“Papi, let me try.”
“Where’s the harm there? The moment is now or it comes in a moment, almost the same thing.” He handed the axe to Dirk. “I need to catch my breath and my nerve. You might as well have a hand at it.”
They exchanged places. Dirk picked up the axe. He knew how heavy it was, because he’d often shifted it around the woodshed. Still, he’d never hoisted it chest-height before. He staggered under its weight.
“Don’t imagine you’ll slay the tree in one stroke,” said the old man. “The first strike is just to make a mark. Swing at an angle from shoulder-height to waist. Gravity will add force to how you land the blow. Keep your grip firm at impact or you’ll lose control. You’ll have calluses in two minutes, but then, they won’t trouble you for long.”
He stood, that old man, one hand in the pocket of his jerkin, fingering his beads, the other raking his beard in a contemplative gesture.
Dirk tried to fashion his stance as the old man had stood. Left foot forward, right leg back and braced. The wood held its breath.
Making or killing. What an argument to have.
He swung. The axe head wavered in a half-circle around Dirk, but it picked up speed. As it came near to burying itself in the tree trunk—or to glancing off it, more likely—something twitched at the roots of the tree. As if the tree were flinching. It was a mouse with six baby mice along her flanks.
The mother mouse looked up at Dirk. The baby mice all tucked their heads under her legs and belly. As Dirk veered, the axe head wobbled, and the whole tool flew out of his grasp. The axe drove itself in the old man’s leg just below the knee.
5.
An unholy aria of muffled wailing and laughing from the old man. Dirk could hardly make out the words. “You bloody moron, and who can blame you,” the old man said, as far as Dirk could tell. “Oh, owww, a pox on you.” The axe fell out of his leg to the ground. Beneath the torn legging, a flap of hairy shin turned slick with blood. “Your scarf, boy, before I bleed to death.”
Dirk handed over the muffler. Wincing and cursing, the old man tightened a tourniquet just below the knee. “Did you mean to kill me?”
Dirk couldn’t speak. The blood was luscious until it matted the cloth, then it turned the color of dirt. “I’ll kill that axe,” the boy finally said.
“Help me up.”
But the old man couldn’t stand. He collapsed with a cry of pain. “The bone may be fractured. Find me”—a wordless moan—“find me something to use as a crutch. A staff, Dirk, a cane.”
“I’ll hold you up.”
“You’ll falter. Look for something to the height of my underarm—something up to your chin would be the right height.”
Dirk scrambled. The undergrowth supplied only spindly wands, too supple to provide support. “There’s nothing near.”
“If you can fell me, you can bring down the damn tree. It’s time to do it. Take your old friend the axe.” The old man was beginning to fade from loss of blood. “Finish off the tree I chose, then trim a straight limb from it.”
The old man closed his eyes and opened them again. “Aim for the center of the trunk. First stroke, chop straight in, next, downward from above. Let the chips fly. You’re making a gap in the tree so it will fall on itself, of its own weight.” His eyes closed again.
Dirk went to work with an energy born of terror. He was sorry to have hurt the old man, but he was more concerned with not being abandoned in the woods.
He hoped the mouse and her babies were safe somewhere else.
After a time he turned to ask Papi how he was doing. The old man had slipped sideways. Only a fainting spell, wished the boy, and not the final sleep.
Perhaps what was needed wasn’t a crutch but a sledge of some sort, so the boy could pull the old man along slithery dry needles toward—
But Dirk had no idea how to get back.
For the first time, he struck the tree with the axe with anger. He didn’t want to be hanged for murder.
He struck it a second time. He had nowhere to go for help. He’d never met another living soul but the old woman and the old man.
The chips flew. The trunk of the tree groaned. A mouth opened wider and wider, eating the blade each time the blade rode home. The living wood was pale, even ghostly white, the color of the skin of Schneewittchen, the girl who ran away to live with the seven little men, as the old woman had told it. The wedge-shaped scraps that flew away among the shavings were like smiles scared from the tree and discarded on the ground.
Disturbed by the commotion, a small brown bird came down and landed on the breast of the old man. Papi didn’t brush it away, which filled the boy with a greater sense of dread than before.
He struck the tree. Again, again.
The bird hopped along the old man’s chest and made a comment or two. Dirk let the axe fall still for a moment and listened. “Are you giving me counsel?” he asked the bird.
The bird flew up. Dirk thought the airy rush of her wings sounded like an army of birds. Or an army of angels, bearing the old man’s soul away to heaven. It was no such army, but the falling tree, which had had enough, and crashed upon the boy, killing him.
6.
It wasn’t that he was falling—was he falling?—so much as that the trees rose up against him. Pale branches ripped into him. Blood rose to the surface of his skin in buttons. He pumped with his feet the way he once had done when jumping into a pond deeper than reckoned. His thighs met swirling arms of long-needled conifer. As if the trees were circling on their stems, crowding in to slow his descent. Finally he was heels-down on somewhere. Underneath the dead leaves and dry needles, the ground writhed. The offended roots of these trees.
He didn’t take in that he was dead. He just didn’t want to be crushed. He struggled against the forest, lunging forward in small steps, tipping down a slope. Sap stung his eyes. The trees seemed to be shifting out of the way to either side. Making a path, an only path. He was naked. His skin seethed. Now one of his eyes was glued closed. Sap or blood.
At last the slope leveled and he landed on his knees, his face in the soil. The trees lashed at his buttocks and his spine and the back of his neck. The top side of each stroke was punishing and the return, apology.
“You’ve come so far and you’re going to crumble like morning cake?”
He rubbed his eyes and straightened up. A small brown bird perched on a branch above him. A bird can only look at a boy one eye at a time, and her eye was cold and temperamental. Her beak was shut.
“You’ve come for a crutch, you’ll need to work for it,” continued the voice, not a bird’s voice. The boy looked down.
A dark knob on the ground, hardly larger than a walnut, stirred and rotated. The top of it had the face of a homunculus. Ironstone, petrified oak, char of primordial ooze—the boy had no idea of what it was made. Gnarly head hunched over knees drawn up to bearded chin. Squatting old creature with a cranium like a brussels sprout. “What are you waiting for? Is it ever the wrong time to act?”
“I don’t know what to do.” So, yes, his voice still worked. The boy was relieved.
“Take a grip of me, and I’ll befriend you.”
“You’d best think twice about helping him out,” said the bird to the boy. Her voice was pure and high, but thick, like sweet golden honey.