The Wood I Ricked Against Her Porch

“Grandma, I want you to let me call the sheriff.”

“No,” she said. Fast. Before I even had it all the way out.

“He stole from you. That is theft, plain. That is your timber and your money and he left you to freeze.”

“He is my grandson.” She said it like it ended the argument, because to her it did. “I will not have the law out here hauling off Donna’s boy in front of the whole county. His mother is in the ground, Renae. She cannot answer for him. So I won’t send him to jail over firewood. I won’t do it and I don’t want to hear it again.”

“Then he gets away with it.”

“Then he gets away with it,” she said. “I have been poor and warm and I have been poor and cold, and I would rather be cold than be the woman who put her own grandbaby in a cell. You can be mad at me. I’m too old to care.”

She meant it. I knew her well enough to know when a door was shut, and that door was shut and bolted.

So I did not call the sheriff. I did something else instead.

The First Saturday

The first Saturday we came at seven in the morning with the frost still white on the grass and the chainsaw and the splitter in the back of Denny’s truck.

We did not say a word to Dale. We did not call him and tell him off. I had thought about it the whole week, lying awake, composing the speech, and somewhere in there I had figured out that the speech would feel good for about four minutes and then Grandma would still be cold.

So we skipped the speech. We went to the woods.

The back forty on that place is good hardwood, white oak and red oak and a stand of hickory along the draw, and some of it Grandpa planted and a lot of it God planted, and it has been cut sustainable for sixty years, a few trees a season, so that it never thins out. Dale had been in there with a saw and you could see where. He had taken the easy ones, the big straight oaks near the landing where he could back the truck right up, and he had left the tops lying where they fell, which is a waste and a fire hazard both, and he had not touched the deadfall at all because deadfall is work.

Denny looked at the mess of tops a long time.

“He left a winter of wood lying right here,” Denny said. “In the tops alone.”

“That’s Dale.”

“No,” Denny said. “That’s lazy. Dale cut the trunks because a trunk’s one cut and a load. These tops are ten cuts for the same wood. He didn’t want to work for it.”