The Cherry Logs From the Home Hill

I didn’t go in. I stood on the porch for a while and looked out at the hill behind the barn, with the stumps showing now among the bare trees.

The new seedlings would come up thick in the spring, where the sun could reach the ground.

After a while I heard them talking low in there, Dad and Lyle, about Lyle’s father, about the old mill, about a flood in ’78.

I heard Lyle laugh once, short and surprised. Then I went out to the barn to finish stickering the boards.

Dad told me what the twelve boards were for on Sunday afternoon, after church, when I came out for dinner.

He took me up into the loft and stood by the stack. He told me his own father had done the same thing in 1951, when the old cherries on the other side of the farm were cut.

He’d kept back the best boards and built hope chests for each of Dad’s three sisters.

“My oldest sister still has hers,” Dad said. “She keeps her wedding quilt in it. My youngest sister’s went to her granddaughter last year.”

He laid his hand on the stack. “I’ve got three granddaughters. That’s four boards apiece.”

My two girls are fifteen and twelve. My sister’s daughter is nine. None of them has ever thought about a hope chest in her life, I’m sure of it.

But I could see Dad thinking about them, and the years ahead, and what they’d keep in there.

“These need to dry two winters,” he said. “Then I’ll build them myself. In the shop, if I can still see straight. If I can’t, you’ll build them, and I’ll stand there and tell you you’re doing it wrong.”

I laughed, and he laughed, and then he got quiet. “They came off my hill,” he said.

“I watched them grow when I was a boy. I want the girls to have something of that hill when I’m gone.”

Mom went in to the dentist the following Thursday. The work will take a few appointments into December, but it’s paid for, all of it, with money left over.

She says her new teeth will be the most expensive cherry trees in Vernon County.

The rest of the money went into three savings accounts at the bank in town, one for each of the grandkids, Mason included.

Dad wouldn’t let Mason argue about it. He said Mason earned his share on the loader.

Lyle still runs the mill, for now. He grades in front of people these days.

Orrin got a check in the mail for the difference on his oak, and I heard Lyle drove out to two other farms and did the same.

I don’t know if the mill will make it through the winter. I hope it does.

He’s still my cousin, and he’s still family, and he sat at my mother’s table and told the truth when it would have been easier to stay away.

But I’ll tell you the part I think about most. It’s not Levi’s notebook or the cash on the stump, and it’s not Lyle on the porch with his cap in his hands, tearing up that check. It’s that first board.

When it came off Levi’s saw that Saturday morning, twelve feet long and red as a barn, Mason set it on the sawdust and stepped back.

And Dad walked over in his old plaid coat, slow, like he was afraid it might disappear. He stood there a long time without a word.

Dad ran his hand down the first board like he was petting a horse.