I drove out after the crew released us, as soon as the road was clear enough to pass. The lane was a mess of torn branches and leaves, and when I came around the curve by the cattle guard, I stopped the truck and just sat there.
The oak lay across the gravel, roots standing up in the air taller than her porch. The whole thing had come out of the ground like a pulled tooth, taking a crater of red clay with it, and it had fallen straight across the lane and halfway into the pasture beyond. The trunk was four feet thick at the base. The limbs alone were bigger than most trees, and they were tangled in the fence and the ditch and the gravel all the way down to the mailbox.
Her car was on the wrong side of it. Her old Buick sat in the yard by the house, and the only way out was down that lane, and that lane was gone.
Chapter Two: Eight Hundred Dollars
My brother Dwight came out the next morning.
He’s three years older than me, fifty-four, a big man with our father’s shoulders and our mother’s blue eyes. He farms about four hundred acres of corn and beans of his own on the other side of Pinckney Ridge, eight miles from Mom’s place, and he does a little custom hay baling on the side. He’s always been the one who knows how to fix things. When I was a girl and something broke on the farm, Dad would holler for Dwight, not me.
He walked the trunk from one end to the other with his hands in his pockets, studying it the way Dad used to study a field before he planted. He climbed up on the root ball and looked at the crater. He crouched down and looked at the place where the trunk lay across the gravel, measuring it with his eyes. Then he walked back up to the porch where Mom and I were standing.
“It’s a big job, Mom,” he said. “It’s going to take a bigger saw than mine, and a lot of chain. I’ll have to hire a man to help me.” He scratched his neck. “Eight hundred. Cash up front for gas, chains, and a helper.”
Mom didn’t hesitate. She went into the kitchen and came back with the coffee can.
It’s an old red Folgers can she keeps on the top shelf of the pantry, behind the flour. She’s kept cash in it since before I was born. Dad used to call it the bank of Nadine. She pulled out the plastic lid and counted out eight hundred-dollar bills on the porch railing, slowly, smoothing each one flat with her thumb, and handed them to her son.
“Thank you, honey,” she said. “When can you come?”
“Saturday,” Dwight said. He folded the money and put it in his shirt pocket. “First thing Saturday. I’ll be here at seven.”
Saturday came and went.
Mom called me at nine that Saturday morning and asked if I’d heard from Dwight. She called again at eleven. At two, she called and said she’d made a pot roast for when he came, and she guessed she’d put it in the refrigerator.
Then the next one. And the week in between. Mom called him four times. He answered once, on the Wednesday, and said he’d been held up but he’d be there Saturday for sure. The next Saturday, he didn’t come either, and when Mom called, it went to voicemail.
I want to be fair to my brother. His own machine shed lost its roof that same storm. The wind peeled the whole sheet metal top off and dropped it in his soybean field, and everything inside was soaked, his tractor and his planter and two hundred bales of hay he’d put up in May. I know that set him back. I knew it was eating at him. I drove past his place twice and saw blue tarps stretched over the shed, flapping in the wind.
But Mom’s heart doctor in Columbia was on Thursday of the third week. She has a leaky valve and an irregular heartbeat, and she’d been waiting four months for that appointment with a cardiologist at the university hospital, to see whether she needed a procedure. A promise does not get a seventy-nine-year-old woman past a trunk four feet thick. And if her heart acted up in the middle of the night, an ambulance would have had to stop at the road, and the paramedics would have had to carry her a quarter mile down a lane full of fallen limbs.
