“Yes. Yes, it would have made more sense.”

“Do it, then. Correctly this time.”

He pauses. My turn to say something. “Okay.”

“Which pallets will you use?”

Trick question? “The ones I put on the grass?”

“Brilliant.” He straightens. I tense. He says, “I expect the new wood to be stacked by the time I get home from work tomorrow. That’s not asking too much, is it?”

I shake my head. Beagle with its tail between its legs.

“Once you’re done in the dishpan, you’d better head for the cellar.”

I nod. Yes sir, yes sir, three bags full. Which, in case your childhood was deprived of nursery rhymes, comes from “Baa, Baa, Black Sheep.” After Cassie outgrew Mother Goose, she latched onto Jack and the Beanstalk, and if you’re reading that book to a kid you don’t have a worry in the world about TV violence.

The cellar isn’t deep enough for me to stand up straight. The overhead light is a bare bulb, the steps rough wood, ending near a cupboard barricaded by boxes. The rest of the cellar? Cracked cement floor, cobwebs, grimy little windows—perfect set for a horror flick.

Our oil-wood furnace is state-of-the-art.

I haul open the door to the outside and toss the logs I piled this afternoon off the pallets. My wrist hurts. When I’ve carried the pallets back down to the cellar and lined them up a foot away from the side wall, I start transferring last year’s dry wood into the cellar and stacking it just so.

I quit at a quarter to ten. Too dark outside to see what I’m doing, bumped my head twice on the sill, moths dashing themselves against the lightbulb, and I’m bone tired.

Wales is losing to the New Zealand All Blacks, so that takes care of Floyd. He prefers rugby to American football—no padding, more injuries. In my socked feet I circle his chair and climb the stairs. Cassie’s fast asleep, Rover squashed against her chest, Horton Hatches the Egg lying open on the quilt. Usually I read her a bedtime story.

I set my alarm then read about the Gobi Desert of Mongolia. All that space with hardly anyone in it. Growing in the sand is a tree called saxaul, which camels like to eat. If you burn a saxaul tree, it gives off three times the heat of birch.

Long way to go for a cord of wood.

*

THREE IN the afternoon, twenty-seven degrees and not a breath of wind; the scorched smell of pine resin hangs in the air. My shirt is stuck to my back. Back, arms, legs, head—all aching. The cellar wood is stacked. The heap in the driveway is three-quarters stacked. Floyd could be back in two hours, and there’s nothing he’d like better than to catch me with the job not finished.