Elwood “Woody” Thorne, 53, spent 22 years as a hotshot wildland firefighter before a blown knee and a messy 2016 divorce pushed him to settle down running a small firewood and tree trimming service outside Missoula. He’s got a scar snaking up his left forearm from a 2018 blaze on the Bitterroot, hates small talk, and has avoided the town’s annual fall harvest festival for six straight years — only showing up this time because his 16-year-old niece begged him to support her 4-H bake sale, threatening to hide his favorite chainsaw if he bailed. He leans against a hay bale sipping lukewarm apple cider, flannel unbuttoned over a faded Garth Brooks tee, work boots caked in pine mud, and pretends he doesn’t notice the pitying glances from old neighbors who still whisper about his ex-wife leaving him for a real estate agent from Bozeman.
He’s half debating sneaking out early when a woman steps in front of the bake sale table, and his jaw tightens. It’s Clara Marlow, the 49-year-old part-time librarian who bought the old Miller farm six months prior, the same woman who’d written a scathing op-ed in the local paper two months back slamming a proposed logging permit for the national forest edge. Woody’d ranted about her for three straight beers with his old crew buddies, called her a city greenie who couldn’t tell a Douglas fir from a Ponderosa pine, who had no clue how carefully local loggers worked to keep the forest healthy, no clue how many fires bad forest management had sparked over the years. He’d gone out of his way to avoid her ever since, even driving an extra mile out of his route to skip past her farm.
He steps back to let a group of screaming kids in cowboy costumes dart past, and his shoulder slams straight into her. Her spiced cider sloshes over the rim of her paper cup, splattering a dark amber splotch across the front of his flannel. “Shit, I’m so sorry,” she says immediately, leaning in before he can react, dabbing at the stain with a crumpled linen napkin pulled from her jacket pocket. Her shoulder presses against his chest for half a second, he can smell jasmine lotion and wood smoke in her hair, silver streaks catching the golden string lights strung above the booths when she tilts her head up to look at him. She doesn’t flinch from the scar on his forearm, her fingers brushing it accidentally when she pulls back, calloused at the tips, not soft like he expected a librarian’s hands to be. “You’re Woody, right? The guy who leaves free firewood on Mrs. Henderson’s porch every winter? I saw you hauling a load up her drive back in January,” she says, and he blinks, because he’d thought no one noticed that.
He finds himself leaning against the hay bale talking to her for 40 minutes straight, ignoring his niece’s teasing grins from the bake sale table. She admits she wrote that op-ed because the logging company pushing the permit was planning to clear-cut 30 acres of old growth without any pre-emptive controlled burns, a detail he’d missed when he’d only read the first two paragraphs of her piece. He tells her stories about fighting fires sparked by unmaintained underbrush, shows her the scar on his forearm, and she laughs when he complains about the city transplants who move to Montana and act like they know everything about the land within five minutes of crossing the state line. “I’m one of those transplants, remember?” she teases, and he shrugs, grinning. “You’re not that bad.”
The sun dips below the mountains by 7, the air turning sharp enough that he can see his breath when he laughs. They wander away from the festival, down a dirt lane lined with aspen trees shedding gold leaves, no one else around except a few stray dogs trotting home for the night. He stops next to his beat-up 2008 Ford F-150, the one with the hotshot crew sticker peeling off the back window, and she leans against the passenger door, her hip brushing his. He doesn’t overthink it, just leans down and kisses her, slow, tastes like cider and the peppermint candy she’d been sucking on, her hand coming up to rest on his chest, right over his old fire department dog tags he still wears under his shirt. It’s not rushed, not messy, just warm, and for the first time in seven years, he doesn’t feel the urge to pull away and make an excuse to leave.
He pulls back, nods at the truck. “Got venison chili simmering on the stove at my place. Homemade cornbread too, if you want.” She grins, swinging open the passenger door and climbing in, her boot knocking against the half-empty bag of kindling on the floorboard. He gets in the driver’s seat, turns the key, the old truck sputtering to life, and reaches over to crank the heat up, his hand brushing her denim-clad knee when he pulls back. She laces her fingers through his for three full seconds, squeezing gently, before letting go to twist the radio dial until an old Johnny Cash song cuts through the static.
