It was harder than he thought it would be. I could tell after the first day. When he drove me and Jon to school the back of the car was already loaded with the first piece of the carving to be taken to the clearing. He said he would start off slowly, start off easy, so he took one of the lighter sections to carry. He arrived back at the house just as I returned home from school and climbed out of the car a different man. There was mud streaked across his face and his shirt was dirty. He walked slowly, bent over like a flamingo’s neck. ‘You all right?’ I asked. ‘Kind of,’ he replied. ‘A bit tired, that’s all.’ He shuffled passed me, through the front door and into the kitchen and lowered himself into his chair with a grimace on his face. He was asleep before the kettle boiled.
The next few days followed a similar pattern. And every time he returned to the house I thought that would be it. That he would admit defeat, say it was too hard, a bloody stupid idea and let’s please not mention the stupid bloody wooden horse again. I expected the whisky bottle to come out and a toast to knocking the whole thing on the bloody head. The whisky bottle did come out, and he had a drink, but I was watching closely and he wasn’t drinking like he did when we first arrived in Duerdale, when a bottle could disappear in a night. After a few more days, I noticed the slightest changes. He was still as tired when he got home, but in the mornings, even though he complained and moaned about the pains in his bones and joints and hobbled about like an old man, he seemed a little brighter and stronger despite all of this. He didn’t look as fragile as eggshell any more. A few days after this change I noticed a muscle in his arm that flickered as he stirred his coffee. I hadn’t seen that before. There was even the slightest touch of colour to his cheeks, a thin veil of red resting on the grey. He was still as skinny as ever but it seemed less of a hospital bed thin, less of a dangerous thin. I thought to myself that I must be imaging things, that a few days dragging lumps of wood through a forest couldn’t change a man much surely? But each time I risked a glance, I could clearly see that he was ever so slightly starting to look healthier.
I offered to help with moving the carving but he said that there was nothing I could really help with and I knew that he was right. I’d tried to lift some of the pieces in the workroom and I could do, just. But it would have been impossible for me to move them further than the car outside, never mind all the way through the forest. Each morning when Jon clambered into the car he looked in the back to see what parts were being transported that day. He would see that it was one of the flanks or thighs and say, ‘Whoa! That’s a big piece, that must kill you!’ And Dad would say, ‘Yes, Jon, it might just about do that.’ And we would wish him luck as we climbed out of the car and said goodbye and he would drive off with a look in his eye that made you think he might be going to war.