The Woodsman

Thwack.

She heard the distant noise just as she stepped outside and again as she reached the edge of the woods.

Thwack.

She hesitated for a moment, staring at the spot where the frozen grass gave way to dead grass and then, abruptly, to no grass. Dry dirt, littered with flecks of bark and broken branches, stretched along the rows of uniform trees. “Gaunt” was the first word that came to her mind. But she strode onward into one of the many tree lined aisles anyway, resisting the urge to glance back at the house.

Thwack.

She found him nearly a mile in. He was mid-stroke when she entered the clearing, the axe high above his head, and she couldn’t help but cringe as the steel edge of his axe sliced into fresh bark.

Thwack!

He paused for a moment, both hands gripping the rough handle of the axe still buried deep in the side of the tree.

“Your mom said you’d be out here,” she said.

He pulled the axe free and swung it again, this time from below his hips. A chunk of wood fell from the tree and landed among a pile at his feet.

She stopped near the clearing’s edge and looked around, for the first time appreciating just how large of a clearing it was. Her eyes found what must have been a hundred neatly spaced piles of wood placed in tight, concentric rings. The piles grew incrementally larger as they grew further from the clearing’s center.

She watched him take another swing at the tree trunk — a savage sweep she hadn’t seen yet.

Thwack!

“I didn’t know you came out here,” she said, scrutinizing each word as it left her mouth.

He coughed, and swung the axe again. She was only halfway across the clearing, but she could still see the brown splotches of rust covering the blade’s steel tip. The handle, however, was long and smooth, a rich, light-brown color that clashed with the dismal grey trunks of the surrounding fallen trees.

“Did you make it yourself?”

Thwack!

“The axe, I mean.”

Thwack!

“Because the handle looks new…but the head looks old.”

Thwack!

She waited, blinking at every swing of the axe. The tree he was working on seemed thicker than the others, which she thought only seemed fitting. Tall and ancient, it was putting up a formidable last stand, its branches groaning in protest as the chill breeze rubbed them against neighboring trees.

She took a seat on a nearby stump and watched him work, soon forgetting the harsh hacking sounds and instead appreciating the rhythmic sound of the blade as it cut the air, back and forth. With every swing he seemed to struggle more under the weight of the axe, but every swing was stronger than his last. His eyes remained fixed on the trunk, widening with every Crack! of steel on wood. He began to swing the axe faster and harder. Sweat began to trickle down his brow and he began grunting stubbornly into the still air. She was breathing heavier now. The mark on the tree was quickly turning from a crisp, geometric cut to a hackneyed mess of splinters and woodchips. She gasped as a chunk of wood erupted from the tree and shot across the clearing. But he kept swinging, a newfound passion in his eyes. As the strikes came quicker and quicker, his disciplined strokes regressed into headlong tomahawking motions, his hips and legs twisting and bending and shooting into every flurry of blows, his teeth clamped tight into a painful grimace, his hands raw and red until they leaked blood — and now he is screaming, she thought, he’s screaming and sputtering and spinning and hacking at the ground. Dirt clods and tree roots flew high into the air and rained down on her head. She yelled at him to stop as he beat the ground mercilessly, jerking the axe from the cold dirt and shoving it back in. He lunged back at the tree, hacking at it as fiercely as ever, cursing and punching and kicking at the strips of wood as they clung stubbornly to the trunk, splitting them in two when they landed on the ground. He hacked and fought and sliced and stabbed until he couldn’t any longer. And then he stopped, his quick breaths rattling his body, and collapsed against the tree.

She could taste the salty tears in the corners of her mouth, but she did not hear her sobs echoing through the woods.

“I’m sorry!” she finally sobbed.

And then he turned on her, eyes half-crazed and clouded by red spider webs. He wrenched the axe from the tree, and for a moment she thought he might kill her. But he spun and hurled the axe into the woods with his most sickening grunt yet. He stood for a while, looking into the woods and listening to her sobs, before he turned back to her. He stepped closer.

“Leave now,” he whispered. “And don’t come back.”

She did not leave. She stayed for a while after he left, after her sobs had silenced and her tears had dried, after she had stared in horror at the mutilated tree for what felt like hours. At nightfall, she got up and walked to the axe. She ran her hands along its smooth handle, now stained red with blood. Pausing and thinking for a moment, she slid her finger across the blade’s edge, and was surprised that it still hurt.