The Qualities of Wood (10 page)

‘One rumor's as good as another.'

She gave him a hard look and turned back to Vivian. ‘Then the story changes again. Some people say that Mr Stokes went off looking for her, some say he just holed up in that house. He's definitely gotten stranger. His father died a few years later and since then, nobody sees much of him.'

‘I've only been here a few weeks, and I've seen him twice,' Vivian said.

‘That's true,' Katherine said. ‘But you're neighbors.'

Max said, ‘Vivian says that Mrs Brodie came out there.'

‘What for?'

‘She wanted to see the place they found Chanelle,' Vivian said.

Katherine frowned. ‘Now there's a woman who would've driven old Jesper Stokes crazy. Too bad she and Abe Stokes never hit it off. And to think, they've been neighbors all this time and she's never cast her magical spell over
him
.'

‘Now, Katherine,' Max said, ‘the woman just lost her only child.'

‘I know, but it doesn't change the past. If I didn't trust you so much, I'd worry about her bringing her clothes in for cleaning.' She gave Vivian a strange look, as if she just realized something, then just as quickly, looked away.

As they sat on the porch, night spread over the land like a thick, black blanket. After they had coffee, Katherine and Max both came along for the drive to Grandma Gardiner's house. The old white house looked dark and abandoned from the road, with the truck gone and only the porch light on. Katherine walked Vivian inside and waited while she turned on lights and checked around.

‘Thanks again,' Vivian said. ‘It was fun. Max is a great guy.'

Katherine looked around. ‘Are you sure you're going to be alright here?'

‘Of course.' They walked out onto the porch. Vivian waved to Max in the car then went in and closed the door. Katherine called from outside: ‘Lock it.'

Just like a mother, Vivian thought as she locked the deadbolt.

She turned off all the lights except for one lighthouse lamp in the bedroom. The bluish glow extended down the hallway. She followed it to the kitchen, where she poured a glass of water. Through the window in the study she saw a small, bouncing light in the trees, like the flashlights they saw the night she arrived. This time there was only one light, fading rapidly back into the woods as she watched. In a moment it was gone, and she began to doubt whether she'd seen it at all. She listened to the whisper of the trees as
they flowed with the night breeze and she strained her eyes, searching over the waves of tall grass and back through the tangled mass of trees in the direction of Abe Stokes's house.

Vivian dreamed that she was in a room filled with books. On each side, wooden shelves extended from floor to ceiling, stacked with multi-colored spines. A stepladder rolled soundlessly on a narrow track and from the top rung, her father threw books down. They dropped like bombs. Leaping this way and that, she called to him but he ignored her. The books made a loud, slapping sound when they hit the floor.

Like soft fingers tapping against her brow, the sharp, steady impacts echoed in the room that Vivian slowly recognized as Grandma Gardiner's. There was the faint smell of waxy, aged wood and the steam-ironed starchiness of the sheets. There was the oddly colored painting with the green sky and there was the worn armchair in the corner. The thuds continued, becoming more distinct. Slowly, she realized they were coming from outside. Someone was chopping wood, she thought, and in the same instant her mind raced ahead: Abe Stokes.

In a few moments, she was striding through the tall grass of the backyard, the cool blades tickling her ankles, brushing against her calves. She had tucked the t-shirt she wore to bed into denim shorts and slipped on a pair of sandals. The morning sun was low and liquid, spilling over the ground in high contrasts and soft tinges of red and yellow. When she reached the edge of the trees, she looked back and saw her reflection in the window to Nowell's study. From that considerable distance, it was only a flash of color and her long, dark banner of hair. She turned and plunged in. She kept her course straight,
first following the chopping sounds then directing herself toward a bluish figure amidst the trees, Vivian soon reached the source of both. She called out: ‘Hello!'

Mr Stokes propped the long-handled ax against his shoulder like a baseball bat. ‘Mrs Gardiner?'

She entered the small clearing. A log lay across a wide tree trunk that served as a chopping block. Next to the trunk was a small stack of kindling, the wood clean and recently cut. The blue she had noticed through the trees was Abe Stokes' denim shirt. He also wore blue jeans, and his face was flushed from exertion.

He swung the ax and set it down. ‘Is something wrong?'

She shook her head, suddenly embarrassed. Why had she come?

‘Did the noise wake you?'

Vivian glanced at her wrinkled t-shirt, a souvenir from one of her parents' vacations, and reached up to smooth her hair. ‘Not really,' she said. ‘I needed to get up anyway.'

‘Sometimes I forget that other people are around.' He motioned for her to sit on a smaller log. ‘Before Mrs Brodie got that job at the nursing home, she'd come over now and again to complain, but I thought I was in the clear now.'

‘And then your new, bothersome neighbors moved in,' Vivian said.

‘No,' he grinned. ‘I forgot how easily sound travels in the morning. It's one of the reasons I like to get up early. Peaceful.'

‘I've been too lazy to notice until now,' Vivian said.

‘You don't strike me as the lazy type.'

‘Don't I?' She pulled her feet onto the trunk and hugged her knees. ‘Maybe it's giving up my job, I don't know. I've been restless lately.'

‘What did you do before?'

‘My job?'

He nodded.

‘I worked in an office, a water management company.'

‘Managing water?' he asked.

She smiled. It sounded misguided, even unnecessary, the way he said it.

He poured coffee from a thermos and gave her the plastic cup-shaped lid. It reminded her of the thermos her father took on their picnics back east, the same one she used at school for several years.

‘Where's Mrs Brodie's house from here?' she asked.

He pointed to his right. ‘A good distance that way.'

‘Do you know her well?'

‘We've been neighbors a long time. Almost fifteen years now, ever since old Mrs Duncan died.'

Vivian sipped her coffee. It was strong and tasted of walnut. Abe Stokes cleaned the edge of his axe with a ragged yellow cloth that looked like it used to be part of a curtain then continued to chop wood.

‘Why are you cutting so much firewood in the summer?' she asked during one of his pauses.

‘It wouldn't do to try and cut it in a snowstorm. Haven't you ever seen squirrels collecting nuts for the winter?'

‘The other day you said I might be afraid of squirrels.'

He smiled his lop-sided grin. ‘If you quit running from them long enough, you'd notice that they store things. Didn't you ever have a hamster as a kid?'

‘My mother wouldn't allow pets.' She watched as he drove the ax through the log. ‘How much wood does one person need?'

‘I usually burn a couple of logs a night in the winter months.'

‘I guess that adds up,' she said. ‘Don't you worry about depleting your supply of trees?'

Mr Stokes put one foot on the trunk and leaned on his knee. His face was serious. ‘No, I don't. I only use what I need and I get kindling from what's laying around or from trees that are already dead.'

A few awkward moments passed, and then she stood up. ‘I guess I should get going. I didn't mean…'

‘Wait,' Mr Stokes said.

She turned towards him.

His ran his hand through his hair. ‘Listen, I know you didn't mean any harm. I'm not so great with people, with conversation.'

‘Mr Stokes, don't worry about it. I'm sure you're very responsible with your land.'

The muscles underneath his shirt clenched and released as he gripped the axe. Vivian thought about the story Katherine told her about the woman who abandoned him without warning. ‘We all have things that we're sensitive about,' she said.

The glint returned to his clear eyes. ‘I thought we agreed that you'd call me Abe. Why did you come out here, other than to tell me to stop making such a racket?'

‘Actually, I came to give you a hard time about what you said to Katherine and Max Wilton. About my snooping the other day.'

‘I didn't…'

‘Because if that's what you think, you're wrong. I was just enjoying nature, like you this morning.' She crossed her arms and looked up at him through her eyelashes.

‘That's it, is it?'

‘Yes,' she said. ‘That's all.'

Abe Stokes took an awkward drink from the narrow opening of the thermos then wiped his lips with his sleeve. Vivian thought about the way her father dabbed the corners of his mouth with a napkin, first one side and then the other. She heard a rustle in the trees.

‘Good thing for squirrels,' Mr Stokes said, ‘they help spread around more trees.'

‘What?' Vivian said.

The sunlight cast geometric shapes on his chest and shoulders as he lifted a log onto the cutting block. ‘Savers and burrowers are liable to drop things now and again in their rush. All of these squirrels running around collecting nuts makes for a pretty good planting system. So you don't have to worry about the tree supply.'

‘I bet you know a lot about nature,' Vivian said.

‘I'm no expert,' he said. ‘I just try to get along out here, but sometimes I wonder…' He looked away.

‘What?'

‘What you said about my chopping wood.'

‘I didn't mean anything,' she objected.

‘I know. But sometimes I wonder if we should cut trees or not.'

‘What do you mean?'

‘Evolution.' He brought the ax down with a crack. ‘Survival of the fittest and all that. Aren't we the fittest? Maybe it's our duty to take over the land, to build on it.'

‘Then some people would question what we use the wood for,' she said, ‘whether the things we build are necessary for survival or not.'

‘What does it matter, if we're the fittest? Animals don't kill just for meat. They have their own ways of showing strength.'

‘But shouldn't we worry about the future? About trees?'

Mr Stokes raised his eyebrows. ‘And water?'

‘Yes,' she laughed, ‘and water. We're arrogant, aren't we, to think that we can have a big effect on this planet, and we're naive if we don't?'

He took another swing at the log. ‘It has to matter. It's morality, really. I have to believe that it matters.'

‘Morality?'

‘Whether our actions matter or not,' he said. ‘Morality.'

Vivian noticed the narrow rivulets at the corners of his eyes, like a tangle of thin branches. ‘That's a complicated issue for so early in the morning, isn't it?' She stood and wiped the dirt from her shorts. ‘Thanks for the coffee and the conversation. You've given me something to think about today.'

‘Sorry again for the noise.'

‘Don't worry about it.' Vivian started to walk back the way she came, but turned abruptly and caught him watching her leave. Quickly, he began straightening the pile of kindling at his feet.

‘We're going to have the Wiltons over for a barbecue one night,' she said. ‘You should come, too.'

He slid his right hand into the front pocket of his jeans. ‘Thank you. I can bring something for the grill.'

‘Okay,' she said.

Vivian walked back through the trees, confident of her direction now. Back at the house, she made scrambled eggs and toast. She was hungrier than she'd been in the morning for some time. As she ate, she heard the rumble of the road crew's truck outside and realized that it was just about the time she got up most mornings. The whole incident with Abe Stokes could have been a dream; it might never have happened. As the birds raised their voices in competition with the drone of the truck and the occasional shouts of the men who were now working some distance from the house, she thought about Abe Stokes, about his confident movements and the vulnerability in his eyes. He was a man with a story waiting to be unraveled and for the first time since she had arrived at the house, Vivian felt truly interested in something.

She took a quick shower then sat down to write a grocery list. She wanted to plan the barbecue for the following weekend. Earlier than expected, she heard the old truck rumble up the driveway.

When she went outside to greet him, Nowell pulled her down from the porch. Her legs dangled above the ground as she clung to his neck. ‘How's your mother?' she asked.

‘I didn't see her much.'

‘How did things go with the lawyer?'

‘He seemed to have everything under control. I don't know why my mom is so worked up.'

What a surprise, Vivian thought.

In the kitchen, Nowell set his bag on the table. ‘I have some great news,' he said.

‘What?'

‘Lonnie showed up this morning to introduce Dorothy to my mom. I invited them to come out and stay with us for a couple of weeks.'

‘Oh?'

‘He got a new construction job, but it doesn't start until the fall. They've got some time to help out.'

Vivian followed him as he took his bag to the bedroom. ‘So you met Dorothy?'

‘Yes.'

‘What was she like?'

‘Nice. They seem to get along great.' Nowell motioned to one of the spare bedrooms. ‘Do we have sheets for the extra bed?'

‘I think so. There are linens in one of these hall closets.'

‘I'll help you get the room ready today. We'll just move those boxes into the other one.'

‘We don't have to do it today,' she said. ‘You had a long drive.'

‘They'll be here tonight.'

‘Tonight?' She felt the grip of something, like a cool breeze across her skin.

‘I know it's short notice, Viv, but we don't have much going on. Everything doesn't have to perfect. They know we're in the process of cleaning this place up.'

‘But we don't have much food in the house…'

Nowell pulled her against his chest. ‘Poor Viv. Spontaneity isn't your thing, is it?'

‘What do you mean? I don't mind last-minute planning, I just like to have certain things ready.'

‘Then it's not last-minute, is it?'

‘I'm always up for adventure,' she said weakly.

‘You've never seemed that way to me.'

‘You're Mr Schedule, Mr Routine. What time do you get up every morning?'

His brow wrinkled. ‘Seven o'clock, why?'

‘Never seven-fifteen, seven-thirty?'

‘Sleeping in makes someone adventurous?' he asked.

Vivian broke away from him and stretched out on the bed. ‘It can.'

‘Sleeping in, or staying in bed late?' He joined her on the bed. When he leaned down to unbuckle her sandals, he said, ‘Your shoes are muddy.'

‘That area out front isn't dry from the storm yet.'

‘And there's grass and look, a pine needle stuck in the side of your shoe.'

She thought about her morning visit with Abe Stokes. ‘I was outside yesterday,' she said, ‘taking things to the garbage in back.'

‘Looks like you've been through a jungle.'

Nowell was slow in his lovemaking and for once, Vivian wished he would speed it along. Her mind was on other things, things like evolution and the Midwestern tree
supply, and Mr Stokes' lonely existence in the woods. An hour later, Nowell stood humming in the shower while Vivian called her parents in the kitchen. She felt a need to hear about their normal lives, the subjects they were studying. After four rings, her father picked up. His voice sounded old and tired.

‘Don't you have a class today?' she asked.

‘No, but I've been reading student papers most of the day.'

‘You could always take a summer off.'

‘Then what would I do?'

‘Mom would say you could take a vacation.'

He laughed. ‘Yes, well, your mother's the traveler in this family.

She thought: I like to travel.

‘What have you been doing out there, Vivie?'

‘Taking it easy mostly.'

‘How's Nowell's work coming?'

‘Fine, I think.' Vivian suddenly realized she'd forgotten to read the other chapter from the book. She'd have to finish it after Nowell went to bed that night. ‘It's very peaceful here,' she said.