Too Much Happiness

that are holding it up. These limbs are under pressure-they may be bent like a bow-and the trick is to cut so that the tree will roll away from you and the limbs won’t whack you. When it is safely down, you cut the trunk into stove lengths and split the stove lengths with the ax.
    Sometimes there’s a surprise. Some squirrelly wood blocks can’t be split with the ax; they have to be laid on their sides and ripped with a chain saw; the sawdust cut this way, with the grain, is taken away in long shreds. Also, some beech or maple has to be side split, the great round chunk cut along the growth rings on all sides until it is almost square and can be more easily attacked. Sometimes there’s dozy wood, in which a fungus has grown between the rings. But in general the toughness of the blocks is as you’d expect-greater in the body wood than in the limb wood, and greater in the broad trunks that have grown up partly in the open than in the tall slim ones that have pushed up in the middle of the bush.
    Surprises. But you can be prepared for those. And if you’re prepared, there’s not the danger. He used to think of explaining all this to his wife. The procedures, the surprises, the identification. But he couldn’t think of the way to go about it, so that she’d be interested. Sometimes he wished he had got around to passing on his knowledge to Diane when she was younger. She would never have the time to listen now.
    And in a way his thoughts about wood are too private-they are covetous and nearly obsessive. He has never been a greedy man in any other way. But he can lie awake nights thinking of a splendid beech he wants to get at, wondering if it will prove as satisfactory as it looks or has some tricks up its sleeve. He thinks of all the woodlots in the county that he has never even seen, because they lie at the backs of farms, behind private fields. If he is driving along a road that goes through a bush, he swings his head from side to side, afraid of missing something. Even what is worthless for his purposes will interest him. A stand of blue beech, for instance, too delicate, too weedy, to bother with. He sees the dark vertical ribs slanting down the paler trunks-he will remember where these are. He would like to get a map in his mind of every bush he sees, and though he might justify this by citing practical purposes, that wouldn’t be the whole truth.
    A day or so after the first snow, he is out in a bush looking at some girdled trees. He has a right to be there-he has already been talking to the farmer, whose name is Suter.
    At the edge of this bush there is an illegal dump. People have been throwing their trash in this hidden spot rather than taking it to the township dump, whose open hours may not have suited them, or whose location may not have been so handy. Roy sees something moving there. A dog?
    But then the figure straightens up and he sees that it is a man in a filthy coat. In fact it is Percy Marshall, poking around the dump to see what he can find. Sometimes in these places you used to be able to find valuable old crocks or bottles or even a copper boiler, but that is not so likely anymore. And Percy is not a knowledgeable scavenger anyway. He will just be on the lookout for anything he can use-though it is hard to see what that could be in this heap of plastic containers and torn screens and mattresses with the stuffing popped out.
    Percy lives alone in one room at the back of an otherwise empty and boarded-up house at a crossroads a few miles from here. He walks the roads, walks along the creeks and through the town, talking to himself, sometimes playing the part of a half-wit vagabond and sometimes presenting himself as a shrewd local character. His life of malnutrition, dirt, and discomfort is his own choice. He has tried the County Home, but he couldn’t stand the routine and the company of so many other old people. Long ago he started out with a fairly good farm, but the life of a farmer was too monotonous-so he worked his way down through bootlegging, botched house-breaking, some spells in jail, and in the past decade or so he has worked his way up again, with the help of the old-age pension, to a certain protected status. He has even had his picture and a write-up in the local paper.
    The Last of a Breed. Local Free Spirit Shares Stories and Insights
.
    He climbs out of the dump laboriously, as if he felt obliged to have a little conversation.
    “You going to be taking them trees