LITMIR.BIZ

Chapter One

       The Stump

      It was just a stump now, but once it had been a grand and glorious tree that soared far above the ground with great branches that spread like a protective umbrella over its part of the world. Its thick canopy had given protection from the elements to both man and beast for a long, long time.

      The very thing that killed it was the force from which it had once given protection to others. On a stormy day when the wind roared and the rain lashed, a jagged bolt of lightning raced from the clouds, struck the great tree, and shattered the life out of it all the way down to the tips of its roots deep beneath the surface of the earth.

      I missed that old tree, and also the nuts the squirrels and I had collected from it. They were hard to crack and the meat inside was minuscule, but sweet and tasty. After I had cracked the nut, I used the curved end of one of my momma’s hairpins to pick out the meat. It had been a black walnut tree.

      After the tree had been dead for awhile, sometimes during a full moon I would gaze out the window and marvel at the amazing display of shadow and light the moonshine played upon its bare, silver branches.

      Then one day my father and some other men came in a big log truck with chains, ropes, axes, and a crosscut saw, and with two mules tied behind.

      The men cut the dead tree down. It crashed to the ground with a thunderous roar and its dead branches shattered and exploded into the air.

      They used the mules to load that giant tree trunk on the truck. I heard one of the men say they were going to take it to a sawmill, that black walnut was very valuable wood. I wondered where they were taking the old tree. There had been a sawmill about a mile from our house, but it had closed back in the late summer.

      The men cut up all the branches, and my two older brothers, Ned and Fred, stacked them to be used as firewood. That was a good thing because winter was coming and we would be burning a lot of wood soon.

      I had loved that tree, but now it was gone with only its stump left like a tombstone that shone in the moonlight, to remind the world it had lived long and served a purpose in the world.

      I hung out around that stump a lot, and that’s where I was on Saturday afternoon when I heard Fred approaching from toward the house.

      “Hey, boy, what you doing?” he called out.

      “Cracking nuts,” I replied.

      “What kind of nuts? There ain’t no more walnuts out here.”

      “I picked up some hickory nuts while I was squirrel hunting with Ned this morning.”

      “What for? There’s even less meat in a hickory nut than in a black walnut. You wasting your time, unless you are a squirrel.”

      “Nothing better to do.”

      “Wanna bet?” my brother said.

      I paused from digging around inside that nut with my hairpin and looked up at him. I knew my brother, and I could tell from the look on his face that something was up. He was good at making up games and building toys. We had toy log trucks and bows and arrows he had made, but we had grown tired of both. Now, he had something new he was hiding behind his back.

      It was getting dark before we left the stump. We had sat around it for hours playing checkers on a checkerboard my brother had made from a piece of cardboard he had cut from the side of a box that apples had been shipped in. On the outside was a picture of a big red apple, but on the plain inside he had used his ruler and a pencil to draw off the sixty-four squares of a checkerboard, after which he had colored every other square black or red with some stubby crayons.

      The

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