Safe from the Sea by Peter Geye Page A

asked, looking around at what seemed an unending supply of wood.
    “It needs time to cure. That pile there”—Olaf pointed at a four-foot-tall by eight-foot-deep pile of split wood as long as Noah’s rental car sitting beside the shed—“it won’t be ready until next year.”
    “It won’t burn?”
    “Of course it’ll burn, just not very well.”
    Noah jerked the maul free of the stump. He swung it up onto his shoulder.
    “There are a couple of trees down in the gulch. They blew over this spring. One’s an oak, the last on the lot, I think. I’d like to get them up here before it snows.”
    “We can do that.”
    Noah measured the distance between the log on the block andthe head of the maul in his extended arms, swung the handle over his right shoulder, and let the steel head fall square on the balanced log. The wood split with a clap, and the two pieces landed four feet away on either side of the stump.
    “We’ll get the city boy out of you yet,” Olaf said.
    “That felt good,” Noah said, still feeling the reverberations in his shoulders.
    “Let’s get at that oak,” Olaf said.
    “All right.”
    They emptied the wheelbarrow in the yard, and Olaf fetched a chainsaw, a gas can, and two pairs of gloves from the shed. They started toward the gulch, Noah in front and pushing the wheelbarrow.
    “I called Solveig,” Noah said over his shoulder. The wheelbarrow bounced over the roots and pine saplings that had overrun the path. “I left her a message.”
    “What are you talking about?”
    “I mean, she ought to know what’s going on.”
    “Aaah,” Olaf grumbled. “What does she need to hear about it for?”
    “Maybe,” Noah said, setting the wheelbarrow down and turning to face him, “she just deserves to know. Maybe she would want to know because you’re her father, after all, and people tend to worry when their father is sick.”
    “Do me a favor and don’t call her again. She doesn’t want to see me like this.”
    Noah took a deep breath and rolled his neck over his shoulders. He turned back for the wheelbarrow.
    They followed the path slowly for another five minutes before they reached the oak, which had fallen across the whole expanse of an old creek bed so that it formed a kind of bridge between the twosides. The sinewy roots hung like dead willow branches on the other side of the ravine.
    “Must have been some wind,” Noah said.
    Olaf agreed. He explained the chainsaw, said it’d be easiest to work on the branches first, that he should approach the job as if he were whittling a stick. He warned Noah about how, when cutting off a particularly large branch—and he pointed out half-a-dozen examples—he had to be careful because the tree’s balance might shift. Finally he pulled the cord and the saw fired up. He handed it to Noah. Olaf sat down with his long legs hanging over the edge of the gulch and pointed at Noah to get going.
    The saw whined with the first squeeze of the trigger, pulling Noah toward the tree. He trimmed the first branches, the finer treetop limbs still thick with dried leaves. He ripped through them, moving quickly, the branches falling into the gulch, until he had worked halfway down to the thicker limbs. After fifteen minutes he looked back at the pile of branches lying on the bank of the gulch. The air smelled of sawdust, and his ears rang from the shrill saw.
    He kept at it until the only thing left was the spotted trunk spanning the two sides of the creek bed. Olaf sat there, his shoulders draped over his chest, his hands folded on his lap, like a child. Noah flipped the power switch and the saw choked off. The muscles in his arms and back stung and twitched.
    “Oh-hohh!” Noah hollered. The air had gone silent when he turned off the saw, but his ears still buzzed. “That’s work!”
    Olaf smiled.
    “Now what, just start on the trunk?”
    “We’ll leave that for tomorrow. It’s getting dark.” Olaf turned his attention to the sky. “The days are so