Cutting through illusions.

It was serious work the two of us did that long-ago winter, but a lot of it went up in smoke.

He had a monstrous wood saw, a huge, whirling, toothed disc mounted on bicycle wheels and driven by a lawnmower en ne and a tangle of pulleys and belts-something he'd found at a sale or botched together himself. Dangerous as anything, it must have been. On those frozen mornings in the northern Ozarks of Missouri, we'd push it through the snow, into the woods, in search of fallen trees to cut in chunks that we carried back and split for our stoves. The saw was his; the woods were mine. The chunks we divided.

He was a little wiry man, about the age I am now (58), yappy and tiresome. But I endured him, pretending to listen, grinning like an ape at his maundering stories thrice-told. If you have ever tried to feed a stove with firewood cut by hand, you know that you would bear almost any torment in trade for the help of a machine.

That was a fierce winter, with nights routinely eight and 10 degrees below zero. Two dogs slept on my feet, and still, in the last long hour before dawn, when the stove fire had sunk away to only embers, I suffered mightily.

In a country neighborhood, at least in those days, the size of the woodpile was, besides its practical importance, an index of the owner's shiftlessness or moral solvency. Pass a dooryard where only a few sticks could be seen flung haphazardly beside the porch, and you knew that place was dwelt in by folk whose tomorrows promised nothing good. So we took the work seriously, my neighbor and 1-in the interest of survival, and also for our souls' sakes.

I preferred cutting in the morning, to have it done and the rest of the day clear. But he liked afternoons, and, as I've said, he owned the saw. The thing was out of tune and a devil to start. The pull-rope was my punishment for youth. I yanked until my shoulders ached, and very often, just as the engine gave the first premonitory cough to clear its throat, he would reach in a meddlesome hand and pull the choke to flood it again.

There were no rest breaks. To shut the beast off, if ever it could be gotten running, was folly. So we worked straight through-the scream of the blade resonating inside our skulls and rising like a Gorgon's howl over the wooded hills-until we were out of gas or darkness stopped us. Then, grease- and chip-covered, we would stumble through the cold and deepening night out to an old wagon road and back to our abodes, leaving the chunks to be carried the next day. He had someone to keep the stove stoked. But I went back to cold and silence.

Once, toward the end of February, I thought the bitter spell had broken. The trees at daybreak did not creak with cold. The sky was soft and bright. Barefoot, wearing only my woolen long underwear, I stepped out the cabin door into a morning that, although fresh, seemed a miracle of gentleness. I stretched, like some winter beast awakening. I listened to the song of birds from the budded thickets. Then I looked at the thermometer on the outside cabin wall.

It said 17.

We are adaptable. When agony has become a habit, mere discomfort is inexpressibly sweet. Anyway, the respite was short. A day later, another arctic blast blew in, and the march of brutal days resumed.

Between our wood cutting, which was almost a daily affair-four afternoons a week, at least-we worked, the little man across the road and 1. He at trying to make a house from a ruined shack. I at trying to make stories. He could not hear my typewriter, but I could hear the banging of his hammer. Sometimes, if my hounds happened to chase up an extra rabbit, I took it across as a gift and also as an excuse to see how he was proceeding with his task. A cobbled-up affair it was-boards ripped from other fallen houses and laid down, mismatched, to make a floor; windows gotten the same way; a roof whose gaps between the shingles he patched with pieces of rusted tin; the whole thing raised somehow with a car jack and propped on field stones, with an airy hollow underneath.

Sorry as the abode was, I could not have begun to do as well. So when I praised his cleverness, it was sincere. What I was doing on my side of the road he never asked about. I think he found it pitiful that a grown man would have to spend time that way and did not want to embarrass me by seeming to notice. Maybe he was right.

Or it's possible he was sunk in his own problems, for they were real. His wife, who was a good deal older-in her 80s-had fallen ill in late autumn. First she walked in pain, bent over at the side. Then she took to bed and spent much of the winter there, bundled under blankets and hand-sewn quilts, rising only to tend the stove fire and to cook, which he also considered not a man's work.

"She'll be fine," he said. "When spring comes and she can get outside, she'll be back on her feet again. "

She had a cancer in her bowel, but he didn't know that, and it would never have occurred to either of them to get a doctor's opinion in the matter. Meantime, he was treating her himself with various drugstore antacid lozenges and indigestion syrups, the effect of which proved disappointing.

I remember how the spring finally did come. One night I was awakened and drawn outside by a racket of wild geese northing. There must have been thousands of them, because their passage lasted several minutes-invisible travelers, shouting their comradeship and purpose through a chilly fog. The next day's sun burned it off, and the last patches of snow sank away into the leaves. The tree frogs began their peeping. The birdfoot violets pushed up their budded stems. The resident mouse abandoned my woodbox for the larger world. And I dispatched, from the mailbox at the front of my lane, the thing I'd spent the winter writing.

My neighbor across the road had finished his work, too. The shack, leaning and wrapped in vines when he arrived, was fit more or less to live in. The brush around it was beaten back, and he had spaded up a place for a garden. The woman-Della was her name-came outdoors, as he'd promised she would. The pain still bent her sideways, and she could not straighten to hang her washing on the wire between the trees. But he was certain her recovery was imminent.

He wheeled the monster saw into a little storage shed he'd built of oak poles and salvaged tin. I was relieved to have made it through the winter with all my parts attached and glad not to have to go with it and him to the timber again. Our wood stacks were low, but enough chunks were left for an unseasonable chilly spell. In general, the ordeal of stove-feeding was behind, and both of us, I think, were caught up by a fever of optimism, a sense of large things accomplished and larger promise ahead.

My bundle of typewritten pages was unacknowledged, but at least it had not come back. And he was encouraged about his wife.

"She's stronger every day," he said. "Yesterday she asked if maybe I'd get her a few hens." So I crossed the road to visit, but the improvement he spoke of was not discernible. Her face was wooden with pain, and when she spoke, the words seemed to arrive from across a long distance of lonely introspection.

The winter-burned grass began to green. The wild plums opened their blossoms. Squadrons of tadpoles agitated the shallows of the pond, and in the reeds at the far end a pair of wood ducks made their nest.

Then my gift to contemporary literature found its way home, courtesy of Bill, the rural postman-rejected, not even with a letter, just a printed card. Six months' work, for nothing. I tried to read it again to see how editors could have been so mistaken but had to give up in humiliation at the astonishing awfulness of what I'd wrought.

Shortly after that, Della died-in torment but without complaint. Her chickens, a half-dozen gaudy Bantams and one rooster, wandered into the woods to be meals for hawks and foxes. The wiry little man moved on to tell his endless yarns somewhere else, leaving his resurrected shack behind and his garden plot unplanted. The vines he'd cut sprouted from the roots and flung their tendrils up the cracked, unpainted boards. Then a wildfire driven by the April wind scoured that section of the country.

All that has been more than 30 years ago.

Out walking one recent day in those same woods, I came upon an artifact coiled among the weeds and fallen branches like a gray snake out of season. I dragged it out, and time took a sudden backward lurch.

It was one of the rubber belts from that hellish wheeled saw. I remembered the day it broke, the exact oaths the little man and I swore together, the trouble we had persuading his ancient truck to run so we could go to town and find a replacement that would let us continue our unending contest against winter's cold and the appetite of stoves.

I remembered, in that same moment, our vaulting expectations as we yearned ahead toward spring. His wife's health would mend, and they would watch her hens multiply, their garden flourish. They would have their ease at last. My own hopes all had rested on that thickening stack of typed sheets, and the opportunity the fame, even-that naturally would follow when those many thousand words were unleashed upon the world.

That's not how it went for either of us, was it? I thought, as I turned the belt in my hand. We failed equally.

Which isn't to say that we were useless men. For, between our other wasted labors, even disabled as we were by illusions, we did manage between us to cut a fearful lot of wood.