The Receipt on the Feed Store Board

Mrs. Hartmann’s house is a small white one with green shutters and a porch across the front. There was one lamp on in the front room. There was a path worn in the grass from her door to the mailbox and no other path at all.

I knocked. It took her a while. She came to the door with her cane in one hand and a cardigan buttoned over another cardigan, and when she opened the inside door the air that came out of that house was no warmer than the porch.

She looked at me. She looked past me at the truck with its headlights on and the oak heaped in the bed, and at Cole already dropping the tailgate.

“Oh,” she said.

That was all, at first. Just “Oh,” very small, with her hand coming up to the collar of her sweater.

“It’s late this year,” I said. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Hartmann. I should have been here two weeks ago.”

“Rebecca.” She has never once called me Becky. “I did not think anyone was coming.”

“I know.”

“I would not have asked you. I want you to know that. I said to myself, Ilse, that girl has buried her husband, and you will buy your wood like everyone else. But the man in town wants a hundred and ten dollars a cord, and I thought I would wait and see how cold it got.”

“How cold has it gotten?”

“I have been keeping the propane at fifty-eight,” she said, with great dignity. “It is perfectly adequate with a sweater.”

I am the one who fills her tank. I had been wondering for three weeks why she was not burning any.

“Well, we’re going to stack this, and then Cole’s going to lay you a fire,” I said, “and then you can turn that thermostat down as far as you like.”

She stood in her doorway with the storm door propped on her hip and watched us carry every stick. Cole stacked it on the porch the way Jim always had, bark side up, tight to the wall under the window, with the kindling splits on the end nearest the door so she would not have to reach.

When he was done he carried an armload inside and knelt at her stove. She stood over him and told him how to do it, and he let her.

When it caught, she put her hand on top of his head. He is six feet tall, but he was kneeling, and she could reach.

“You stack like your father,” she said. “He stacked crooked in the fourth grade, too. I never could break him of it. It always held.”

Cole did not look up. He nodded at the stove door for a while.

On the porch, going out, she took hold of my sleeve.

“Eleven years he brought it,” she said. “I made him a pie every time, and every time he said, ‘Mrs. Hartmann, you didn’t have to do that,’ and then ate half of it standing in my kitchen. I have not got a pie tonight, Rebecca.”

“You don’t owe me a pie.”

“I owe somebody one,” she said. “I will work out who.”

Sunday after church we loaded the second cord and took it to Donna Peterson, who tried to give Cole a twenty, which he would not take. We took the third to Marlene Olson and carried it all the way into her back entry, a wheelbarrow at a time, so she would only have ten feet to go with her hip. Marlene had a pie already made. She said she had made one every Sunday in October, just in case, and had been eating them herself.