The Winter Room

by Gary Paulsen

  “And that is the story of Crazy Alen.”

  * * *

  We sat then and listened, and Mother took a breath because she had been holding it, with one hand over her mouth, and I thought of death. Death never seemed funny to me. All I knew of it was when I had been sick and thought I would die and was afraid, or in the fall when we killed and killed. But it was impossible to think of Crazy Alen without smiling and that meant I was smiling at death, laughing at death and the picture of Alen with his arms and legs out and the foreman trying to get him down the trail.

  There were many questions I wanted to ask and I knew Wayne wanted to ask some as well but we didn’t. We never did. The stories were just there, not something to be questioned and opened up. Uncle David just told them and they came from him and went into us and became part of us so that his memory became our memory. But nothing about them was ever questioned.

  Until he told the story that broke things.

  * * *

  It is strange, the way it happened, strange and kind of inside-out. It all came down to how Wayne felt about the stories. I always thought of them as just stories and didn’t think they were real. I mean I know there probably aren’t a man and woman living in a cottage under the sea — probably. Once Mother said the stories were not for believing so much as to be believed in.

  But it was different for Wayne. I didn’t know it, but it was different. Somehow the stories had mixed in his mind so they had become a real part of his thinking, so that he believed them. And even when he knew they couldn’t be — knew there couldn’t be a man and woman living in a cottage under the sea — even then he wanted them to be real, wanted her hair to take the ships down, and by wanting them to be real somehow they became real in his mind. And that’s how the trouble started.

  There is nothing I could have done about it anyway but if I could have stopped it, stopped the hurt I saw in Uncle David’s eyes, I would have given anything.

  We had spent a long day splitting and carrying stove wood in because the wind had come around to the northwest and it was picking up into a storm. Father said it would blow for three or four days and drop to forty below when it stopped snowing and blowing and we wanted to be ready for it. Father split with the big double-bladed ax he kept in the ax bin in the granary, each ax so sharp you could shave the hair on your arms with it, just as Uncle David said. Wayne and I weren’t allowed to use them, not even to split kindling. They were axes that used to belong to Uncle David and to Nels when they cut wood in the old days and they were something to see. All shining and silver, the two blades on each honed with a small, circular stone. I had seen Uncle David and Nels sharpening them with the stones, sitting with peaceful smiles on their faces while the stone went round and round and I thought it was the same look Mother had sometimes when she was knitting. But I had never seen Uncle David or Nels use the axes and I figured it was because they were so old now that they couldn’t use them because it would hurt them somehow.

  So Father split wood and I asked to help carry it and Father said yes. I felt like I must have brought in most of a cord by myself, stacking it under the overhang on the porch. When we were done, finally, I couldn’t see over the pile. It covered the whole porch and I thought there was enough for two weeks before Father finally put the ax away and we went to milk and do evening chores.

  That night it was my turn to crank the separator and change the buckets, and by the time we at last went to the house for supper it was so dark the lantern light from the kitchen window made all the snow in the yard seem to glow. I was so tired my brain felt filled with rags.

  Mother had made a big pile of mashed potatoes with meat gravy and I made a little lake of gravy in the middle and ate around the edges until I couldn’t eat any more, and then, after Wayne and I did the dishes, we went into the living room.

  Father started to carve and showed us how far he’d come along since last time and Mother nodded and smiled and Nels and Uncle David filled their lower lips and talked about how the snow cover was good for the crops next year. Then they talked about work that needed doing, and I was watching the fire through the small window on the stove door and my eyes closed and I was sleeping. Or half sleeping. Just going in and out of it when I heard Uncle David start a story — and it wasn’t about Alida.

  “It was when I was young but I was old enough to have come to the new country and to the north woods and was working as a cutter.

  “In the first winter we cut in the lake country and used the lakes and rivers as ice roads for the teams and sleighs. Boys too young to cut took water sleighs with tanks of water in them and soaked the grooves where the runners ran to keep them slick, and put hay in the downhill grooves to slow the loads so they wouldn’t run over the teams. I tell you we moved some wood and those horses got so strong they could haul a load as big as a house down to the rivers where the logs were left on the ice to float down the rivers to the sawmills in the spring floods.

  “I don’t even know how much wood we cut. One camp didn’t speak with another, one company didn’t speak with another. We just cut and cut until there wasn’t anything left. Where there had been forest so thick you couldn’t see ten yards without looking at a giant Norway or white pine, you could stand on level ground and see fifteen miles and nothing higher than a stump when we were done cutting.

  “It was sad and most of us wished we hadn’t done it when it was finished but it was that way then just as it is now that the forest has started to grow up some again. People just cut without thinking.

  “But this isn’t a story about the cutting so much as it is about a man who was young then.

  “There were many men who were good cutters because that was a time when all men were cutters, and there are stories about most of them. Some could use a saw this way and some could use an ax that way. There were stories of men who could cut a six-inch pine with a single swing of a double-bitted ax and other men who shaved with axes and still others who could make saws and axes sing and weep and bleed. But there was one man who they said could do all these things.

  “It was said that no man could use an ax like him. The wood of the handle seemed to grow out of his hands and there was nothing he could not do. Men in the camps would stop work to watch him and this becomes important when you know that men were paid by how much they cut. To stop meant they did not receive pay.

  “But he was such a wonder with an ax that they would stop. The young man would walk to a tree and swing and the chips would float off like they were made of air — chopping half the head and more deep with each blow so the tree would almost fly off the stump when he cut through.

  “They said many things of him. They said he could put a match in a stump so the head was sticking up and swing the ax with his eyes closed and catch the match perfectly so that it would split and both sides would light.

  “And it was true.

  “They said he shaved each day with an ax and never cut himself and his cheek was as smooth as a baby’s.

  “And it was true.

  “They said he could take a four-foot piece of cordwood and swing two axes, one in each hand, swing them into the two ends and the wood would split clean and the axes would meet in the middle.

  “And it was true….”

  * * *

  Here father caught his breath and looked up sharply and said across the stove:

  “But that was you. All those things were about you….”

  And I felt Wayne stiffen next to me on the rug. I turned to look at him and saw he was staring at Uncle David so hard he seemed to stare a hole through him. Wayne was mad. No, more than mad, tight with it, tight with mad the way he got when Philly Hansen took him down again and again in front of the girls at school.

  Hurt mad.

  Mad like to burn with it — Wayne was raw mad and I could tell he wanted to say something but he didn’t because we never talked during the stories.

  Uncle David coughed a little and spit in the can and looked for a long time at F
ather and then finished the story. It was about how the young man who was the best cutter of all thought that his new life would last forever only it didn’t. None of it lasted. The woods were gone and he was old, and it ended that way but I didn’t hear much of it because Wayne kept staring at Uncle David. He kept stiff like wood and staring at him and I knew something was wrong but I couldn’t understand what it could be.

  And when the stories were done that night and we went up to our room and got under the quilts to hide from the cold, even then I didn’t learn because Wayne just turned away and didn’t say anything. I knew he was awake because his breathing was tight and ragged somehow. I wanted to talk to him about whatever it was but he said nothing. I tried to stay awake but the whole day of wood and work and cranking the separator and listening to the stories and the heat from the stove and the cold from the bedroom and the warmth from the stacked quilts on top came crashing down on me and I fell asleep almost before my eyes closed.

  In the morning we went outside for morning chores and Wayne looked a little funny at Uncle David in the barn but he didn’t seem so mad anymore and I thought whatever it was had passed.

  But I was wrong, so wrong, and I would see a thing so awful I wished I had never seen it….

  Wayne and I have a special place in the granary in back of the oats bin. I guess it isn’t very much of a place but it’s close and cozy and sometimes we sit there and talk about things. It wasn’t something we planned so much as it just happened when we were small and as we got older we just would find ourselves there now and again when we wanted to talk. That day Wayne looked at me and walked toward the granary. I knew he wanted to talk so I followed. It was just after chores and barely light so I left the door open because there wasn’t a lantern in the granary and it was pitch dark. Even with the light coming in the door it was still pretty gray.

  “He’s lying,” Wayne said, as soon as I came in. He was sitting on an overturned bucket by the door so I went in and squatted in the corner.

  “Who’s lying?”

  “Uncle David. All the time he’s been lying with the stories, just telling us lies.”

  “But they’re only stories. They aren’t real. They’re supposed to be lies….”

  “It’s that he put himself up as one of the heroes — a great thing. That makes it all bragging and not just stories. Bragging makes it all a lie on a lie. How could anyone cut a match in half blindfolded? How could anyone make two axes meet in the center of a log? That’s just all lies. It’s all lies and he’s a liar and a braggart.

  “Don’t you see? Father caught him at it. Uncle David told lies about himself and that makes it all lies, just lies and lies and lies.”

  I was surprised to see that Wayne was crying, that it hurt him, this thing of Uncle David and the stories. He was crying and he said over and over:

  “Liar, liar, liar …”

  And that would have been bad enough but I looked up, over Wayne, and there was Uncle David and I knew he had heard most of it, maybe all of it, because his eyes were full of pain; they looked like the pig’s eyes just after Father cut its throat and it knew it was going to die. All pain and confused, all fall killing pain and confused Uncle David’s eyes were, so hurt and ripped that it seemed he would crumble, and I could not shut Wayne up.

  “Lies, all lies, and he’s a liar, a liar, a liar….”

  I tried to make a sign, to show Wayne, but it was too late. Uncle David turned slowly and seemed to cave in and walked away and then I told Wayne, finally I got it out, and Wayne felt bad but not as bad as I thought he should.

  It was over, and Uncle David was broken and done.

  That night we ate supper and it was good but tasted like wood in my mouth. I saw Wayne who usually ate like a granary dog just pick and pick at his potatoes.

  After supper we went into the living room and Uncle David didn’t tell a story.

  Not even the story of Alida.

  He sat and rubbed his face and Father talked and Mother talked and even Nels talked but there was no story, none of anything like a story. Just talk of chores and summer crops and Mother spoke a little of the neighbors who were having trouble with a sick baby, and I thought it was like fall and something had been killed.

  Here, I thought, in this room a thing has died. I nearly cried and wished Wayne would be hurt for what he’d done.

  And another night.

  And another night.

  Nothing like a story — just talk and talk until we went up to bed. I started to hate Wayne then and think he should be punished — and on the fourth or fifth day after he broke Uncle David we were in the hayloft.

  Many times we went into the hayloft to fool around. It was fun to swing on the trip rope that carried the hay up into the barn when we stored it. We would swing from the little landing up under the roof near the top of the loft down on the trip rope and land in the soft hay. It was something I never got tired of because the hay would catch you, just let you sink soft and down, and it smelled nice.

  But this time I was still mad at Wayne, mad and sick of him so it went bad. I made a swing and landed on his leg and he squealed a bit and before I could stop it I was on top of him beating him and crying and cursing him for what he’d done to Uncle David.

  We fought around the loft and down the side of the hay, only of course he’s bigger than me so it wasn’t much of a fight. Pretty soon he was sitting on top of me and he gave me a clout that made my nose bleed.

  I got madder then and went a little crazy but he still held me down and clamped my arms to my side while I just squirmed and I was trying to bite him when I looked up and he wasn’t paying any attention.

  The way we had fallen we were jammed back into the corner where the logs were crossed in together. Because the barn was very old, some of the logs had warped so there were small gaps between them. Father said if it had been a house he would have chinked it and filled the holes, but it being a barn they just ventilated the hay nice and kept it dry — like a big crib.

  Wayne was looking at something through the cracks in the corner and when I saw how interested he was I forgot all about fighting.

  He let me loose and I pulled up alongside of him and wiped blood off my lip and nose and looked out the crack and saw Uncle David.

  In the back of the barn was a large pile of wood cut in four-foot lengths for shipment to the paper mills. Father and some other men in the neighborhood cut the wood each fall and haul it out to the railroad when the roads get frozen and slick enough for the bobsleds, and it brings in a little extra money for Christmas.

  Uncle David was standing staring at the pile of wood. His arms hung down at his sides and he looked small and sad somehow and I hated Wayne again for what he’d done. I thought it would be right for me to go down to him and touch him, maybe on the hand, and lean against his leg the way I did sometimes but before I could move Uncle David turned away from the stack of wood and walked to the granary.

  I thought it was over, that time when I could have touched him, but in a few seconds he came out of the granary.

  He was carrying two axes. He had one in each hand, two double-bitted axes, big and shiny and sharp as razors and I knew then, I knew what he had planned and I thought no, no. I must have moved because Wayne put a hand on my arm and held a finger to his lips.

  “Be still….”

  “But he’ll hurt himself,” I whispered.

  Wayne didn’t answer. He’d turned away and was looking out through the cracks again and I did too. I couldn’t stop.

  I couldn’t stop though I didn’t want to see it, the way I couldn’t stop when they killed the pigs and chickens in the fall — I couldn’t stop looking through the cracks.

  Back at the woodpile Uncle David took a log down, studied it, pushed it aside and took another one. The logs looked heavy and big, bigger than him. He seemed so caved in and tiny, and when he finally got the log in the right place on the ground he had to stop and catch his breath and I thought no, no, no, I should
run for Mother or Father and have them stop him because he should not do this and it will hurt him.

  But now it was too late and I knew that, too, knew that it would be terrible to keep him from at least trying.

  He stood to the side of the log facing it and held the axhandles, one on each side with the heads of the axes resting on the ground and all of him was curved down onto the axes so they looked like hickory crutches. He was a broken and tired and sad old man, and there wasn’t a thing he could do, I thought, even to lift the axes: So awful a thing, the way he stood, the axes standing at his side, his hands on the handles and little bits of steam coming from his breath as he looked down at the log and I thought no.

  Please no. And no matter what it would do, no matter if Wayne tried to stop me, I was going to run down and tell him that he didn’t have to do this, that it didn’t matter.

  But now he moved his head up and looked at the sky and the sun caught his face and we could see it plain, see his face in the sun. The wrinkles seemed to leave. The skin seemed to smooth as the sun covered his face.

  And his hands tightened on the axhandles and the heads of the axes in the snow, the heads trembled a little and it was as if something came from the earth.

  Some thing, some power passed from the earth up through the silver axheads and through the hickory handles and it started in his arms. A little movement, then the arms seemed to swell and his shoulders came up and filled and his back straightened and his whole body filled with it until he was standing straight and tall and I heard Wayne’s breath come in and stop and mine did the same.

  “He’s young again,” Wayne whispered and it was not just a whisper but more a worshiping thing, like part of a prayer, and he was right.

  Uncle David stood before the log and he was young, and as we watched, as we could not turn away and we watched, the axes started to move.

  Up.

  They came up from the snow. The heavy axheads came up and out to the side, came up like they were floating on light air, up and up until they were over his head, one on each side, the sun catching them and splashing the silver from the heads down on him like a new light, a life light and they hung there for what seemed like hours, days, hung in the air over his head while we held our breath. And just when it seemed that all things had stopped, that nothing would or could ever happen again, just then they started down.