Page 14 of Recluse Lumberjack Heart
"Not with a stitched-up arm in the dark."
Fair point. I don't give him the satisfaction of admitting it.
"Wait it out," he says. "Half hour, it'll pass."
"You inviting me to stay?"
"I'm telling you the road's gone."
"Sure. That's what you're doing."
He builds up the fire. The temperature's already dropping the way it does in the mountains, fast enough that the heat from the stove feels like a gift. My boots come off. My feet go toward the warmth. He sits back down across from me with his coffee.
The rain doesn't pass in half an hour.
We talk.
He gives it up in pieces, each one costing him something. His granddad's mill. A yellow lab called Sadie who rode the log truck with him for eleven years. The winter he ran a nine-man crew on the Olympic Peninsula and hated every minute of managing people.
I give him mine. Mama's diner in Coos Bay. The regulars who raised me as much as she did. The horse that broke my collarbone at twelve. The elder woman in the tribal office who sat with me all afternoon, showing me how to split cedar bark with my thumbnail.
"You lead with your chin," he says.
"I lead with my whole face."
He shakes his head at his mug, and there's something happening in his beard. Something that might be a smile if he'd let it loose.
My eyes are getting heavy. The fire. The rain. His voice, low and steady, telling me about ponderosa pine and how you can tell a healthy one by pressing your nose to the bark and breathing in.
"I can't believe you smell trees."
"Every lumberjack smells trees."
"That's either the most beautiful or the strangest thing anyone's ever told me."
"Probably both."
I laugh, and my whole body lists sideways in the chair. The rain's still hammering. Serenity's under the porch overhang, dry and unimpressed.
"Take the bed," he says. "I'll stay out here."
"Where do you normally sleep?"
"I don't."
Not a joke. He says it the way he says everything, flat and plain, but the weight of it settles in my chest.
"Aid – Harrison."
"Four in the morning. Every morning. Since about 2018." His thumb traces the rim of his mug, slow circles. "Body decided. Didn't consult me on it."
"What happens at four?"
He watches the fire.
"Nothing happens at four," he says. "That's the whole problem. Nothing to do but sit with your own head."
Seven days. Seven days of grunting and coffee and calling me a waste of time, and now he's three feet away in firelight telling me he hasn't slept through the night in six years. Something turns over in my chest and does not turn back.
