The Oak Across Mom’s Lane

Tuesday

The second morning, we were back at seven. My arms had stiffened overnight, and it took me two pulls of the cord before I could stand up straight. Kenzie was stiff too, but she did not complain.

I was sharpening both chains on the tailgate when I heard an engine coming slow down the county road.

I looked up. A pickup was turning in at Mom’s lane, pulling something on a trailer hitch.

It was Amos Whitcomb.

Amos is 84 years old. He farmed the place across the road from Mom for fifty years and sold it to his grandson after his wife died.

He still drives to the café in town every morning at six for coffee with the same five men he has had coffee with since the Carter administration.

Behind his truck was his old log splitter, a gas-powered one with a hydraulic ram and a big steel wedge, painted green a long time ago and patched a dozen times since.

He backed it right up to Mom’s fence, a little crooked, and climbed down.

“Morning, Joann,” he said. “Morning, young lady.”

“Morning, Amos.”

He looked at the trunk. He looked at the row along the fence. He looked at the two of us in our chaps with our sore arms.

“Heard at coffee you were out here,” he said. That was all. He did not say one word about Dwight.

He just checked the oil on the splitter, pulled the cord twice, and the engine caught.

“You cut it in rounds,” he said over the noise, “and I’ll split. Sixteen inches?”

“Sixteen inches.”

“Then sixteen inches it’ll be.”

I had to turn away for a minute. I made it look like I was checking my bar oil.

The Men From the Café

By nine o’clock, two more trucks had pulled in at the road.

Two of the coffee men from the café, both somewhere past seventy, came walking up the lane in feed caps with work gloves sticking out of their back pockets.

One was a retired mail carrier named Lavon who had delivered our mail when I was a girl.

The other was a man I knew from church who had run the hardware store until it closed.

They did not ask what they should do. They just started picking up split wood.

By ten there were two more. One brought a hand truck. One brought a cooler of ice water and a sack of peaches from his wife’s tree.

Nobody made a speech. Nobody said anything about my brother. Every once in a while one of them would say “Nice stack” or “That’s good wood,” and that was about it.

The way it worked, I cut the trunk into rounds with Dad’s saw. Kenzie ran the small saw on the last of the big limbs.

The men rolled each round over to Amos with a peavey, and Amos ran the splitter, and the rest of them carried and stacked.

Cutting the trunk was the hardest work I have ever done. At the top end, where it was two feet through, I could cut straight down.

Toward the butt end, I had to cut a slot on one side, roll my body around, and cut in from the other side to meet it.

Amos watched me make the first big cut near the root end. Then he walked over and put a hand on my shoulder, and I shut the saw down.

“Leave the last eight feet by the roots for the end,” he said.

“When that trunk comes loose from the stump, that root plate’s liable to stand back up. Weighs more than my truck. You want to be standing somewhere else when it does.”

I had read about that. I had never seen it happen. I thanked him and moved my cuts up the trunk toward the top.