I used Daddy’s ax today. Mama wanted a small tree cut down. “Trash tree,” she called it. I went to the shed and chose the old wood-handled ax over the fiberglass one. The wood was worn where Daddy’s hands once held it. As my hands slid down the smooth handle I couldn’t help but let a little sigh escape.
It’s been a while since I chopped wood. My first swing landed in the ground at the base of the tree and dirt kicked back into my face. Blowing off the lens of my glasses, I suddenly remembered Daddy saying, “Focus your eyes on the place you want to cut and watch that spot while you swing, son.” Whack! Dead center. “Thanks, Dad,” I laughed to myself.
Daddy loved to cut wood. In his later years that was about all that seemed to bring him joy. Mid-morning he would head out to the field, chainsaw and ax in hand, and stay out most of the day. Come winter, he would have cords of wood stacked to the sky. Once the temperature dipped into the 60's, he would have a roaring, and I mean ROARING, fire in the fire place. If you walked in the front door on one of those mornings, you’d be hit in the face with a wave of heat that would singe your nose hairs. “Whoa, Dad! It’s only 69 degrees!” “Yeah, it’s kind of chilly. Don’t that fire feel good?” he’d reply in his best St. Helena Parish accent.
I took another swing at that trash tree, and mid-swing I could hear Daddy saying, “Relax your wrists, boy! You’re gonna break a bone! Let the weight of the ax head do the work!” I chopped away, eyes focused and wrists relaxed, sweat dripping off the tip of my nose, keenly aware of the wood-chopping legacy my dad left me.
The day Daddy's heart gave out, we were gathered around his bed in the ICU room: my sisters and their husbands, my nieces, my wife and daughters, and me. Mama had already said her goodbyes privately. We gave the nurse the OK to turn his ventilator off, and it got quiet while we held hands and wiped tears and watched his body sag. It was horrible. It was sweet. It was life.
But he kept shallowly breathing. The nurse said this wasn't unusual. The seconds seemed like hours as we half-heartedly tried to sing Amazing Grace like you read about in a Guideposts story. It fell flat; I guess we're just not one of those types of families. His breaths were getting shallower as one of my sisters said, "It's ok, Daddy, you can let go. Melissa Jo is waiting for you." Melissa Jo is our baby sister that died as a newborn in the late 1950’s.
More minutes dragged by. I made myself walk up to the head of the bed, and leaned over to whisper to him : "Dad, I bet heaven's full of trees and God's just waiting on you to chop some of them down. He's probably got the best, sharpest ax ready and waiting for you. We're all ok. You go ahead and go see Grandmama and Granddaddy and Aunt Sybil and Uncle Pokey and Melissa Jo. Now go chop some wood." I squeezed his shoulder and stepped away from the bed, and he took one more breath, then....nothing. He was gone. "He always listened to you, Deloy," one sister teased softly through her tears.
It was horrible.
It was sweet.
It was life.
As I chopped down that trash tree with Daddy's old ax, I couldn’t get his passing out of my mind. I felt his presence all around me: I felt it in the way I swung the ax, in the way I wore my cap crookedly on my head, in the manner I wiped the sweat from my forehead. The ghosts of his arms shadowed my arms with each chop; his hands merged with mine on the wooden handle of that sacred old ax.
I finished, drenched with sweat and tears, and plodded back to the shed to put the ax away. “I’ll talk to you next time, Dad,” I whispered as I leaned the ax in the dusty, cobwebbed corner. That was our commonality now, our kinship flowing through the wood of an ax handle. And that makes sense to me. After all, chopping wood was the last thing I ever talked to him about.
