The Wood I Ricked Against Her Porch

Denny And The Saw

I need to tell you about the second Saturday and the splitting block, because that is where Denny earned something I did not know could be earned.

We had gotten into a rhythm. Denny ran the saw all morning and I bucked and hauled, and after lunch we both split, him on the maul for the stuff the splitter did not need and me running the hydraulic, and we would rick until the light went.

The splitting block was a big round of white oak, two foot across, that Grandpa had set by the woodshed forty years ago and that had sat there so long it had grown into the ground a little. You split on top of it so your maul does not bury in the dirt. Every farm has one and they last a generation.

Denny was splitting hickory on it, the straight-grained stuff that pops open clean if you read the grain, and he was good at it, he did not swing like a man killing snakes, he swung easy and let the maul do the work, and the hickory came apart white and sweet-smelling and we stacked it to the side because hickory is too good to burn common, you save it for the cold snaps.

A truck came up the drive about three o’clock.

It was Dale.

He got out and stood by his truck with his hands in his pockets and he looked at the rick against the porch, which by then was maybe eight feet long and shoulder high and growing, and he looked at us, and I watched him do the math behind his eyes. The math of a man who had sold the easy wood and was now looking at the easy wood being replaced for free by his sister, which meant nobody could say he had left Grandma cold, because look, there was wood, plenty of wood.

“Hey,” Dale said. “Looks good. I was gonna get back out here, I’ve just been slammed.”

Denny set the maul down on the block. He did not raise his voice. Denny has never raised his voice in the eleven years I have known him.

“You know where the tops are,” Denny said. “Back forty, by the landing. You left about four cord lying in them. Saw’s in the truck if you want to help.”

Dale looked at the saw. Dale looked at the tops he would have to buck, ten cuts for one load, the work he had walked away from in August.

“I got a thing in town,” Dale said.

“Figured,” Denny said, and picked the maul back up, and that was the whole conversation, and it was worse for Dale than any speech I would have given, because Denny had offered him the one thing that would have made it right, the work, and Dale had turned it down standing in front of his freezing grandmother’s house.

Dale got back in his truck. Before he pulled out he called through the window, “Tell Grandma I said hey,” and Grandma, who was at the window and had heard every word, did not wave.