The Porch Full of Oak

The porch wall was bare. I stood at the bottom of Mom’s steps with my bus keys still in my hand, and I looked at the place where 12 cords of oak had been stacked that morning.

There was nothing there but bark chips, a few curls of kindling, and the pale stripe on the siding where the wood had kept the sun off for the whole summer.

It looked like a picture had been taken down off a wall.

Mom was sitting inside at the kitchen table with her coat still on. She had her church bag on the chair beside her, the one with the quilting hoop sticking out of the top, and she was not crying.

That was what scared me. My mother cries at weddings, at baptisms, at the national anthem before a high school ballgame. She cried every day for two weeks after we buried Dad. Now she just sat there.

“Mom,” I said. “Where is Dad’s wood?”

She folded her hands on the oilcloth. “Arvella says Gerald came with his trailer,” she said. “Around nine. She thought he was taking it to his shed to keep it out of the weather for me.”

“Gerald took it,” I said. “Uncle Gerald took all of it.”

“Arvella waved at him,” Mom said. “He waved back.” She said it like that was the part that hurt her, and maybe it was.

I want to tell you about my father before I go any further, because none of this makes sense unless you know what that wood was.

Leonard Kowalczyk was 77 years old when he had his stroke in the first days of October.

He was born in that farmhouse off the county road in Marathon County, Wisconsin. He milked cows there until the late nineties, when the milk check stopped paying for the feed, and then he rented the tillable ground to the neighbor and kept the woodlot for himself.

Every summer for 52 years, Dad cut the winter’s oak. He would start in June, after the hay, and work the woodlot two or three mornings a week before it got hot.

He split by hand until he was seventy, then gave in and bought a little splitter.

He stacked it on the porch in October, all along the front wall of the house, bark side up, the ends square as a brick wall.

He was proud of that stack. People slowed down on the county road to look at it.

Mom heated that house with his wood stove. There was an old oil furnace in the basement that Dad kept for emergencies, but it had not run right in years, and Mom said it smelled like a gas station. The wood stove was the heat.

Dad said 12 cords would carry her to April in a hard winter. He said that every fall, standing on the porch with his hands in his back pockets, like he was telling her the weather. It was how he told her he loved her.

He died on a Wednesday at the hospital in Wausau. We buried him that Saturday from the little country church where Mom had been the secretary for 26 years. Half the county came. The ladies’ circle fed all of them.

Three weeks later, on a Thursday morning, while Mom was at that same church with the quilting circle, his younger brother backed a trailer up to the porch and took every stick.