At not quite the center is a tulipwood, too thin to survive for long. Many of them died a year ago in the drought—they’re on the land, dead standing—but this one reaches into a large pine’s branches with new leaves. Yesterday I took firewood from the bed of the truck and set stick atop stick against two sides of the tulipwood’s trunk to make a stack as tall as me.
The pieces fell, and afterward I saw my body in front tripping before the falling wood until covered. A phantom ache like the one I’ve had since last spring when I set a wood plate full of sunflower heads, cut from the stalk and dried, on the ground. I worked the seeds out, flung them in the backyard, hoping some would root. But when I picked up the empty plate, there was a timber rattler underneath folded on itself.
All sorts of ways that could’ve gone wrong, my neighbor said when I told him the story. All I had seen when I set the plate down was leaf and rock on dirt. Those brown, gray markings were tattoos of scale and skin. The rattler was young and too groggy to strike, but I thought of the flick of the wide head at my ankle all summer and winter. Left an ache where there was none to have.
When the stack of firewood fell because I wanted it tall as me, because I needed it that tall to hold all the wood I’d cut and gathered from my neighbor’s lot, I was lucky to be setting a corner and not working along the front. I picked the sticks up, rebuilt the stack. It fell again. What’s that they say about doing the same thing over and over?
So I slowed down and tried to leave fewer gaps between the firewood so they wouldn’t come loose. Tried to make the stack more level by examining each end, placing the big and the small where they fit best until the wood jutted north and south for twenty feet—how perfectly straight the stack had looked when I put it together. I shook the top. The whole thing wobbled.
But last night in a burst of wind that brought on a thunderstorm, a straight liner the weathermen talk of with pauses of warning stuck in their throats, when the line came to us, the stack held. Even with the tulipwood’s new leaves swaying the pine branches above and the belly of the stack below, all the pieces I had cut from red oak rounds dead, split, tossed into the bed of my truck, carried home, unloaded, placed, watched fall and replaced, watched fall and lifted into place until I was breathless, they held.
What to tell you of that work now other than my back doesn’t want to forgive me. My fingers, my wrists, and belly are scratched and sore. All night there were leg cramps to unknot. People tell me, there’s easier ways to heat the cabin than by firewood. No matter what I’m doing, they tell me there’s easier ways, but that kind of ease leaves me empty, always has.
Last spring the rattler woke, didn’t bother to coil up, just headed out. I went for a shovel because of Tina, the dog, the cat. Can’t have a poisonous snake on the land, which was something taught to me growing up in south Georgia. One of the first fears put in me though fear has never left me in a good place—I didn’t like taking that rattler’s life. It had slept under the lightness of the wood plate, and then hurried through the huckleberry that keeps this part of our ridge from washing, hurried from a trespass that wasn’t a trespass at all.
Last night when the straight line wind come on, the tulipwood swung about, which in turn moved the wood pieces along the trunk, which in turn moved the whole stack slightly, a kind of breathing. At least, that’s what I imagined, all I had cut into rounds, split and thought dead, wasn’t. Then the rain and the lightning come on us until out of the whirling blue, one blue strike dove for the iron in the earth it wanted, and I held my breath for the thunder to travel the heart of the ridge up into the loft where we had been asleep.