The Porch Full of Oak

Around ten o’clock I walked to the far end of the oak wilt patch to see how many more dead trees there were. That was where I found the paint.

There was a bright orange dot on the trunk of a dead oak, about chest high. It was the kind of marking paint that comes in a can and sprays upside down.

I knew right away whose it was. Dad kept a can of it on the shelf in the machine shed.

The next tree had a dot too. Then I found one with two dots, one above the other, and then one with three.

I stood there and counted. I went from tree to tree with my gloves in my hand and counted every one.

One dot was for next summer. Dad was going to cut those first. Two dots were for the summer after.

Three dots were for the summer after that. He had marked out the whole patch, tree by tree, three years ahead.

My father was 77 years old with a bad heart and a worse knee, and he had walked these woods sometime in August with a can of paint and planned three more summers of cutting wood for my mother.

I sat down on a log. I put my face in my work gloves, the tan leather ones that were brand new that morning and still stiff, and I cried harder than I had cried at the funeral.

I did not hear Wade come up. He just sat down on the log next to me and put one hand on my back and left it there.

After a while he looked up at the trees. “He marked them,” he said. “Didn’t he.”

“One dot for next year,” I said. “Two for the year after. Three for the year after that.”

Wade was quiet a long time. Then he said, “Then we cut the ones with one dot. We leave the rest. Those are still his.”

So that is what we did. Every Saturday we cut only the dead oak with one orange dot, and the old blowdowns Dad had already limbed.

We did not touch the two-dot and three-dot trees. I could not have, even if we had needed them.

We bucked the logs into sixteen-inch rounds, Dad’s length, the length his stove liked. We loaded them into the pickup bed and drove them up to the yard behind the house, where Dad’s little splitter sat under its own tarp.

By noon on that first Saturday my shoulders were burning and my hands were raw inside my gloves.

We had maybe a cord and a half split and stacked at the near end of the porch. It looked like nothing against that long bare wall.

Mom came out on the porch at noon with sandwiches and a thermos. She stood by the screen door holding her coffee mug in both hands and watched me carry the last armload up the steps.

“That is your dad’s way of stacking,” she said. “Bark up.”

“He taught me,” I said. “I was eight. He made me do it over three times.”

She almost smiled. It was the first time in three weeks I had seen her face move like that.

Then she went back inside, and I saw her through the window, standing at the cold stove, with one hand on the mantel near that stick of oak.