Someone—usually me—had to do the other work of keeping the farm running while the basement hummed on. The daily maintenance, the chores and the crises: always keeping the wild back, keeping the farm from teetering into decay, the weeds pushing at the door of the house like hungry children. I was always beating back nature, bending it into working for me, ripping out the multiflora rose thorns, hacking and burning hemlock, spraying aphids off the pot.
The summer chores were difficult. But winter was dire, made up of essential tasks necessary just to survive. And now winter was everywhere. Winter was always. Winter was the fire, the fire, the fire—keeping the stoves going and the water running, which meant remembering to leave the taps on a trickle at night and sometimes hiking up to the cistern and either chopping at the ice crust on top, or running a hairdryer on the pipes closest to the surface if they froze. Or, if I couldn’t unfreeze the pipes and it was biting cold, lugging buckets of fresh water from the cistern back to the house.
But the fire. The fire needed to be fed always, and with Lobo and Mama busy in the grow room—turning the plants, picking bugs off the plants, trimming the leaves from the plants—the fire fell to me.
Soon it all did, all the work. Lobo knew somebody in California. The man had a house and fields, needed a grower. After the first cold year, the year the outdoor harvest died, the first time we skipped spring, Lobo and Mama went on ahead to check it out. They left me alone with the farm.
* * *
I burned more fuel than I ever had before. Usually we would start in July, chopping wood for the coming winter. It was strange to think about cold when the sun was high and bright, when sweat pasted my hair to the back of my neck, and we drained iced nettle tea in jars. But that was the way of the work: to plan ahead, to be ready. What was coming would eventually come. Chopping a few days a week, a few hours a day, no more, we would have a decent supply of wood by October’s first frosts.
But now I couldn’t chop fast enough. I was neglecting my chores in the grow room. Meanwhile, the woodpile sank low. Mice scuttled into the house to keep warm. The farm was too much for anyone to manage alone, I thought as I shoved my ax into the truck. I needed more wood again.
I could take Lobo’s old truck anywhere, it didn’t matter: into the mud, off the road. We would drive it till it died, and leave it where it lay, probably at the bottom of a hill somewhere or in a timothy field, the rusting red hulk of a whale. There was a cutout through the lower field that led into the trees, which the neighbors used for hunting. I drove the truck there to find wood.
The deer were leaving. We had hunted them, we had hunted them a lot. We had finally, when spring didn’t come this year, panicked, and went after them with a desperation that knew no season.
People had always poached in the woods. But parking the truck and stepping out into the forest, I saw smaller skulls than I had ever seen before. Deer bones jutted out of the leaves. Does, which were good eating.
But maybe some fawns, too.
I didn’t wander too far from the truck; I wouldn’t be able to carry the wood. In the cold weather, in the bulky coveralls and coat I wore all the time now, hair stuffed up in my hat, not much marked me as female. But not much marked me as adult, either. I was small, a head shorter than Lisbeth and most of the women in the holler. I wasn’t as strong as I wanted to be, as Lobo always thought I should be. Runt, he called me. The weakling that came with the real woman he wanted. Good for nothing, he would say. He had told me I had to learn to defend myself. Because of the way I looked, because of who I was, men would come after me.
He was right about some things.
I found a decent tree, a dead sugar maple. I would chop it in the woods, heft the pieces into the bed, drive home, and split it. The work would take all morning, maybe all day, and it was harder, more demanding work than sitting at a table and snipping buds off plants. My back would ache in different places tonight.
But the good thing about chopping wood, your mind wasn’t bothered by anything. I could forget missing Lisbeth, missing Mama. What they were doing in California, why she hadn’t called for months—he hadn’t let her—even the missed spring, I put it out of my mind. It was just me and the ax.
It felt good not thinking, listening to the ax’s song. I got warm for a moment. But I heard something. I stopped, buried the ax in the log. I heard a voice calling, not birdsong.
Mama.
That was my first thought. A voice, calling in the woods. What else do you call for?
“Hello?” I stepped off the cow path, let my eyes rove the landscape: hills, speckled with dead leaves, a little snow clustered in feathery patches.
Something detached from a log, becoming not a part of the woods, but a hand, raised up as though I had called his name.
A man lay in the leaves, a hatchet beside him. His right foot was turned to the side, and he held it with his other hand. He looked familiar, in the way all men did: bland features, broken capillaries on his cheeks from the cold or bad shaving. Long dark hair stuck to the side of his face.
I approached him slowly. “Are you okay?” I asked.
“I guess not. I guess I twisted my foot.”
“What are you doing here?” I didn’t look at his foot. I looked at the hatchet beside him. I looked out of the corners of my eyes and couldn’t see a truck, a friend of his. But where there was one man, there were certainly others. I saw notch marks in the log felled beside the man. The marks looked fresh, like the nibbling of a small beast. “A white birch?” I couldn’t help myself. “That burns way too fast. That’s a bad tree to use for firewood. If that’s what you were doing.”
He just looked at me, then tried and failed to stand. “Can you help me? Drop me off in town? I think my foot’s broken or something.”
What was the trick, what was the scam? But nothing in the woods seemed out of place. No branches were broken off along the path. I saw no cigarette butts in the snow, heard no rustling. There was no one else around. Cold whistled in the trees like a drunk.
It was just me out here, me and this man. I heard Lobo’s voice in my head, telling me not to be stupid, not to be a girl about this. Not to trust anyone.
“Lean on me,” I said.
We hobbled together to the truck. I helped him into the front seat and started the engine. I listened to it turn over, thought about what to say that wouldn’t give up too much. “My mama always wants me to carry a first-aid kit with me when I’m chopping wood, but I always forget,” I said.
“Me, too. Obviously.”
I looked over at him. “What’s your name?”
“Grayson. You’re Wil. Short for Wylodine, I remember.”
“You remember?” I studied him as he leaned back in the passenger seat, teeth gritted with pain as I began to drive. The truck bounced over the rutted path. “Did we go to school together?”