burning the wood
CHRIS BULLARD
“Not as old as you might think,” the tree man said about the Norway maple we were taking down. “They grow fast and die young.” He must have been in his twenties. He was wearing overalls, but he had the mien of a lawyer. He added, “They rot from the inside.”
I assumed that he knew what he was talking about. He was right that the tree was hollow. When he had hoisted himself up and begun to lop off the lower branches with his chainsaw, a frantic raccoon had shot from a hole in the tree like a prisoner escaping from confinement.
“Good thing we’re taking it down,” your mom said. She was always the practical one. It was the biggest thing on our property and put everything else in shade. If it fell during a storm, it might come down on our roof. I hated killing it, though.
The maple didn’t go easily. Our tree man almost drowned when his chainsaw hit a reservoir of water trapped in the trunk. We’d watched as he flailed on his harness, waving his revved-up saw like a man beset by a bee swarm while a fountain of water cascaded down the bark of the tree. We were worried for him and also about the liability.
He’d lowered himself down and wiped his face with a cloth from his tool kit, remarking that some trees were a joy and others only a problem. It was easy to see which kind he thought our tree was. I figured that he saw that chainsaw as something of a problem solver.
It only took a couple of days for the tree man to whittle the tree down to a stump. He left it in rounds about two feet high that I could cut it into firewood. I thought that I might appease the tree gods if I did something useful with it.
I started spending my idle time chopping. I bought a wedge that I’d hammer into the center of a round. When I hit the wedge with a maul, the trunk would shatter into pieces that I’d shape with an axe into fireplace size chunks. Even with those pieces that had a rotten center, I could always find a place to put my wedge. When I hit it right, it would just fall apart
I can’t tell you how much I enjoyed the process of chopping up the tree, stacking the firewood into neat piles, hauling it into the house and making a fire. I had a red settee that I had pulled from a pile of someone’s junk left on the street. I put it catty-corner to the fireplace where I could stretch out and watch the flames play over the wood.
I had counted the rings in the tree sections. If that was an accurate way to judge time, the tree was about thirty years old. If so, I was only a little older than it was. Sometimes I’d joke with your mom that when I fed the last log into the fire that I’d be gone, too.
After dinner, your mom would drop you in a playpen and leave you with me while she made phone calls. You would pull yourself upright on one of the playpen walls and watch me as I drank red wine and declaimed passages from whatever I was writing. You always seemed so interested in what I said. I don’t suppose you remember any of that.
When your mom told me she wanted out of our marriage it was like I had been pounded with that maul I kept in the yard. I don’t know how long she had been thinking it over. By the time she told me it was a done deal. The lawyers in her office had already drawn up a proposed property settlement. As I say, she was a practical woman.
Things went fast after that. By the spring, when we sold the house, the wood was gone. The buyers complained about the dead spot in the yard where I’d killed the grass with my chopping, but they went ahead with the sale. You ended up with your mother in another city, and I couldn’t do anything about it. That was what the law said, or so I was told.
I stumbled a bit before I found someone again, but I finally got things back together, so I know what you’re going through. You’re welcome to stay here until you decide what you’re going to do.
I wish that I had some words of comfort to offer. I wish I could give you some old man’s wisdom, something about how everything will work out all right, etc. We both know what a joke that sort of thing is.
A couple of years ago, a fire came over those hills at the back of our property. It took out the old growth forest up there and a couple of restored farmhouses.
I stood on the porch watching the woods burn. I could feel the heat in my face and see cinders landing in our vegetable plot. I don’t know how long I would have stood there, but Sal finally pulled me away. We got in the pickup and high-tailed it down to the highway. Fortunately, the wind turned and the fire never reached our place.
It was terrible and lovely, horrible and beautiful. All I could do was look.
Chris Bullard lives in Philadelphia. He received his B.A. in English from the University of Pennsylvania and his M.F.A. from Wilkes University. Kattywompus Press published High Pulp, a collection of his flash fiction, in 2017 and Grey Book Press published Continued, a poetry chapbook, this year. His work has appeared in recent issues of Nimrod, Muse/A Journal, The Woven Tale, Red Coyote, Cutthroat and The Offbeat.