The Oak Across Mom’s Lane

Thirteen Days

I could not get out to her that night. We worked until the light went, clearing Route Z and two county roads, and the foreman had us back at six the next morning. Every crew in the county was on twelve-hour days.

Dwight got there first. My brother is 51 and runs a cow-calf operation of about forty head on the other side of the county, plus he drives a feed truck three days a week.

He has a big chainsaw and a truck that will pull anything.

He called me Wednesday at noon while I was eating a sandwich on a guardrail. “I walked it,” he said.

“It’s a big one, Jo. Seventy feet if it’s an inch. Pulled the whole root plate out of the ground. That trunk’s four foot through at the bottom.”

“Can you get it?”

“I’ll get it. I told Mom eight hundred. That covers gas and bar oil, a new chain or two, and I’ll need to pay somebody to help me roll the big pieces. She gave it to me out of the coffee can.”

I want to be fair to my brother, because he is my brother. Eight hundred dollars was not a crazy number.

The tree services were quoting three thousand and up that week, when they would call you back at all.

But I knew what was in that coffee can. It was Mom’s money from the egg customers and from renting the hay ground, the money she uses for the things her Social Security check does not stretch to. Eight hundred dollars was most of it.

“When?” I asked.

“Saturday,” he said. “First thing.”

Saturday came. I drove out after the morning crew let us go at noon and walked up the lane.

The oak was exactly where it had been. Mom was on the porch shelling peas into a dishpan.

“He called,” she said before I could ask. “His machine shed lost half its roof in the storm, and he’s got hay in there getting wet. He has to get tin on it first. He said next Saturday.”

I did not say anything. I sat down beside her and shelled peas.

I was raised that you do not run your brother down in front of your mother, and I was raised that way by her.

That week I carried groceries in over the trunk after my shift.

The lane was soft gravel on each side, and the pasture beside it was a bog after four inches of rain.

Her car sat in the shed behind the house, trapped on the wrong side.

The oak had come down at an angle, so the top was in the ditch and the trunk lay across the whole lane.

The root plate stood up on the pasture side taller than Mom’s porch roof, a wall of red clay and torn roots with a hole under it you could have lost a calf in.

Neighbors helped where they could. The mail carrier left Mom’s mail in a coffee can wired to the fence at the road.

A woman from Mom’s church walked in a casserole. But nobody could do anything about the tree, because every man with a saw in the county was cutting his own.

The next Saturday came. Dwight called Mom at nine in the morning and said a heifer was down and he had the vet coming.

He said Sunday after church. Sunday morning he said the feed truck needed a part.

I want to say plainly that I believe every one of those things happened. My brother does not lie about cattle.

But I also knew that the $800 had gone into roofing tin for his own shed, because he told me so himself on the phone that Friday, a little ashamed.

“I’ll make it right,” he said. “I just had to get my hay covered. You know how it is, Jo.”

I did know how it is. That was the trouble. I knew exactly how it is, and I knew Mom had paid him first.