Split and Loaded

"A good yard tells you everything about the man who runs it. Mine says I don't throw anything out and I know where it all is."

The splitter was already going when I backed the truck in. That rhythmic hydraulic grunt followed by the crack of wood parting — I could hear it over the engine, over the gravel, over the magpies that had colonised the stringybarks along the fence and treated every arrival as a personal affront. The sound meant Corey had decided to show up after all, which was either a sign of conscience or a sign that he'd run out of food at home. With Corey, you never knew which, and it didn't matter because the result was the same: a man standing at the splitter in a beanie and a hi-vis vest that had faded past any colour you could name, feeding rounds of blue gum onto the cradle like he'd been doing it all morning and not just the last thirty minutes.

I killed the engine and sat for a second. Just a second. The cab still smelled faintly of something I couldn't place — or could, if I was honest, but wasn't going to be. I opened the door and the cold hit me like a slap. Sharper than it had been at the Owens' place. The wind had swung northwest since morning and it carried a metallic edge now, the taste of rain that hadn't fallen yet but was making plans.

"Thought I said today was light," I called, swinging down from the cab. My boots hit the compacted earth of the yard — that particular surface that Dad had spent years building up with gravel and crusher dust until it was harder than most roads and flatter than any of them. The yard was his before it was mine. Sometimes I still caught myself looking for his truck parked by the shed, and it'd been ten years.

"Yeah, well. Nothing else on." Corey didn't look up. He had a round of blue gum on the cradle, one hand on the lever, feet planted wide and weight shifted left — the stance you learned after the first time a split half kicked sideways into your shin and you spent a week limping. "Figured I'd get ahead on this lot. That pile's been looking at me."

"Wood doesn't look at you, Corey."

"This lot does. Judgmentally."

I walked past him to the loading bay — a stretch of raised earth along the eastern fence that Dad had built up with railway sleepers so the truck tray sat level with the stacks. The sleepers were weathered almost black now, the wood so hard you couldn't drive a nail into them. I'd tried once, when I was sixteen, and Dad had watched me bend three nails in a row before he said anything, which was his way of teaching. Let the mistake play out. Let the boy figure it out. Don't waste words when the material will do the talking.

The stacks ran in rows behind the sleepers. Blue gum on the left, seasoning — the cut faces still showing that pinkish blush that meant they needed another few weeks. Stringybark in the middle, dry and ready, the bark curling off in long strips that Thomas junior liked to peel when he was here on weekends, an absent-minded habit I'd never corrected because I'd done the same thing at his age. Mixed hardwood on the right, newer cuts. I could tell you the age of any stack from twenty feet by the colour and the lift of the bark. Wasn't a skill. Just time.

I pulled on my gloves — leather, stiff with the cold, cracked across both palms — and started loading the stringybark. Dry stuff. The Proctors' usual. Each billet was a good weight, dense and properly seasoned, the kind of wood that burns slow and hot and doesn't spit. I hefted them into the tray two at a time, setting them with the grain running the same direction because that's how they stacked tightest, and because old habits are just movements your body kept making after your brain stopped asking why.

"How'd the delivery go?" Corey called over the noise. The splitter cycled, grunted, cracked. The halves tumbled off the cradle.

"Fine."

"Owens' place, yeah?"

"Yeah."

"They right?"

"Wasn't them. Someone else took the order."

Corey paused long enough to register this as worth a raised eyebrow. He pulled the split halves off the cradle, tossed them onto his pile with a practised flick — one, two, each one tumbling into place. "Someone else? Who?"

"Woman. Don't know her. She'd called it in. Cash."

"Cash?" He said it the way you'd say asbestos or mother-in-law. Like the word itself carried a warning. "Who the fuck pays cash for firewood?"

"People who want firewood and have cash."

"Yeah, or people who don't want a paper trail." He grinned at me. Corey listened to too many podcasts. He'd been listening to some true crime thing for the past three weeks that had turned every minor anomaly into evidence of conspiracy. Last Thursday he'd spent twenty minutes explaining how the pattern of dead possums on Collinsvale Road was "statistically suspicious." I'd told him the statistics were called "cars" and he'd looked at me like I was the one being unreasonable.

"It's firewood, Corey. Not laundered money."

"That's exactly what laundered money looks like. Ordinary transactions. Cash. No names."

"You're a splitter operator, not a forensic accountant."

"I contain multitudes, Jim."

I shook my head and kept loading. The billets thudded into the tray — dense, solid, satisfying. The sound of good wood hitting steel was one of those noises that lived in my spine. I'd been hearing it since before I could spell my own name. Mum used to bring me down to the yard after school and I'd sit on an upturned crate eating a Vegemite sandwich while Dad loaded the truck, and the thud of each log landing was as regular as breathing. The whole world had been that sound, once.

"Owens weren't there though?" Corey pressed. He'd moved on to a new round — a big bastard of a blue gum, knotted and twisted, the kind that fought the blade. He repositioned it twice on the cradle before he was satisfied with the angle. The splitter strained. The hydraulics whined up a pitch. Then the crack came, louder than the clean ones, the wood tearing along the grain in a jagged split that left both halves rough-faced and angry-looking.

"No."

"Weird."

"Not really. People go away."

"Yeah, but usually there's a car in the drive, or the geese going off. Place looked dead when you pulled in?"

"Quiet," I said. "No geese. No car. Just the woman and her sedan."

Corey chewed on that for a second. "And she just — what? Ordered a load to someone else's house and paid cash?"

"That's about the size of it."

"And you didn't think that was a bit off?"

"I thought it was a delivery, Corey. I delivered it."

"Right. Yeah. Course." He fed another round onto the cradle. The splitter grunted. "Just seems —"

"Do the Owens usually file a departure notice with you personally?"

"No, but —"

"Split the wood, Corey."

He held up one gloved hand in that exaggerated surrender he did — palm out, fingers splayed, backing off but making damn sure you knew he was right. The grin hadn't left his face. It rarely did. Corey's default expression was amusement — either genuine peace with the world or a failure to look closely enough. I'd never worked out which.

The truck was half-loaded now. I worked through the stringybark stack methodically — the good billets first, anything with too much bark or a dodgy split set aside for the mixed pile. My arms had settled into the rhythm, the muscles warm, the joints loose. Loading was the part of the job that most people assumed was the worst — the heavy lifting, the monotony — but it was the part I'd always liked best. The body knew what to do. The hands knew the weight. You could let your mind go wherever it wanted, and mine had been going places all morning that I kept pulling it back from, like a dog straining at a leash.

I could still feel her cheek under my palm. Cool skin. The faint tremor in her jaw. The way she'd leaned into it for a half-second before something in her pulled back — not her body, her body had stayed, but something behind her eyes that shut like a door. And the taste. Wine and adrenaline and cold air, and underneath all of it something that was just her, just skin, just a mouth I had no right being near.

Christ.

I threw a billet into the tray hard enough that it bounced off the headboard and nearly came back at me. Corey looked over.

"The fuck was that?"

"Missed."

"You don't miss. You've been loading trucks since the Stone Age."

"I missed."

He stared at me for a long three seconds. The splitter idled between them, that low hydraulic hum that filled the gaps in conversation like an umpire waiting for play to resume. Corey's eyes narrowed. Not suspicion — something sharper. Recognition.

"You're being weird today," he said. Flatly. Not a question.

"I'm loading a truck."

"Yeah, weirdly." He pulled his beanie down a fraction, a tic he had when he was thinking, which was rare enough to be notable. "You've got that look."

"What look?"

"That look like someone's shoved a stick up your arse and you're trying to pretend it's comfortable."

"That's not a look, that's a medical condition."

"Jim."

"What?"

"Did something happen at the Owens' place?"

The question sat in the air between us. The splitter hummed. A magpie shrieked from the stringybarks. The wind pushed through the yard, carrying sawdust and the smell of rain and something colder underneath it.

"No," I said.

Corey held the look for another second, then shrugged. The full-body shrug — shoulders, arms, spine, the whole apparatus involved. "Right. None of my business."

"Correct."

"I'm just saying, if you —"

"You're just saying nothing. Load's nearly done."

He turned back to the splitter. Fed another round onto the cradle. The hydraulics cycled up and the wood cracked open and the halves fell away, and the rhythm of the yard resumed as if nothing had interrupted it.

I finished loading in silence. The tray was full now, the billets packed tight, the weight of it settling the truck's suspension into that familiar low-slung stance that meant a proper load. I checked the tie-downs, tested the tension on each strap by pulling hard enough to feel the resistance in my shoulders. One was fraying. I'd replace it tomorrow.

The sky had changed while we'd been working. The pale grey from earlier had thickened into something that looked like a ceiling being lowered — dark underneath, yellowish at the edges where the last of the morning light was being squeezed out. The pressure had dropped. I could feel it in my sinuses, that dull compression that came before serious weather. The stringybarks along the fence were leaning now, their upper branches moving in a wind that hadn't reached ground level yet but was working its way down.

Corey had noticed it too. He had his phone out, balanced on the splitter housing, the Bureau of Meteorology radar filling the screen in shades of green and yellow and, further west, an ominous band of red that was moving toward them with the kind of steady purpose that made you check the gutters.

"Forty mils," he said. "At least. Maybe more." He held the phone up like he was showing me evidence in court. "That red bit? That's going to be here in less than half an hour."

"I can see the sky, Corey. I don't need a screen to tell me it's going to rain."

"Just saying. Might want to get the Proctors done quick."

"That's the plan."

"And bring us back a pie."

"I'm not going past the servo."

"Go via the servo."

"Corey."

"Steak and cheese. Or pepper steak. Not the chicken ones. They taste like sadness wrapped in pastry."

I closed the tailgate. Walked to the cab. The vinyl seat was cold through my jeans and I sat in it the way I always did — heavy, one hand on the wheel, the other reaching for the key. The envelope from Gladys was still on the passenger seat. I hadn't moved it. Hadn't counted it. It sat there with its weight and its wrongness and I looked at it for a beat too long before turning the key.

The engine caught on the second try. Always the second try. Karen said I should get it looked at. I said it was character.

Through the windscreen, Corey was already back at the splitter, headphones on, lost in whatever crime podcast he was feeding himself this week. He didn't look up as I pulled out. He wouldn't. That was the arrangement — you worked, you talked shit, you went home. No ceremony. No goodbyes. You just weren't there anymore, and the other bloke kept going.

The first drops hit the glass before I'd cleared the gate.