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oblivion
forged steel could sound
like that. Three apple trees
by the house—how much
effort had it taken to grow
them here!—had gone wild,
all their force going into
offshoots and foliage, and
the branches untouched
by buds dropped brown
leaves onto the ground;
the color of dead leaves,
the color of rotting apples
was everywhere, giving the
house and ground an aging,
debilitated air. Old pruning
cuts painted with pitch
remained on the trees, but
the pitch had cracked and
fallen off, and even though
the tree had grown a tight
leathery circle around the
cuts, the trunks were already
crumbling and the roots
were probably dying off. The
wires holding branches that
threatened to fall off dug too
hard into the wood, cutting
the bark.
I went into that smal l
fallow garden, engulfed in
the bitter-ash smoke that
comes from a badly built or
deteriorating stove; it was
getting colder and the leaves
fell less frequently, as if their
twigs were growing torpid.
Behind the house, at a
grinding machine made from
a converted foot-operated
sewing machine, sat a
shaggy old man; I saw him
from the back, broad and
hunched, half covered by
long tangled gray hair, with
apple leaves nestled in them;
I thought at first that he was
a werewolf with claws, but
then I realized they were
fingernails, yellow, curved,
broken or crookedly cut.
The old man was sharpening
an axe on a long handle, a
lumberjack ’s axe; it was
badly chipped, someone had
used it to chop up boards
of an old structure and kept