A Flannel Jacket

My grandfather always wore flannel to split wood.  All summer he’d peer out his cracked storm window above his cobwebbed assessor’s desk, absentmindedly rubbing his flannel jacket’s sleeve while he stared down the chopping block.  One thousand clean strokes by winter, he’d gravely inform me, his cocksure baritone laden with menace for the offending trees.

He’d chain weathered logs to a tractor shaking with its engine’s age, and then he’d drag it past the sheep barn to a shady place between the feed corn and the raspberry thicket.  Wearing that flannel jacket, that ancient, threadbare, checkerboard-patterned suit of armor, he’d begin to swing.  Like an automaton, pivoting at a precise measure, the nicked and scratched blade rose and fell.  I was young, then, eager to help, so I dragged the logs he split to the woodpile.  The haphazard piles would gradually bow to gravity, and my gently smiling grandfather would secretly re-stack them.

Something about it made him deliriously happy; looking back, he probably felt like his grandfather, gathering fuel to fight the dangers of a rural Wisconsin winter.  Neighbors would ask for wood, and I never once heard him turn them down.  Exhausted, he’d run a forearm popping with muscles through his sun-bleached hair, and I watched the sweat flick off of his fingers to the ground.  Can’t stop now, he’d tell me, studying my five year-old self, tired and on the precarious edge of capitulation, dithering feet kicking at the splinters.  Told ’em they could have it today, Mitch, and you know what?  Saying you will is a promise.  Why don’t you run and check the tree taps?  And when you come back, I want to hear some of that Wordsworth we memorized.

Then, he was getting older.  Those rusty hydraulics didn’t hiss and flow like they once did.  They weren’t clean strokes, either; Darn it, he’d mutter, damn green wood is harder ‘n steel.  He knew better.  And he’d pull the head out of the wood with a grunt, sigh heavily, and swing again.  His generic jeans were bulky–he was wearing diapers.  Grandpa, I’d tell him, come on.  If you’re gonna insist on splittin’, that’s fine, but take off the damn flannel.  It’s the middle of August.  He’d slowly straighten, and I could hear the gears grinding down the length of his back.  Winter’s coming, Mitch.  One thousand strokes by winter, and I have to start earlier now.  He raised the axe, tottering for a brief moment as the axe’s momentum threatened to tip him backwards, and then put eighty years of emotion into a single, fluid swing.  All the anger and frustration of why can’t I split this wood I used to split this wood why won’t my arms and shoulders work like my grandpa’s arms and shoulders did that eventually didn’t but wait that can’t be now rushing out of him, and all the coppery beauty of the turning trees around him rushed in to replace it.  He turned around and walked by me, saying, You owe me nine hundred-and-ninety-nine clean strokes by the first snow.

I rehafted his axe when he died.  I sharpened the nicked and scratched blade.  I bought a brand new flannel jacket to break in.  When I lifted my grandfather’s axe, snarling my determination at the thick thigh of a white pine…well, I felt like my grandfather, dipping my toes into the rivers of time.

Bon Iver, who’s from Wisconsin, and his video, shot in Wisconsin.