The Nail

M.K. Sturdevant

 

There is an urn on the table, containing her husband. She spreads peanut butter across some bread and cracks open a can of pop. The urn is taking on a stripe of sun. She has lived here for 26 years and knows that by the time she finishes the sandwich the urn will be shaded again. Soda bursts between her teeth, the cold drink descends, then pools in her gut.

Outside, a flat stump waits. She likes that her arms are still strong. There are tanned wrinkles under her armpits. Her small breasts slope but she still wears the same clothes she always did, always more or less the same size. Only a freckle, a sunspot here or there, has spread, become an oval. She pulls the sharp maul down hard on a small log, splits it nearly clean. She pulls the wood-halves off the head of the maul and lays them in the grass. Lift, center, pull and split. The sound of it is something she knows well. She always knew it. She cannot remember ever learning it.

Her uncle split wood smoking a pipe. She can smell the cherry cavendish, hear the smack, see the buttons of his shirt. She doesn’t remember him, nor her father, ever wearing a T-shirt. She wonders when she learned about T-shirts. Lift, center, pull down hard, crack. Pull them apart with your hands if the blade doesn’t fall all the way through. Or push the maul down harder, crack the last bit if they don’t come apart, he would say. Lay them down. Repeat.

Her uncle has sweat rings under his shirt. Lift, center, crack. Lay them down. He takes his pipe out, pokes at its contents with a twig, pulls air through it, exhales. Looks over at her. “Seen your dad?” She can feel the warm, metal curve of a tin pail in her small hands; she is packing it into a rusted baby stroller. She shakes her head no, but she has seen her father.

In the woodshed down the driveway, tucked deep in a thicket of birch, there is just enough room for her father and the neighbor’s wife. His belt is loose, pants wrinkled at the waist. Mrs. Cole looks sweaty, desperate, her dress draping over the middle of them both. Pushing the stroller up the drive to get more pails of dandelions to feed the fairies that surely live under that one, emerald, melting log, the girl thinks that Mrs. Cole must have been hurt. Or maybe they were helping one another.

In the yard, her uncle chops. The image lingers. It becomes a weight inside her; it transforms into something bad, her own fault. It locks itself into a hard thing.

Lift, center, pull down smack—stop—the shift in rhythm catches her fit, old muscles and snags. Her thoughts curse the nail she finds, some old bolt in the log. Its cruel assault enrages her. Nostrils flaring, she throws it to the edge of the yard and examines the blade.

Gray hair spills out from her baseball cap. She tucks it back in. She has plenty of wood. And anyway, she knows that before her husband died, she forgave him too, vocally, in therapy, for once treating a stranger in an airport to a moment of respite from an overnight delay. Lift, center, split. He had pleaded with her not to be angry about it. It wasn’t good anyway, he had said, groveling.

She chokes up on the handle and straightens her back. She needs to lift the maul higher. And she needs to pull it, not just drop it. She splits the next log clean, exposing the dark pith all the way down.

She kicks the two halves to the side.

Lay them down. Repeat.

She stacks her cuts, goes inside for a glass of water, and sits down at the table. She centers one finger over the top of the urn. The light at the window becomes purple, then black.

 

M.K. Sturdevant recently completed a writer’s residency at the HJ Andrews Experimental Forest, May 2018. Her work has appeared in Orion, Flyway, Alluvian, is forthcoming in The Trumpeter, and was listed in the Top 25 Emerging Writers for Glimmer Train Press in 2017. She lives and works in the Chicago area.