The Wood I Ricked Against Her Porch

The Neighbors Come

Word gets around in the hills whether you want it to or not.

I do not know who started it. It might have been Carl Reed from the next place over, who drove by on his way to the feed store and saw us out there two Saturdays running and figured it out, because Carl has known this family forty years and he can read a woodpile like a newspaper. A full rick against the porch in August means a family that takes care of its old folks. An empty wood box in October means something went wrong.

The third Saturday Carl showed up at eight in the morning with his own saw and his boy Travis, who is nineteen and built like a door, and Carl said, “Thought you could use a hand,” and that was all the explaining anybody did.

The fourth Saturday there were nine of us.

The Hadley sisters came, both widows, both in their seventies, and they did not cut or split but they ran the kitchen, and they fed us dinner at noon off Grandma’s stove, which somebody kept fed hot all day for the first time in who knows how long, and the smell of that kitchen with real heat in it and real food on it near made Grandma cry, I could see it working at her.

Pastor Dean came on the fifth Saturday in his old clothes and ran a splitter. A man named Ferris I had never met before showed up with a log arch, which is a two-wheeled rig you drag behind a four-wheeler that lifts the front of a log clean off the ground so one man can skid it out of the woods, and with that arch we moved the big stuff out of the draw that we never could have moved by hand, deadfall oak that had seasoned two years where it lay and burned like coal.

Nobody said Dale’s name. That is the heartland way, and I love it and it drives me half crazy both. Nobody stood in Grandma’s yard and said your grandson robbed you and we are here to fix it. They just came. They came with saws and trucks and dinner and a log arch, and they filled her porch with wood, and the fixing of it was the only sermon anybody preached.

Carl said one thing to me, the one thing, splitting beside me on a cold afternoon. He said, “Your grandpa gave me a load of this wood in nineteen seventy-one when I couldn’t afford to heat my own place. First winter me and Shirley were married.” He set a split on the rick. “So I’m not doing anything here but paying a man back, and he’s been dead twelve years, so this is as close as I can get.”