and the Writer-in-Residence took his place at the podium. He took a bottle of Jim Beam the size and shape of a hip flask out of his jacket pocket and took a pull from it, and without saying a word of thanks to us for coming, he began to read. The story was about a woodpile and the snow falling on the woodpile and the old man who owned the woodpile and who wasn't actually that old but who had been so beaten down by life that he looked old. The old man was sitting at his kitchen window drinking bourbon straight from the bottle and watching the snow wet the wood that he and his family needed for their heat and that needed to be chopped, pronto. His son was supposed to chop the wood, the son had promised, but he was off somewhere getting into trouble with a girl the old man didn't much care for because she was a slut (she was a slut, it seemed, not because she'd actually had sex with someone or someones, but because who else but a slut would date the old man's son?). The old man hated the girl and he hated the son and he hated the snow and he hated the un-chopped wood, which clearly was some sort of symbol of how the man's life hadn't worked out the way he'd planned, and the old man hated the bourbon, too, which he kept drinking anyway. I couldn't understand why the old man didn't just get off his ass and chop the wood himself, and I also couldn't understand why the author didn't use metaphors or similes in his story, but he didn't; the story was more or less an unadorned grocery list of the things the old man hated. And speaking of grocery lists, the old man's wife entered the kitchen with her grocery list and told the old man that she was going to the store, and as an aside she looked at the dead woodstove and said, "Pa." The old man didn't answer her, maybe because he didn't like to be called "Pa," or maybe because he liked to be called "Pa" so much that he wanted his wife to call him that again, or maybe because men like him are only called "Pa" in books and he didn't realize he was in one. In any case, his wife said it again ― "Pa" ― and then: "It's cold in here. Why don't you go out and chop some wood?"
The old man didn't look at his wife when she said this; instead he looked at the ax resting in the corner, and he looked at it in such a resigned, meaningful way that it was clear that he wouldn't chop wood with it but would instead use the ax to commit some horrible violent act against his wife or his son or both and that the violence was inevitable. The story ended with him staring at the ax, and then the Writer-in-Residence left the podium and reclaimed his seat next to the Director.
There were several minutes of big, thunderous applause. It was like the time I spoke to Katherine's first-grade class for career day. I'd brought in the ziplock plastic bag I'd invented for show-and-tell, and I showed the kids how it zipped and locked, zipped and locked, and then told them how I'd made the bag that way and why. Afterward the kids gave me a sustained, raucous ovation, not because they were so impressed by the bag, but because they were competing with one another to see who could clap the loudest and the longest. The ovation in the Robert Frost Place was like that. Even I slapped my hands together, in the spirit of the thing and to be agreeable. The only person in the audience not clapping was Peter. At first I thought it was just that he clapped the way he talked. But then I noticed he was staring at the Writer-in-Residence, really staring at him, squint eyed and furious, as if the Writer-in-Residence were an especially hateful eye exam. Instead of clapping, Peter was grinding his right fist into his left palm in such a way that it made me feel very sorry for the palm.
"What's wrong?" I whispered.
"I hate him," he growled.
"Why?" I asked, but he didn't answer me, not even a shrug. That's how angry he was.
And after thinking about it a few moments ― the applause continued, which was good because I think better with the help of white noise, the way some people sleep better with the help of a fan ― I was pretty sure I