The Porch Full of Oak

He was right. Oak wilt had come through the east end of the woodlot a couple summers before.

The trees it killed were still standing, gray and bare, and the bark was falling off them in sheets. That wood was already half seasoned.

Dad had also dropped a few big oaks in a windstorm the summer before last, and limbed them, and left the trunks lying on blocks to dry.

He had meant to buck them up this summer. Then the stroke came.

On the Friday, I went to tell Mom what we were planning. I found her sitting by the wood stove in the front room with her coat on and an afghan over her knees.

The stove was cold. She had maybe a wheelbarrow of kindling left.

“We are going to cut wood tomorrow,” I said. “Wade and me. Out on the lot. We are going to fill the porch again.”

She looked at me a long time. “You have the kids,” she said. “You have your route. Wade has his job.”

“Saturdays,” I said. “We have Saturdays.”

She turned her face to the window. I could see the bare porch wall through the glass. “Your dad would not want you hurting your back over this,” she said.

“Mom,” I said, “Dad would be out there already.”

She did not answer that. But when I left, she walked me to the screen door, and she stood there with her hand flat on the frame for a while, the way she used to stand when Dad was going out to the barn.

Before I got in my car, I looked under the porch steps. I am not sure why. Dad used to toss the odd pieces there, the twisted ones that would not stack.

Back in the dark, behind the lattice, there was one stick of split oak that Gerald’s trailer had missed.

It was a good piece. Straight grain, about sixteen inches long, the bark still tight on one side.

I could see the marks from Dad’s maul on the end where it had split clean. I carried it in and set it on the kitchen counter.

Mom picked it up and turned it over in her hands. She did not say anything. She just held it, the way you hold a baby that is not yours, careful and a little afraid of it. Then she set it on the mantel over the stove.

The first Saturday we drove out at seven in the morning, as soon as it was light enough to see.

Wade had sharpened both of Dad’s saws the night before at our kitchen table, with a towel spread out under them so I would not have a fit.

The woodlot runs about forty acres behind the house, back past the old pasture. There is a two-track lane through it that Dad kept open with his tractor.

We drove our old blue pickup back there, bouncing in the ruts, the saws in the bed under a tarp.

It was cold enough to see our breath. The ground was covered with leaves, brown and yellow, and they made a sound under our boots like paper.

The sun came up through the trees low and orange and lit everything for a while.

Wade went to work on the first standing dead oak while I hauled brush. He is careful with a saw.

Linemen are careful people, because the ones who are not careful do not get to be old linemen.