I worked it out, and I had to set the knife down, because it was a brass plate about the size of a playing card, and the engraving on it read: FROM THE BURR OAK AT THE HOME PLACE, MADISON ROAD — TAKEN DOWN MARCH 2024 — FOR JANET.
My tree.
There was a burr oak in the side yard of the farm I grew up on, big enough that three of us couldn’t reach around it, and there was a rope swing in it, and my father is buried about four hundred yards from it. We sold that place in 2009 when my mother went into care and I have not driven past it since, because I am a coward about certain things.
The people who bought it took that oak down in March of last year. It had rot in the crotch and a limb came down on their barn and there wasn’t any choice about it, and I did not know one thing about any of it.
Gene knew. He’d been driving past that place for years without telling me, the way he’d drive past and check on things.
In the gap under that plate was the rest of it, folded down small. A ticket from a portable sawmill outfit out of Sabina, dated the ninth of April, one log, burr oak, quarter-sawn, and a kiln receipt from June, and a note in the margin from the sawyer saying it was the prettiest oak he’d cut all year.
He asked those people for the log. A stranger’s yard, a man he’d never met, and he asked if he could have the trunk of a tree that had not been ours in sixteen years, and they gave it to him, and he hauled it to a sawmill and paid to have it cut and dried and then he made me a cutting board out of it.
His note was under the sawmill ticket.
Janet — there’s enough of that oak in the shop for a table someday if I get to it. The plate goes on the board once you’ve used it enough to earn the oil into it. That’s why I hid it. If I’d handed it to you with the plate on already, you’d have hung the thing on a wall and never cut on it, and a tree doesn’t want to be a picture. Use it hard, and one day it’ll give you something back. — G.
A tree doesn’t want to be a picture.
I leaned that board against the backsplash and let him see I was hurt over a miter saw and a piece of scrap. Two weeks later his heart went out in that shop and I could not reach him in time, and for eleven months I used every other board in the drawer and never his.
The oak is out there. Six slabs on the rack in his shop, stickered and stacked the way he’d have wanted, and our son-in-law says he can make the table if I’ll help him.
The plate is screwed into the end of that board now. I cut on it every day and it has a groove worn in it already, and the oil is going into it the way he said.