The Carpenter's Yard

The story I’m about to tell takes place on Lag BaOmer – an Israeli holiday that, for reasons no adult has ever adequately explained, its main activity boils down to giving children full social permission to play with fire. A lot of fire.

Officially, it lasts one night. Unofficially, it begins weeks in advance – because children, as it turns out, are terrible at respecting calendars.

Weeks before the actual night, the entire neighborhood would descend into a quiet, organized panic. Kids roamed the streets like tiny, unqualified contractors, searching for wood. And it wasn’t just wood. Anything that could burn. Broken chairs, forgotten planks, someone’s fence - if it looked abandoned enough, it was fair game. Each of us had the same goal: build the biggest, longest-lasting bonfire in the area.

Like everything else back then – and, I guess, still today – arm strength ruled. Unfortunately, I wasn’t a very strong kid. And neither were most of my friends. More than once, we’d found the perfect stash. And more than once, it stopped being ours . The older kids would show up – the local punks, the kind who didn’t ask – and loot our haul with threats and fists, leaving behind only useless twigs they didn’t bother with. That was the system.

The neighborhood I lived in back then consisted of detached houses, where the yard of the very last house faced the main street. An old carpenter lived there. No one ever actually saw him, and I don’t really know how everyone knew his profession, but it was a well-known fact in our neighborhood. I passed the carpenter’s yard every day on my way back from school. Even though I wasn’t a particularly strong kid, I had my moments of clarity. One afternoon, while walking home, I looked at the carpenter’s fence, and it dawned on me. Everything became crystal clear: a carpenter. A carpenter’s yard. Wood.

Wood? Piles of it! Planks, sawdust, finished and unfinished pieces, sanded, rough – hewn, fine oak, and cheap scrap – all mixed together. Woods and boards of every kind, tons of it. Just waiting to be taken.

I smacked my forehead. How had I not thought of that until now? All we had to do was grab some wood from the carpenter’s yard, and that was it. Our bonfire would be the envy of the whole town, and that’s a promise.

I rushed to my friend Simon, buzzing with the genius of my plan.

“I don’t get it,” he said, looking skeptical. “You want us to actually ask the carpenter for wood?”

“Who said anything about asking?” I scoffed. “We’ll just take it ourselves.”

“You mean steal it?” Simon gasped, already halfway to a moral crisis.

“Shhhh!” I hissed, glancing nervously around. “Who said anything about stealing? We’re just taking the leftovers. Did you see how much he has in there? You think he’ll even notice if a few pieces go missing?”

“And how exactly do you think we’re going do it?” he asked. Jeez, the kid could be so thick sometimes; you had to spell everything out for him. “Are you seriously planning on us breaking into the carpenter’s yard?”

“For heaven’s sake, breaking into? What are we, felons? Honestly, Simon, where do you get these ideas?” I looked at his skeptical face and decided to drop the winning argument. “Look, if we take something that’s right there by the street, it’s practically like the carpenter wants us to have it. Why else would he put it where anyone can reach?”

That finally did it. He was sold.

We set the plan for the following day. As soon as school let out, we headed to my house, threw our bags in the corner, and ran out the door. I yelled to my mom that we were going to play football, but our feet carried us straight to the end of the neighborhood. We stood in front of the carpenter’s fence and just stared.

Right there in front of us, popped up against the rusty squares of the chain-link fence, a beautiful wooden log. It was solid, sanded, finished wood. My imagination began to race. This log would burn for hours. Nobody else in the town would have anything like it; they’d all have to make do with scrap wood from construction sites. But we? We were going to burn a real deal. I glanced at Simon. I could tell he was as captivated by it as I was.

We looked left and right. There wasn’t a living soul in the street. And even if there had been, I knew nobody would pay attention to two kids hauling a log in broad daylight. Adults live in a parallel universe; they see the world, but they don’t really see us. In their eyes, we were just part of the background, and that day, that was exactly what we needed.

We started pulling the log. At first, it was just me. Then Simon joined in. Then the both of us, teeth clenched, threw our whole weight into it. We gripped the rough edges with our small hands and heaved. We pulled and pulled, but the log barely budged. We were sweating buckets, and the log didn’t move an inch. The fence was in the way, with other heavy beams leaning against it, and besides - it was just too heavy. I realized then that even if we somehow managed to pry it loose, there was no way we could actually drag it anywhere. But we didn’t care. In that moment, every ounce of our strength was pouring into pulling that damn thing out.

We gasped and heaved, our muscles straining. The fence creaked and groaned as the heavy beam scraped against the metal. Just as we paused for a second to catch our breath, we heard approaching footsteps. Heavy, slow, deliberate footsteps. We froze. Each thud on the pavement felt like a heartbeat of pure dread. To our dismay, we saw him: the carpenter. He was ancient, his face a weathered mask of wrinkles and unyielding grumpiness. He didn’t rush. He just paced toward us, one soul-crushing step after another, as if he already knew our guilt.

Simon was the first to snap out of it. He dropped his end of the log , and before I could even blink, he was already bolting toward the end of the street. When he reached the corner, he stopped and looked back. To his horror, he saw me still frozen to the spot, right where he’d left me, clutching the heavy beam in my hands.

“Run!” he shrieked from the corner, his voice cracking with terror. “It’s the carpenter, Run! Get out of there! He’ll kill you!”

I looked back and forth - from Simon at one end of the street to the carpenter at the other, then down at the heavy beam, and back again. The carpenter kept coming, slow and steady. At the far end of the block, Simon was hopping from foot to foot, looking like he was torn between two contradicting urges – the desperate need to rush back and help his friend, and the overwhelming instinct to run for his life while he still could. I could actually see the struggle written all over his face; he was paralyzed with indecision.

I turned to the carpenter. Unlike Simon, he had clearly made up his mind. He just kept getting closer. And there I was, still planted in my place, unable to budge. Something inside me was screaming: what are you waiting for? He’s really going to kill you. Run! But my legs wouldn’t move. I was terrified - I nearly pissed my pants right then and there. Like a rabbit frozen in the headlights, I stood stuck to the spot, clutching that beam, looking back and forth between Simon and the approaching man.

The carpenter was almost upon me. At that moment, Simon gave up on me, turned and vanished around the corner. I sighed, looked at the heavy beam, then up at the towering man, and thought: oh, the hell with it. Finally, my brain and legs were back on speaking terms. I dropped the log – it hit the pavement with a dull thud – and broke into a run.

And at that very second, the carpenter closed the final few inches between us. He extended a grim, calloused hand, clamped it firmly onto my ear ,and aborted my flight before it had even begun.

“Owwwwww! Ow, ow, ow! That hurts, let go!” I shrieked, my voice jumping an octave.

The carpenter leaned in, bringing his face so close I could see every deep crease in his weathered skin. I noticed the stray white hair sprouting from his ears and the shock of white on his head. He smelled of fresh sawdust, raw wood, and that unmistakable, musty scent of old age.

“You stealin’ from me, huh?” he asked, his voice full of reproach.

“No, no! I wasn’t! Ow, let go of my ear!” I pleaded, trying to twist away from his grip.

“You shall not steal!” he grumbled. His ‘L’ had a heavy, foreign roll to it – an accent that certainly didn’t belong around here.

“We weren’t stealing, ow, let go!” I cried.

He practically lifted me off the ground by my ear; I could swear my feet were dangling in the air. I was certain that at any moment, my ear would be ripped clean off. And then, go explain to your parents why you’d returned home without an ear.

“D’you hear me? You shall not steal! If I catch you near my yard one more time, I’ll take a chainsaw to that ear. Do you understand?”

“Yeah! Yeah! I hear you! I won’t steal, I swear - never ever. Just let go!”

He let go.

I dropped back to the dusty ground. Then, as if a tightly wound spring had been released, I sprang up and bolted. I ran the entire block without looking back, not stopping until I reached the safety of my home.

***

So, Lag BaOmer’s bonfire was indeed especially lousy that year. I saw it as some kind of punishment for our failed attempt at theft. Simon and I never talked about it again; we never mentioned the incident for the rest of our lives. It took me quite a while before I dared to pass near that yard again.

But one thing has bothered me ever since, and still bothers me today –

Why didn’t I run when I had the chance?