What came out of that hollow was a steel ammunition box, the old Army surplus kind, rusted on the outside and bone dry on the inside. Painted on the lid, in faded white letters, were four words. Oak Tree Club, Private.
Inside were three pocketknives. A Boy Scout compass. A map of Spencer, hand drawn in pencil, with every creek and swimming hole marked and named. A photo of three boys sitting on the lowest branch of that same oak, grinning. And a sheet of notebook paper with a pact written on it.
We, the Oak Tree Club, swear to meet under this tree on June 1st, 2000. No matter what. Signed, Tommy Dale, Ricky Moss, Walter Sayre. August 1961.
I read it out loud to the couple. Their names were Sharon and Bill, and they had lived in that house for just six weeks. Sharon asked what happened to them.
It took Sharon two days on the phone with the county library. Tommy Dale died in Vietnam in 1968. He was nineteen. Ricky Moss moved to Texas and passed in 2011. Walter Sayre was still alive. Seventy seven. He lived in a care home in Charleston, about an hour away.
Sharon called the home and asked to speak to him.
His voice was thin but clear. When she told him what we found, he did not say anything for a long time. Then he said, the Oak Tree Club. And he started to laugh.
He told her the story. The three of them hid the box in a rotten hollow in the trunk the summer they were twelve. They filled it with cement because Ricky read somewhere that trees heal themselves around it. They made the pact because Tommy said the year 2000 sounded like the future.
Walter was the only one who came back on June 1st, 2000, and he sat under that tree alone for three hours before he gave up and drove home.
He said the house had new owners by then, and he never had the nerve to knock.
Sharon told him he did not need to knock anymore.
We did not drop all of that oak. The split top had to come down before it came through the roof. But Bill asked me to leave the bottom eight feet of the trunk standing, with the old hollow still in it. I cut it level and sanded the top smooth so you could sit on it.
Walter came out on a Sunday in June. His granddaughter drove him. He walked over with a cane and sat down on that stump like he had been waiting to do it for sixty years.
Sharon handed him the box. He opened it slowly. He picked up one of the pocketknives and turned it over in his hand. He said that one belonged to Tommy. Then he picked up the photo and held it for a long time and did not say anything.
Before he left, he put the box back in the hollow. He asked Bill to keep it there.
Bill planted a new oak sapling right next to the old trunk that fall. Walter picked the spot.
Twenty six years I have been dropping trees. That is the only one I ever left standing.