Splitting Wood

I have heard that there are many types of therapy when going through a divorce. Hacking on this wood seems to work for me. I’ve heard that another type of therapy is to take a vacation and observe beautiful things, like clear streams or big mountains, or Pacific blue water, or something of that nature. Although the water in front of me is cloudy and far from paradise, like I mentioned, splitting this wood does the job just fine.

The water in the pond is thick with jumble and dirtier than it was the last time I was here. Despite my distress due to the size of this pile of cut maple to be split, I know that dinner time should be coming up soon.

The old turtle I often see got scared out from under one of the logs and crawled to the pond and plumped in the water. Every hack that splits down the grooves of the wood creates hollow echoes that travel without end.

I’ve been visiting this pond just a mile south from Pap’s house throughout most of my life. Maples and a few Sycamores and American Elms round the pond’s border, and some are still growing so the water gets a bit darker every year. The ancient oak that’s been dead for some time still towers on the west side next to shore; its fallen sticks are cluttered in the water a little thicker every time that I visit.

The turtle’s head pokes out the water and is camouflaged in a hodgepodge of sticks and damp leaves; it’s slipping through the nitty-gritty of the oak’s fallen mess, and it’s creating a clear wake that’s closing behind.

*

I look forward to the aroma of Columbia-born coffee beans whenever I visit Pap’s house near year’s end. There’s a fragrance to his coffee that I somehow smell when I’m thousands of miles away. The smell inside the coffee shop that I go to back home in Phoenix doesn’t compare in quality to the incense in Pap’s kitchen.

He grinds his beans with an antique, and his silver filter has metal grazed holes that are too big for the ground-up grains. So every cup I sip, I prepare for the last drink to be strong and somewhat crunchy with bottom bound grounds. The strength gets sweetened with a spoon-full of sugar that I never stir in. I let the sugar sit at the bottom of the old pottered cup that I’ve used since I was a boy.

When I was ten years old with a full stomach of stew, I had a hot thermos in hand while Pap propped me up on the wheel guard of his ’53 Ford tractor with a trailer hitched on back. Before we rolled off, he turned his head over his shoulder to make sure I was holding on tight.

We rode down the trail to the pond to split timber – prepare for the cold winter that was impending ahead. Back then, the trail wasn’t worn down as it is now; we’d drive over the felled trees, which we would soon split to be burned in the woodstove.

It was a bouncy ride. With the thermos in one hand, I’d hold on for my life with the other. The tractor’s massive back wheel spun under my butt, and Pap would turn over his shoulder and yell above the puffy engine, “Hold on to that coffee, son!” I bounced around without a wonder why I was risking my life for a thermos full of coffee.

He didn’t slow down when we rode over trees; he’d hammer the throttle and force the old engine to give us all she had. He bounced in his seat with both hands on the steering wheel while I held on to something, anything, with my one free hand while my eyes were pasted on the spinning tracks of the tire beneath me.

“Son, take a duck,” he’d yell, which naturally made me want to look up, which led to smacks in the face by hanging twigs and damp, fragile leaves. He’d laugh, and I couldn’t help but do the same in nervous tone when his mustache shifted to a smiley face while his body bounced in the sprung-up seat.

“I said duck, not raise your head!” He was calm and never seemed to have fear for my danger. There was always some kind of confidence he had in me I myself could never seem to find.

The overcast that day sprayed a cold drizzle from the sky, just like today. There is a combination of sweat from swinging this axe and water from the spraying mist running down my face as I split this wood. I’ve hacked away at about twenty logs now, and Pap should be coming down the path any time. I’m hungry and he said he’d pick me up with his tractor when the stew finished simmering, which could be hours from now depending on how the batch is evolving.

I mentioned that the stew smelled done hours ago but he knew that it wasn’t close. Stew is all he cooks and just about all he eats. He makes big batches, enough to fill dozens of canned jars to stack in the basement so he can eat his two meals a day until he runs out. So it’s a big deal when he cooks it.

It’s good stew. He adds fresh-picked veggies from the garden outside the house and venison from the previous fall. It all gets strategically placed into a few large metal pots at precisely the right time. After years of calculation, he knows when to put each veggie in so it finishes with his preferred texture and taste.

Gilly, who lives down the road, provides the venison. He usually kills a deer, tags it and cuts it up himself and packs it in my father’s full-size freezer. They have been doing a meat-for-veggie trade for years. They also help one another out with house chores and maintenance and things of that nature.

Ever since Pap’s red barn was built a few years ago, his house appears to be more worn down. The white paint has been getting crustier, and the large screen on the front porch has wrinkled and wearied. The old wooden swing on the porch that he made still hangs mid-air on rusted chains near the north wall.

There is plenty of warmth inside of his house throughout every long winter. His woodstove furnaces the inside and makes the dining room feel almost like a sauna. The reason I’m doing what I’m doing right now is to get his house kicking with heat for the upcoming winter. Hours of hard labor splitting wood needs to be done every fall, and it has always been worth it. He saves thousands on his gas bills after all, and I don’t mind helping out, especially with him getting older. It’s good exercise, and because I’ve been doing this since I was ten, I’ve gotten pretty quick with the axe in the past twenty years.

*

While Gilly and I sat at the dining room table when I was ten, I remember my stomach making funky sounds while Pap ran like a loon around the kitchen stirring and spicing his big batch of bouillon.

“Growing like a tree, kid.” Gilly was always energetic, somewhat loud, and I enjoyed his company because he didn’t talk to me like I was a kid. “What the hell’s your mom feeding you out there in Idaho? Must be all them potatas.”

I rarely responded to him. I didn’t have to with Gilly. I sat across the table while I sipped my coffee, stared and listened.

Gilly was a fat man, and from what I remember, every feature on his body was round. Even features you wouldn’t think of being round, his ears even, and his hands and feet, legs and arms – and his mouth formed into a perfect circle when he’d opened up to talk.

“Gary, what the hell’s Cathy feeding your kid?” Pap probably heard Gilly shout into the kitchen but he didn’t respond.

I shrugged and rolled my eyes and sipped my coffee while tapping my fingers on the table waiting for my stomach to get fed. Gilly sat back in his chair and continued his conversation with me. It didn't matter whether I was listening or not.

“Your dad said you two are going out to the pond to chop some wood when you get done eatin. You’re going to get stronger yet!”

*

I probably have about thirty logs split in fours and fives. I hear the tractor’s engine buzzing in the distance, and it’s a good thing because I’m so hungry and worn out I was about ready to chuck the axe into the ground.

Pap’s shaded silhouette riding the tractor my way down the straight path could make for a nice Kodak. To my surprise, he recently took up in cowboy hats and pipe smoking, a new phase of his. A cloud of smoke crawls out from the curve of his hat. If his tractor was a horse, he’d look like he was straight out of a Western.

Getting closer, now I can tell that he’s in third gear at the most, and has the throttle propped to just a quarter speed. Maybe it’s that he’s getting older, or just likes to take his time these days. The engine sputters as he clicks into Neutral.

“Get a lot done?” He’s not climbing down from his seat which I assume means it’s time to go to the house and eat stew.

“Nah, kept pretty busy.”

“Still work needs to be done though.”

“Yeah of course.”

His pinky finger scratches the inside of one of his nostrils as he grins. “Finished the batch up.”

“Yeah? How’d it turn?”

He lifts his butt from the seat to scratch his lower back. “Good I suppose. C’mon, hop on the horsy.”

“You gonna kill me?”

“Nah,” he smiles. “We’ll cruise her back.”

*

When we were riding toward the pond through the roughed up trail when I was ten, Pap still had the tractor at full speed while I still bounced around, scared for my life. He was in the middle of a midlife crisis. He said he was on the “divorce diet” and had never felt better. He was thin, and apparently felt damn good. Some might have thought he’d gone crazy, but it was just serious vigor that overcame him.

When we got to the pond, he jumped off the tractor and grabbed an axe and began to chop the logs without holding a pause between swings. His strokes fell into a rhythm; the sound waves from his hacks flowed off into echoes that ran in all four directions through the deep brown woods.

“What are you standing there for? Look at all this wood.” He didn’t miss a beat as he glanced at me standing with the shaft in my hand.

“I was wondering if I could ask you about something," I said. His blade split the grooves in the wood for a perfect cut every time. “About the divorce and all that . . .”

He quit chopping and after about ten seconds of stillness, a wood pecker got busy on a nearby tree and broke the silence.

“What can I say? It happens. Just the way it is.”

*

The first spoon-full of stew burned my tongue and killed the taste buds in my mouth. I was too hungry and couldn’t wait for it to cool down. But I just assumed it was good as always and inhaled the nearly overflowed bowl.

Here in the dining room, beads of sweat are lining down my forehead as I sip some coffee and light a cigarette up for the first time in this house. Pap’s in the kitchen finishing his bowl of stew. He waited for his to cool down.

“Better not make a habit smoking in my house. Just a one time deal.” He’s rinsing his bowl at the kitchen sink.

“Nah, I won’t. It’s too cold to go outside.”

“Not that cold yet.” He stuffs a pinch of black snuff in the left corner of his lip while walking through the doorway toward me in this hot dining room. “Yeah, you’ll be gone soon I suppose. The smoke will clear out.”

A few quiet minutes passed after he sat across the table from me, and the snaps from the burning wood in the stove seem to be taking over the room.

“Nah . . . didn’t quit smoking yet.” The sudden impulse to interrupt the silence just overcame me as I exhale the final hit of this non-filtered cigarette. “Kel is leaving me by the way.”

“Oh yeah?” He spit in a bottle after a few more minutes had gone by, and then took a drink of his coffee.

“Yeah, I’m too self-centered I guess. Have communication problems, too.” I can feel the ground coffee beans pasted on my gums and teeth as I take the last drink. “According to her. . .” My voice cracked and I lost my air, as if I had just slammed a double shot of whiskey.

“Well I could’ve told you that.” Pap’s laugh is stiff. The silence is awkward and it floats in the dull air for what seems to be a second at a time.

The wood in the stove cracks. Pap coughs and clears his throat not because he needs to clear his throat, but more so that he needs to break the silence. He screeches his chair across the wooden floor, out from the table, and stands and walks off, scratching his butt as he paces towards the kitchen. “Yeah, so, what’d you think of the stew?” He broke the silence again, this time with dependency to hear a compliment from his son.

The fire needs more wood and there are just two dry logs left. My eyes squint in reaction to the heat while I set the logs on top of the coals. “I’m sure it was good, but I couldn’t taste it.”