The Receipt on the Feed Store Board

Cole did not say anything until we were on the road.

“Did you just pay him?”

“I did.”

“For Dad’s splitter.”

“Yes.”

“Mom.” His voice cracked on it. “It’s ours. You just let him…”

“I didn’t let him do anything,” I said. “I rented a splitter for the afternoon and I have a receipt. Now we have about six hours of light and I want to know how much oak two people can split in six hours. Get your gloves.”

We backed the splitter up to the row of rounds a little after noon. I braided my hair back out of the way and put on my work gloves, and I checked the hydraulic oil and the engine oil, because Jim always did and because I did not know how it had been kept all summer. Both were full and clean. Dale is a lot of things, but he does not neglect a machine.

That was when Cole saw the tank.

He had crouched down to look for the fuel shutoff, and he stayed crouched. I came around to see what was keeping him.

Jim wrote on things. He wrote on the inside of the cupboard doors, on the furnace, on the fuse box. On the side of that hydraulic tank, in white paint marker, he had written the dates he changed the oil, a column of them going back six years in his square printing. And underneath the column, set apart, he had written one more line.

Cole. First cord. Age 11.

Cole put his glove on it. Just laid his hand there, flat, the way his father had put his hand on the kitchen table.

I did not say anything. There are times a mother should talk and times she should go pull the starter rope, and I went and pulled the starter rope. The Honda caught on the second pull, the way it always had.

When Cole stood up his eyes were red and his jaw had quit working. He rolled the first round over to the beam and said, “You run the lever. I’ll feed.”

“We’ll trade off,” I said. “Every hour.”

You set a round on the beam against the foot plate. You pull the lever and the ram pushes it into the wedge, slow, with twenty-seven tons behind it, and the oak groans and then lets go with a crack you feel in your teeth. Red oak splits clean and straight. It smells sour when it opens, like vinegar, and that night you smell it in your hair.

One of us fed and ran the lever and the other pulled the split pieces away and stacked. You do not talk much, because of the engine. You just go.

By one-thirty we had the first face cord stacked in the bed of the truck, heaped and tight.

By half past two we had the second on the ground beside it and my shoulders were talking to me.

Around three o’clock I went into the lean-to to get the water jug, and I saw the wall.

I had seen it a hundred times. I had not looked at it since April. On the bare studs inside the lean-to, right by where the maul hung, Jim kept a list in carpenter’s pencil. He started it the first fall we lived there and he wrote over it every October to make it darker, so that it stood out black on the gray wood.

Mrs. Hartmann, one cord. Donna Peterson, one cord. Marlene Olson, one cord.