The Porch Full of Oak

That night, Wade and I lay in bed with every muscle we owned aching. “A cord and a half,” I said. “We need twelve. We have three more Saturdays. That is not going to work.”

“Then we buy some,” Wade said. “Good seasoned wood, as much as we can afford, to fill the gap. Your mom needs to burn something next week, Jo. That stove has been cold since the funeral.”

It turned out we did not have to go far. On Monday a man who farms a mile down the road called the house.

Arlo had heard about the porch at the feed mill. He had two cords of seasoned oak and maple in his own shed, two years dry.

“I will sell it to you at what it cost me to cut,” he said. “Gas and chain oil. Call it a hundred dollars for the both of them. I am not taking any more than that from Len’s girl.”

He brought it over on his hay wagon that Tuesday while I was on my afternoon route. When I got there after, Mom had a fire going in Dad’s stove for the first time in a month. The front room smelled like oak smoke and coffee.

She was sitting in Dad’s chair with her stocking feet up on the hearth. “He stacked it himself,” she said. “He would not let me help. He said Len pulled his boy out of a ditch in a blizzard in 1979, and he has been waiting a long time to say thank you.”

The second Saturday, a man with a log splitter on a hitch showed up at the end of the lane at eight in the morning.

He was a dairy farmer from two roads over. I had never spoken to him in my life.

“Heard you were cutting,” he said. “My splitter is faster than Len’s. No offense to Len.” He backed it right up next to the pile and went to work, and he did not stop until four o’clock.

Around ten, two of the high school boys from my bus route walked up the lane in their barn coats.

They did not ask. They just started picking up rounds and tossing them into the pickup bed, the way boys do, too fast and laughing.

At noon a woman from the church came with a pan of bars and a thermos of coffee and a stack of paper cups.

She set it all on the tailgate and then rolled up her sleeves and started stacking.

Nobody made a speech about any of it. Nobody said a word about Gerald. They just came, and they worked, and they went home with sore backs, and a few of them came back the next Saturday.

By the end of that second Saturday the porch stack ran halfway along the wall. Mom stood by the screen door the whole afternoon in her navy cardigan and watched it grow.

She would not sit down. She said she wanted to see it.

That week, word got around town. Small towns are like that. People who had bought a load of oak from Gerald found out where it came from.

One man drove his load back out to the farm on his own trailer and stacked it himself, and would not take a dime.

I did not go to Gerald. I want to say that plainly, because some people have asked me why I never said anything to him.