Who Left the Firewood at My Door
“I need to say something,” Jeff said. “I’m sorry if it was too much. I thought maybe it was an insult, a man you didn’t know leaving things on your porch. But Kait had the idea of the thermos, and the first time you left one out, we didn’t know what to do.”
“You rinsed it.”
“Mom always said, you give back a dish cleaner than you got it.”
I asked about his family then, because it seemed to me I ought to know them. Bernadette, his wife, worked in the billing office at the hospital in the county seat. Kaitlyn was ten, in fourth grade. Cathy had died three years ago last March, cancer, at the same care center where she’d worked nights.
“Mom was never sure who the wood came from,” Jeff said, “and she was always sure. She told the nurses about it, right to the end. She said there’s people who do a kind thing and never let you hand them a thank-you. And she said if you ever get the chance, you do the same.”
“Well,” I said, “you did.”
“I tried.”
“Kait ties the Saturday bundles,” he added. “I showed her the knot the first week. It’s the one I worked out at twelve, looking at his bundles. I kept a piece of that twine in my dresser for twenty years. I taught it to my own girl, and we’ve been doing it for you since November.”
“It’s Ray’s knot,” I said.
“It’s Mr. Oakes’s,” said Kaitlyn again, patiently.
Here is what I did not do. I did not give Jeff a check. He wouldn’t have taken it, and I’d have insulted him by offering, and I was already learning. I did not ask him to stop. When I said something about it, as gently as I could, he looked me right in the eye.
“Mrs. Oakes, with respect, I can’t,” he said. “I’ve been twenty years behind on this. I’m just starting.”
“But, Jeff, it’s been three months. The winter’s nearly gone.”
“Then let me finish out the winter,” he said. “And let me split Ray’s rounds first thing when the ground thaws.”
So we came to terms, which is how people in Iowa settle things. He would bring wood through March and not a stick over, and I would not argue about it. He would split Ray’s pile on the first warm Saturday, with Kaitlyn stacking, and I would feed them dinner. I would not put out any more thermoses unless it was twenty below. And he’d call me Marian, and I’d call him Jeff, and Kaitlyn would call me whatever she liked.
“Mrs. Marian,” Kaitlyn said, deciding it on the spot.
We shook on it across my kitchen table, a big callused hand around mine.
He stood in the back doorway to go, with the light coming bright off the snow behind him, and he stopped.
“Can I ask you something?”
“Of course.”
“Would you do the knot for me? Just once. I’d like to see it done by somebody he taught. I’ve only ever watched my own hands.”
I took a bundle of kindling from the stack and a length of orange twine off his truck seat. And in the doorway of my husband’s house, in my robe and Ray’s old coat, I tied the double half-hitch with the little tuck in it, and Kaitlyn watched me with her whole face. I pulled the loose end, and it came apart. I tied it again.