The Receipt on the Feed Store Board

“Forty dollars,” Dale said. “An afternoon.”

He said it with his hand resting on the splitter, the way a man rests his hand on a thing that belongs to him.

It did not belong to him. It was a red twenty-seven ton splitter with a Honda engine, and my husband had bought it at Fleet Farm six years ago for fourteen hundred dollars, and had made the last payment on it with money from selling firewood to the cabin people. Jim’s handwriting was on the hydraulic tank in white paint marker. I could see it from where I stood in the door of Dale’s shed.

“Forty dollars,” I said.

“Rental place in Rhinelander gets ninety a day,” Dale said. “And you’d have to drive for it. Forty’s a family price.”

He was grinning a little. Not a mean grin, exactly. It was the grin of a man who has rehearsed a thing in the truck and is relieved at how it came out.

It was a Saturday in the middle of October, gray, about forty-five degrees, the kind of day in the north woods when you can smell snow that is still two weeks off. My son was sitting in the pickup in Dale’s yard with the heater running. He was sixteen. He had his father’s shoulders and, that fall, none of his father’s patience, and I had told him to stay in the truck for exactly that reason.

I should say how the splitter came to be in Dale’s shed at all.

Jim died in April. He was forty-eight years old. He was lacing his boots at the kitchen table at ten minutes to five in the morning, getting ready to go sit in a log truck he could not drive anywhere, because the spring road bans were still on, and he put his hand flat on the table and said, “Beck,” and that was all he said. The doctor told me later it was his heart and that there was nothing I could have done with the four minutes I had. I have decided to believe him.

The week of the funeral, Dale came over with his truck. He was Jim’s older brother by three years. He lived half a mile down Otter Creek Road from us, by himself, and did mechanic work out of the pole shed behind his house. “I’m going to take the splitter down to my place,” he said. “For safekeeping. You’re gone on that truck all day and the boy’s at school. Somebody’d have that hooked up and gone in two minutes.”

I said thank you. I would have said thank you to anybody that week.

Then it was summer, and I did not think about firewood. I drive a propane truck for the co-op, a bobtail, three thousand gallons, and I took every hour of overtime they would give me, because a widow’s arithmetic is not complicated. There is one check now. That is all the arithmetic there is.

By the first of October I was thinking about firewood.

People think it is funny that the woman who brings their propane heats her own house with wood. It is not that funny. I know what propane costs better than anybody on my route. We have a furnace, and we have a wood stove in the front room that Jim put in the year Cole was born, and the stove is what we live on.