Pieces of the Frame

by John McPhee

  “When your confidence is drained, you tend to do desperation shots. My desperation shots, a lot of times, turn matches. I felt something was gone. I didn’t have strength to get to the net quickly. I can’t explain what it was. If you’re not confident, you have no weight on the ball. You chase the ball. You look like a cat on a hot tin roof.”

  Laver serves, moves up, and flips the volley over the base line. “Get it down!” he shouts to himself. His next volley goes over the base line. Now he double-faults. Now he moves under a high, soft return. He punches it into a corner. Taylor moves to the ball and sends it back, crosscourt. Laver, running, hits a rolling top-spin backhand—over the base line. Advantage Taylor. Break point. The whispering of the crowd has become the buzz of scandal.

  His red hair blowing in the wind, Laver lifts the ball to serve against the break. Suddenly, he looks as fragile as he did at Hurlingham and the incongruity is gone. The spectators on whom this moment is making the deepest impression are the other tennis players—forty or so in the grandstands, dozens more by the television in the Players’ Tea Room. Something in them is coming free. The man is believable. He is vulnerable. He has never looked more human. He is not invincible.

  “The serve is so much of the game. If you serve well, you play well. If not, you are vulnerable. If you play against someone who is capable of hitting the ball as hard as Roger can, you are looking up the barrel.”

  Laver serves. “Fault” He serves again. “Double fault.” Game and service break to Taylor, fourth set. Laver, without apparent emotion, moves into the corner—and the shadow that until moments ago seemed to reach in a hundred directions now follows him alone. The standard he has set may be all but induplicable, but he himself has returned to earth. He will remain the best, and he will go on beating the others. The epic difference will be that, from now on, they will think that they can beat him.

  Taylor lobs. Laver runs back, gets under the bouncing ball, kneels, and drives it into the net. He is now down 1-5. He is serving. He wins three points, but then he volleys into the net, again he volleys into the net, and again he volleys into the net —deuce. He serves. He moves forward. He volleys into the net. Advantage Taylor—match point. The sound of the crowd is cruel. “Quiet, please!” the umpire says. Laver serves, into the net. He appears to be trembling. He serves again. The ball does not touch the ground until it is out of the court beyond the base line.

  Photographers swarm around him and around Taylor. “Well done, Roger. Nice,” Laver says, shaking Taylor’s hand. His eyes are dry. He walks patiently through the photographers, toward the glass doors. In the locker room, he draws a cover over his racquet and gently sets it down. On the cover are the words ROD LAVER—GRAND SLAM.

  “I feel a little sad at having lost. I played well early in the tournament. I felt good, but I guess deep down something wasn’t driving me hard enough. When I had somewhere to aim my hope, I always played better. Deep down in, you wonder, ‘How many times do you have to win it?’”

  Firewood

  FIREWOOD HAS BEEN SELLING, OF LATE IN NEW YORK CITY, for one dollar a stick. Piles of it. Right off the sidewalk. Split from small logs of oak or ash or maple. Split. Split again. Four pieces, four dollars. The bulk rate is around a hundred dollars a cord in the suburbs and a hundred and fifty dollars a cord in the city. From such prices, understandably, the less fortunate have turned aside. The Harvard Club is burning artificial logs made of wax and compressed sawdust. There are people enough, however, who seem prepared to pay for real wood—people, in fact, who are removing the boards and bricks from fireplaces long in disuse. With the destruction of old buildings and the erection of new ones, which tend to have fireplaces only in penthouses, fireplaces had steadily been disappearing from the city, an atrophy that has now abruptly ceased. As petroleum reserves ran low early this winter, a row of apartment buildings on Park Avenue exhausted its allocation of heating oil and the buildings went cold, bringing on a micro-crisis that was overcome by heavy deliveries of firewood handsomely packaged in burlap.

  At roughly the same time, a memorandum went out from Albany, from the director of the Division of Lands and Forests to all regional foresters in the state, instructing them that it was now “the policy of this Department, as an energy conservation measure, to encourage the cutting of firewood for fuel on state land.” For five dollars a cord, plus a dollar seventy-two for liability insurance, plus twenty cents tax, a private woodcutter could be assigned to a segment of the state’s forests and permitted to remove sugar maple, red maple, ash, birch, hickory—the cutter’s choice. “The major value of this new effort,” the memorandum went on to say, “may be to help alleviate the energy shortage.”

  Interested citizens in the southeastern part of the state were to call 914-677-8268, where foresters were waiting to answer questions and to explain the terms of the state’s printed contracts. The phone was in Millbrook, northeast of Poughkeepsie, but there was designated forest land near Carmel, closer to the centers of population, and foresters would meet people at the site in order to complete contracts and consummate sales. After the phone number appeared in newspapers, customers began to fan in to the Carmel woods from all over the metropolitan area. Ralph Fisher, for example, a retired I.B.M. branch manager, drove up from Larchmont with his son in his son’s Toyota. They took an axe and wedges, a large mallet, and a manual saw. They cut wood from trees that were down and dead, because “due to this energy problem” they wanted “a lot of heat” on short notice from wood that was ready to burn. They went home with a modest load of maple, oak, and ash. The state would allow them two months to make return trips, whenever they liked, to cut the rest of their purchased cord. William Nalepa, a Nassau County detective, drove up to Carmel just to study the situation. With the energy shortage, firewood on Long Island had all but disappeared. He bought a cord but postponed, for the time being, the work involved. “What looked good to me there was a lot of the ash,” he told his family. “They’re simple to split.” Ed Talbert also went up from Long Island—from East Patchogue, a hundred and forty miles from Carmel. He drove a truck that carried an old farm tractor, and he took with him two chain saws and three sons. Talbert knew what he was doing. He had lived around Herkimer once, where he had been a logger. His home in Patchogue is heated by a wood-and-coal space heater. He signed a contract for five cords, paid twenty-seven dollars and seventy-two cents, and began felling trees. He hauled big logs out of the woods with the tractor. He took two and a half cords on his first trip—about fifty trees. He did not work so hard that he failed to notice other cutters in the forest. “I’ve seen some of them,” he said later on. “They don’t know what they’re doing.”

  One woman called the foresters and asked if a cord of wood would fit into her Pinto. A cord of wood and a Pinto are about the same size. The cargo capacity of a Pinto Wagon is sixty cubic feet. A cord (four by four by eight) is a hundred and twenty-eight cubic feet. If it is hardwood, it weighs something over two tons. (A cord as commercially sold is often a “face cord”—four feet high and eight feet long but only as deep as the length of firewood. What the state is selling for five dollars is, of course, a standard cord. ) Some callers seemed disappointed when told that the state’s wood was not already cut, split, and stacked by the road. Others expected that the foresters would load the wood for them. One man said he had an electric chain saw and he wondered if there were electrical outlets in the forest. Another asked if there were toilet facilities close to the trees. In Albany, a man walked into the forestry office with a hacksaw and said he wanted to sign up for a cord and go cut it.

  Foresters, in the main, welcomed the state’s new policy, because it would publicize forestry and the forests, but they worried also about the inherent risks. A glimpse of a city person working the woods with a chain saw was enough to make a forester avert his eyes. It would be the forester’s job, after all, to sort out felled limbs, seeing which had twigs and which had fingers. Felling and cutting trees was dangerous work
for professionals, let alone amateurs. Workmen’s-compensation rates for the logging industry were as high as for any industry in the country, and the timberlands were full of thumbless pros who seemed to be suffering from permanent concussions. Minimally, any woodcutter coming to the state woods needed a hard hat, hard shoes, and a knowledge of felling techniques. But they came instead in suède and sneakers, untutored, bareheaded. Most apparently were unaware, too, that the preponderance of trees that the foresters had marked for cutting were alive and standing—good green timber, which would be ready to blaze across the hearth and ease the energy crisis by the Fourth of July. Green wood will burn, after a fashion, but it deposits droplets of creosote inside the chimney, and the deposits build up until they themselves catch fire. Then flames lick the roof and start back down through the building toward the fireplace.

  “It sounds real good on the surface. Cut a cord of wood. Take it home and burn it. But it’s not that simple,” one forester said.

  “I’ve cut a lot of trees,” another said. “No matter how many you’ve cut, it’s still dangerous.”

  “A fireplace is an inefficient wood-burning facility anyway. It’s a romantic way to suck cold air into a room, heat the air, and send it up the chimney.”

  “Yes, but for all that, this program is bringing foresters closer to people. It’s doing the woods a lot of good, through selective thinning. And it’s a way, at last, to show people that it’s not evil to cut a tree. Trees do grow again. Trees are a renewable resource. We can now explain on a one-to-one basis the renewability of the forest. We never reached the happy homeowners before.”

  Eric Meola, one freezing day, left his apartment at nine in the morning and drove in a small rented van to Carmel. His apartment was a floor-through loft on lower Fifth Avenue, and it was cold after ten in the evening, cold all day Sunday, and drafty in the lightest wind. He had read in the newspaper of the state’s new program and had decided to add heat to his home with wood. He began with almost nothing. He had no axe, no saw, no maul, no wedge. In fact, he had no fireplace. So for three hundred and ten dollars he had bought a great inverted funnel, a hood, of red enamelled steel, whose connecting stovepipe would rise through a skylight. He was twenty-seven years old, skillful with his hands, and he did the installation himself. He was pleased with it—a handsome fireplace, freestanding. The firebed below the hood rested on, among other things, white marble chips.

  Carmel was a little over sixty miles from the center of the city—far enough away to be a small and integral town, not in any apparent sense suburban. As Meola rolled in there, he passed under a railroad bridge whose most prominent graffito was “We’re us.” He had learned by phone where he could rent a chain saw, and now, inexactly following directions, he passed the Putnam County Courthouse (tall-columned and gleaming white), looped around, made a left by a half-frozen lake, and stopped by a sign that said “Paden Rental.” Meola had two friends with him, one of whom was experienced with chain saws, having worked parts of his college summers cutting wood at a resort in Maine. His name was Randy Phillips and he had a vested interest in the day’s results, for he was cold, too. Like Meola, Phillips was a photographer, and both used Meola’s apartment as a studio. The other friend, Myrna Wollitzer, was an anthropologist, whose interest was in man, not Firewood. She had no idea what a chain saw was, and seemed in no hurry to find out. She had cool gray eyes and a lingeringly contemplative stare. Everybody went into Paden Rental.

  Paden, if that was his name, looked from one customer to another with an expression that seemed to suggest that this energy crisis had started some extremely novel trends. The woman, in leather boots and dungarees, was wearing a thin red Chinese jacket covered with lotus blossoms, and the wind outside was bitterly cold. Meola, the leader, was a tall man in a leather jacket, leather boots, corduroy trousers—handsome, with a calm and soft voice, and such a wealth of beard and curly dark hair that he could well have played the lead in Jesus Christ Superstar. (He had, in fact, done the photograph of the Superstar cast that appeared on the cover of Time.) The other man, Phillips, wore hard, heavy, sensible rubber boots. He had stringy light-brown hair and a ten-day beard. The lenses of his eyeglasses were small perfect circles rimmed in metal, and he wore a knitted cap and a long overcoat, which in the woods would give him the appearance of a Byelorussian refugee painted against the snow. To Paden’s apparent relief, Phillips was asking knowledgeable questions about the chain saw—a bright-yellow Partner 16, which Paden had presented for inspection. Meola paid the rent: twenty dollars and eighty cents for one day’s use. Then he went across the street and into the Carmel Farm Supply Company, where he paid eight dollars and twenty-eight cents for a pair of leather work gloves and ten dollars and thirty-nine cents for a Plumb axe—the last axe in stock. The energy shortage had touched off an axe boom. “Use it in good health,” said the man who sold it. “And don’t chop your leg off.”

  Several miles north of town, a thin black road framed in old stone walls led in to the state woods. The tract was about nine hundred acres of rising ground topped by a fire tower on a hill called Ninham Mountain. These woods were not part of the vast acreages that the New York State constitution insists “shall be forever kept as wild forest land.” These, to the contrary, were woodlands always intended for “multiple use”—lumbering, hunting, recreation—and now, along the south side of the road and going back some distance, a selected and high proportion of the trees had been daubed with large dots of orange paint. There were many fresh stumps. Strewn over the ground was a great deal of slash. Across the road and up a short drive was a large equipment shed—“Ninham Mountain Field Headquarters, Division of Lands and Forests.”

  The forester inside was a pale-complexioned man of middle height with a plain and straightforward manner. His name was Jerry Gotsch. He did not wear a uniform. He had on an old blue quilted jacket, twill trousers, thong-laced leather boots. He began to fill in a contract—on legal-size paper—that contained at least four thousand words in six-point type. He said not to worry. This was the same standard form the state used when selling to a pulp or lumber company a hundred thousand board feet of timber. He spoke gently, in a high nasal voice, without a trace of rustic condescension, explaining simple facts about the program. He had a look at the rented van, at the request of Meola, who wanted to know how much wood it could carry. The vehicle was a Ford Econoline (bright yellow, bearing the Technicolor heraldry of the house of Hertz). Wood weighing what it does, anything more than a quarter load in the cargo space of the van would probably destroy it, the forester said. The thing might not survive as much as half a cord of green wood. Another time, it might be well to rent a pickup.

  Myrna Wollitzer asked, “Is that the kind that’s open in the back?”

  “Yes, that kind.”

  After Meola had paid his six dollars and ninety-two cents and had signed the contract, Gotsch said, “The trees here are sugar maple, red maple, ash. Elm, too—which is harder than the devil to split. There’s also some black cherry, red oak, gray birch, black birch, black locust, sassafras, wild apple, quaking aspen. Take what you want. It’s your choice. But please cut the stumps low and utilize the tops up to four inches. Anything you leave on the ground should have a diameter smaller than that. You have two months in which to take your cord. To get a cord out of these woods, you may need to cut twenty trees. It’s up to your honesty that you take only as much as you buy. There’s an old saying about cutting wood—‘It warms you twice.’ It warms you when you cut it, and it warms you when you burn it. The heat value of a cord of wood equals the heat value of two hundred gallons of fuel oil.”

  The door opened and more customers entered the shed. Gotsch said to be careful and he would stop by in the woods later on to see how the cutting was going.

  Even the light was cold outside, coming down from a pale, fluorescent sun. Snow mists were collecting around it. The sky was otherwise blue. The wind was fresh and freezing. Myrna Wollitzer shivered, and said, “So how l
ong does it take to chop this wood?” Her friends shrugged. She waited in the van.

  Meola and Phillips walked among the trees, looking for dead ones. They wanted their fires this winter. The place was beautiful, they remarked—woods on a slope down to a fast-moving and ice-rimmed stream. Just being there was worth the trip. Phillips stopped by a fourteen-inch trunk daubed with orange paint—a big tree compared to the others there—and looked up into the high branches.

  “O.K. Let’s take this one,” he said.

  “What is it?”

  “It’s dead.”

  “A dead what? What kind?”

  “Tree,” Phillips said. There was an antic professorial look about him as he leaned down over the chain saw and inspected it through the narrow diameters of his steel-rimmed spectacles. His long overcoat, touching the ground, formed a drapefold curve, like the base of a tree. The saw started on the nineteenth pull. Its din shot up the air. Deciding to drop the tree more or less due north, Phillips made a large notch in the north side. Then he moved around to the other side to make the back cut. In theory, as the saw moved toward the notch, the tree should slowly, majestically bend across the hinge created in its heartwood and drop like a mighty arrow, pointing precisely in the direction intended by the sawyer. Deafening, staccato, the Partner 16 bit into the wood and moved toward the notch. Suddenly, Phillips leaped out of the way. He scrambled for his life. A ton of American elm thundered onto the forest floor, pointing due south.

  One could always pick up a telephone and call Clark & Wilkins, on East 128th Street, and order a bag of regular. A bag of regular, also known as a bag of standard mixture, contains, say, fifteen pieces of split oak, ash, beech, maple, seasoned at least a year and neatly trimmed by a table saw to an exact length. This is the firewood of the high world. A bag costs from five dollars and fifty cents to six dollars and a quarter, depending on how many bags are ordered and how tough the delivery is. Three logs, split, can fill a bag. The company stocks different lengths, but the bag price is uniform. The shorter the length, the more pieces in the bag. In Greenwich Village, fireplaces are small, and Clark & Wilkins generally delivers twelve-inch wood there. The fireplaces in midtown apartments take sixteen-inch or eighteen-inch wood. Certain town houses require twenty-four-inch wood. These long pieces are bundled, not bagged (eight or nine are bound tightly together with plastic bands). There is a class of people who cannot enjoy a bottle of wine unless its subtle pigments are asparkle in the light of a Clark & Wilkins fire. Such people have accounts with the company. They say that getting a delivery from Clark & Wilkins is rather like getting a delivery from Tiffany. The burlap is immaculate. The company’s name is boldly stencilled across it. If one pays no more for one’s wine than for one’s wood, and only occasionally indulges in a bag of special (cherry, birch, hickory, at seven dollars and fifty cents a bag), twenty-five hundred dollars will nicely cover the combined cost, for two, of a winter’s wines and fires. Imperial and Cadillac limousines often pull up at Clark & Wilkins, which is below the Penn Central Railroad’s elevated tracks. There, in the heart of Harlem, a uniformed chauffeur or a woman in fur will step out and pick up a bag of regular. They get a dollar off if they pick it up themselves.