The Porch Full of Oak

That night I sat at my own kitchen table with my husband. Wade is 46. He works the lines for the electric co-op, and he has spent more ice storms on top of poles than any man I know. He does not talk much.

“I want to call the sheriff,” I told him. “I want to drive over there and call the sheriff from his own driveway and make him watch.”

Wade turned his coffee cup around on the table. “You could,” he said. “It would be the right thing on paper. What does your mom want?”

I already knew what Mom wanted. Calling the sheriff on Dad’s own brother three weeks after the funeral would have broken her heart.

And even if the county took it all the way, she needed heat by November, not a court date in the spring.

The wood was already gone, burned or stacked in other people’s sheds. No judge was going to put 12 cords back on that porch before the snow.

And Mom had told me, plain as day, sitting in her coat.

“He is Len’s brother,” she had said. “Len would not want the sheriff in it. Don’t you do that to me, Jolene. I just buried one of them.”

I could have bought her wood. That is the other obvious thing. But 12 cords at $250 is $3,000, and a school bus driver and a lineman with two kids in high school do not have $3,000 lying in a coffee can in November.

We had already paid most of the funeral. Mom’s money was Social Security and a small church pension. Her house was paid for, and that was about all she had.

Wade sat there a long time. Then he got up and went to the closet and got his work jacket, the brown canvas one with the frayed cuffs. He did not put it on. He just held it.

“Your dad’s saws still in the machine shed?” he asked.

“Two of them,” I said. “The big one and the little one. And the splitter. And his wedges and his maul.”

“Then we cut it again,” Wade said. “Saturday. Every Saturday until it is done or until it snows.”

I looked at him. I thought about 12 cords. A cord is a stack four feet high, four feet wide and eight feet long.

Twelve of them is a lot of oak. It had taken my father all summer.

“We cannot cut 12 cords in a month,” I said.

“Maybe not,” Wade said. “But we can cut what we can cut, and your mom can see us doing it. That counts for something.”

There was one more problem, and it was the one my father would have spotted first. Green oak does not burn.

Oak cut fresh in November is heavy and full of water, and it smolders and fills a chimney with creosote. It needs a year, better two, to dry.

Dad knew that better than anybody. It was why he cut every summer for the winter after next, and why he never let a green stick into Mom’s stove.

So we could not just walk into the woodlot and drop the nearest live tree.

Wade figured it out on the drive over to Mom’s the next morning. “Standing dead oak,” he said. “And the blowdowns. Your dad never let anything go to waste out there. There will be dead oak on that lot that has been drying on the stump for two years.”