My Brother-in-Law Charged Me $40 to Use My Late Husband’s Own Log Splitter So I Paid Him and Let the Whole Road See the Receipt

“Forty dollars,” Dale said. “For an afternoon.”

He said it with his hand resting on the splitter. The way a man rests his hand on something that belongs to him.

It did not belong to him.

It was a red twenty-seven-ton log splitter with a Honda engine. My husband bought it at Fleet Farm six years ago for fourteen hundred dollars. He made the last payment on it with money from selling firewood to the cabin people 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 stood in the doorway of Dale’s shed.

“Forty dollars,” I said.

“The rental place in Rhinelander gets ninety a day,” Dale said. “And you’d have to drive all the way up there to get it. Forty’s a family price.”

He was grinning a little.

Not a mean grin, exactly. It was the grin of a man who has practiced a thing in his truck on the way over, and is relieved at how smoothly it came out.

It was a Saturday in the middle of October. Gray. About forty-five degrees. The kind of day up

here in the north woods of Wisconsin when you can already smell the snow that’s still two weeks off.

My son was sitting out in the pickup in Dale’s yard with the heater running.

Cole was sixteen. He had his father’s shoulders. And that fall, he had none of his father’s patience. I’d told him to stay in the truck for exactly that reason.

My name is Becky Thorson. I’m forty-four years old. I drive a propane truck for the co-op.

And I need to tell you how that splitter came to be 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 to five in the morning. He was sitting at the kitchen table lacing up his boots, getting ready to go sit in a log truck he couldn’t drive anywhere, because the spring road bans were still on.

He put his hand down flat on the table.

He said, “Beck.”

That was all he said.

The doctor told me later it was his heart. He said there was nothing I could have done with the four minutes I had before the ambulance came.

I’ve decided to believe him.

The week of the funeral, Dale came by with his truck.

Dale is Jim’s older brother. Three years older. He lives half a mile down Otter Creek Road from us, by himself. He does mechanic work out of the pole shed behind his house.

“I’m going to take the splitter down to my place,” he said, standing in my yard. “For safekeeping. You’re gone on that propane truck all day, and the boy’s at school. Somebody’d have that hooked up and gone in two minutes.”

I said thank you.

I would have said thank you to anybody that week.

Then it was summer, and I didn’t think about firewood at all.

I drive a bobtail for the co-op. Three thousand gallons. I took every single hour of overtime

they’d give me all summer long.

Because a widow’s arithmetic isn’t complicated.

There’s one paycheck now. That’s all the arithmetic there is.

By the first of October, I was thinking about firewood.

People think it’s funny that the woman who delivers their propane heats her own house with wood.

It’s not that funny.

I know what propane costs better than anybody on my route. We have a furnace. But we also

have a wood stove in the front room that Jim put in the year Cole was born. And that stove is what we live on all winter.

Jim had left about six face cords split and stacked under the lean-to from the year before.

Up here, when we say a cord, that’s usually what we mean. A face cord. A stack four feet high and eight feet long and one stick deep. About a good heaped pickup load.

Six of those would get us to about Christmas.

What I had plenty of was rounds.

Two winters back, Jim dropped nine red oaks along the north line of our property. The oak wilt was coming through, and he wanted to get them down before they died standing.

The fall before he died, he bucked every one of those oaks into sixteen-inch rounds. Then he lined them all up along the fence on pallets.

They’d been down two years now. The ends were checked and gray. They were as dry and ready

as oak ever gets.

There was a long, long row of them.

And every single one was too big to fit in my stove.

You can split red oak with a maul. I’ve done it.

But I can’t swing a maul through fifteen cords of oak. Not in the handful of weekends I had left before the ground went white.

So on Friday night, I called Dale and told him I’d be down in the morning to get the splitter.

“Come on 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. Have it back by dark.”

There were a number of things a person could say at a time like that.

It’s Jim’s.

Jim’s is mine.

You took it out of my yard the week I buried him, and I said thank you.

I had every single one of those sentences lined up behind my teeth.

But I looked at Dale’s hand resting on the beam of that splitter. And I looked at his face.

And I understood 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 burned away. With my son watching the whole thing through a windshield.

And I still wouldn’t have my wood in.

I understood something else, too.

If my husband’s brother was going to charge me rent on my dead husband’s splitter, I wanted it written down. In his own hand. With his own name under it.

“All right,” I said. “Thank you, Dale.”

I took my wallet out of my back pocket. I took out two twenty-dollar bills. I handed them to him.

He took them.

He folded them once and put them in his shirt pocket. And he looked more surprised than I’d seen him look since we were all young.

“I’d like a receipt,” I said.

“A receipt.”

“I keep track of things now. I have to.”

He laughed.

He went over to his workbench and tore a sheet off the little parts-store pad he writes his repair tickets on. He found a pen that worked on the third try. And he wrote it out standing up.

He was still grinning when he handed it to me.

I read it right there in the shed.

Rec’d of Becky Thorson, $40, rent on log splitter, one afternoon. Dale Thorson.

And the date.

“Good enough?” he said.

“That’s just right,” I said.

I folded it and put it in the chest pocket of my flannel shirt. And I buttoned the pocket.

He helped me hook it up. I’ll say that for him.

He dropped the tongue on the trailer ball. He ran the safety chains. He told me to keep it under forty-five on the road because those little tires heat up.

Then he stood in his yard with my forty dollars in his shirt pocket and watched me drive his brother’s splitter half a mile home.

Cole didn’t say a word until we were out on the road.

“Did you just pay him?”

“I did.”

“For Dad’s splitter.”

“Yes.”

“Mom.”

His voice cracked on it.

“It’s ours. It’s Dad’s. You just let him—”

“I didn’t let him do anything,” I said. “I rented a splitter for the afternoon, and I have a receipt. Now we have about six hours of daylight left, and I’d like to know how much oak two people can

split in six hours. Get your gloves.”

We backed the splitter up to the row of rounds a little after noon.

I braided my hair back 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 kept all summer.

Both were full. Both were clean.

Dale is a lot of things. But he doesn’t neglect a machine.

That’s when Cole saw the tank.

He’d crouched down to look for the fuel shutoff. And he stayed crouched down.

I came around to see what was keeping him.

Jim wrote on things.

He wrote on the inside of the kitchen cupboard doors. On the furnace. On the fuse box in the

basement.

And on the side of that hydraulic tank, in white paint marker, he’d written down the date every time he changed the oil. A whole column of dates, going back six years. In his square, careful printing.

And underneath that column, set apart by itself, he’d written one more line.

Cole. First cord. Age 11.

Cole put his glove on it.

He just laid his hand there. Flat. The same way his father had laid his hand on the kitchen table that morning in April.

I didn’t say anything.

There are times a mother should talk. And there are times she should go pull the starter rope.

I went and pulled the starter rope.

The Honda caught on the second pull. The way it always had.

When Cole stood up, his eyes were red. His jaw was working.

He rolled the first round over to the beam.

“You run the lever,” he said. “I’ll feed.”

“We’ll trade off,” I said. “Every hour.”

Here’s how it works, if you’ve never done it.

You set a round on the beam, up against the foot plate. You pull the lever. The ram pushes the

round slowly into the wedge, with twenty-seven tons of pressure behind it.

The oak groans.

And then it lets go with a crack you can feel in your back teeth.

Red oak splits clean and straight. It smells sour when it opens up. Like vinegar. That night, you smell it in your hair.

One of us fed the rounds and ran the lever. The other one pulled the split pieces away and

stacked them.

You don’t talk much, because of the engine.

You just go.

By one-thirty, we had the first face cord split and stacked in the bed of the truck. Heaped up and tight.

By two-thirty, we had the second one stacked on the ground beside it. And my shoulders were

starting to talk to me.

Around three o’clock, I went into the lean-to to get the water jug.

And I saw the wall.

I’d seen it a hundred times. I just hadn’t looked at it since April.

On the bare studs inside the lean-to, right next to where the splitting maul hangs on its nail, Jim kept a list. Written in carpenter’s pencil.

He started it the very first fall we lived in that house. And every October, he wrote over it again to make it darker. So now it stood out black against the gray wood.

Mrs. Hartmann, one cord.

Donna Peterson, one cord.

Marlene Olson, one cord.

Three widows on Otter Creek Road.

Mrs. Hartmann lives at the very far end of the road, past the creek. She’s eighty-six. She taught fourth grade at the elementary school in town for thirty-four years.

Donna Peterson’s husband went through the ice on a snowmobile when their kids were small.

Marlene Olson lost her husband, Art, to cancer. Her hip is so bad she can’t carry more than three sticks of wood at a time.

Every October, for as long as Jim and I were married, he split their wood first. And ours second.

He delivered it. He stacked it on their porches. And he wouldn’t take one single dime for it.

He’d take a pie. If the pie was already made.

That was his whole rule.

I stood there in the lean-to holding the water jug. And I counted the daylight.

We had the splitter until dark. Dark was about ten after six.

At the rate we were going, we’d have four cords done by then. If nothing broke, and neither one of us quit.

Four cords wasn’t anywhere close to my winter.

And I thought, I’ll pay forty dollars again next Saturday if I have to.

But there are three old women down this road who’ve been looking out their windows ever since the leaves turned. And not one of them has called me.

Because how do you call a brand-new widow and ask her where your free firewood is?

I came back out with the jug.

“Three of these are going down the road,” I said to Cole. Loud, over the engine.

He looked at the truck. At the pile. At me.

He’d been riding along on those deliveries since he was big enough to carry kindling. He knew exactly which three.

“Dad’s list,” he said.

“Dad’s list.”

He nodded.

He rolled the next round over to the beam.

My son had spent most of that year angry at everything that moved. At school. At me. At the dog. At the whole world, for taking his father.

But he split wood that afternoon like a grown man.

And when we traded off at four o’clock, he said, “I’ve got the lever, Mom. You stack.” Because he could see my arms were shaking. And he didn’t want to say that he could see it.

We finished the fourth cord at twenty minutes to six.

The clouds had come down low over the pines. The light was going blue.

I shut off the Honda.

The quiet came in so fast that both of us just stood there in it.

Four face cords. One in the truck bed. Three on the ground in rows.

My hands wouldn’t close all the way.

“We have to take it back now,” Cole said.

“We do.”

“That is the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.”

“I know it,” I said. “Hook it up.”

We pulled the splitter back down the road with a cord of oak riding in the truck bed.

Dale came out of his shed wiping his hands on a rag.

He looked at the wood in the truck. I watched him do the figuring in his head. The way any man up here would.

“Got some done,” he said.

“Four cords.”

“Four.”

He looked at Cole. Then back at me.

“In one afternoon. The two of you.”

“Thank you for the use of it,” I said.

He unhooked the splitter himself and rolled it back into his shed by the tongue.

From the shed door, he called out. “Same time next week, if you want it.”

“I’ll let you know,” I said.

Cole had his hand on the door handle. I could see him getting ready to say something.

I put my hand on his arm. He stayed in the truck.

And we drove straight on down the road. Right past our own driveway. Across the creek. All the way to the very last mailbox.

Mrs. Hartmann’s house is a small white house with green shutters and a porch across the front.

There was one lamp on in the front room.

There was a path worn into the grass from her front door to her mailbox. And no other path at

all.

I knocked.

It took her a long time to come to the door. She came with her cane in one hand. She had a

cardigan buttoned on over another cardigan.

When she opened the inside door, the air that came out of that house was no warmer than the air on the porch.

She looked at me.

Then she looked past me, at the truck with its headlights on. At the oak heaped up in the bed. At Cole, already dropping the tailgate.

“Oh,” she said.

That was all, at first. Just “Oh.” Very small. With her hand coming up to the collar of her sweater.

“It’s late this year,” I said. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Hartmann. I should’ve been here two weeks ago.”

“Rebecca.”

She has never once in her life called me Becky.

“I did not think anyone was coming,” she said.

“I know.”

“I would not have asked you. I want you to know that. I said to myself, Ilse, that girl has just buried her husband. You will buy your wood like everybody else.”

She shook her head.

“But the man in town wants a hundred and ten dollars a cord. And I thought I would wait and see

how cold it got.”

“How cold has it gotten?”

“I have been keeping the propane at fifty-eight,” she said. With great dignity. “It is perfectly

adequate with a sweater.”

I’m the one who fills Mrs. Hartmann’s propane tank.

I’d been wondering for three weeks why she wasn’t burning any.

“Well,” I said. “We’re going to stack this. And then Cole’s going to lay you a fire. And then you can turn that thermostat down as far as you like.”

She stood in her doorway with the storm door propped open on her hip and watched us carry

every single stick.

Cole stacked it on her porch the way his father always had. Bark side up. Tight against the wall under the front window. With the smaller kindling splits on the end nearest her door, so she

wouldn’t have to reach.

When he was done, he carried an armload inside and knelt down in front of her wood stove.

She stood right over him and told him exactly how to do it.

And he let her.

When the fire caught, she reached down and put her hand on top of his head.

He’s six feet tall. But he was kneeling. And she could reach.

“You stack like your father,” she said. “He stacked crooked in the fourth grade too. I never could break him of it.”

She patted his head.

“It always held.”

Cole didn’t look up. He just nodded at the stove door for a long while.

On the porch, as we were leaving, Mrs. Hartmann took hold of my sleeve.

“Eleven years he brought it,” she said. “I made him a pie every single time. And every single time he said, ‘Mrs. Hartmann, you didn’t have to do that.’ And then he ate half of it standing up in my kitchen.”

She held onto my sleeve.

“I have not got a pie tonight, Rebecca.”

“You don’t owe me a pie.”

“I owe somebody one,” she said. “I will work out who.”

On Sunday, after church, we loaded the second cord and took it to Donna Peterson.

Donna tried to give Cole a twenty-dollar bill. He wouldn’t take it.

We took the third cord to Marlene Olson. We carried it all the way into her back entry, one wheelbarrow load at a time. So she’d only have to walk ten feet with her bad hip to get to it.

Marlene had a pie already made.

She said she’d baked one every Sunday in October. Just in case. And had been eating them all herself.

We took the pie. Those were the rules.

That left one cord, out of the four, for my own stove.

And thirteen or fourteen more cords still lying in rounds along my fence.

Sunday night, I sat at the kitchen table.

In Jim’s chair.

I had Dale’s receipt smoothed out flat in front of me. And an index card from the recipe drawer.

I wrote four different notes. I threw away three of them.

I’m not a spiteful woman. I want that to be true. So I’m careful about it.

I did not write one word about Dale on that index card.

What I wrote was this.

Free split oak for any widow or shut-in on Otter Creek Road who needs it before snow. Split Saturdays on Jim Thorson’s splitter. Call Becky Thorson.

And my phone number.

Every word of it was true. And there wasn’t one word on it I’d have minded reading out loud in church.

Monday morning, I was at the feed store at seven o’clock, right when Ray unlocked the door.

I had to start my route at seven-thirty. So I was already wearing my co-op jacket.

Everybody up here knows that bulletin board at the feed store. It’s by the front counter, next to

the coffee pot. It’s where you find out who has hay for sale and who lost a beagle.

I took two thumbtacks out of the corner of the board.

I pinned up my index card.

Then I pinned Dale’s receipt up right next to it.

Just the receipt. On its little parts-store paper. With nothing written on it except what Dale wrote himself.

Ray was behind the counter counting his cash drawer. He looked up when he heard the thumbtacks go in.

He came around the counter and stood next to me. He had his reading glasses pushed up on his

forehead.

Then he pulled them down.

He read the card.

He read the receipt.

He read the card again.

“Jim’s splitter,” he said.

“Yes.”

He looked at the receipt for a long time.

He didn’t ask me one single question.

He took his glasses off and folded them.

“You want some coffee, Becky?”

“I’ve got a route,” I said. “Thank you, Ray.”

And I went to work.

I didn’t say another word about it to anybody. I just pinned up two pieces of paper and drove my propane truck.

But you can’t fill a propane tank in this county without somebody coming out on the porch in his slippers to visit.

And by Wednesday, they were coming out with something in particular on their minds.

A man named Larry, out on Pine Road, held the hose for me while I filled his tank. He’d never done that once in six years.

“I’ve got a thirty-ton splitter,” he said. “I could have it in your yard tonight. You could keep it till Easter.”

“That’s good of you, Larry. But I’ve got one.”

“So I read,” he said.

That would’ve been the easy way out. For everybody. Dale included.

But then the red one would’ve sat in Dale’s shed for the next ten years. With Jim’s handwriting on it.

I didn’t want Larry’s splitter. I wanted my husband’s.

Three other men made me the same offer that week.

The phone rang at home too. Two calls were for the free oak. Both from people farther out than

Otter Creek Road. One was a widower on Spring Lake. One was a young mother whose husband was deployed.

I wrote their names down.

Cole came home from school Wednesday afternoon and dropped his backpack by the door.

“Everybody at school knows,” he said. “Everybody. Why don’t you say more? You could bury

him, Mom. Everybody’s waiting for you to.”

I was standing at the sink peeling potatoes.

I kept peeling.

“Because he’s your dad’s brother,” I said. “He taught your dad to drive. He stood next to me at the grave, and he couldn’t get through the Lord’s Prayer.”

I set down the peeler.

“Whatever this is, it isn’t all he is. I put up the truth. And it was a small truth. In his own handwriting. If there’s more to it than that, I want him to be the one to tell me.”

“And if he doesn’t?”

“Then I pay forty dollars on Saturday,” I said. “And I ask him for another receipt.”

Cole almost smiled.

It was the first time in a long while.

Ray told me later what happened on Thursday.

Dale came into the feed store for hydraulic fittings around ten in the morning. That’s when the

counter is the fullest.

Four or five men were standing there with their coffee.

Dale said good morning.

Nobody was rude to him. Somebody said, “Morning, Dale.”

And then nobody said anything else.

And one by one, they looked over at the bulletin board.

And then at the floor.

Dale turned around to see what they’d all been looking at.

Ray said he read it standing very still. A long time.

He could have torn it right off that board. Nobody would’ve stopped him.

He didn’t.

He paid for his fittings. He left a five-dollar bill on the counter for a three-dollar sale. And he walked out without his change.

Friday night, I was doing dishes when I saw headlights come up Otter Creek Road and slow

down at the end of my driveway.

The headlights stopped. I watched them sit there on the kitchen wall.

They sat there for most of a minute.

Then they went on.

Saturday, I worked a half day. October’s when everybody suddenly remembers they have a propane tank.

I was driving home a little after noon in my own pickup when I saw somebody walking along the gravel shoulder of Otter Creek Road.

Very slowly. On the wrong side for traffic.

It was Mrs. Hartmann.

She had on a wool coat, and a clear plastic rain bonnet tied under her chin. Even though it wasn’t raining. She was planting her cane out ahead of her like a woman driving fence posts.

I pulled over and rolled down my window.

“Mrs. Hartmann. Where in the world are you going?”

“I am going to see Dale Thorson.”

“That’s another half mile.”

“I am aware of where he lives, Rebecca. I drove this road for forty years.”

“Who told you?”

“Donna Peterson drove me to town for my prescription on Thursday,” she said. “I can still read a bulletin board.”

She didn’t stop walking. I had to let my truck creep along beside her.

“You may drive me. Or you may follow me. I would prefer that you drive me. Because I would like to have some breath left when I get there.”

I got out and helped her up into the cab.

She weighed nothing. She smelled like wood smoke. I was glad of it.

“I don’t want you fighting my fights,” I said, after I had her seatbelt on.

“I am not fighting anything,” she said. “I am going to ask a former pupil a question.”

She set her cane upright between her knees and folded both hands on top of it.

“I had both of those boys at the same desk. Three years apart. Second row, by the radiator. I know them both a good deal better than you do. With respect.”

Dale was out in his yard when we pulled in. He had the hood up on somebody’s Ford.

He saw my truck and straightened up.

Then the passenger door opened.

And the cane came out.

And then one small black shoe.

I’ve watched my brother-in-law walk out on lake ice in March that nobody else in this county would

stand on.

I watched him take one step backward from a woman who didn’t come up to his shirt pocket.

“Mrs. Hartmann,” he said.

And he took his cap off.

He was fifty-one years old. And he took his cap off.

“Dale.”

She walked right out into the middle of his yard.

She didn’t hurry. She didn’t look down at the ground. The shed door was standing open, and the red splitter sat just inside it.

She stopped where she could see it. Then she turned so she could see him.

“I have burned your brother’s wood for eleven winters,” she said. “I am burning it now. I had a fire this morning that his son laid for me. With oak that his widow paid you forty dollars for the

privilege of splitting.”

She looked at him.

“I read that on a wall in town. In your own handwriting. Which has not improved.”

“Mrs. Hartmann—”

“I am not finished.”

She wasn’t loud. People say she never once raised her voice in thirty-four years of teaching. She

didn’t raise it then.

“I have known you since you were nine years old,” she said. “You were not a greedy child. You were a proud one. You would take a zero on a test before you would ask to borrow a pencil. I

sent a note home to your mother about it.”

Dale’s ears had gone red.

“So I do not believe you did this for forty dollars,” Mrs. Hartmann said. “I think there is something

you could not make yourself ask for. And I would like you to tell this girl what it is. Right now. While I am standing here.”

She leaned on her cane.

“I am eighty-six. I cannot stand here long.”

Nobody moved.

A chickadee was calling in the pines behind the shed.

Dale looked at the splitter. He looked down at the cap in his hands.

Then he looked at me.

It was the first time he’d looked straight at me since April.

“He owed me six hundred dollars,” he said.

I didn’t understand him at first.

“Who did?”

“Jim. Back in February.”

It came out of him in pieces. Like something he had to pull out by hand.

“The rear end went out on his plow truck. He was laid up from hauling. The road bans were

coming. You two were tight. I found an axle at the salvage yard in Antigo. Six hundred dollars. I put it on my credit card. And I put it in for him myself, over two nights. I didn’t charge him the labor. I wouldn’t have.”

“He never told me,” I said.

“He wouldn’t have. He said, ‘Don’t say anything to Beck. She’s got enough to worry about. I’ll square it with you when the roads open up and I’m hauling again.’”

Dale turned his cap around in his hands.

“The roads opened up on April twenty-second.”

Jim died on April ninth.

“And then I didn’t know how,” Dale said.

His voice was getting thick.

“I’m not good at it. I had the card bill coming every month. Every month I’d think, I’ll go up there

and tell her. And then I’d think about walking into that kitchen. And asking a widow for six hundred dollars. At the table where he—”

He stopped.

“I couldn’t do it.”

He looked over at the splitter.

“I took the splitter that week because I thought, well, I’ll hold onto it. And when she asks for it, I’ll say it then. And then you asked. And I had it all ready to say. And what came out of my mouth was forty dollars an afternoon.”

“Fifteen afternoons,” Mrs. Hartmann said.

She’d always been quick at arithmetic.

“Yes ma’am.”

Dale’s eyes were wet.

“Fifteen afternoons, and we’d be square. And I’d never have to say it out loud. It sounded all right in the truck.”

He looked at me.

“It didn’t sound all right when you handed me the money. And then you asked for the receipt. I thought you were just being careful. I thought it was kind of funny.”

“I know you did,” I said.

“It’s not funny on that board.”

“No. It’s not.”

I stood there in his yard and felt a whole week of being right go out of me. Like air out of a tire.

Not all of it.

A man who’s owed six hundred dollars says so. He doesn’t take a dead man’s tools out of his

widow’s yard and charge her by the day. I thought that then. I still think it now.

But I also thought about Jim, sitting at the kitchen table in February. Not telling me. To save me the worry.

And his brother down the road, not telling me. Because he was too ashamed to say it.

The two of them were exactly alike.

Second row. By the radiator.

“Wait here,” I said.

“Becky, I don’t—”

“Wait here, Dale.”

I left Mrs. Hartmann standing in his yard. Dale went and brought her a folding chair from the shed.

I drove the half mile home.

I went into the kitchen. I reached up on top of the refrigerator and took down the coffee can.

That was the wood money.

Every fall, Jim sold a few cords of firewood to the cabin people on the lake. Ninety dollars a face

cord. And every single dollar of it went into a Folgers can on top of the refrigerator.

I hadn’t touched that can since April.

I couldn’t even make myself take the lid off.

I drove back to Dale’s. And I took the lid off right there on my tailgate. With both of them watching.

There was six hundred and forty dollars inside.

Twenties, mostly. Soft and a little bit sawdusty.

I counted out six hundred dollars onto the tailgate. I squared up the stack.

And I held it out to him.

“I can’t take that,” Dale said.

“You can. And you will.”

I kept my arm out.

“It isn’t mine. It’s his. It’s the wood money. And he’d have brought it down to you himself the day the roads opened. You know he would.”

Dale didn’t move.

“Jim paid what he owed,” I said. “Every time. His whole life. I’m not going to let him be the one man on this road who didn’t.”

He took it.

His hand wasn’t steady.

He didn’t put it in his shirt pocket this time. He just held it.

Then he reached into that shirt pocket with his other hand.

And he took out two twenties. Folded once.

The same two.

“I never spent it,” he said. “I’ve been carrying it around all week. I couldn’t make myself break them.”

I looked at those two bills in his hand.

I could’ve told him to keep it. That it was rent, fair and square, and I had a receipt. A week before, I might have.

I took them.

I put them in the coffee can. And I pressed the lid back down.

“I’m sorry, Becky,” Dale said. “I’m sorry I took it out of your yard. I’m sorry about the forty dollars. Jim would’ve—”

He shook his head.

“I don’t know what Jim would’ve done.”

“He’d have called you a stubborn fool,” I said. “And then he’d have split your wood for you.”

I nodded at the shed.

“Hook it up for me.”

He hooked it up.

He dropped the tongue on the ball. He ran the safety chains.

And this time, he didn’t tell me how fast to drive.

Mrs. Hartmann watched the whole thing from her folding chair. When the hitch pin was in, she

stood up on her cane.

“Dale.”

“Yes ma’am.”

“There are thirteen cords lying in rounds along this girl’s fence. And one boy to help her. You own a chainsaw and a truck.”

“Yes ma’am.”

“I will leave that with you,” she said.

And she let me help her back up into the cab.

I drove Mrs. Hartmann home first.

Then I drove to town, with the red splitter rattling along behind me. And I parked right in front of the feed store.

There were three men at the counter. They all stopped talking when I walked in.

I went over to the bulletin board.

I took the thumbtack out of Dale’s receipt. I folded it up. I put it back in the chest pocket of my flannel shirt and buttoned the pocket.

I left the index card up.

The free oak was still free.

Ray looked out the front window at the splitter hitched to my truck. Then he looked at the empty

spot on the board.

“All settled?” he asked.

“All settled,” I said. “It turns out Jim owed Dale for an axle. Back in February. It’s paid now.”

I said it loud enough for the three men at the counter to hear.

They’d carry it all over the county by supper.

That was only fair.

I’d put one truth up on that wall. I owed the town the other one.

Dale’s truck was in my yard at eight o’clock the next Saturday morning.

He didn’t knock.

I heard the chainsaw start.

When I went outside with a cup of coffee, he was already down at the end of the row. Cutting the biggest rounds in half, so Cole could lift them onto the beam.

The three of us split wood until dark that day.

And the Saturday after that.

And the one after that.

We put up my whole winter’s wood. And five cords left over.

Those five cords went to the names I’d written down from the phone calls. The widower on Spring Lake. The young mother whose husband was overseas. Three more after that.

Dale and Cole didn’t say much to each other that first Saturday.

By the second Saturday, Dale was showing him how to file a chainsaw chain.

By the third Saturday, Cole was arguing with him about it.

Which, in that family, is how you can tell everything’s going to be all right.

That was a year ago.

This October, I had the splitter out of my own shed. Right where it belongs.

I went into the lean-to and went over the list on the wall fresh, in carpenter’s pencil. I did that part myself this time. Pressing hard, the way Jim always did.

Mrs. Hartmann, one cord.

Donna Peterson, one cord.

Marlene Olson, one cord.

I’d been going back and forth all week about whether I had the right to add anything to it.

The first Saturday of the month, before I’d even pulled the starter rope, a truck turned in at the end of the driveway.

Nobody had called him. Nobody had asked.

Dale got out with his own chainsaw in one hand.

And a pie in the other. In a tin. With plastic wrap pulled tight over the top.

“Mrs. Hartmann sent this,” he said. “She says she worked out who she owed it to.”

He held it out.

“She says it’s for whoever stacks.”

Cole is seventeen now. He’s taller than either one of them ever were.

He took the pie and the chainsaw out of his uncle’s hands. And he handed him a pair of work gloves.

I went back into the lean-to for the water jug.

I stood there and looked at the wall for a minute.

Then I took the carpenter’s pencil down off its nail.

And under the three names, in my own handwriting, I wrote a fourth line.

Dale brings the saw.

It isn’t as square as Jim’s printing.

But it’ll hold.