The Pecan I Climbed After He Took the Truck

Tully got out the little notebook I keep in the truck and started writing names, because my hands were shaking too bad to write.

We had seven jobs written down before we left Opal’s yard that afternoon. By Friday night it was eleven, counting Elwood, because people called people, the way they do in a small town after a storm.

Every one but Elwood’s on a street I could walk to from Opal’s porch.

We came back to Opal’s on Wednesday at first light and took the standing half of the pecan down to a stump. I climbed it the same way, Daddy’s saddle and Daddy’s rope, and Tully ran the lowering line.

Leota brought the doughnuts again, and the older man with the hackberry came and helped drag brush all morning.

We were done by two o’clock Wednesday. When the freezing rain came in Thursday night, there was nothing over Opal’s roof but sky.

Her roof cost her son a little over four thousand dollars to fix, and her insurance paid most of it after her deductible. I charged her twenty-six hundred for the whole tree, both days, which is what I had quoted her on Sunday with the bucket truck.

It was more work without the truck, but it was not her fault the truck left.

Vance came on Saturday.

I was at Opal’s that morning with Tully, splitting the last of the small rounds for her woodstove, when the bucket truck came down the street and pulled in at her curb.

It was the first time I had seen it since he drove it away.

He did not set the outriggers. He got down out of the cab and stood on the sidewalk a minute with his hands in his coat pockets, and then he came up the walk to the porch where Opal was sitting with her coffee.

I put down the maul. Tully stopped stacking. I want to be honest: I did not know what he was going to do, and part of me hoped he would get back in that truck and go.

Vance took his cap off. He is a big man, a lineman’s build, and he stood at the bottom of Opal’s porch steps like a boy sent to the principal.

“Mrs. Kimbrough,” he said. “I’m Vance Holloway. I’m the one who took the truck off your tree Tuesday.”

“I know who you are,” Opal said. “I saw you through my window.”

“Yes ma’am. I don’t have a good reason. I had a reason, but it wasn’t a good one. It was money.”

He turned the cap in his hands. “I’d like to make it right if I can. I’d like to pay for your roof.”

Opal looked at him for a long time. I remember the sound of a car going by and the drip from the gutters.

“My boy already paid for my roof,” she said. “And I don’t want your money, Mr. Holloway.”

He nodded. He started to put his cap back on.

“But I’ll tell you what I do want,” Opal said. “Sit down a minute. There’s coffee. You can tell me about your daddy. I believe I knew him. Wasn’t he the one who carried the mail out on the Morris road?”

And Vance sat down on Opal Kimbrough’s porch step with his cap on his knee, and Opal poured him a cup out of her late husband’s green thermos, and they talked about his daddy and the mail route for twenty minutes while Tully and I stacked wood and did not look at them.