The Backyard Lumberjack by Frank Philbrick

Author:Frank Philbrick
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Storey Publishing, LLC
Published: 2006-03-10T16:00:00+00:00

The family that stacks together. The saw wasn’t running, but my mouth still was. Charlie (aka “Tood”) keeps the helmet on while splitting and I stack ’em up.

There is more in that old wood room than the similarity between the doorsill and my head. That’s not even unique, as my head has been compared to all manner of inert hardware. That wood room has a kind of timelessness to it. For a number of reasons, the space between those walls was on a different schedule, a different level of importance, than the rest of the house. We lavished labor on that one room for a few weeks every season and then carted away its precious store armload by stumbling early-morning armload. The warmer months saw the wood room isolated and utterly ignored.

Ray Gage

There was an old-timer in our town named Ray Gage who taught me a number of things, none of them good and few of them true. He was a deranged-looking old hillbilly, never far from a very intimidating dog he called Cody (among other things). In retrospect this dog could not possibly be as big as he appeared to me as a boy, but I can say with confidence that he was no more than 5 feet tall at the shoulder, and not much over 400 pounds after eating. His smell was bigger, and his coat was an odd, bleached white that had stained yellow for some undoubtedly disgusting reason. Ray used to lam Cody with his cane (he was also the type of guy who makes it all right for me to use the word “lam”).

Eventually, Ray would always come around to the following tale from his childhood as an adopted boy in the hills. His new father took him out to the dooryard his first day at his new home and told him to split the pile of wood before him. Then, with a benevolent pat on the shoulder, his new father told him to simply make another pile of any pieces too difficult to split by hand. Having finished, little Ray asked innocently what he was to do next. “Now split the other pile,” was the reply.

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