Thursday
On Thursday morning I drove Mom to Columbia in her own car, down her own lane, past sixty feet of oak. She had her pill list in her purse, underlined twice.
The heart doctor said her valve was about the same and the new water pill was doing its job.
He said the swelling in her ankles was a little up and asked whether she had been on her feet a lot.
“No,” Mom said. “My granddaughter’s a nurse. She made me keep them up.”
He smiled and wrote something in his chart. He said to come back in three months.
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On the drive home, Mom slept most of the way with her purse in her lap, and I drove slow on the gravel so I would not wake her.
That Winter
Amos had told us to split the wood small, and we did.
“White oak’s slow to dry,” he said on the second day, “but small splits in full sun along a south fence will burn by Christmas. Use the dead top wood first. It’s half seasoned already.”
He was right. The top of that oak had been dying back for a few years, and those limbs were dry enough to burn by fall.
Mom started on them in October, mixed with what was left of last year’s pile.
By the first week of January, the trunk wood had sat in that summer sun for six months, and it burned.
It hissed a little at first. By February it burned clean and hot, and Mom never once turned the propane furnace past sixty.
In October, Dwight came out on a Saturday morning without being asked.
He brought his own saw and a load of dead ash from a fence row on his place, and he cut and split all day, and he started a second row of wood right behind the first one.
He came back the next Saturday, and the next. By Thanksgiving there were two rows along Mom’s fence, the oak in front and Dwight’s behind it, and he had stacked every stick of the second row himself.
I will not pretend everything between us was fixed in one afternoon. Some things take longer than a tree.
But he calls Mom every Sunday now, after church, and when he says he is coming on Saturday, he comes on Saturday.
Kenzie went back to nursing school in August with forearms like a fence builder.
Her clinical instructor asked her where she got so strong. She said, “My grandma’s lane,” and did not explain.
Amos still drives to the café every morning at six. When I see his truck there, I stop in, and he lets me buy his coffee, which he says is the only payment he will take. The men at his table still never mention my brother.
That oak heated Mom’s house all winter, and Dwight stacked the second row himself.