The forest was different, and the fields were, and maybe the river was the same, yet somehow altered, and that, too, was how my father seemed to me when I thought of the stories Franz had told me about him and just as much after what I had seen him do on the jetty in front of Jon's house. I did not know whether he was more distant now or maybe closer to me, whether he was easier to understand or harder, but he was certainly different, and I could not talk to him about it, for he was not the one who had opened that door, and so I had no right to enter in, and I did not even know if I wanted to. Now I could see how he was impatient. Not that he was brusque or short-fused in any manner, he was just the way he had been since we arrived on the bus, and though it was true I felt a great difference inside myself thinking of him, I could not see any difference. But now he was tired of waiting. He wanted the timber on its way. Regardless of what we had been doing during the day, gone to the shop, or rowed upriver to the rapids by the bridge to fish from the boat on the way back down, or worked on carpentry in the yard or walked around in the felling waste wearing gloves and clearing up the tangled chaos and hauling branches onto a bonfire we could light up later when the weather would allow, he did not want to leave a mess behind him when the future time arrived, he had to go down to the two piles of timber by the river at least twice every evening to push at them and thump the timber and calculate the angle and the distance to the water to see whether the trunks would land correctly when they took off and then go through it all once more.
