The Cold Kitchen
The thermostat on Grandma Opal’s woodstove read two hundred and ten degrees, and that was with the damper choked down so far the fire was more smoke than flame.
I stood in her kitchen in my coat. Inside her house. In October.
“Sit down, Renae,” she said. “You’re letting the warm out, standing there like that.”
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There was no warm to let out. That was the thing. The stove in the front room was ticking the way a stove ticks when somebody has starved it, and the kitchen where we sat might have been fifty-eight degrees if it was a day.
She had a quilt over her knees and fingerless gloves on her hands, the kind she used to wear to snap beans so her fingers could still work. She was eighty-one years old and she was wearing them to sit at her own table.
“You’re cold,” I said.
“I’m fine. I’ve got the stove.”
I looked at the stove. Then I looked at the wood box beside it, and the wood box had maybe six splits in it, and they were small, the kind of thin stuff you burn when you are trying to make a little last a long time.
I had grown up in that house half the summers of my life. I knew what the wood box looked like in October. It looked full. It looked like a wall of oak you could not see the back of, because Grandpa, when he was alive, and then my dad, and then all of us, cut off the family timber ground every fall and the whole point of a farm with forty acres of hardwood on it was that nobody in this family was ever cold.
“Grandma,” I said. “Where’s your wood?”
She picked at the edge of the quilt.
“I’ve got enough to get by,” she said. “I don’t need the place hot as an oven. At my age you move slow, you don’t need all that heat.”
“That is not what I asked you.”
She looked at me then, and there was something in her face I had not seen before, something that was partly shame and partly the stubborn thing that had kept her alive through sixty Ozark winters, and she said, “Dale handled the wood this year.”
And I felt the whole thing turn over in my stomach before she even finished saying it.