The Wood I Ricked Against Her Porch

Two winters. We did that on purpose. I wanted a year where nobody, not Dale, not anybody, could leave her cold, and then a second year behind it as a cushion, so that if I got sick or Denny’s back went out or the truck died, Grandma Opal would still be warm clear through to the spring of the year after next.

The money Dale made selling her wood, I figured that too, lying awake. If he moved even eight cord at town prices he cleared close to two thousand dollars off his grandmother’s timber. I never got the exact number and I never will, because Grandma would not let me ask him and I was not going to call him myself. But two thousand dollars, near enough.

Here is what I came to understand about that two thousand dollars, and it took me the whole fall to understand it. Dale got the money. We got the porch full of wood and the nine neighbors and the Hadley sisters’ dinners and Carl paying back a dead man and Pastor Dean with sawdust on his good trousers. Dale came out two thousand dollars ahead and poorer than I have ever seen a man be.

First Hard Frost

The first hard frost came the second week of November, the kind that kills the garden for good and puts an inch of ice on the stock tank.

I drove out that morning to check on Grandma before work, and I came up the drive and I saw it before I was out of the truck.

Smoke. Real smoke, a good gray column of it standing up straight out of her chimney in the still cold air, the smoke of a stove with a real fire in it and the damper open.

I went in and the house hit me like a wall. Warm. Not fifty-eight. Warm the way that house used to be warm when I was a girl, warm enough that you took your coat off inside, warm enough that the cat was stretched out on the floor in front of the stove on her back with her feet in the air.

Grandma was at the kitchen table without her gloves on. Without the quilt. In a housedress, like it was summer.

“You’ve got it cranking,” I said.

“I opened the damper,” she said, and she said it a little defiant, a little proud, like a woman confessing to a small sin she had decided to enjoy. “I have got more wood than I know what to do with. A body would be a fool to sit here cold next to six cord of oak. So I opened it up.”

“Good,” I said.

“I had forgot,” she said, and here her voice did a thing. “I had forgot what it was to just be warm. Not watching the wood box. Not figuring can I make it to March. Just warm.” She put her bare old hand flat on the table. “I was rationing heat like we did in the war, Renae, and I am eighty-one years old and I have got no business being cold in a house full of wood, and I had just, I had got used to it. You get used to anything if you have to.”

I did not say anything. I did not trust my voice.

“Don’t you cry,” she said. “If you cry I’ll cry, and I’ve got a pie to make.”