“Forty dollars,” said Dale. “For an afternoon.”
He said it with his hand resting on the divider. The way a man places his hand on something that belongs to him.
It didn’t belong to him.
It was a 27-ton red log splitter with a Honda engine. My husband bought it from Fleet Farm six years ago for 1400 dollars. He made the final payment with money from selling firewood to the people at the cabin on the lake. Jim’s own handwriting was on the side of the hydraulic tank in white paint marker. I could see it from where I was standing in the doorway of Dale’s shed.
“Forty dollars,” I said.
“Rental housing in Rhinelander receives ninety dollars a day,” Dale said. “And you’d have to drive all the way here to get it. Forty is a family price.”
He smiled slightly.
Not a mean smile, exactly. It was the smile of a man who had practiced something in his truck on the way and is relieved by how smoothly it went.
It was a Saturday in mid-October. Gray. Around forty-five degrees. The kind of day here in the woods of northern Wisconsin, where you can already feel the snow that’s still two weeks late.
My son was sitting in the pickup truck in Dale’s yard with the heater on.
Cole was sixteen. He had his father’s shoulders. And as luck would have it, he had none of his father’s patience. I told him to stay in the truck for that exact reason.
My name is Becky Thorson. I am forty-four years old. I drive a propane truck for the co-op.
And I have to tell you how this separator ended up sitting in my brother-in-law’s shed in the first place.
Jim died in April.
He was forty-eight years old. It was ten minutes past five in the morning. He was sitting at the kitchen table, lacing up his boots, getting ready to go and sit in a log truck that he couldn’t drive anywhere because the spring road closures were still in effect.
He placed his hand flat on the table.
He said, “Beck.”
That’s all he said.
The doctor later told me it was his heart. He said there was nothing I could have done in the four minutes I had before the ambulance arrived.
I decided to believe him.
The week of the funeral, Dale came with his truck.
Dale is Jim’s older brother. Three years older. He lives 800 meters from our house, all alone, on Otter Creek Road. He does mechanical work from the pole shed behind his house.
“I’m going to take the separator home with me,” he said, standing in my yard. “For safekeeping. You’ve been gone in that propane truck all day, and the boy’s at school. Someone could have hooked it up and made it disappear in two minutes.”
I said thank you.
I would have said thank you to anyone that week.
Then it was summer and I didn’t think about firewood at all anymore.
I drive a bobtail for the cooperative. Three thousand gallons. I did all the overtime they gave me all summer.
Because calculating a widow’s estate is not complicated.
There’s a paycheck now. That’s all there is to it, simple arithmetic.
On October 1st, I was thinking about firewood.
People find it funny that the woman who delivers their propane heats her own house with wood.
It’s not that funny.
I know how much propane costs better than anyone on my route. We have an oven. But we also have a wood stove in the living room that Jim installed the year Cole was born. And that’s the stove we live on all winter.
Jim had left about six split facial cords piled up under the previous year’s lean-to.
Here, when we say a cord, that’s generally what we mean. A face cord. A pile four feet high and eight feet long and a stick deep. About a good pile of retrieval.
Six of them would bring us to Christmas.
What I had a lot of were cartridges.
Two winters ago, Jim dropped nine red oak trees along the northern boundary of our property. The oaks were showing signs of decline, and he wanted to get them down before they died standing.
Before his death, he transformed each of those oak trees into sixteen-inch bales. Then he lined them all up along the fence on pallets.
They had been out of commission for two years now. The ends were checked and were grey. They were as dry and ready as oak can be.
There was a very long line of them.
And each one of them was too big to fit in my stove.
You can split red oak with a mallet. I’ve done it.
But I can’t swing a mallet through fifteen cords of oak. Not during the few weekends I had left before the ground turned white.
So on Friday evening, I called Dale and told him I would come tomorrow morning to pick up the separator.
“Come down,” he said. “We’ll talk about it.”
Now I knew what there was to talk about.
“Forty dollars,” I said again, standing in his shed.
“For the afternoon. I’ll pick it up before nightfall.”
There were a number of things a person could say at a time like that.
It belongs to Jim.
Jim’s is mine.
You pulled it out of my garden the week I buried it, and I thanked you.
I had each of those sentences lined up behind my teeth.
But I looked at Dale’s hand resting on the beam of that divider. And I looked at his face.
And I understand something.
If I said those things, he’d say something back. And then I’d be a widow standing in a shed in October, arguing about a machine while the daylight beats down. With my son watching it all through a windshield.
And I still didn’t want to have my wood in it.
I understand something else, too.
If my husband’s brother were to charge me rent for my deceased husband’s separator, I wanted it in writing. In his own handwriting. With his own name underneath.
“Very well,” I said. “Thank you, Dale.”
I took my wallet out of my back pocket. I took out two twenty-dollar bills. I gave them to him.
He took them.
He folded them once and put them in his shirt pocket. And he looked more surprised than I had seen him since we were all young.
“I would like a receipt,” I said.
“A receipt.”
“I keep track of things now. I have to.”
He laughed.
He walked over to his workbench and tore a sheet of paper from the small notepad at the auto parts store where he wrote his repair tickets. He found a pen that worked on the third try. And he wrote it standing up.
He was still smiling when he handed it to me.
I read it right there, in the hangar.
Receipt from Becky Thorson, $40, rent for a log splitter, one afternoon. Dale Thorson.
And the date.
“Good enough?” he said.
“That’s absolutely right,” I said.
I folded it and put it in the breast pocket of my flannel shirt. And I buttoned the pocket.
He helped me plug it in. I’ll say that for him.
He dropped his tongue onto the trailer hitch. He was directing the safety chains. He told me to keep it below 45 on the road because those little tires get hot.
Then he stood in his yard with my forty dollars in his shirt pocket and watched me drive his brother’s separator half a mile to his house.
Cole didn’t say a word until we were on the road.
“Did you just pay for it?”
“I did it.”
“For Dad’s separator.”
« Yes. »
« Mom. »
His voice broke on it.
“It’s ours. It’s Dad’s. You just left it—”
“I didn’t let him do anything,” I said. “I rented a splitter for the afternoon, and I have a receipt. We now have about six hours of daylight left, and I’d like to know how much oak two people can split in six hours. Put on your gloves.”
We moved the separator back up to the row of cartridges a little after noon.
I braided my hair to keep it out of the way. I put on my work gloves. I checked the hydraulic oil and the engine oil, because Jim always did, and because I didn’t know how the machine had been stored all summer.
Both were full. Both were clean.
Dale is many things. But he doesn’t neglect a machine.
That’s when Cole saw the tank.
He had crouched down to look for the fuel shutoff valve. And he remained crouched.
I came to see what was holding him back.
Jim wrote about certain things.
He wrote on the inside of the kitchen cupboard doors. On the oven. On the fuse box in the basement.
And on the side of that hydraulic reservoir, with a white paint marker, he had noted the date each time he changed the oil. A whole column of dates, going back six years. In its place, a neat print.
And below that column, set apart by itself, he had written an additional line.
Cole. First umbilical cord. 11 years old.
Cole put his glove on it.
He just placed his hand there. Flat. In the same way that his father had placed his hand on the kitchen table that morning in April.
I didn’t say anything.
There are times when a mother should speak up. And there are times when she should go and pull the starter rope.
I went to pull the starter rope.
Honda caught up on the second run. As has always been the case.
When Cole stood up, his eyes were red. His jaw was working.
He rolled the first round all the way to the beam.
“You turn the lever,” he said. “I’ll feed it.”
“We’ll compromise,” I said. “Every hour.”