The little boy stood at the edge of the woods and stared in. A small trail climbed beneath an overhang of tall oaks. He stood at the bottom of the trail, assessing the path. He felt as if he were standing at steps to a cathedral, as if he were about to enter holy ground.
His grandfather's old shed stood to his left. Its weathered boards and green roof swayed in the breeze and the boy briefly wondered if it'd fall. To his right was the black tar-paper well house. The well house's wooden shelves held pickled okra and jam his grandmother made and the trinkets his grandfather found along Highway 10.
The boy assessed the woods with hands stuffed in his jacket pockets. Leaves blew across the path. A rumble came from the shed, then stopped. Turning, he saw his father pulling the cord on the big green chainsaw. Finally, the chainsaw choked, gasped, and grumbled to life. His father held it aloft, gassing it as a blue cloud floated above him. Then, his father smiled and motioned for him to hop in the back of the truck.
The boy's grandfather had made a deal with the timber company that owned the woods. He could take any hardwood that was leaning or otherwise not perfect as long as he helped keep the old logging trails clean. The boy bumped along in back of the old Chevy pickup, its flecked white paint giving way to orange rust. He tilted his head back and stared into the leaf-patterned sky.
The boy's father cut wood while the boy and his brothers stacked it. "Stack it straight," his father would say over and over again. "Stack it straight." The boy wondered why he had to do that. Was it because his father didn't want the pile to fall? Or was it some sense of order he demanded from the scattered woods?
After cutting down two large leaning trees and stacking the wood between two saplings, the father ordered the boys in the back of the truck. They rumbled and bounced back down the hill. The boys cheered when the truck passed the old shed and continued down the dirt driveway. They cheered because that meant breakfast at Fletcher's Cafe on the side of the road.
A couple of months later, the boy would return to the woods and help his father load the truck. They had sold the firewood to the boy's teacher and were going to make a delivery. The boy felt awkward seeing the teacher outside school, but his father explained that selling firewood provided Christmas money. Plus, it provided an excuse for all of them to be in the woods.
As the boy grew, he returned to those woods often. Every time he ventured there, he stood at the trailhead and, for an instant, marveled at the little rise that allowed entrance into the cathedral-like forest. He noted the same trees, the underbrush that never stopped growing, the path that his grandfather kept clear. The shed still swayed in the breeze, the green shingles flipping like pages in a book.
In high school, he took friends hunting there. They'd amble up the hill and plink with .22s at old cans the loggers left behind. Then they'd head toward the Little Maumelle and stalk country squirrels. Sometimes the boys would check out the family graveyard hidden in the brush.
In college, the boy, now a young man, would steal away for camping trips in that forest. Again, he would stand at the entrance and marvel at its invitation to enter, to breathe the damp soil and dry leaves, to inhale the clean sky and hear the crunch that comes only when walking on a forest floor. The camping trips were escapes from college life where everything seemed temporary.
When the young man met his future wife, he took her to those woods. He explained the firewood gathering trips, the squirrel hunting, the camping excursions. He pointed to the well house and to the still-swaying shed. His grandfather was gone, but his grandmother still fixed sweet tea in the house. They hiked a lot in those first few months together. He needed her to know how important those woods were to him, to his family.
The man took his oldest son squirrel hunting one day, noting that the entrance to the woods seemed a little different. As they walked along the path overgrown in the absence of his grandfather, he noted that the hill had changed. More sky was visible. As they crested, he smelled diesel. Bulldozers.
The man did not return to the woods for several years. When he finally did, he stood at that old entrance with his son and stared into the blankness of a privacy fence hemming in someone's backyard. The well house still stood guard, the old shed still swayed, but the woods had disappeared into a new neighborhood.
Last week, cold air finally made it south and the man went to his woodpile. He remembered paying for the firewood on the side of the road and watching the two young guys deliver it to his home. "Stack it straight," he mumbled. But they didn't.
As he watched his son build the fire, he stepped back and inhaled the smell of the first embers coming to life in that dark fireplace. His youngest child, new to the family, stepped forward in her pajamas and watched the fire with him. She was only 5 years old and had never been to those woods, had never seen the cathedral entrance, the cleared path, the leaning trees or its blue sky.
They watched the fire burn in side-by-side silence. The man knelt down and said to her, "You know what? Daddy used to cut firewood when he was your age." She turned and smiled. And within that smile, the man saw the cathedral entrance once more.
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Steve Straessle, whose column appears every other Saturday, is the principal of Little Rock Catholic High School for Boys. You can reach him at sstraessle@lrchs.org.
Editorial on 11/16/2019