I took the hatchet down off the wall the next morning, alone, in my kitchen, with a dish towel spread on the table and a pot of strong coffee beside me. The head of the old double bit blade was fixed to the handle by a thick iron wedge that Leonard had driven in himself in 1975. I tapped it with a hammer, gently, from below. It did not move. I tapped it again. On the seventh try the head loosened with a sigh, and I lifted it free. Where it had sat in the hickory, in a hollow no wider than my finger, was a small tight roll of waxed paper.
My hands were not quite steady when I unrolled it. It was a single page, covered on both sides in the neat pencil hand of my husband. At the top he had written, For my wife, when I am gone. I knew from the first line that I would need to sit down. My name was never Leonard Tremblay, he wrote. It was Walter Dunn. I was born in a mill town in Wisconsin, the son of a drunk, and I ran from home at sixteen. In the summer of 1975 I worked a log drive on the French River in Ontario with a friend named Leonard Tremblay, twenty five years old, the best man with a pole I ever saw.
One morning the jam broke while I was out on the logs. I fell. Leonard came after me. He pushed me to the bank, and the river took him. He did not go at once. He called to me. He said to take the hatchet from his belt, and he said, Tell Madeleine I tried. Those were his last words. I was twenty three, and half drowned, and I had been running from my own name for years. When the men came, they thought I was Leonard, because I wore his jacket, and I let them. I told myself it was only for a day. But a day became a week, and a week became fifty years.
A man can borrow another name in a moment of terror and spend the rest of his life trying to make it worth the price.
I read the rest aloud, standing in my kitchen, to nobody. Walter wrote that he had entered the competitions in the name of Leonard because he could not bear to let it vanish. Every year at the summer championships he told himself he was chopping for two. Every year he sent half of his prize money to a small church in Ontario, to be given to a widow named Madeleine Tremblay, without a name. He was ashamed to face her. He wrote, I did not take the name of her husband to steal a life. I took it so that he would not be forgotten.
I drove to the Lumberjack Bowl that afternoon with the page in my purse and found Tyler behind the concession stand, looking pale and sleepless. The collector from Minnesota, whose name was Mr. Aldridge, was sitting with the old woman in the wheelchair at a picnic table, and she was holding the program from 1976 against her chest. I walked over, put the page into her hands, and said, “Madeleine, this is for you. He wrote it for you.”
She read it slowly, with her lips moving. She read it twice. When she was done, she folded it in half and held it against her heart. “I knew,” she whispered. “Not all of it. But I knew somebody was sending me money. Every year at Christmas an envelope would come to my church, and the priest would say, from a friend of the river. I lived on it. I raised my boy on it. My son became an engineer.” She looked up, and her eyes were wet, but there was no anger in them. “So he was the one,” she said. “He was the one who took care of us.”
Madeleine and I sat at that picnic table for three hours. We talked about the two men, the one who died and the one who lived with his name. She told me about Leonard Tremblay, a joker and a singer who loved his wife. I told her about the man I married, a quiet man who hummed hymns while he chopped wood and could not pass a stray dog on the road. Somewhere in the middle of the afternoon we both realized we were holding hands. She said she hoped Walter had forgiven himself. I said I hoped so, too.
Tyler stood a few steps away through all of it, with the letter of the lawyer in his hand. When Madeleine finished, he knelt in front of her wheelchair, in the dust, in front of everybody. He said, in a cracked voice, “Mrs. Tremblay, I called the tool of your husband a toy. I called it a joke. I did not know. I am so sorry.” She patted his cheek with her thin hand and told him that the young are allowed to be foolish, as long as they are willing to be taught.
Tyler then did something that made me prouder than anything he had done in his life. He took down every video he had made of the hatchet. Then he made one new one, ten minutes long, with no tricks and no music, just the old tool on a table and his own voice. He told the story, all of it, exactly as it happened. He asked his followers to give to a scholarship in the name of both men. More than four hundred thousand people watched it in a week. The scholarship raised sixty thousand dollars.
On the last day of the championships in July, the lumberjack hall of fame in Hayward held a small ceremony. The title of 1976, which belonged to a name that no longer belonged to anyone, was recorded for both men, Leonard Tremblay and Walter Dunn. The hatchet hangs in the museum under glass, with a card that tells the whole story. Madeleine came, in her wheelchair, with her son, and she cut the ribbon. And I stood at the back, in my concession apron, with a coffee in my hand, and I told my husband he could rest now.