The Oak Across Mom’s Lane

Every time she finished a limb, she shut the saw off, set the brake, and carried the wood to the fence line.

We had decided right away where the wood would go. Mom heats the house with a wood stove in the living room, plus a propane furnace she hates to run because of the bill. Her woodpile from last winter was down to a few armloads.

“Stack it along the fence,” Mom called from the porch. “Bark side up on top. Your daddy always stacked along that fence so the sun hits it all afternoon.”

So that is what we did. Kenzie started the row at the corner post and worked down the white board fence toward the house, stacking each piece the way Grandpa had taught her when she was little.

By ten o’clock we had burned through a gallon of mix. By eleven the heat was a hand on the back of my neck.

Kenzie made us stop every hour and drink a full bottle of water whether we wanted it or not.

“I’m serious, Mom,” she said, holding the bottle out. “Heat exhaustion comes on before you feel it. I just did a whole unit on it.”

I drank it. I had stood on enough blacktop in July to know she was right.

The Chain and the Chips

Around noon, Dad’s saw started throwing fine dust instead of chips. That is how you know a chain has gone dull.

I had hit dirt on a limb that was lying in the ditch, and a chain hits dirt once and it is done.

I sat on the tailgate and filed it, the way Dad taught me: same number of strokes on every tooth, file held level, round file sized to the chain. It took twenty minutes. Kenzie watched me the whole time.

“Grandpa taught you that?”

“He made me file every chain on the place the summer I was fourteen,” I said. “I hated it. I’d give anything to have him here complaining about my angles.”

She did not say anything to that. She just handed me the bar oil when I reached for it, before I asked.

Mom brought us egg salad sandwiches and a jar of sweet tea at noon.

She walked down the lane slowly, with her cane, and sat on a cooler in the shade of the old fence-row hedge while we ate.

“You’re doing fine,” she said, looking at the stack. “Your daddy would say you’re doing fine.”

That afternoon we worked the bigger limbs, the ones as thick as a man’s waist. Those you have to cut in pieces, watching which way they will roll.

Twice my bar got pinched, and I had to drive a plastic wedge into the kerf with the back of the axe to free it.

By four o’clock my arms were shaking so hard I could not hold the saw level.

My shoulders were a solid ache. I had sawdust in my hair, in my ears, and down the inside of my shirt.

But the top was cut. The brush pile at the corner was taller than me, and the row along the fence ran about fifteen feet. The trunk itself still lay across the lane like a wall.

“That’s the hard part tomorrow,” I told Kenzie as we sat on the tailgate.

“That trunk’s four feet through at the butt end. Dad’s bar is two feet. We’ll have to cut from both sides and meet in the middle.”

She looked at it. Then she looked at me. “We can split all those big rounds by hand?”

I did not answer right away. I had been wondering the same thing.

A white oak round four feet across weighs more than both of us together. Splitting the trunk by hand with a maul would take a week.

“We’ll figure it out,” I said.

That evening, Mom called Dwight. I heard her from the porch. She did not tell him to come.

She just said, “Joann and Kenzie are cutting the oak. I wanted you to hear it from me.”

I do not know what he said back. Mom only said, “All right, son,” and hung up.