Carrying Firewood
When I was 14, I got in trouble. I don’t remember what for, I think it was lying, it doesn’t matter. The point is it was November, and there was a half cord of wood on the back porch. It was decided that for my punishment I would shift the wood from the porch to out by the shed, and I would cover it with a tarp for the winter. It was near freezing, so I put on my coat, a wool cap and heavy winter boots, and walked outside into the gray afternoon to pay my debts to society.
The reason shifting the wood pile was such a terrible punishment was not the task itself, but the particulars. There were three different species of spider in residence in that half cord of wood, enough of each to constitute a multicultural society. There were first of all the smaller gray ones, which skittered and spun webs, but were the least objectionable of the three. There were thin brown ones, which seemed to sprint to their destination, and bore an uncomfortable resemblance to brown recluses. Then there were big fat black ones, which moved with a glutton’s slowness, and exploded with sticky goo when smashed, like rotten blueberries. These spiders had thoroughly infested the wood, stretching their webs across the planks, laying their eggs in the knots, curling up under the bark to rest and scheme the next phase of their invasion into our back porch. My mission was to annihilate this nation of crawling things, scatter them to the winds, and consign their apartments to the distant garden shed. This was why the wood pile needed to be moved.
I bit my tongue against the cold, and circled around to the back of the house to survey the project. My nose stung. There was a brisk wind blowing in across the neighbor’s pond, driving small, quick ripples across its surface. Dead leaves flapped with the wind, trapped between the pieces of wood in the pile, slowly decomposing, adding a layer of silt to the entropy at play. I winced, imagining the armies of spiders that would come out after me once I began shifting things, but I also shivered, and I knew it wasn’t going to get any warmer. The house wouldn’t be unlocked to me until I finished. I grimaced, and grabbed the first two logs from on top of the pile. I tossed them to the ground, kicked them each a couple time, and then, once I was satisfied any potential spiders had been dislodged, picked them up again and carried them over to the shed. I set them down on a waiting bed of cinderblocks.
This is how I worked for the next three hours. The top layer had nothing living in it — it was cold and dry, and only good as a barricade against the elements. Below that, however, moisture had set in, and some of the logs were damp, some had decomposing material on them — soft, loamy buildup that slipped under my fingers and made impact patterns on the pavement where I threw down the logs. This layer had spiders. Many would run away as I peeled off layers, concentrating in the bottom half of the pile, which I did not like. Their egg sacs could not evacuate, however, and I forced myself to scrape every one I found off with a piece of bark. When I did pick up a piece of wood with a spider, throwing it against the ground would usually dislodge him and send him scurrying off toward the garden. If he didn’t fall off the first time, I would try to judge where on the wood he was, then pick it up by the furthest away point and throw it down again. I saw mostly the bulbous black ones, which were the most viscerally disgusting to me. The brown ones scared me the most because of their speed. I stopped noticing the small gray ones — I made a game out of stepping on them before they got to the garden. They were the only ones that didn’t repulse me, but I still made sure not to let them near my fingers. As I got lower the pile got danker, and the spiders more frequent.
I grew to hate those spiders with a burning passion. I don’t like spiders in general, not even one at a time, not even when I’m armed with a heavy shoe and a spray bottle of bleach. I feared those spiders in the wood pile, and every one I encountered made me more fearful, and more resentful at the spiders for cowing me. I fantasized about burning the entire wood pile right there, their bodies hissing and popping in the blaze. I prayed that a plague would strike all arachnids. I challenged them to duels, and then kicked them off the porch into the chilly garden dirt. It was a cloudy day, and so already fairly dark, but the sun set early, and as I neared the end of the pile it became harder and harder to see details on the damp, black wood. I only saw spiders by their motion, and every time I confirmed another one driven off or squashed I felt a thrill of victory. This spider nest was my mortal enemy and piece by piece I was demolishing it.
The final few pieces of wood were actually drier than the ones above them, because they were elevated off the ground. I stacked them on top of the pile now by the garden shed, and howled in victory. I pulled a large gray tarp over the entire pile, and weighed it down at each corner with half a brick. I stepped back, and exhaled. The light was fading and the wind was getting stronger, but I was no longer cold. As I breathed out, I felt all of the tension and hatred of the past three hours flow out of me. I felt as if all the ugly spiders, with their blitzing legs and malformed bodies, had never existed. It was a moment of pure bliss. I had won.
I knocked on the front door, and my mother let me in.
