Free Six Feet Over It by Jennifer Longo Page A

sunlight through elegant, towering pines, dust spinning like diamonds. A bird sang, took flight. A quiet creek splashed over rocks somewhere close. Bumblebees buzzed. I inhaled deeply.
    And then Grandpa revved up the chain saw.
    For the next six hours we were a well-oiled machine: Grandpa cut a pie-shaped wedge from one side of a thick pine trunk, then moved around to the other side to cut straight through. For a moment the giant hovered, balanced precariously on itself, until a great shove from Grandpa’s shoulder and a shout to Gramma (who every single time chose the exact spot where she knew the tree would fall to bend over and start picking up kindling)—“Jesus Christ, Irene, get the hell outta the way here it comes!”—and Gramma dove from the advancing shadow of the falling tree just in time to watch it slam onto the soil.
    “Goddamnit, Wallace! You nearly killed me! You would just love that, wouldn’t you? You’d be the happiest man in town; you’d just clap your hands if I died, wouldn’t you? Wouldn’t you? ” Grandpa shook his head and got busy cutting the tree into rounds, which Kai and I raced to gather. We rolled them to the truck, heaved them up and in. All day long Grandpa felled trees, Gramma accused him of attempted murder, Rene ran around pooping, and Kai and I loaded the rounds.
    The scream of the chain saw, the sharp splintering of wood, the sweet tang of pine sap, a heavy, brief silence, then the rush of air through green needles, the sharp, deep thud of tree against soil. Over and over and over until dusk, until the truck was full.
    Another death ride back to their house, where Gramma called Meredith to report, “Your father tried to kill me today— again. ” Then she settled on their black vinyl sofa to watch TV and work on a tablecloth-size version of The Last Supper rendered entirely in white crocheted thread. One hook, thin thread, years and years of devotion. Kai and I took long baths using gallons of Gramma’s Prell shampoo and climbed, sore and exhausted, into twin beds where Gramma sat at the foot to listen to our prayers, a confusing but required recitation. According to Gramma, when we lay us down to sleep, we must pray the Lord our souls to keep; that if we should die before we wake, we needed to pray the Lord our souls to take. Then we said “God bless …” followed by a litany of names, names of every person we knew or had ever met and the pets, because if we didn’t include them, God wouldn’t bless them, and if they should die tonight, they would go to Hell and burn forever thanks to our negligence. I said Kai’s and Emily’s names twice.
    Kai, thrilled to be off the couch and not dead and have the strength to run for miles and lift wood, fell instantly asleep each night, while under the blanket with a flashlight I wrote letter after letter to Emily, wide awake in the dark, missing her and her mom, missing the ocean, still hearing the sharp splintering of wood, the rush of air through pine needles, the heavy thud of trees against black soil. Over and over and over, again and again, trees and trees and trees until morning.
    The next day was for splitting and stacking at home. Grandpa split the rounds, releasing a sweet ooze of sap and fat white grubs, and we ran to stack the pieces. Splitting, stacking, running for more. The sky was burning pink when we finished for the day, cords of wood, ten feet by six feet by three, stretched up beyond the well pump behind the house.
    We stacked eleven cords of wood that summer, all of it very unintentionally Montessori of them—these people who, to be fair, as kids themselves had Grapes of Wrathed it from Missouri to California when the effects of the drought and Great Depression had reached the Ozarks and therefore knew the value of good day’s work, so who am I to judge. But the satisfaction of a job well done was giving way, at least for me, to the monotony and heat, to wishing for more than one day in a row in life that