BY HEATHER E. GOODMAN

Joel’s chainsaw fell to an idle, and the tree crashed to the ground. A thud in my chest, an echo. The puppy was safe inside. Early February but no smoke from our chimney. The tulip poplar, only good for a spring or early fall burn, was foolish to drop when the woodshed was empty. But the tree was dead, practically next to the shed, so for once we wouldn’t have to haul logs.

We’d never let ourselves run out of wood before. We could turn on the backup propane heat, but we never did. Even now.

I piled logs into the wheelbarrow and spotted our neighbor Nate walking up our drive in heavy boots. Nearly seventy, he lived in the mill across the bridge. Chainsaws and bonfires—outside activities with noise and smell—were what people on our rural road used for permission to visit. A system Joel and I had avoided for the last ten months.

“Heard the saw,” Nate said. “Need wood?”

I was relieved that was his question. He offered logs from a shed he was cleaning out for tool storage.

Joel took off his cap, smoothed his hair before he replaced it. Trying to get used to accepting things, he said, “Thanks. We’d take wood if you aren’t burning it.”

My eyes stung. Kindness, sometimes, the hardest thing to bear.

That week, the dead hemlock took out the old outhouse. No wind, no snow, just rot taking its toll.

Since the hemlock would muck up the woodstove, Joel texted Warren to ask if he wanted the pine for sugaring. Warren lived a quarter mile down the road, wore his Trout Unlimited cap perched high on his head, so it never bent or broke in. Even his work clothes neat—he could be covered in dirt, yet look like his shirt had just been pressed.

Warren wrote back immediately, as he always did, said we could borrow the truck to haul the wood, so the first Saturday after the tree fell, Joel sawed, the Husqvarna screaming in the punky wood, while I tossed shattered boards from the outhouse down the old hole. The couple who’d built our two-bedroom log home used the outhouse when they camped in the small clearing just after the driveway’s entrance during the home’s construction. They sold the property to us the year before Charlie was born, and now we’d been here twenty-eight years. As a boy, Charlie was scared of its moldering structure, and I’d held his hand when we walked by to get the mail.

The outhouse door remained unharmed, and I leaned it up against one of the oaks.

The whole of last year, Joel didn’t touch the Husqvarna, and I never asked. I’d wrapped my hand around the jug of bar oil, just to put my fingerprints where Joel and Charlie’s had been.

After all the casseroles, cards, and voicemails: just Joel and me. We declined invitations, deleted emails, maybe answered texts. Weekdays easier because of work. Weekends, Joel in the basement, building shelves and racks, cleaning or rebuilding engines—meat slicer, lawnmower, tiller. I’d come in from outside, seeds planted, leaves mulched, garden turned—and Joel’d be streaked with oil, smelling like the days when he and Charlie rebuilt the motorcycle, a choking smell I fled, my excuse for a shower, the steaming water scalding my skin, a scorching I needed.

When Joel cut the last hemlock round, he killed the saw, stretched, nodded at the door’s greyed planks and rusting handle. He said he’d be back, and I rolled rounds into a pile. Bark needled the holes in the fingers of my gloves, the duct tape I’d used to fix them, worn through. I could feel my skin shredding, peeling back. Joel had been the one to identify Charlie’s body, spared me of it. But since then, I wondered if I should have accompanied him, hard to believe it could be worse than I imagined.

Joel returned with three long stakes and hung the door on the big oak at the driveway’s first hairpin turn. “A door to the woods,” he said. Did it for the joy of it—just like when he brought the puppy home, a smile hinting at one corner of his mouth. Me, my throat closed.

He was clawing out. How? All I wanted was to lie down, join Charlie, be dust and ash in the naked dark trees. I couldn’t use a knife. Or a gun. It would have to be pills, the Prozac.

But Joel. Leave him to deal with it all on his own? Maybe he’d just get another puppy.

At Warren’s, the hood of his wife’s Subaru open. “In deep,” he said, hands bruised with grime, but still his clothes spotless, his cap sitting jauntily on his head. Always a project with Warren; the neighbors called him Bees’ Nest.

Joel said, “I could take a look once we get the wood stacked.”

“Shouldn’t a started it.”

Joel asked, “Alright if we use the truck again on Friday? We’re taking half days.”

The way he said it made me count the years to retirement. Nine to go for me. Even less for Joel.

Warren nodded. “Course. I’ve got this appointment at noon but should be back around 1:00.”

“Appointment?” I asked.

Warren shrugged, said, “Keys are in it.” He scuttled in his toolbox and called to us as we walked to the truck parked on the far side of the barn. “Let’s make it a trade. I loaded the bed with some oak. Sin to burn that in the shack,” and then he ducked back under the hood.

No one had volunteered wood before Nate and Warren. We all had trees. Almost all of us burned for one reason or another: us, Hendricks, and Wools for heat, Warren for sugaring, Nate and Gretta for outdoor fires for the grandkids. But it was something they could do. And we’d felt helpless enough to know that doing anything at all was a damn sight better than doing nothing.

And the neighborhood had been our longtime friends—Joel never looked back after he left his parents’ baffling fights, and I was no longer close with Ellen and her family. My adoption had been good for all of us when I was eleven; they needed help on the farm, and I needed a home instead of an institution.

Charlie had made us the family we needed.

The following Friday afternoon Joel chainsawed the huge arm of a beech tree we’d lost back in the January ice storm while I humped rounds into the wheelbarrow. The rot was nearly all the way through the tree, and I wondered what else I didn’t know, what else lurked beneath the surface.

Nate clomped up in his big boots. The puppy, tied to a tree with a rope, jumped on him, and then tugged at his laces.

Joel saw the commotion and turned off the saw. Nate offered to help, but Joel shrugged him off. I considered asking after Nate’s three kids: two girls, who’d babysat for us, and the youngest, Jared, who Charlie had idolized. But I couldn’t yet know what it was like for life to progress as it should.

Nate asked, “You hear about Warren?”

I shook my head, and the feeder creek seemed a loud hush without the noise of the saw.

“Spots on his lung. Says he can feel a lump near his shoulder.”

“He told you?”

“Heck no. Joe Pritchard ratted him out because his wife told Carla.”

I said, “So Graeme and Amy know?”

Joel had convinced me to walk to their house yesterday to return their Tupperware. We’d brought the puppy and had a round of beers, except for Amy who was due in five weeks. She’d jostled in her chair, couldn’t sit still more than a minute. I’d forgotten how voluminous I’d felt that close to my due date.

Amy had asked, “Did your fingernails turn to steel, too?”

I nodded, and we talked about the waviness that had come to her dark, sleek hair, the way she couldn’t eat enough cheeseburgers, Graeme teasing her about the amount of mustard she was plowing through. She’d been making and freezing soups and stews for easy dinners once the baby arrived. Graeme showed us the crib he’d assembled. They didn’t know if it would be a boy or girl, wanted it to be a surprise.

Nate held a stick out to the puppy and said, “Yeah, I think they know.”

I looked at Joel. No one wanted to give us more bad news. I bit the inside of my cheek; I’d been so consumed.

My chest clenched, and I looked at the holes in my gloves, the worthless, rotten canvas strands. Then I was mad—searing. A spike drilled down my throat, and the wind knocked out of me.

I blinked at the ground, surprised to see the beech logs there.

Nate cleared his throat. “I’ll bring that wood up when I get the crap in front of it out of the way.”

On Sunday, the beech needed to be split before the rain or snow—whatever would fall, would fall.

Joel hefted the five-gallon bucket of hydraulic fluid and poured it into the funnel I held steady. When the fluid overflowed the funnel, it slicked onto my gloves, dripping dark and viscous. Then the puppy was under the splitter, and he wore a slash of wet across his back.

“Shit! Out, Tuck,” Joel said.

I threw a stick for him, and he dashed after it.

Joel started the splitter, and this time it only died once, then fell into its putter.

He positioned a knotted round of beech, and with my inky glove, I rocked the throttle forward. The log snapped and popped, a crushing sound that used to thrill me.

We’d showed Charlie the splitter a week after we’d bought it used from Warren. “Sure, now you get one,” he joked. In the shade of the storage shed, a relief from the humidity, Charlie—brown hair shorter than it had been in years and wearing a t-shirt from his buddy’s brew pub—studied the controls, the welding. He lifted the splitter’s tow end and said, “She’s a beast.” Out in the sunlight rose our neat rows of oak. Charlie picked up his old axe from the shed’s corner, felt the familiar weight of it.

Afterwards, we ate chicken salad sandwiches on the screened-in porch, the ceiling fan whirring, conversation rolling. His desire to move out of his shared apartment, his excitement about his new job at the data services firm. We mentioned we were thinking of driving to North Carolina, and he said he hoped to surf fish there someday. Before he got in his car, we circled back to the splitter. He said he was glad we’d bought it. I nodded and Joel talked about the way it made time for us, giving us hours—whole days—back.

I don’t know how many times I looked him in the eye that day, but however much it was, it wasn’t enough.

The wood appeared in the shed on Tuesday, aged walnut rounds and some other species I didn’t recognize. Some people are purists, only burn oak, but we’ll try anything but pine at least once. The walnut would burn hot to a fine powder, and emptying the ash tray would leave a thin dust in the house. Beech was tough to start, but heated well. The meat of the unfamiliar wood was yellow, still damp, and therefore freshly cut, nothing that had been in the way.

In the house, I changed and waited for Joel to come home, loaded black walnut into the woodstove, geared myself up to make some dinner.

I touched my hand to Charlie’s old bedroom door. Not that it was his bedroom anymore; we’d converted it into an office five years ago, after he graduated from Penn State. We’d closed it the night we’d come from the hospital. My thumb brushed the centered nail hole. Charlie, ten-years-old, tapping a finishing nail into a garter snake skin he’d found near the creek. The other driver had died too, and I wondered if his parents had a door to close.

I sat at the table with the cutting board, knife, onions, carrots, and celery. The day gone, so I could see my reflection in the window. I’d taken to feeling the skin around my eye sockets, and did so now, pressing my three middle fingers against the bone. I inched my fingers and pictured National Geographic photographs and my own skull and Charlie's. Those empty sockets’ dark depths, the long, long wait.

The following Sunday, Graeme texted that the baby was coming a month early, that he and Amy had left at 3 a.m., so I hustled down to feed and let their dog out. On the table, gift bags of clothes, board books, bottles, and blankets from the recent baby shower I’d made an excuse not to attend. Hallmark cards stacked with Amy’s post-its about who gave what. After I fed and let out the dog, he chewed on a Nylabone at my feet. I found a pair of scissors in the kitchen and cut clothing free of its packaging. The clothes were on miniature hangers, and an excessive amount of tiny white plastic Ts connected outfits to each other in multiple places, to hangers, to tags. Too many little Ts, and I was blinking back diapers and feedings and the way the world had both closed down and opened up when Charlie arrived.

Before I realized it, I’d snipped my finger and smeared blood on a onesie with puppies flying kites. I blinked fast, looked at the dark streak on the perfect cotton, and slammed the scissors down on the table.

The dog stopped chewing his bone, ears back, eyes wide and watching.

I could feel it engulfing me and quick buried my face in the dog’s chest, smelled the warmth of his fur—let it come.

Afterwards, I put the first round of clothes and blankets in the washer, folded tissue paper and bags, arranged books in the nursery’s shelves.

That afternoon, when we got the text that the healthy but small baby boy had arrived, we sawed the downed tree Graeme and Amy offered us the day we’d returned their Tupperware.

Joel pulled down his winter hat, zipped branches and called, “Nice and dry.”

I nodded, more black walnut. I tossed logs until my back screamed. The Husqvarna’s buzz emptied my thoughts, and sweat beaded at my lip and hairline. I stretched my back and watched Joel measure his next cut, then bear down on the tree, then repeat again and again. He didn’t look up, didn’t rest, just kept pushing.

The sweet musk of the sawdust cleansed and warmed against the day’s damp. Joel made the last cut, killed the saw, and in the new quiet, smiled at me. He looked boyish with his hat askew, face flushed with work. I smiled back.

After showering, I moved the Prozac. I hadn’t taken one pill, needed to live with the gaping hole. Maybe someday I could work up to tossing the pills. But today I managed moving the bottle from the medicine cabinet to underneath the sink, nestled it way back among gauze pads and an old ankle brace.

Monday, sunrise at the woodshed with the puppy. The younger outer rings of the walnut rounds blond against the dense heartwood. I picked up a log. The center of the walnut so dark and grained, so bolted through with magenta and deep green, it gleamed, flamed like a jewel when I held the log to the sun. I breathed in the wood, filled my whole chest.

Maybe I’d take the day off, text Warren later to see if he wanted a ride to the oncologist’s office, make up the crib at Amy’s. Ask Joel to take the day with me.

The axes leaned just inside the woodshed. I should get my gloves, put the puppy inside. Instead I stood a large round and stacked another atop it. I picked up Charlie’s axe, checked the dog, up at the wood’s edge beyond the garden dragging a branch three times the size of him, tail up, prancing and proud, and my mouth gave in to the grin.

There’d be more wood this weekend. We’d make time with the splitter.

But I didn’t want to make time. I wanted it back.

I brought the axe behind my head, swung, and as I’d hoped—the smallness of my hopes now could cleave me—the walnut split in two, both halves toppling to the ground, ready to burn.

Heather E. Goodman’s writing has been published in The Sun, Fiction, Witness, Shenandoah, Gray’s Sporting Journal, and the Chicago Tribune, where her story won the Nelson Algren Award. She teaches high school students and lives along a creek in Pennsylvania with her partner Paul and pups.

Process Note: I think best about stories when I’m working: at the woodshed, in the garden, with the laundry. Working towards something tangible, whether it’s stacked wood, a weeded bed, or folded laundry, allows me to think more clearly about the imaginary.