...more

He made no answer, of course. She never in her life had left and would never leave. You can lie here, Hattie said, all right, I'll grant you that; you can be buried here, we’ll all of us be buried here, but what’s the matter with a trip to Carolina in the winter? Or maybe New Orleans; you said you loved New Orleans; remember how you said that once?

The cords line the front of the cow barn. He had had them stacked there in October, starting on the north wall, to keep at least that much wind back. It took ten cords to front the wall, and then they’d gone eighty feet east and eighty feet south and west. "Biggest log cabin around," Judah joked. "Now all’s we need’s the roof."

Yet it is a charmed enclosure, four foot high and four foot wide and trim. They took the deadwood first, from the south. He had walked in November through the space the ash logs left and stood in the center of his heat fort. “Lord, give me one more winter,” he prayed. “Lord, grant me one more spring.” Early on, he had had the habit of prayer and then, as he grew older, the habit of blasphemy. Now he mixed the two and wasn’t sure of the proportion. “God, let the sap in me run.”

“You’ve got no earthly reason,” his sister complained, “not to waste this time. Not to visit New Orleans instead of just lying up here.”

But lie here he would, or sit, or stand in his diminishing fort. From the window where he sits now, in April, the wood is a single squat line. There is sugar maple left to burn, and locust, and hickory wood. He’d not permitted sugaring this year. He’d lost his sweet tooth anyhow, and the profit wasn’t worth the trouble, and he wanted sap in the trees. There’d been bloodletting and leeching enough in his time.