next morning in his overalls and looked at it for a long time. Then he went in the house and called Mr. Howell, who had a portable sawmill on a trailer and would come to your place for fifty cents a board foot.
They sawed it on the dam where it fell. I sat on the tailgate and handed out lemonade and watched the blade come through the gray sapwood into that dark brown heart, and I thought it was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.
Dad had Mr. Howell saw the best of the trunk into eight quarter boards, two inches thick, so they would be good for anything later. Twelve of them came out of the clear part, ten feet long and most of them over a foot wide.
He hauled them up into the loft of the barn and stickered them himself. Every board laid flat, every cedar strip lined up straight above the one below, so the air could move through and nothing would twist.
“An inch a year,” he told me, tapping the end of the stack with his pencil. “That’s the old rule. These’ll be dry in two. But I’m not in a hurry with these.”
“What are they for?” I asked.
He looked at me with that half smile he got when he had already decided something.
“Your babies, Alice,” he said. “Cradles. One for every grandbaby. Your mother rocked you in a store bought one that wobbled, and I’ve never forgiven myself.”
I rolled my eyes. I was twelve. Babies were about as far from my mind as the moon.
He took his carpenter’s pencil and wrote on the end grain of the top board, in his square block letters: A’s babies. 2006.