Rain began falling again. Mom went back in the house. After a few minutes I did, too. Mom handed me a paper sack. Inside was the last of Dad’s ashes, sealed in a rolled-up plastic sandwich bag. She made a joke that it resembled a nickel bag of pot, and I told her it had been a long time since she bought pot. She tipped her head and said, “I don’t think I ever bought any. People just gave it to me. I thought it was so cool.”
I looked at the bag in my palm. My father kept getting reduced, subdivided into packets. I was reminded of a battle scene in the movie Monty Python and the Holy Grail. King Arthur cuts off the arms and legs of the Black Knight, leaving him a limbless trunk, still trying to fight. Though I didn’t want the leftover scraps of my father in a snack bag, I had to safeguard them. I was tired of it all—the house, the decisions, the porn, and now a nickel bag of ash. Standing in the kitchen and holding the remains of my father’s remains, I had nowhere to take my irritation. My wife was exhausted, my mother slightly lost. At night they drank and tried to laugh.
The movers were coming at the end of the week, and we were behind on preparations. I set aside my feelings. It wasn’t difficult. I hadn’t cried, hadn’t allowed myself to feel sorrow. There was simply too much to do. I went upstairs and tucked the Baggie in my suitcase. I still had boxes to fill, arrangements to make. We were low on packing tape. The gutters needed cleaning. I had to cancel the phone, talk to a lawyer, pay final bills. I could mourn later, be irritated later.
I’d spent the summer organizing everything into two groups: one for Mom’s new place, a duplex in Oxford, Mississippi, and the rest bound for my house a few miles away in the country. Her load was furniture, clothes, and kitchen goods, while mine was Dad’s desk, books, guns, and porn. I walked the rooms of my childhood home one last time, knowing I might never see them again. Empty, it was no longer Dad’s house. I saw it as my parents had in 1964—the broad staircase, beautiful woodwork, and turn-of-the-century light fixtures. The living room seemed enormous without bulky furniture, centered around a fireplace with a mahogany mantel and carved posts. A good home for kids.
My father chopped firewood every day until age sixty, primarily using a long-handled double-bit ax. For tough hardwood, he resorted to a heavy maul. Dad stored the tools outside, exposed to weather, which rendered them worthless. I intended to keep his ax. The chipped blade was dull and rusted. I loved the hickory handle, split at least twice and crudely repaired with small nails, ragged duct tape, and wire as loose as bangles on a wrist. I knew my father had made these repairs, because my mother would have known to use screws for the wood. She’d have wrapped individual pieces of wire instead of one long piece destined to unravel quickly. The ax represented a part of my father separate from all other aspects—the outdoors. Splitting wood was the only activity I ever witnessed him doing outside, and, more important, the only task he’d ever let me help with.
My initial job was to gather pieces of bark to use as kindling. As I got older, I hauled armloads of firewood to the house. Next I graduated to placing a log upright on the chopping block, turning it in just the right way for Dad to see a knot. At age ten, I wielded a hatchet to trim small branches off the logs and split softwood for kindling.
Dad talked as he worked, calling each log a warrior, describing his combat. A heavy piece of oak with multiple hidden knots was a log that fought back. A stroke that split the log cleanly at a single blow was a beheading. Bark was blood. Chips were body parts. If he misaligned his aim and cut off a small strip of wood that flew across the yard, he said his opponent had thrown a dagger. This was partly for my entertainment, but it went deeper for Dad. As I watched him split log after log, sweat running down his face, vapor puffing from his mouth, I understood that he had entered an illusory realm in which he was determined to defeat an army of soldiers one by one. His competence increased as the foes became more real in his imagination. It was important that I remain silent, a squire to the knight. Afterward, Dad set the ax head on the ground and leaned on the handle, breathing hard from exertion. He stared at the plain of battle with an expression of triumph.