PART 2
The young man’s words hung in the cold kitchen while my ears rang.
“Put the wood in the box,” I said. My voice sounded flat, stranger to my own ears than his was. “Right there by the hearth. Slow.”
He dropped to his knees carefully, easing the split logs down one by one so they wouldn’t thump on the linoleum. When he stood back up, he tucked his bare, raw hands deep into his coat sleeves. He couldn’t have been more than twenty-two or twenty-three.
His face was gray with tiredness, and his hair looked like it had been trimmed with kitchen shears.
“What do you mean, Walter let you sleep in the shop?” I asked, keeping the bat rested against the kitchen table. “Walter died in November. That shop has been padlocked since the funeral.”
“No, ma’am,” he whispered. “The side window latch is broken. Has been since summer. You just pull up on the sash and step over the scrap bench.”
He reached into his pocket slowly, two fingers pinched together, and pulled out an old silver brass-head nail and a crumpled paper stub. He set them on the edge of the kitchen counter like he was offering up evidence to a judge. The stub was a receipt from the diner in town, dated two days before Walter went into the hospital, with Walter’s shaky handwriting scrawled across the bottom: *Two cord split by Friday. Take the shop.*
I looked from the paper back to his face. “What’s your name, son?”
“Toby,” he said. “Toby Miller. No relation to the hardware folks. I worked the saw for Mr. Walter when his back gave out last winter. He told me as long as I kept the stove fed and didn’t touch the drill press, I could bed down by the wood burner in the back room when the snow got bad. He paid me twenty dollars every Saturday to stack the cords.”
My stomach gave a hard, hollow turn. Walter had kept that back workshop locked tight for the last year of his life. He spent hours out there, telling me he was working on small cabinets, but he never brought any furniture into the house. When his lungs started failing, he’d sit on the porch staring toward that shop like he’d left an iron on the stove.
I had thought it was just his stubbornness, his pride about losing his strength.
“Why didn’t you knock, Toby?” I asked. “Why sneak around like a thief?”
Toby looked down at the linoleum. “People around here don’t want someone like me knocking on their door before sunrise, Mrs. Vance. My brother got caught stealing copper out by the quarry last spring, and everybody in the township thinks I was in on it. When Mr. Walter died, I saw the cars parked out front for the viewing. I knew you’d call the sheriff if you saw me on the place. But the wind was blowing zero degrees out on the ridge last week, and I… I owed him the wood.”
He pointed toward the woodstove in the corner. “He always kept three armloads in reserve for you by breakfast so the parlor floor wouldn’t get drafty. He told me if anything ever happened to him, you’d forget to bank the lower damper at night and let the coals burn out to ash.”
I looked over at the stove. The draft lever was notched exactly at the quarter-turn mark, right where Walter used to set it with a little brass ruler he kept on the mantel.
“You’ve been out in that shed during the blizzard?” I asked.
“There’s an old wool blanket behind the tool locker,” Toby said. “And the small cast-iron stove. I only burned scrap ends. I never touched the good oak.”
I pulled out a kitchen chair and sat down. My knees were trembling, not from fright anymore, but from the sudden, sharp ache of realizing how little I had seen while I was busy wrapping Walter’s coats in plastic bags and putting his boots in boxes for the church donation drive.
“Toby,” I said, pointing toward the stove, “take off that coat and shut the storm door. You’re letting the heat out.”
PART 3
He didn’t move for three seconds, like he expected the floor to open up beneath him. Then he turned, pulled the heavy back door shut, and pushed the latch firmly into place.
I took four eggs from the wire basket on the counter, set the cast-iron skillet on the front burner, and clicked the gas ignition. The blue flame caught with a soft hiss. Toby stood by the coat hooks near the entryway, shifting his weight from one boot to the other, his arms pinned to his sides like he was trying not to take up space in the room.
“Sit down,” I told him, nodding at the round pine table. “Before you fall down.”
He sat on the very edge of the chair, his hands flat on his denim knees. When I set a mug of hot black coffee in front of him, his fingers shook so violently against the ceramic that the liquid slopped over the rim. He wiped it up with his sleeve before I could even hand him a dishtowel.
“I need you to show me the shop,” I said, scraping the scrambled eggs onto two plates. “After we eat.”
“There’s nothing broken out there, Mrs. Vance. I swear it.”
“I didn’t say there was.”
We ate in silence. The only sound was the wind rattling the bare lilac branches against the storm window and the scrape of Toby’s fork against the stoneware. He ate with the frantic, careful neatness of a stray dog that knows the bowl might be pulled away at any second.
When he finished, he carried his plate straight to the sink, rinsed it under the tap, and stood waiting by the door.
I pulled on my heavy wool coat, stepped into my muck boots, and took Walter’s brass key ring from the drawer by the telephone. The walk across the yard was crusty with frozen snow, but the path from the back porch to the woodpile had already been cleared down to the dirt. Toby had done it before I woke up.
At the workshop, I didn’t bother using the key. Toby led me around the north wall where the honeysuckle vines had died back for winter. He reached up, pushed the loose bottom window pane, lifted the wooden frame four inches, and popped the hook with the blade of an old butter knife he’d stashed in the siding.
Inside, the air smelled like cedar shavings, machine oil, and cold iron.
In the back corner, behind Walter’s big table saw, sat an army-green cot with two thin blankets folded military-neat across the mattress. On top of an upturned lard bucket beside the cot was an open spiral notebook and an envelope with my name written across the front in Walter’s heavy pencil stroke: *Martha.*
My chest seized up. “Did you read this, Toby?”
“No, ma’am,” he said, keeping his eyes on his boots. “Mr. Walter set it on that bucket the afternoon before the rescue squad took him. He told me, ‘If I don’t come back down the drive by Sunday, you leave that right there for Martha when the weather clears.’ But I was scared to bring it up to the house.”
I picked up the envelope. The paper was stiff and cold. Inside were three folded pages and a small brass key to the firebox in Walter’s desk.
*Martha,* the letter began. *If you’re reading this, my breathing finally quit on me. Don’t be hard on the Miller boy. His uncle run him off the farm with nothing but the shirt on his back, and he’s got more work in his hands than any three men in this county. I paid him through November out of the cash tin, but he’s got two cords left to deliver to the county garage that’s already paid for. If you let him stay till the spring thaw, he’ll keep your roof clear of ice dams and keep the stove going. Don’t let Dale talk you into selling the timber on the back forty. Dale owes the bank in town and he’s looking to pay his own notes with our trees. Trust the boy before you trust Dale.*
I lowered the paper. The workshop was dead quiet except for the wind whistling through the cracked window sash.
Everything Dale had said over the past three weeks came rushing back into focus. His visits every three days. His constant remarks about how hard the winter was going to be on a woman alone. His offer just last Tuesday to “take the farm management off my plate” if I’d sign the timber deed over to his LLC so he could clear the ridge. Dale hadn’t been worried about my sleepwalking. He had been waiting for the first freeze to break my nerve.
I looked at Toby. His ears were red from the cold, and he was watching me with those wide, terrified eyes, waiting for me to tell him to pack his bag and walk down Tobin Road into the snow.
“Toby,” I said, folding the letter and tucking it into my coat pocket. “Where are your clothes?”
“In that feed sack under the cot, ma’am.”
“Bring it,” I told him.
ENDING
We carried the sack across the yard together.
I set Toby up in the spare room upstairs, the one over the kitchen that catches the heat from the stovepipe. It hadn’t been slept in since our son moved out west twenty years ago. The bed was stripped to the ticking, so I made him take the fresh flannel sheets from the linen press and put them on the mattress himself. He stood in the doorway of that room looking at the braided rug like he was afraid his boots would soil the wool.
“You take off those wet boots down by the boot tray,” I told him. “And there’s hot water in the boiler if you want to wash up before lunch.”
At noon, Dale’s red pickup came roaring down Tobin Road, kicking up slush from the ditches. He didn’t even knock. He walked right into my back mudroom stomping the snow off his fancy leather boots, holding a yellow manila folder under his arm.
“Aunt Martha,” Dale called out, stepping into the kitchen with that loud, easy confidence he always used when he wanted something. “I saw the tire tracks in the drive. You need to come look at this timber contract before the snow gets any deeper on the ridge. The mill’s offering top dollar if we let them bring the skidders in by Monday.”
He stopped dead when he saw Toby sitting at the kitchen table, wearing one of Walter’s old flannel shirts, drinking coffee from Walter’s blue speckled mug.
Dale’s face tightened up like a fist. “What the hell is this tramp doing in Uncle Walter’s chair?”
“He’s not a tramp, Dale,” I said, leaning against the counter with both hands flat on the edge. “He’s Walter’s hired hand. And he’s staying through the spring.”
“Are you out of your mind?” Dale took a step forward, his voice rising, trying to push me with that familiar family authority. “The boy’s brother is a felon. He’s been squatting out in your shop, Martha! The neighbors told me they saw smoke coming from the chimney out there. I came by to run him off before he burned the place down or robbed you blind.”
“The neighbors didn’t see smoke, Dale,” I said quietly. “You did. Because you’ve been driving by at five in the morning checking to see if I was scared enough to sign your papers.”
Dale opened his mouth to lie, but the look in my eyes stopped him cold.
“Put that folder back in your truck,” I said. “The timber on the back forty stays right where it is. Walter wrote me a letter before he went into county general. He told me all about the county garage contract, and he told me about your notes at the bank.”
Dale’s jaw worked silently. He looked at me, then at Toby, who had stood up from the table. Toby wasn’t shaking anymore. He stood with his shoulders back, taller than Dale by two inches, with hands that had split six cords of hard oak with a wedge and sledge.
Dale didn’t say another word about the trees. He turned on his heel, slammed the mudroom door so hard the glass pane rattled in its putty, and drove his truck down the hollow so fast the chains threw gravel into my mailbox post.
The yard has been quiet since then.
This morning, the temperature dropped to four below zero. I woke up at dawn to the smell of cedar kindling and bacon frying downstairs. When I walked down to the kitchen, the linoleum was warm over the furnace ducts, the water bucket was filled from the well, and the front porch was shoveled clean all the way out to the gate.
Walter’s ash baseball bat is back in the umbrella stand by the front door where it belongs. I don’t need it by the bed anymore.
Toby was out by the woodpile when I opened the back door, swinging Walter’s double-bit axe with clean, steady strokes that echoed off the frozen ridge. When he saw me standing on the porch in my sweater, he stopped, rested the axe handle against his thigh, and nodded once.
“Mornin’, Mrs. Vance,” he called out, his breath rising in white clouds against the pines. “The stove is banked for the day.”
“I see that, Toby,” I told him, holding the storm door wide. “Come on inside. The griddle is hot.”
