The Porch Full of Oak

Mom did not say a word about the wood. Not one word. She turned around and went in through the screen door, and the door slapped shut behind her, and I heard her in the kitchen.

Gerald stood there on the porch with his hands hanging down. I think he thought she had gone in to get away from him.

I thought so too, for a second. I could see on his face that he thought that was what he deserved.

Then the screen door opened again. Mom came out with a second mug of coffee, steaming in the cold, and she held it out to him with both hands, the same way she was holding her own.

“You take it black,” she said. “Len always said you ruined good coffee with sugar when you were young, and then you quit.”

Gerald looked at the mug. He took it. His hand was shaking so hard the coffee slopped over the rim onto the porch boards. He did not seem to notice.

“Bernice,” he said. That was all he could get out. “Bernice.” He tried two or three times to say something else. He could not.

Mom just stood next to him with her own mug, looking out at the yard and the maples and the gold light on the field across the road.

She let him stand there. She did not make him say it.

After a while he set the mug down on the porch railing. He reached inside that old jacket and took out an envelope, a white bank envelope, fat and folded over. He held it a long time.

Then he reached up and laid it on top of the stack. On top of the oak. He set it there gentle, the way you set something on a casket.

“It is all there,” he said. His voice was rough. “Three thousand. I sold the trailer Thursday.”

Mom looked at the envelope on top of Dad’s wood. She did not reach for it. She did not say thank you and she did not say it was all right.

She picked up his coffee mug off the railing and put it back in his hands.

“Drink your coffee, Gerald,” she said. “It is cold out here.”

He stood there on that porch and drank it. Across the road, the neighbors went back inside Arvella’s one at a time, quiet, like people leaving church. Nobody said a word to him. Nobody had to.

Wade walked up the steps then and shook Gerald’s hand. One shake. Gerald held on a second too long.

Then Wade went back down to the truck and handed me another armload, and I carried it up past my uncle and stacked it.

Gerald finished his coffee. He set the mug down. Then, without a word, he went down the steps and over to our pickup, and he took a load of split oak out of the bed, and he carried it up the porch steps and stacked it next to mine.

Bark up. Ends square. He knew how. He and Dad had grown up stacking wood on that same porch, sixty years before.

The three of us emptied that truck. Mom stood by the screen door and watched us do it, holding her coffee, and her face was wet, and she did not wipe it.