The Oak Across Mom’s Lane

The oak had been lying across Mom’s lane for twelve days when I finally stopped waiting on my brother, and the thing that made me stop was a reminder card stuck to her refrigerator with a magnet.

It said Thursday, 10:15 a.m., Cardiology, Columbia. Under that, in Mom’s careful cursive, she had written “bring pill list” and underlined it twice, the way she has underlined things since I was a girl.

I was standing in her kitchen on a Sunday afternoon with two sacks of groceries I had carried a quarter mile up the lane and over a trunk as tall as my waist. The card was right at eye level.

“Mom,” I said, “how were you planning to get to Columbia on Thursday?”

She was putting the milk away and did not turn around. “Dwight said he’d have it cleared by then. He said this weekend for sure.”

“He said last weekend for sure.”

“He’s had a lot on him, Joann.” She shut the refrigerator door and finally looked at me. “His shed. The calves. He’ll come.”

I am going to tell this the way it happened, which means I have to start with the storm, and with the money, and with the coffee can.

The Storm

My name is Joann Teagarden. I am 47 years old, and I flag traffic for the county road crew in Callaway County, Missouri.

I am the woman in the orange vest holding the stop and slow paddle while the men patch the blacktop.

It is not glamorous work, but it is steady, and it has insurance, and after my husband passed eleven years ago, steady and insured was what Kenzie and I needed most. I have stood in a lot of sun.

My mother is Hazel Teagarden. She is 79 and lives alone on the farm south of Fulton where I grew up, eighty acres of pasture and hay ground, a white farmhouse with a green tin roof, and a white board fence along the lane that Dad painted every other spring until the year he died.

The lane runs a quarter mile from the county gravel road up to the house.

For as long as anyone can remember, a white oak stood at the bend about halfway, on the fence side, so big that three of us kids could not reach around it holding hands.

Mom says it was already big when her own grandmother was a girl.

Dad used to say it was the oldest thing in the county that still had a job, because it shaded the lane and dropped acorns for the deer and held up the swing he hung for us.

The storm came through on a Tuesday in the middle of June, a little before four in the afternoon.

The radio called it a derecho. I had never heard the word before that summer, and now nobody in our county will ever forget it.

I was on the shoulder of Route Z with my paddle when the sky to the west went the color of a bruise.

The foreman pulled us off the road and we sat in the trucks while the wind came through flat and straight, like a freight train that did not stop.

It lasted maybe twenty minutes. When it quit, there were limbs across every road in the county and the power was out from Fulton to the river. My phone buzzed in my lap. It was Mom.

“Joann,” she said. Her voice was steady, but it was the steady voice she uses at funerals. “The big oak is down. It’s across the lane.”

“Are you hurt? Is the house all right?”

“I’m fine. The house is fine. It just missed the fence.” She paused.

“It’s lying right across the gravel, honey. Roots and all. I can see the bottom of it from the kitchen window.”