Feb. 16, 2010
MANN TALK: Winter Thoughts from Summers County West Virginia
By Perry Mann
THE FIREPLACE
Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.
I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,
Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?
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The poem is titled “Those Winter Sundays.” The author is Robert Earl Hayden (1913-1980), who lived in the Detroit slums as a youth and whose poetry focused on early African-American history and dealt with the sufferings and achievements of his people.
I don’t how I came to have this poem. I discovered it typed on an otherwise blank sheet of paper while cleaning out a drawer. I did not remember having ever read it and I did not have any knowledge of the author. But when I read it, I knew that he and I had both experienced and benefited from “love’s austere and lonely offices.”
In winter on the farm in the Twenties and Thirties, the fireplace was---particularly in the long, dark evenings---the center around which everyone gathered. Except for a dim lamp beside the family Bible on a side table, the fireplace was the only light and the only warmth in the room. The far corners were cold, the floor was cold and the ceiling was cold. One could readily find a knot hole in the wall and feel winter breezing in. But before the fire and around the family it was warm and secure and there was a sense of let winter howl and heave and do its worst. The only music was the click of the clock in time with the swing of the pendulum, the crackle of the fire and sigh of slumping embers.
In the fireplace was a backlog and on the andirons was a forelog and in between were smaller logs. The backlog was huge and lasted the night. Once its face was red with coals one’s shins knew it and it was the backlog that supplied the banked embers for morning. The forelog and smaller logs had to be replaced frequently. So someone had to go to the porch and carry in wood from time to time; and if the supply on the porch ran out, one had to go to the woodshed to get it. When the door was opened for the carrier of logs, a wind of winter blew in with him.
Granddad stacked the woodshed with wood from ground to rafters. Some of the autumns of my youth I helped him to fill it. I would go with him with axes, crosscut saw, iron wedge, gluts made from dogwood, a maul made of hickory and a jug of well water if no spring was near the cutting area. Granddad would choose a tree, clear the brush from around it, and cut a notch to direct its fall. Then, we would level the cross cut saw at the point of cut and begin the pull and sway, the to and fro, rhythm of sawing while aromatic sawdust piled up on the ground on both sides of the cut.
Granddad would take a break to determine whether or not the cut of the saw was parallel to the cut of the notch. If it was not, we adjusted the cut to assure that the hinge between tree and stump was not over cut in order to prevent an unexpected or erratic fall of the tree. Then, it was back to the rhythm and to the anticipation of the moment the tree’s support begin to leave it and it began to creak and to lean ever so little and then ever so much from its upright position to an angle with the ground, an angle that grew quickly with a roaring rush to a parallel and to a great crash and bounce and settling of the downed giant. This moment had a sad aspect to it: here lay prostrate the corpse of a live being that had been reaching for the light of sun for decades.
The brush was cut out and piled save for what was large enough to sled home, the trunk was sawed into manageable lengths, and on another day the horses were hitched to the sled and the logs were transported to the wood yard, where on another day the hillsides would echo the whir and whine and scream of wood against the teeth of a huge wood saw by which fireplace lengths and woodstove length became the final product, except for the splitting of stove wood.
I slept in an unheated room that was separated by a hallway from the living room and the fireplace. By morning the only heat in the house was the fireplace's embers lying beneath inches of gray ashes. It was my grandmother who arose in the “blueblack cold” and carried a shovel of red embers to the kitchen cook stove. I was always awakened by her rattling the stove’s grate to empty yesterday’s ashes in preparation of starting a new fire for a new day. I would lie half awake and hear “cold splintering and breaking,” and soon after I would grab my clothes and run to the fireplace where a new blaze had risen from evening’s ashes.
I don’t remember ever thanking my grandmother or my grandfather but I never spoke indifferently to them. Nor was there ever in the house a chronic anger to fear. In all my days with them, they went about their austere and lonely offices with quiet duty and steady habits from dawn to dusk season after season. The closest they were to me was at the fireplace when winter’s worst was held at bay by the heat from the blaze of the downed giants of the woods.
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Perry Mann is a former teacher, a lawyer, a former prosecuting attorney of Summers County and a columnist for Huntington News Network. He lives in Hinton, WV.