I worked like this for an hour or more, settling into a reassuring pattern, until the thought of the boy in the woods—the ghost of my grandfather—fled from my mind. I did not waste movement, keeping the ax biting into logs and adding to the pile of cut wood. I worked hard enough that I stayed warm even though I noticed an odd chill in the air. Occasionally I stopped and looked up at the sudden roiling black clouds that pulled in across the sky, like darkness against the roof of heaven.
Despite the dropping temperature and the change in the sky, the light stayed clear and steady. Still, I was not surprised when I saw the first few flakes of snow drift down before me.
The late summer snow melted as it touched my skin, and I had no worries that this snow had come to stay. At most, I knew, it was an early visitor that would be gone by morning, and I welcomed it. There would be snow and cold in Edmonton, but not like this, not like what I knew from Sawgamet. Though I had never even been as far as Havershand, I was afraid that the streets and buildings of Edmonton would be as foreign and frightening to me as the dark and woods of Sawgamet were to men and women who came unprepared to the north.
I paused for a moment and then took one last piece of wood and placed it on the stump. I rested the ax on the ground and pushed my palm into the solidness of the handle. When I picked it up again, I was struck by the weight of the ax and the history it carried. The dents and dings in the blade, the marks and grooves, and, of course, the scar of a burn worked into the handle, each blemish a story that my grandfather or father told me, stories that I did not yet realize I would tell to my own children.
I lifted the ax behind me, and as I swung it down into the waiting wood I felt something shift. As the ax struck the wood, the handle broke and sent the blade twisting into a knot in the log. I saw the blade buckle and heard the groaning shriek of the metal give. The blade cleaved in two, one piece lodged in the wood, the other shearing into my leg.
As I fell to the ground, I did not see the future, did not hear the stories of my own life that I would tell my daughters—Marie, Martine, and Nathalie—when I returned to Sawgamet and the winter snows kept us in for days on end, did not even see far enough ahead to know that I would return to Sawgamet.
Neither did I think of the present, of the way the metal burnt a bright suffering in my leg, of how I had ruined my pants with blood, of how I would be forced to take to my bed for a week before I could leave for Edmonton.
Instead, as the shattered blade entered my leg, as I fell heavily to the ground, I thought of the stories that my father and grandfather had told me, just as I think of them now.
I thought of how my grandfather had crossed a continent to stop here, in Sawgamet, and how with that very ax he had cut saplings and branches to make a lean-to, the first marks of destruction to visit these woods. I thought of how my grandfather must have thought that the ax would be passed down from son to son to son, keeping on as long as Sawgamet kept on.
I lay under the purpling sky and watched the snow falling gently down upon me. My leg hurt, but I did not worry. I knew with utter certainty that at this moment something both terrible and wonderful was happening in the kitchen or in the church, and that any moment my mother or stepfather would come rushing to me. It was a shame, I thought, that the snow was not falling hard enough to give me one last taste of the fury that Sawgamet could bring to bear, but as I had the thought I realized that maybe this snow was something else: maybe the soft, fluttering flakes of snow were a sort of tenderness, an offering of love, a benediction to see me safely off to Edmonton so that one day I would be able to return to Sawgamet.
OR PERHAPS THE SNOW was just snow that day, and perhaps the snow is just snow on this night, the night before I bury my mother. But it is hard not to ascribe some meaning to it. I look out the window now, and think that the snow is falling with reverence, slow and spinning, great pieces of white drifting through the lights of the train yards.
It is the same Sawgamet that my grandfather knew, that my father knew, that I knew as a boy, and yet it is barely recognizable. It is not the town that has changed so much as the woods. The cuts are just a place to work now. Horses and sleds and axes and saws are still used, but so are machines and motors now. They’ve driven out the ghosts and terrors of my childhood.
I’m tired, and I know I need to sleep before my mother’s funeral in the morning, but I can’t stop thinking about what happened to my grandfather, my grandmother, my father, my sister, even Pearl and his wife, as if the woods have tried to reclaim what is rightfully theirs.
Perhaps tomorrow, after the funeral, when my wife takes the baby home, I’ll walk along the river or into the woods with my two oldest daughters, Martine and Marie, and I’ll tell them the rest of the stories that they have yet to hear. Maybe I’ll convince them to look for their namesakes, my grandmother and my sister, and maybe, in turn, they’ll be able to convince me that if we walk far enough into the woods we’ll find my grandfather, young again, with my grandmother, that we’ll find my father and Marie holding hands, my mother looking over them.
THIS ONE LAST THING before I go to sleep. I keep the broken halves of the ax head on my desk, but tonight I decide to take them down to the river. They are the most physical part of Sawgamet that I carry: Jeannot’s ax, my father’s ax, good for little more than paperweights since the day the blade cleaved in two.
I scoop them from my desk and creep down the stairs, conscious of not waking my wife or daughters. I pull on my coat and shut the door behind me. In the morning I’ll walk to the graveyard and speak over the body of my mother—the same graveyard where my grandfather and grandmother are buried, where my father and sister would have been buried if we had found their bodies—but for tonight, it’s down to the river.
The snow seems to carry me the short distance to the water, and even though there is a part of me that is expecting it, I am still stunned at what is before me: the river frozen over, the ice shining from below, as if the river had swallowed the moon. I think for a moment of flinging the pieces of blade out onto the ice, of the sound the broken ax head would make when it hits, like metal on metal, or how the halves might break through the ice and leave a dark hole of water, but instead, as the light under the ice fades, I slip them back into my pocket and turn toward home.
And once there, back in the house, I take a last look at the sleeping forms of my daughters nestled into their bedrooms before I pad down the hall and slip into bed beside my wife. She stirs a little at the comfort of my weight. I fall asleep listening to the snow continuing outside. I can hear its soft whisper on the window and against the trees, the quiet it brings, and I think it is fitting that tomorrow, when I wake, Sawgamet will be made clean for my mother’s funeral.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I WOULD LIKE TO THANK: Bill Clegg, a wonderful agent and reader, and his assistant Shaun Dolan. Jill Bialosky and her assistant Alison Liss at W. W. Norton & Company, Michael Schellenberg at Knopf Canada, Juliet Brooke at Chatto & Windus, and all editors and assistants everywhere who deserve thanks. Téa Obreht and Jared Harel, best friends and best writers. Marie Mockett, Maud Newton, Kaytie Lee, Matt Grice, Seth Fishman, early readers, extra eyes. Michael Koch, Stephanie Vaughn, J. Robert Lennon, Alison Lurie, Sigrid Nunez, and Ben Fountain, teachers and encouragers. Ben George, who picked me out of the slush.
To my family: my mother and father, who despite everything else, always encouraged me to write. My brother, Ari, and his family. The Rhéaumes. The Willicks. And always, to my wife, Laurie Willick, and my daughters, Zoey and Sabine.
ALEXI ZENTNER is the winner of the 2008 O. Henry Prize and the 2008 Narrative Prize for short stories. His fiction has appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, Tin House, and many other publications. His debut novel, Touch, will be published simultaneously in Canada, the UK and the United States, and in six other countries. Born and raised in Kitchener, Ontario, he now lives with his wife and two daughters in Ithaca, New York. www.alexizentner.com
Alexi Zentner, Touch
Touch Page 22