The Porch Full of Oak

When the last piece was on, Gerald stood back and looked at the stack. “Len always did it bark up,” he said. “Said the rain runs off.” He wiped his nose on his sleeve. “I am sorry, Bernice. I was wrong. I knew I was wrong the day I did it.”

“I know you did,” Mom said. “Come in and warm up.”

He came in. They sat in the front room by Dad’s stove, with the fire going, and Mom put the envelope in the drawer of the end table without opening it.

I heard them talking in there a long time, low, about Dad when he was a boy.

I went out on the porch and stood by the stack. The sun was nearly down. It was the last daylight before the snow, and I stood in it and put my hand on the wood my husband and I had cut, and I thanked God for every stick.

It snowed on Monday, just like the radio said. Eight inches. I drove my route in it with chains on the back wheels, and the whole time I thought about Mom’s porch, stacked along the whole wall, and the smoke coming out of her chimney.

The next Saturday, a little after eight in the morning, a truck came down the county road and turned into Mom’s drive.

It was Gerald. He had a chainsaw in the bed of his truck, an old one, and a gas can, and a thermos.

He walked up and knocked on the screen door. Mom answered in her housecoat. He stood there on the porch with the snow on his boots and his hat in his hands.

“I was thinking,” he said, “the two-dot trees will want to come down next summer. That is a lot of wood for one lineman and a bus driver. I thought maybe I would go walk the lot with Jolene and see what Len had planned.”

Mom looked at him a long time. Then she stepped back and held the door open. “Coffee first,” she said. “Then you can go walk.”

So that is how it went. Gerald walked the woodlot with me that morning in the snow. I showed him the orange dots.

He stood in front of a three-dot tree and put his hand on it and did not say anything for a long time.

“He was going to keep going,” Gerald said finally. “Three more years. That stubborn old fool.” He was laughing and crying at the same time. “He always was the stubborn one.”

Mom never opened that envelope. In January she put it back in Gerald’s hands and made him pay his propane bill with it.

She said Len would not have wanted his brother cold either, and the wood was back on the porch, and that was what mattered.

He comes out every Saturday now that the weather allows. He and Wade are going to cut the two-dot trees next summer, and he has already started talking about the three-dot ones. Mom feeds them both like she used to feed Dad.

She burned that oak all winter. Every stick of it. It carried her to April, just like Dad always said twelve cords would, and she never once had to start up that old furnace in the basement.

All but one piece. The one I found under the porch steps, the one Gerald’s trailer missed. It is still on the mantel over the wood stove, with Dad’s maul marks on the end, and she says it is never going in the fire.