February 26, 2004

It would be a big risk to tell this story to an unfamiliar audience. However, I know that from the editing level to the readers, all have been in enough trouble to be understanding, or at least too nervous about their past to comment.

To be a successful whistleblower, you have to be able to pucker your lips without flinching, or dropping your head like a black swan posing for a picture. That said, the story begins on a cold Sunday morning in Mertzon. For a long time, services in the small mission church across the railroad tracks have ended just at the time the other churches' services begin, at close to 11 o'clock.

The first serious cold front of winter is building up in the north, with purple cloud banks promising a relentless icy wind to rattle the doors and window panes and fill the air with dust. On the way back from church to the Mertzon house, my pickup veers to the left and stalls by a rick of sawed wood owned by a householder who just departed to go to church on the hill.

Don't anticipate the worn excuse, "I don't know what got into me judge" — or wife, or sheriff. Don't buy that one. I knew what I was doing; I was driven by man's ancient and overpowering desire to warm his dank cave and fuel his feeble body. To prepare a rich broth of marrow bones and shoulder meat to bubble over hot coals. To heat and bake his bread on a black iron skillet in the gray ashes of the aftermath. To sit afterwards, heating the soles of his feet in front of a crackling blaze, warming the hearth to induce a cricket's song and temper the bitterness of the raging storm outdoors.

Not until the wood was unloaded in my woodpile did the consequences hit. No, I can do better. Not until the wood was unloaded in my woodpile did I realize that as long as the wind blew westerly, I couldn't risk the smell of smoke wafting down on my donor's place, giving him a smokescreen to trace to my chimney.

It is, I've heard, the hog rustler's creed to warn, "Don't slam the trap door too quick. Give all the pigs time to join the sow, or the squealing will alert the owner." (In the Big Depression, some of the county's finest citizens trapped unmarked hogs on the Middle Concho River. It was only considered stealing if more hogs were taken than the family needed for winter meat.)

Seemed as if instinct guided my actions. Told you once how the Big Boss and his pal Oral camped across the Spring Creek on Dove Creek one winter, subsisting by breaking horses for the public. Subsisting also on burning the chopped wood snitched from the box of a young married couple who befriended these two scalawags by feeding them supper a couple of times a week.

As I stood in the backyard holding the last stick of wood and trying to decide whether to take an armload inside, an old hymn from childhood chimed from the steeple of the very church the wood owner attended. And perhaps he and his family stood, heads bowed and eyes clinched, in the very pew where my dear mother plopped me down in a basket so long ago, covering as much of my face in a wool blanket as she dared, but hoping to hide as much as possible.

The wind whipped around the storeroom, signaling a change from the west to the north. Chips and bark swirled in the pickup bed, cleaning away the evidence. Sheltered by the storeroom, the chimes silent, safe in the thought of how deep Christian charity reigns over Mertzon, I laughed at myself, realizing the wood cutter meant to share the wood.

Once inside, the mirth increased. I wasn't even guilty of a prank. Been lots of wood given away on the ranch. Wouldn't make me mad if, in the face of a storm, a poor soul on the way home from church cut limbs hanging over in the highway right-of-way as long as he didn't damage the fence. Big Boss was always giving away kid goats and range hogs. If I had any hogs or goats, I'd pick a fat one to give the old boy for the wood.

I burned the last log over the weekend. Noticed Sunday that the remaining cut wood was inside a chain link fence on the near side of a big, spotted, glass-eyed dog's territory. The weather man says all next week will be in the 70s. Hunters left a little jag of wood at the Old Barn Camp. If I can find the help to load it, I might be able to finish the winter on that supply.

February 26, 2004