The Oak Across Mom’s Lane

What Mom Said

Mom looked at the envelope a long time. Then she looked at him. Nobody at the splitter said a word. Amos had shut his engine off all the way.

“I know you meant to, son,” she said. “I never doubted it.”

Dwight held the envelope out to her. She did not take it.

“Put that toward the rest of that roof,” she said.

“Mom, it’s your money.”

“It is. And what you owe me is not money.” She folded her hands in her lap on top of her Bible.

“You can pay me back in wood. Next June, I want a row along that fence just like this one, and I want you to cut it and stack it yourself.”

Dwight stood there. I watched his throat work. He looked at the row of oak again, the whole length of it, and then at Amos, who was eighty-four and had run a splitter for two days in the heat for a woman who was not his kin.

“Yes, ma’am,” Dwight said.

That was all. I did not say anything. I had thought about what I would say to him for two weeks, and when the moment came, there was nothing I needed to add to what Mom had said.

Amos started the splitter back up. There were still a dozen rounds waiting. He looked at Dwight over the engine and held out a pair of work gloves.

Dwight took them. He pulled them on and went to work rolling rounds to the splitter, and he stayed until the last one was split and stacked, almost two hours, without stopping once.

Nobody said anything to him about it. That was the thing about those men. They did not make speeches, and they did not make him smaller.

They just let him work alongside them, which I think was harder on him than anything they could have said.

The Last Round

When the last of the split wood was on the row, Kenzie stood up from the round she had been sitting on and closed her pocketknife.

“Okay,” she said. “Grandma, come look.”

Mom came down off the porch on her cane, slowly, with Dwight on one side of her and me on the other.

Kenzie had rolled the round over by the fence, and she turned it so the cut face was toward her grandmother.

Carved into the top of it, deep and careful, were two sets of initials: H.T. and C.T. Under them, Kenzie had carved a small heart and the year 1966.

C.T. were my father’s initials. Kenzie had heard the proposal story from Mom at lunch the first day, when I was down at the trunk filing a chain.

Mom stood and looked at that round for a long time. Then she let go of my arm and put her hand flat on the carving, the way you would put your hand on somebody’s shoulder.

“Oh, honey,” she said. That was all she could get out.

Kenzie put her arms around her grandmother, and Mom held on to her and cried the way I had not seen her cry since Dad’s funeral.

Dwight stood with his gloves in his hands and his eyes wet. I did not even try to hide mine.

That round never went in the stove. It sits beside the stove in Mom’s living room to this day, with a potted fern on top of it, and the initials facing the room.