Denny fired up the saw. I want to say the right thing about the saw, because Denny is particular. It was Grandpa’s old Stihl, the 029, and Denny had rebuilt the carburetor on it two winters back and it ran like new, and he ran it the way you are supposed to, chaps on, ear protection on, the dogs of the saw bit into the wood and not fighting it. He cut and I hauled, dragging the rounds to the splitter, and the splitter was an old twenty-two-ton we had bought used, gas engine, and it banged those oak rounds apart like they were nothing.
By noon we had a trailer load. By dark we had split and hauled four loads up to the house, and we ricked the first of it against the porch where Grandma could reach it from the steps without going out in the weather.
Grandma watched from the window most of the day. Along about two she came out with coffee for us in a thermos, and she stood there in her sweater holding the cups, and she did not say anything for a while. Then she said, “You don’t have to do this.”
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“I know it,” I said.
“It’s a lot of wood.”
“It’s your wood, Grandma. It always was.”
She was quiet, watching Denny set the saw down and stretch his back. The light was already going long and gold the way it does in the hills in late October, and the smell of fresh-cut oak was everywhere, that sweet green smell that gets in your clothes.
“Your grandpa used to cut right there,” she said, and pointed at the stand of oak along the fence. “He’d be out there of a morning before I had the coffee made, and I’d hear that saw start up and I’d know where he was by the sound of it.” She wrapped her hands around her own cup. “I have not heard a saw on this place in a long time, Renae. I didn’t know how much I missed it till just now.”
I put my arm around her. She is a small woman and she has gotten smaller, and under the sweater she felt like a bird.
“You’ll hear it every Saturday till the wood’s in,” I said. “You’re stuck with us.”
“I can think of worse things to be stuck with,” she said, and went back in out of the cold.