She too had gone along. There was no doubt that in the early morning she had come home to get me.
There was a lump in my throat as I said, “I’m sorry, little girl, I should’ve known.”
The first half-hour was torture. At each swing of the ax my arms felt like they were being torn from their sockets.
I gritted my teeth and kept hacking away. My body felt like it did the time my sister rolled me down the hill in a barrel.
As Papa had said, in a little while the warm heat from the hard work limbered me up.
I remembered what my father did when he was swinging an ax. At the completion of each swing, he always said, “Ha!”
I tried it. Ker-wham. “Ha!” Ker-wham. “Ha!” I don’t know if it helped or not, but I was willing to try anything if it would hurry the job.
Several times before noon I had to stop and rake my chips out of the way.
I noticed that they weren’t the big, even, solid chips like my father made when he was chopping.
They were small and seemed to crumble up and come all to pieces.
Neither were the cuts neat and even. They were ragged and looked more like the work of beavers.
But I wasn’t interested in any beautiful tree-chopping. All I wanted was to hear the big sycamore start popping.
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