He was pulling his old log splitter. He walked around the end of his truck in his overalls and his seed cap, slow, the way old farmers walk. He looked at the trunk. He looked at me in Dad’s chaps. He looked at Kenzie with her blistered hands.

He did not say one word about Dwight.

He just backed his truck around in the pasture gate, unhitched the splitter, and pushed it up against Mom’s white board fence. Then he pulled the cord. It started on the first try, rattling and smoking, and he looked at me over the top of it.

“You cut ’em in rounds, about eighteen inches,” he said. “I’ll split ’em. The girl can stack.”

That was all he said. That was all he had to say.

So I cut rounds. I started at the top end of the trunk, where it was thinner, maybe two feet across, and I cut it into rounds eighteen inches long, one after another. Each one took a couple of minutes with Dad’s big saw. Then Kenzie and I rolled the rounds over to Amos, and he’d lift them onto the splitter, slow and careful, and the hydraulic ram would push them into the wedge, and they’d split open with a crack like a rifle shot. Then he’d split the halves again, and again, until he had stove-sized pieces, and Kenzie would carry them to the fence and start stacking.

By nine, two of the coffee men from the café were there too. Lyle Brandt and Ernie Schulte, both in their seventies, both retired farmers who’d sat at that long table with Dad for thirty years. They pulled in behind Amos’s truck in Lyle’s Chevy, and they didn’t say anything either. They just got out with their work gloves and walked over to the woodpile and started stacking alongside Kenzie.

Then two more. Bob Kessler and Floyd Mertz came about ten, with Floyd’s grandson, who’s sixteen and plays football for Pinckney Ridge and could carry three rounds at once. Then Ray Fogle from the small engine shop came out at noon with a cooler of Gatorade and a spare chain for Dad’s saw, already sharpened.

They took turns stacking. Nobody made a speech. Nobody asked where Dwight was, though I knew every one of them was thinking it, because Pinckney Ridge has about six hundred people in it and everybody knew he’d taken the money. They just stacked. One piece at a time, along Mom’s white board fence, bark side up so the rain would run off, the way Dad used to stack it.

Mom sat on the porch with a pitcher of tea and her Bible in her lap. She’d come out at seven with her cane and settled into the old porch swing, and she watched every minute of it. Every hour or so she’d get up and fill the tea pitcher and carry it down the steps to the men at the woodpile, and they’d stop and drink and thank her, and go back to work.

Kenzie kept checking Grandma’s ankles for swelling. That’s the nurse in her. Mom’s ankles swell when her heart is acting up, and Kenzie knows it, and every time she walked up to the porch for tea, she’d crouch down and press her thumb against Mom’s ankle and watch to see if the dent stayed.

“Grandma, feet up,” she’d say.

“Yes, nurse,” Mom would say, and swing her feet up onto the porch railing.

That made Mom laugh for the first time in two weeks. I heard it from out by the trunk, over the noise of the saw. A real laugh, the laugh I remember from when I was a girl, high and surprised and a little bit embarrassed. I shut off the saw for a second just to listen to it.

Chapter Five: The Carving

On the third day, we got to the butt log.

That’s the bottom of the trunk, the biggest part, right above the roots. It was four feet across, the wood so dense and heavy that Dad’s big saw slowed down to a crawl going through it. Each cut took ten minutes. Amos’s splitter couldn’t handle rounds that big, so we had to cut them thinner, a foot instead of eighteen inches, and even then it took two men and Floyd’s grandson to roll them over to the splitter.

About two in the afternoon, I made a cut and the round fell away, and I stopped.

There were letters on the bark. Old ones, carved deep a long time ago and grown over and stretched by the years of the tree growing, but you could still read them. A heart, lopsided. And inside it, two sets of initials and a date.

C.F. + N.W. 1966.

Clarence Fischer and Nadine Wilmes. My father and my mother. The summer they got engaged.

I shut off the saw and stood there looking at it. Kenzie came up beside me, and she saw it too, and she put her hand over her mouth. Then she turned and looked up at the porch.

Mom was already coming down the steps. She’d seen us stop. She walked across the yard with her cane, slow, and stood beside the round with the carving on it. She reached out and touched it. She traced the heart with one finger.

“He did that the night he asked me,” she said quietly. “Right here. With his pocketknife. He was so nervous he cut himself.” She smiled. “He bled all over my good dress.”

None of us said anything. The coffee men had stopped stacking. Amos shut off his splitter.

“Dwight used to sit under that heart on the tire swing,” Mom said. “When he was little. He’d trace it with his finger and ask what it said.” She looked down the lane toward the road. “Clarence told him it said that’s where everything started.”

She looked at the round for a long time. Then she looked at me.

“Don’t split that one,” she said. “Set it aside. Put it on the porch.”

So Floyd’s grandson rolled it up to the porch, and we set it by the front door, bark side out so the heart showed.

Chapter Six: Sixty Feet

On the third afternoon, I made the last cut on the butt log.

It was just after four o’clock, three days and almost exactly three weeks after the storm. The last round fell away from the root ball with a groan, and I shut off Dad’s saw and set it down on the gravel, and for a minute I couldn’t move. My arms were shaking. My back was screaming. I had sawdust in my ears and my nose and down the back of my shirt.

The lane was open.

I stood there and looked at it. Quarter mile of gravel, clean, from Mom’s front porch all the way to the mailbox. The root ball was still there at the side, standing up out of its crater, but it was off the lane, and you could drive a car past it. You could drive an ambulance past it.

And along Mom’s white board fence ran a row of split oak, sixty feet long and stacked chest high.

Kenzie measured it later with a tape measure from the barn, just to be sure. Sixty-one feet, two inches. Four feet high. That’s six full cords of seasoned white oak, maybe more, the best firewood there is. It burns hot and slow and long. Mom heats her house with a woodstove in the kitchen and an old propane furnace she hates to run because propane is so expensive, and that wood would keep her warm for three winters. Maybe four.

The coffee men stood back and looked at it with their hands on their hips. Nobody said anything for a minute. Then Lyle Brandt said, “Clarence would’ve stacked it neater,” and everybody laughed, and Ernie said Clarence never stacked a straight row of wood in his life, and that started a whole argument that lasted until Amos told them both to hush.

Kenzie sat down on the last round. It was a big one from the butt log, too big to split, and Amos said to leave it as a chopping block. She sat on it with her legs crossed and her pocketknife out, the little Case knife her father gave her when she was seven, the one she still carries. She was bent over the top of the round, carving something into it.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Nothing,” she said, and put her arm around it so I couldn’t see.

“Kenzie.”

“You’ll see,” she said. “When I’m done.” And she wouldn’t let me look.

Then Dwight came up the lane.

Chapter Seven: The Back Pocket

I heard his truck before I saw it. A red Dodge with a dent in the tailgate, coming in slow over the cattle guard. Everybody heard it. The coffee men turned around. Amos straightened up from the splitter. Kenzie stopped carving.

He came down the lane, the clear lane, and I watched him look at it through his windshield. The fresh gravel where the trunk had been. The root ball standing off to the side. The burn pile in the pasture, still smoking.

He stopped beside the woodpile.

He got out of his truck slowly. He was wearing work clothes, jeans and a sweat-stained T-shirt, and he looked worse than I’d ever seen him. He’d lost weight. He hadn’t shaved in days. There were dark circles under his eyes like bruises. My big brother, who could fix anything, looked like a man who’d been sleeping in his truck.

He looked down the whole sixty feet of it. All the way down the fence line, from one end of the woodpile to the other. I watched his eyes move along it, slowly, piece by piece.

He looked at Amos, then at me in my sawdust and chaps.

Then at Mom on the porch.

She was sitting in the swing with her Bible in her lap and her feet up on the railing, where Kenzie told her to keep them. She didn’t get up. She didn’t call out to him. She just watched him, with no expression on her face at all.

Nobody on that whole farm said a word. The splitter was off. The saws were off. You could hear the cows in the back pasture and a mockingbird in the cedar tree by the barn.

He walked to the steps and put one hand on the rail.

“Mom,” he said.

Then he reached into his back pocket.

He brought out an envelope. A white one, from the Bank of Pinckney Ridge, the kind they give you when you take out cash at the window. It was creased down the middle like it had been folded in his pocket a long time. He held it out toward her, up the steps, and his hand was shaking.