The Pecan I Climbed After He Took the Truck

When he got up to leave, he came over to me by the woodpile.

“I’m sorry, Darcy,” he said. “I mean it. You can have the truck at the old rate any time you want it. I’ll put it in writing.”

“I appreciate that, Vance,” I said. “But I’ve got a man in Henryetta who’s going to rent me his from here on. I already shook on it.”

He looked at me a long time. Then he nodded, slow.

“That’s fair,” he said. “That’s fair. Your daddy would’ve done the same.”

And he got in the truck and drove away, slow this time, and he lifted one hand off the wheel to Opal as he went by, and she lifted hers back.

Shad called me that night. We do not talk much anymore, but he called. He said, “I didn’t know, Darce. I’d have told him to leave it. I’d have done my oaks with a rope myself.”

“I know you would have,” I said. And I did know it. Shad has a lot of faults, but he was always good with old people.

He was quiet a minute and then he said, “Dad hasn’t rented the truck out since. Elwood’s check is still in his shirt pocket. I don’t think he’s going to cash it.”

I do not know if Vance ever cashed that check. I never asked.

What I know is that we did Elwood’s fourteen post oaks the next two weeks, every one of them with a rope, and that was the best paying job my little crew had ever had.

And the man in Henryetta did rent me his truck, for the jobs that needed it, at a fair price.

What I know is that Tully and I worked every day for three weeks straight after that storm, and every one of those eleven jobs came from the people who stood at Opal’s fence that Tuesday afternoon and watched.

And what I know is this.

Before we hauled the trunk off Opal’s lot that Wednesday, I asked her if she wanted anything from the tree.

She thought about it a minute, standing in her coat in the sun next to the stump.

“Maybe just a little piece,” she said. “Something to sit on.”

So I cut her a round off the bottom of the trunk, a little over two feet across and eight inches thick, and I took it home and let it dry in my shop until spring.

Then I sanded the top smooth and sealed it and drilled two holes in the bottom to set it on, so it would not rock.

Tully and I set it by her back step in April, where the old step had a crack in it, so she would have something wide and solid to put her foot on.

She stands on it every morning when she goes out to look at the stump. She told me last month that her husband would have liked that, the tree he planted holding her up after all these years.

Every time I drive down her street, I look for it, and I tap the horn, and if she is out, she lifts one hand.

It is still there by her back door, that piece of the pecan I cut for her, and Opal still uses it as her porch step.