4. Owen
four
Owen
Thursday morning. Festival day one.
I'm at the axe-throwing lane before the grounds open, while the air is still cool and the light is coming in low from the east. This is the best part of competition morning: the quiet, the lane empty, the targets fresh-set and waiting.
I throw twenty axes before anyone else arrives.
I find my rhythm in about the fourth throw and it's there after that, the stillness you develop in the shoulders, the unhurried precision of a motion you've done ten thousand times.
Axe-throwing is about patience. You don't hurl the thing.
You release it — controlled, deliberate, the handle leaving your hands at the right moment in the rotation so the blade arrives flat.
It requires stillness in the body even while the arm is moving.
Every time I've had a bad competition it's been because I was rushing, because something in the morning made me want to get to the end faster instead of staying inside the throw.
I throw five more. All in the red. I rack the axes, cover the lane, and go to find coffee before the crowds arrive.
The festival opens at ten and by noon the grounds are full — families, older couples, groups of young men who have driven up from the valley to compete.
The chainsaw carving demo draws a crowd.
The log-rolling tank is packed four deep with spectators.
The vendor alley smells of pulled pork and pine resin and something sweet from the jam table near the north entrance.
The axe-throwing competition starts at two.
I'm warming up on the practice lane at one-thirty when she comes through the gate.
She's with Donna Marsh, the festival chair, the two of them walking the grounds with clipboards, and they stop at several vendor stalls and at the log-rolling barrier and then they're moving toward the competition area. I see her spot the axe-throwing lane and track across to find me.
I don't break the warm-up. I keep throwing. But I feel the back of my neck prickling, the way it always did when she was watching me in a crowd. She had this quality even when we were twenty: she paid full attention.
I throw four in a row into the red. The fifth drifts an inch.
The competition runs for two hours, eight competitors, three rounds of elimination.
I've thrown against most of these men before.
Brody from my crew enters and does respectably — gets through the third round, which I didn't expect.
The man from Kamloops who's won the last two years is here, a big quiet guy named Rourke who throws clean and keeps his nerves off his face.
I beat Rourke in the final by three points. It's not the cleanest competition I've thrown but it's solid, and when it's done there's applause from the crowd and Donna Marsh hands me the ribbon and I shake Rourke's hand.
I look for her. She's still at the barrier. Watching.
I walk toward the edge of the grounds.
She's moved by the time I get there — walking the vendor lane, making notes, doing the very professional thing she's been doing for three days. I fall into step beside her and she doesn't startle. She clocks me, keeps moving.
"Nice shooting," she said.
"Throwing."
"Sorry. Nice throwing." She turns to face me. We're between vendor stalls, away from the main foot traffic — not private exactly, but not on display either. The afternoon light is doing that August thing where it turns everything golden-edged and I wish it wouldn't.
"Owen."
"I want to finish what you started the other day," I say. "The conversation."
"I didn't start a conversation. I tried to end one."
"Same thing."
She sighs, letting out ten years of frustration. “I left because you told me to go."
"I know."
"You sat across from me at the diner and you said you should take it and I asked if you'd come with me and you said Silver Ridge was home and that was — Owen, that was it. That was the whole conversation."
"I know what I said."
"So what were you expecting me to do?"
"I expected you to come back," I say.
The silence that follows is longer than any silence should be on a festival grounds in August with the log-rolling crowd shouting thirty meters away.
"You expected…?"
"I was wrong," I say. "That's what I'm saying. I was wrong to expect it and I was wrong about the other thing too. The telling you to go. I told myself I was letting you choose. I wasn't."
Her clipboard is down at her side, she shoulders slumped. "What were you doing?" she asks.
"Being too proud to ask you to stay."
Grace hesitates. Her mouth opens slightly and then closes. She looks like herself at twenty-three, before she learned to keep her reactions half a step behind her face.
Then she says, "I wanted you to ask."
I take a step toward her. She doesn't step back.
The space between us at that point is about two feet, and then it isn't, and the first time I touch her in ten years is both hands on her face, tilting her up to me, and she makes a small sound that I felt all the way down to my boots.
I feel her hands close on my shirt. I feel her lean in.
We're in the vendor lane at the Timber Festival in front of whatever portion of Silver Ridge might be watching and I could not care less.
When we break apart, her eyes are closed for a moment. Then they open.
"I need to think."
"Take all the time you need."
She takes about fifteen seconds. Then: "We should meet at your cabin. Not my mother's house."
"She'll notice you're out late."
"She'll figure it out." She takes a breath. "My mother likes you. She's always liked you. She's going to be insufferable about this."
"I know," I say. "Come tonight."
She looks at me for a long moment. The armor is fully gone now. I'd almost forgotten what she looks like without it.
"Okay.”