In Which We Split Wood After All

So, we did get in on the wood chopping after all. Not chopping, but splitting. There was still a pile of un-split logs left from Saturday, and the splitter Dad rented didn’t have to go back until 9:00 this morning. So Mom came and cheerfully roused all her little lumberjacks at 6:30. I say lumberjacks, but at that point we were more like zombies. Rising with the sun is all good and well if you go to bed with the sun, but some of us don’t, and it is our fault entirely, I admit.

Mom had made us some hearty scrambled eggs and toast, and as we all sat down at the table to eat she said, “See, kids, we could be an Amish family! Only it’s not dark out.” We tried not to actually slay her with our glares; moderate maiming seemed more acceptable. After all, she is our mother.

We ate our eggs and headed for the little barn we used to keep chickens in. (I know it sounds like we’re farmers, but that would be a complete misunderstanding. It was a devastating experience for the chickens.) Strains of “Heigh Ho, Heigh Ho!” were floating through my head, accompanied by a splitting headache (no pun intended).

Dad was already there with the splitter, so I got down beside him to help with that. Soon, Dad was manning the splitter and I was getting the logs into position to be split, while Connor, Mom, and Mattie set up logs for me and stacked the split pieces. It was quite an operation. I wrestled with the logs and Dad guided where they needed to be split.

In the jittery roar of the splitter’s motor, we had to yell in order to hear each other, even though we were only a few feet apart. I’d half-hear Dad’s calls of, “Let’s go three pieces with this one!” Or “Shave off that side and do quarters!” Since I couldn’t hear him that well, he motioned with his fingers whether to split the log into 2,3, or 4 pieces.

I didn’t always see how many fingers, being a little mesmerized with the hypnotic travels of the maul up and down its the greased post. When I started noticing his hand motions, I had to laugh at his gimpy fingers. He has nearly removed three different finger tips in three different accidents, and now one of his fingers points around corners. But I had to remember how one of the fingers (the one affectionately dubbed “Frankenfinger”) got mangled in a table saw while he was making a desk for a little eleven-year-old girl aspiring to be a writer…

Mom offered to take my spot at the splitter, since it looked uncomfortable to be kneeling or leaning back on my heels for so long. But that wasn’t bothering me, and I wanted to stay where I was. I kind of liked working right there with Dad. I felt close to him that way; we were working the same pieces of wood, watching the splitter tear through the grain of each log, each of us tugging a side of it to finish the separation. I was there kneeling next to him, his worn leathery boot near my knee; I could see the grit and bruises on his hands. He was there, guiding the splitter’s lever with one hand and guiding my log and me with the other.

Dad and I often have a hard time communicating with each other, but I think we love each other a lot more than either of us can express. This work was a connecting point. “Half, Cass, I said half,” I heard him yell over the roar, after I had missed the spot where the he wanted the splitter to go through. “Half looks different from over here!” I yelled back.

The work went so well that I was surprised to look back and see how much the pile had dwindled. We finished in an hour and a half, and Dad hitched the splitter to his truck and took it back to the rental, while the rest of us went home to clean the grease and grime and wood bits off our hands and shoes and, well, every where. My hair has gone crazy, I’m a little queasy on gasoline fumes, and I still have that splitting headache, but hey, the day is still young...