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There’s an art to woodcutting: the swing of the axe, the heft of the shaft, the buttery feel of a sharp blade slicing through bark and stem, wood and pith, the resinous tang of the tree’s juices spilling into the air and the rhythmic pound of muscle, iron and wood resounding through the forest. My father had the knack of it, he could fell an acre a day and a wood in a week. He wandered far and wide, never to be seen but for the distant fall of green and the crack and thunder of felled trunk leaving a swathe of churned black earth in his wake.
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It was about this time that a storm began to gather around our home. My father returned and there was a hot rage in the air and the halls echoed with his roar until one day I woke up and the door had been split in two by his axe. My mother came to me then distraught.
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My mother, sister and myself were confronted by him one frightful night as the flames burnt in an ever decreasing circle around us
“I will take what’s yours, it will be mine by might and you, you woman have forfeited any rights by giving birth to this abomination, if you will move away I will claim my son.”
My mother said nothing, moved not, held my sister and looked to me.
“You are a fool father, more stupid than a rock and duller than the blade that’s been struck against it, you are possessed of the wit of the shit beneath my shoe and half as welcome”
“You would ally yourself against me. I will strike you down as an enemy of the clan, nothing will pass to you - you will be outcast”
“And yourself father - who will you be, friendless but for an army whose allegiance is weaker and less pleasing than the link of a child’s daisy chain? Stop this or stride a path to your own oblivion.”
“You are the fool and you are not now my son if you ever were”
“Then I relinquish all the burdens of your parentage. Go!”
And he left.
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It pulled me up, placed me in the palm of its hand, and held me to its face. I opened my eyes to a giant eye peering down at me, its pupil black like some endless disc of night into which I felt myself drowning, sucked insensible into its stupid depths. This was how I was to die. It was in the iris that its intelligence was revealed, the constant flexing of the muscle of the cornea, pulling contracting and expanding. From a distance you would have said they were brown, close up they are a kaleidoscopic marble of tones, flecks great rocks of colour
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I shout
“Fuck off”
“Shut your trap son!”
“Grandmother? Nana”
“Hug me grandson, I ain’t seen you in a while?”
“I can’t, you are too big”
“Big enough to crush you into bits… I could make a meal of you, mash you and smash you, you’d be my crunch and lunch, like those little yoghurt pots you see in the grocery”
“You are one bad nana”
“Where’s your sister?”
“She’s under the bed hiding”
“Come here girl, there, you ain’t scared of your grandma, are ya?”
She stretched a finger, and as she stroked my sister’s hair her face turned thoughtful
“I know my own kin when I see it. He’s a bloody fool.”
She put me down and turned to leave
“Now I got to get back, your grandpa will be wanting his dinner. Not a word about this to anyone or I might get hungry”
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And for something that big she disappeared so fast I hardly believed she had been there at all.
The next day it was as if to wake from a dream into a nightmare. My sister said nothing but signalled me to look outside. There stood a great crowd of men massed around the house, some talking, some laughing, some gesturing or eating or drinking. They wore horned helmets, swords and swinging axes, these men who came with evil intent. We ran to mother who had been joined during the night by many other refugees. There was no sign of my grandparents. She smiled and gestured silence while she talked with the newcomers.
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The door and the outer walls had been patched together and covered with the heartwood, bark and roots of sequoia, a tree both resistant to and loving of fire. Providing, we hoped, some protection.
Outside, a great stack of trunks and felled trees had been piled and the pitch man laid fire upon this, caressing the flames as they jumped back and forth between himself and the wood.
There was a curious waiting to all this; a pause, pregnant with fear and possibility, but somehow ordinary; a day of work for these who would wish us ill and all the more frightening for it.
A great roar of cries broke from the horde and my father walked out, his axe held high. There would be no parley, no last angry words. He broke into a run toward the door. The pitch man directed a huge blast of flame at the house, instantly setting it alight. The glass cracked and melted to the floor. Then they descended upon the house, slashing at the charred and burning wood.
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My father smashed through the door and stood there bathed in flames. My mother, swathed in wraiths, advanced upon him, he raised his axe upon her and I ran at him in a blind rage, slipped under his guard and flung myself at his body, pushing him back a metre or two until he swatted me away like a fly.
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