The Wood I Ricked Against Her Porch

Travis, Carl’s boy, worked harder than any two of us. He was nineteen and he did not understand yet that you pace yourself on a wood day, so he threw himself at the splitting block like it had said something about his mother, and by noon he had a blister the size of a quarter on his palm and he would not quit.

“Son,” Carl told him, “you keep that up you’ll be no good to anybody by two o’clock.”

“I’m fine,” Travis said, which is what nineteen says.

He was not fine, but he did not quit, and I loved him a little for it. When the Hadley sisters called dinner he ate like a field hand and then he went right back out, and I thought, there is the whole thing right there, the old man teaching the young one how to pace, and neither of them being paid a dime, and both of them out here on a Saturday because an old woman they were not even kin to had been left cold.

That is the thing about a wood day. You cannot fake it. Money can buy a cord delivered and dumped in your yard, but it cannot buy nine people on a cold Saturday, and it cannot buy the way a rick looks when neighbors built it, every split set by a hand that meant it.

The Rick Grows Long

By the first week of November the rick against Grandma’s porch had become a thing people slowed down to look at.

It ran the whole length of the porch, forty feet of it, and it was five feet high, and it was tight and square the way a good rick is, split sides out so the air moves through and the rain runs off, and we had put a strip of old tin over the top of it to shed the weather. There was white oak and red oak and hickory in it and a good bit of that two-year deadfall that would burn the coldest January night without a complaint.

I did the figuring one evening, standing back and looking at it. A rick in our part of the country is a face cord, four foot high and eight foot long and however deep your splits are, call it sixteen inches, and three of those make a full cord. What was stacked against that porch and in the woodshed behind it came to better than six full cord.

Six cord is two winters for a woman who keeps a small house and a single stove, even a woman who stops rationing and lets herself be warm.