The Oak Across Mom’s Lane

The Third Day

By Tuesday evening, the lane was still blocked, but only by the last section of trunk near the roots.

The row along the fence ran past forty feet and was stacked as high as my chest.

Wednesday morning I was up at five. I could barely close my hands.

Kenzie rubbed liniment into my shoulders at Mom’s kitchen table while Mom fried eggs and said a short blessing over the skillet, the way she always has.

“Lord, keep their hands and keep their feet,” she said. “And thank you for Amos. Amen.”

“Amen,” said Kenzie.

By eight, Amos was back with the splitter, and so were four of the café men.

The one who had brought peaches brought more peaches. The old mail carrier brought a second peavey he had borrowed from somebody’s barn.

I spent that morning on the big cuts near the butt end of the trunk. Those rounds were nearly four feet across, too heavy for any of us to lift.

The men rolled them on their edges to the splitter, and Amos split them into quarters standing on end.

By early afternoon, all that was left was the last eight feet still attached to the root plate.

The men cleared everyone back to the fence. Amos stood beside me and pointed with his whole arm.

“Cut it from the top side, slow, and let it open on you,” he said.

“When you feel it go, pull the saw out and walk away toward the house. Don’t look back to watch it. Just walk.”

I made the cut. About two-thirds through, I felt the trunk shift under the bar. I pulled out, shut the saw off, and walked.

Behind me there was a deep groan, like a barn door in the wind, and then a heavy thump.

When I turned around, the root plate had settled halfway back into its hole, red clay and torn roots tilted up at the sky, and the trunk lay free.

The men did not cheer. Amos just nodded once, the way you nod when a calf comes out right.

One of them said, “That’ll do it,” and they went back to rolling rounds.

The Lane Was Open

By three o’clock on that third afternoon, I made the last cut on the last round of the butt log.

Kenzie and I rolled it to the side of the lane together. I set Dad’s saw down on the gravel and stood up straight for the first time in three days.

The lane was open. Sawdust covered the gravel from fence to ditch, pale and sweet-smelling. A person could drive a car from Mom’s house to the county road.

And along Mom’s white board fence ran a row of split white oak sixty feet long, stacked chest high and as neat as a church pew.

I had measured it with Dad’s old tape because I wanted to know.

I do not know how many cords that is exactly. Amos guessed close to three, plus what was still waiting at the splitter.

The brush pile at the corner would make a fine fire in the fall when it dried.

Kenzie was not stacking anymore. She was sitting on the last round from the trunk, a big one, cut clean and flat, with her pocketknife open in her hand. She was carving something into the top of it.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Nothing,” she said. “Don’t look yet.”

I let her be. I sat down on the tailgate and drank a full bottle of water without being told to, and my arms shook while I held it.

Dwight

That was when Dwight came up the lane.

I heard him before I saw him, the crunch of gravel and an engine shifting down at the road.

Everyone at the splitter looked up. Amos let the ram come back and throttled the engine down to an idle.

My brother drove slowly. He came the whole quarter mile at a walk, past the brush pile at the corner, past the sawdust, past the root plate standing on end in the pasture. Then he stopped beside the woodpile.

He did not get out right away. He sat there with both hands on the wheel and looked down the whole sixty feet of that stack, from the corner post to the house.

I watched his face in the side mirror. It was very still.

He looked at Amos, who nodded to him. He looked at the café men, who nodded too, and went on stacking.

He looked at me, sitting on the tailgate in my sawdust and chaps. Then he looked up at Mom on the porch.

He got out of the truck. He walked past me without speaking, not rude, just like a man who did not trust his voice yet.

He went to the porch steps and put one hand on the rail.

“Mom,” he said.

Then he reached into his back pocket and took out a bank envelope, folded once.

“It’s the eight hundred,” he said. “The insurance check on the shed came Monday. I should have brought it out Monday. I should have come out the first Saturday.”

His voice caught. “I meant to come every single day, Mom. I want you to know that.”