The Porch Full of Oak

I did not go because I did not want to fight with him in front of my mother, and I did not want to win a fight with him either.

Mom did not go to him either. When the pastor’s wife asked her about it after church, she just said, “Gerald has had a hard year,” and changed the subject to the quilt they were piecing for the auction.

I asked her once, in the kitchen, if she was angry with him. She was rolling out a pie crust. She kept rolling for a while before she answered me.

“I am angry,” she said. “I am angry every time I look at that porch. But I have prayed about it, and I am not going to hand that anger to Len’s brother in front of the whole county. That would not bring back one stick.”

The third Saturday it rained in the morning, a cold gray drizzle, and we waited it out in Mom’s kitchen with coffee.

By noon it cleared, and the afternoon came out bright and windy, and we cut until the light went.

That was the day Wade and I found the old blowdown oak at the back corner of the lot, a big one, maybe thirty inches across.

Dad had limbed it and blocked it up off the ground. It had been drying for more than a year.

It took us the whole afternoon to buck it and haul it. When the last round went into the truck, Wade put his hand flat on the stump and stood there a minute.

I did not ask him what he was thinking. I think I knew.

By the end of the third Saturday the stack ran three quarters of the wall. Counting the two seasoned cords from down the road and the load the man brought back, we were close.

One more Saturday, Wade said. One more and we would have it.

The weather radio on Mom’s counter said the first real snow was coming the Monday after. Six inches, maybe more. We had one Saturday left.

The last Saturday came up clear and cold. By afternoon it had warmed enough that I took off my jacket and worked in my red and black flannel.

The maples along the drive were half bare, the last yellow leaves hanging on.

The neighbors had come again that morning, the dairy farmer with his splitter, the boys from my route, the woman from church.

Around one o’clock Arvella called everyone across the road to her place for chili. She had made two roasters of it.

Wade and I stayed behind to bring up the last load. It was the end of it. Every one-dot tree was down and split. Every one of Dad’s blowdowns was cut up. The woodlot looked swept.

The sun was low by then, that gold November light that comes in sideways across the fields in the afternoon.

Wade backed the old blue pickup to the edge of the gravel drive, close to the porch steps, and dropped the tailgate.

He set Dad’s chainsaw on the tailgate, out of the way, and started lifting split oak out of the bed and handing it out.

I took an armload against my chest in my work gloves, five or six pieces, and walked toward the porch steps.