I hated the wood truck. It always left tire marks across the lawn, flattening the grass and destroying my childhood oasis. I asked my father why it had to come every year.

“Wood is essential,” he replied. “It provides us with heat for the winter.”

We had electricity—it wasn’t as if we needed to keep a fire—but for my parents, it was part of the idyllic country life they’d aways imagined, the romanticized fantasy that couldn’t have been further from the truth.

William, Annabelle, and I would have to help my father prepare the wood. The logs arrived as full, limbless trees freshly cut from the forest. My father would yank the pull-cord several times before it caught, while the three of us sat nearby, the smell of gasoline wafting through the breeze. He’d balance the uncut logs on the misshapen sawhorse he had built from wood of years past. Wood chips and sparks shot up as the chainsaw met the fresh log.

I thought it was a horrible sight, these logs having to hold their brothers still as my father massacred them. To me, it was like cannibalism.

My father paused, shouting over the noise of the chainsaw for us to come help, his red-and-black flannel jacket covered in wood shavings.

We would begin to stack the wood. The first stacks were left outdoors in neat, triangular piles, like the great pyramids of Egypt, in order for it to dry. After a few days, we would transfer those piles into the barn for storage, pressing the logs against a wall until we could no longer reach the top.

As wood was needed for the fire, we would re-stack it a final time inside the porch. To a child, this seemed an unnecessarily complicated ritual, and so, every year, I would cry and try to get out of helping.

William, as the only boy, had the task of chopping the wood for kindling. I would study him as he laid the thicker pieces of wood upright on the chopping block, raising the axe over his head with both arms, and thrust it down, the wood splitting perfectly in two.

One day, I was stacking wood in the barn when I heard William’s scream. I ran outside to find him clutching his right hand, a hatchet in the other.

“My finger,” he groaned. “I cut off my finger.”

I ran indoors, calling hysterically for my mother and father, but neither were there.

Filling a bag with ice, I grabbed a towel then dialled 911, telling them to send an ambulance.

When I went back to William, he was sitting on the ground with blood droplets on the grass below him. He wasn’t crying. His eyes were vacant, his mouth slightly agape.

I knelt next to him and wrapped his finger tightly with the towel. “Where is it?”

William opened his hand and, there in his palm, bloody and pink with a clean, bitten-down nail, was the tip of his pinky. He had cut it from the middle joint.