The White Oak My Husband Sold

“You must be the wife,” the logger said, wiping his hands on his pants. “Jeff said you were fine with all this. Said you were tied up in Springfield with your sister.”

I was standing in mud over the tops of my boots, at the end of what used to be our hay meadow, looking at a pile of white oak logs taller than my car.

Behind me the skidder was grinding up out of the hollow with another load.

“Fine with what?” I asked, though I already knew. I had known since the log truck passed me on the county road twenty minutes earlier, loaded heavy and coming out of my lane.

He was a lean, weathered man of about sixty-eight, in an orange hard hat and black suspenders over a plaid shirt, with sawdust caught in his white beard.

He looked at my face, then came back from his pickup with a clipboard.

“Timber sale,” he said, and held it out so I could read it without taking it.

“Marked white oak, sixteen inches and up, on the forty. Thirty-six thousand. A third up front, the rest in two payments as the loads go to the mill.”

At the bottom of the page was my husband’s signature, the same loopy J he has signed on every birthday card for twenty-six years. There was a blank line beside it marked Landowner. Nobody had signed it.

“The first check,” I said. My voice sounded far off to me, like it was coming from the bottom of a well. “The twelve thousand. Who was it made out to?”

“To Jeff,” he said, and something careful came into his face. “Ma’am, is there a problem I ought to know about?”

I did not answer him right then, because I was afraid of what would come out of my mouth.

My name is Renee Albrecht. I was forty-eight that winter, a clerk in the Douglas County assessor’s office in Ava, Missouri, and the forty acres that logger was cutting had been mine for nine years, since my Grandpa Ray died.

Grandpa Ray Hollis was a small, quiet man who farmed a little, ran a few cows, and drove a school bus for thirty-one years.

He bought that forty in 1951, the year he married my grandmother, for less than a used car costs now.

He never cut it for money. Not once in sixty years. The big oaks he left alone.

When I was six he walked me up the hollow and taught me to tell white oak from red.

White oak bark is pale and shaggy and flakes off in plates, he said. Red oak has those long dark ridges, like ski tracks running down the trunk.

“White oak holds water,” he told me, rubbing a leaf between his thumb and finger.

“That’s why they make barrels out of it. A red oak barrel would leak like a sieve. Remember that, Renee. The good wood holds.”

At the head of the hollow, under the biggest of the oaks, there is a spring.

It comes out of a crack in the limestone, cold as ice in August, and runs down into a little creek that feeds the bigger branch below.

Grandpa kept a tin cup hanging on a nail in one of those oaks, and every time we walked up there he would fill it and hand it to me first.

“Ladies first,” he said, every time, even when I was a muddy kid in his old flannel shirt.