She was right, he could probably manage. It wasn’t that Mick couldn’t handle it, it was just that the whole idea of depending on his wife to bring home the bacon was completely unacceptable. Most of his childhood memories were of working alongside his brothers, cutting grass, sacking groceries, painting houses, digging stumps—anything to put food on the table. Because his father didn’t.
He shook his head, finally, inspecting a callus on his palm. “No. No, thanks, but I’ll find a way. I’ll get us through this.”
The darkness in his eyes betrayed his thoughts. She studied him for a minute, and a slight nod was all it took for him to know that she had gotten the message. It was a matter of honor. Of manhood. He had a right. She knew he was a man when she married him.
“Okay,” she said.
4
* * *
Hap Harrelson.
THE NEXT morning Mick started looking for work. With the threat of housewifery looming, most any odd job would do. He went to see Hap.
Hap Harrelson owned the ten acres on one side of the Brannigan place and Aubrey Weems owned twenty on the other. Hap had been there the longest, having built his little bungalow back in the seventies. Mick and Layne had only been in the neighborhood for five years, Aubrey less than that. The next nearest house was almost a half-mile away, beyond a leased hunting preserve.
Hap had mentioned that he wanted a live-oak tree taken down. Dying from the inside out, the tree stood maybe ten feet from Hap’s front porch and spread its thick arms over the house like an umbrella. Mick offered to take the tree down and cut it up for three hundred dollars if Hap would help drag the limbs off and split and stack the firewood. A tree service would have charged five times that much, and besides, an old country boy like Hap would never hire a tree service anyway. It just wasn’t done.
Hap was a big, red-faced, slow-moving, pear-shaped bear of a man who wore bib overalls, always, and never buttoned the side buttons, claiming he needed the extra ventilation. He had some gray hair and he was getting bald on top, but most people never knew it because he never took that ragged red baseball cap off his head. As far as Mick could tell he never wore anything under his overalls, either. It wasn’t a pretty sight. In the wintertime he’d put on a long-sleeved shirt, but that was about it.
The shop out behind his house was a big dark cave of a building that, apart from a little clear space on one side where he pulled cars in to work on them, was completely cluttered with stuff—motorcycles and lawnmowers and outboard engines mounted in fifty-five-gallon drums of water, all with cowls off, parts scattered across the floor and mingled with roughly a million tools on the workbenches along the outer walls. The workbenches were piled high with parts and pieces, tubing and wrenches, empty boxes, hoses and wires and jars of screws. The bare stud walls held a few tools, some coils of steel cable and rolls of copper wire, all hung on sixteen-penny nails in no particular order. The whole place smelled of old grease and mineral spirits.
Whenever anybody asked Hap what he did for a living he said, “I fix thangs,” which was as good a job description as any. It was widely known that Hap could fix anything, so long as a person didn’t insist on original parts and their only concern was to get whatever it was working again. People from as far away as Covington brought everything from clocks to corn binders and left them with Hap to fix, whenever he got around to it. An old wrecker sat under an awning at the far end of the building, but he didn’t get a lot of calls for towing because he didn’t advertise. He thought nothing of taking the wrecker to the grocery store if it hadn’t been driven lately, although he always had two or three old cars and trucks scattered around the place in various stages of disassembly. He never called anybody when he was finished with a job, he just parked their washing machine or their car wherever he could find a spot, and sooner or later they would come and claim it. Hap kept his books in his head, but he always remembered what belonged to whom and how much they owed him for what he had done. He never charged much.
The one thing Hap would not touch was a chainsaw. Wouldn’t use one, wouldn’t fix one, wouldn’t even pick one up. Mick asked him why once, and Hap pulled up the baggy leg of his overalls to reveal a deep purple scar running like a gulley up through the meat of his left calf. He’d been cutting the limbs from a downed tree, way back thirty years ago when he first built his house, and one of the limbs fooled him. He didn’t read the lay of the tree correctly before he cut it loose. The weight of the entire tree lay against it, and when he cut through the limb it sprang back on him, swatting him down like a housefly. His own chainsaw fell on the back of his leg and took a massive bite before it stopped grinding. Not only that, but his all-time favorite dog, a pretty little springer spaniel named Rudy, was standing next to Hap and got his back broken by the same limb. It took a long time for Hap to extricate himself and stanch his own bleeding before he could put the dog out of his misery.
“Ol’ Rudy was hollerin’ something pitiful,” Hap said, absently rubbing the back of his leg, and the remainder of the incident that still lived in his eyes was enough for Mick to see why he wouldn’t have anything else to do with a chainsaw.
When Mick went over around noon to cut the tree, Hap was busy building a custom roll bar for a ’69 MGB. The spotless little orange convertible had been restored to such a pristine state that it looked out of place in Hap’s dark, grease-stained shop.
He grunted, pulling a U-shaped piece of heavy-gauge two-inch pipe out of the hydraulic bender. Nodding at the chainsaw Mick was carrying, he said, “I need to finish this. Reckon she’ll wait a bit?”
Mick looked out the bay door at a fast-moving cloud bank. The big old oak was dying, and the limbs had started to turn gray and splinter off. Hovering as it was over Hap’s house, the tree really needed to fall the right way. The weather worried him.
“I need to go ahead and get it down before the wind gets worse,” Mick said.
“A’ight, then, suit yourself. Let me know if you need help.” He took a felt-tip marker from his bib pocket, measured and ticked the legs of the roll bar, then hefted it to a shoulder and made for the band saw. There was something abrupt in the way he let his tape measure snap back, and it told Mick Hap would just as soon be absent while the chainsaw was running.
His kids fell in behind him like a row of ducklings as he walked around to the front of the house with his chainsaw.
“What are you doing?” Ben asked.
“I’m taking down the big tree in the front.”
Toad planted her feet and her hands flew up. “But that’s our favorite climbing tree!”
“Yeah, well, it’s dying. If we don’t take it down pretty soon it’s gonna be in Hap’s living room.”
He cranked the saw and cut a wedge out of the front of the tree, in the direction he wanted it to fall, and he was halfway through the backside when the blade struck metal and a shower of sparks shot out, bouncing off his jeans. The saw locked down. Mick goosed the throttle but the chain refused to budge, wedged tight. He hit the kill switch and straightened up. The kids gathered around, staring at the chainsaw sunk to the hilt in the base of a tree whose trunk was bigger around than their refrigerator.
“What’s wrong?” Ben asked.
“It’s stuck. I think it’s jammed in under a big nail.”
“What’s a big nail doing in our climbing tree?” Toad asked.
“Deer hunters used to come here all the time back before I built the house,” Hap said. He had come from around back to see what the silence was all about. “Musta been seventy-one, seventy-two. They had a tree stand here, and they drove big ol’ spikes in it for a ladder. After a while the tree growed over the nails so you can’t see ’em no more.”
Ben leaned close, poked a finger into the cut. “Whatcha gonna do?”
“Get some dynamite and blast it,” Toad suggested, dead serious.
“RIIIIING-ding-ding-ding-ding,” Dylan said, doing a pretty good impression of a chainsaw while squatting in the dirt by the
porch stabbing a pointed stick into the ground.
Hap went out to the shed and brought back an axe and a couple of steel wedges. They drove the wedges into the cut and finally got the chainsaw unstuck, but they broke the chain in the process.
Hap stood there with his hands on his hips looking up through the middle of that big old tree. The wind was starting to pick up and the trunk creaked and groaned a little. It was already cut three-quarters of the way around; if Mick could just finish the cut on the backside it would fall the way he wanted. If he did nothing, and if the wind pushed it the wrong way, it could topple onto the house any minute.
“Got another chain?” Hap asked.
“Nope.” And he knew Hap wouldn’t have one, either.
The wind gusted again and the upper limbs swayed. Hap shifted his feet and looked at his ramshackle house. It wasn’t much of a house, but it was all he had.
“What are we gon’ do?” he asked.
Mick shrugged, hefted the axe. “We could finish it by hand.”
Hap shook his head. “I don’t think she’s gonna wait for us to do that. Besides, if you cut that big a wedge on the wrong side she’s liable to come down on the house anyway.”
“Blast it with dynamite,” Toad repeated. She thought maybe they hadn’t heard her the first time.
“Tie a rope and pull it with the truck,” Ben offered. This was probably the best idea yet, if only he’d thought of it sooner.
“We should have done that to start with,” Mick said, looking up. “Climb up there now and you’re taking your life in your hands.” Lately Mick was feeling a little accident prone, and his knee started throbbing just thinking about
“Riiiing-ding-ding-ding-ding,” Dylan said, still digging his hole.
“Y’all need to go on, now,” Hap said, to the kids. “This old tree’s liable to go any which away.”
Mick pointed toward home. “He’s right. Y’all scoot.”
“I wanted to watch you cut the tree,” Ben whined. “Can’t we just stay for a little bit?”
“I think you should blast it,” Toad said, still hoping.
Mick pointed again. “Go!” he said, raising his voice a notch and giving Ben the look. “Go find something that needs fixing.”
Dylan got up dusting his palms and ran off ring-dinging after his brother and sister.
Mick scratched his head. “I don’t get it, Hap. Layne says they don’t pay any attention when she tells them to do something. They seem to mind me well enough.”
Hap grinned. “She probly ain’t totin’ a axe.”
He laid the axe on his shoulder, grinning. “That must be it. I’ll tell her to start carrying it around the house with her.”
The old tree shivered in the wind, and Mick looked up at it. “So what do we do, Hap? It’s twenty miles to the nearest place where I can buy a new chain—an hour, round trip. We don’t have that much time.”
There was one option left, but Mick shuddered to think of it. Hap looked at the ground, hooked his thumbs in his bib, and Mick could tell by the mournful look on his face he was thinking the same thing.
“I reckon you could borry Aubrey’s chainsaw,” he said, wincing.
Even after the suggestion was out in the light it seemed a dark and perilous path.
“I don’t know, Hap. You know how he is about his stuff.”
5
* * *
Aubrey’s chainsaw.
AUBREY and Celly Weems bought the twenty-acre plot on the other side of Mick’s place four years earlier, then spent two years planning and designing and carefully choosing the right contractor to build their dream home. They’d only been living in it a year or so. From Mick’s house, Aubrey’s mansion could barely be seen through the woods in the summertime, which was a good thing because it also meant Aubrey could barely see Mick’s. Aubrey had lived in upscale subdivisions all his adult life—the kind of places that have neighborhood associations—so he came to the woods with some stubborn notions about how often a man ought to cut his grass and what color he ought to paint his house.
Aubrey had built his wife a castle, a sprawling two-story brick Williamsburg with a three-car garage and a sweeping circular drive in front of it. They were in their fifties; both their kids were grown, the youngest off at college, so they had that big house to themselves. In the middle of the circle made by the driveway sat a manicured little garden that reminded Mick of the one in front of the bank. There was a pretty little Japanese maple hanging over a sculpted bird-bath and a fancy bench carved out of Italian marble, the whole thing ringed about in the summertime with a dense thicket of flame-red salvia and in the winter with a million pansies. Like their house, that little garden island managed to be beautiful without being inviting. Mick just couldn’t see anybody ever actually walking out there and sitting on that marble bench. Layne said their house was elegant, and she liked the way they decorated it at Christmas with one electric candle nestled in a garland of holly precisely centered in the bottom pane of each window, and a tasteful wreath on the front door lit by a spotlight hidden under the little marble bench. It made Mick want to sneak over there in the middle of the night and put up a big plastic Santa Claus with a hundred-watt bulb inside of it.
When Aubrey and his wife first moved in Mick and Hap got together and went over there one Saturday to help him clear brush from the back lot. Aubrey came out of the house wearing coveralls. Mick and Hap laughed about it for months and could never again work together on anything without one of them complaining about “soiling his jeans.” Aubrey opened up a hard plastic case and pulled out a chainsaw that looked brand new—although he swore it wasn’t. He just knew how to take care of his tools. He had to put oil and gas in it before he started, and he was really finicky about not spilling a drop. Later on, in the thick of the brush, Mick picked up Aubrey’s chainsaw by mistake at one point and was about to crank it when Aubrey took it away from him and said, politely but firmly, “I’d rather you didn’t.”
When they got done Aubrey emptied every drop of oil and gas out of his chainsaw, took it apart, cleaned it with a toothbrush and a soft cloth, put it back together, sharpened and oiled the chain, enshrined it reverently in its plastic sarcophagus and then snapped a tiny padlock onto the latch. Aubrey was proud of all his stuff, but like Hap said, he was plumb stupid about that chainsaw.
Any other time Mick would rather have eaten a bowling ball than borrow Aubrey’s chainsaw, but desperate times called for desperate measures.
“I don’t see that we got any choice,” Hap said. “If we don’t do something d’reckly that old tree’s comin’ down all by herself.”
He was right. They had no choice.
* * *
“I promise I’ll take good care of it,” Mick said. He had to do all the talking because Hap just flat wouldn’t talk to Aubrey if he could get out of it. Said they didn’t hardly speak the same language.
“Can’t it wait?” Aubrey was middle-age pudgy—soft in the middle, with a comb-over. That day he was all dressed up in tangerine golf pants and pressed white polo shirt, and he glanced at his gold watch four times while they stood respectfully in his tastefully decorated foyer awaiting his decision. “I have to be at the club in a half-hour. Otherwise, I’d be happy to come over and cut it for you myself.”
“What color is that?” Hap asked, touching a fingertip to the foyer wall.
“Hawk’s Beak,” Aubrey muttered, without looking. He kept jiggling the keys in his pocket and running a hand over his bulbous forehead, pushing his glasses up with a forefinger, looking this way and that, doing anything he could to keep from making eye contact.
Mick tried again. “It’s an emergency, Aubrey. We’ve just got to cut through about this much of the trunk. Once the tree is on the ground we’ll leave it until I can go get another chain, but there’s no time. We’ve got to do something right now, before it falls on the house. We just need your saw for like two minutes, and then we’ll clean it up and put it right back in the case
. I swear.”
Aubrey squirmed and grimaced like a kid about to wet himself. Mick thought for sure he was going to say no, but he didn’t. In the end he took two keys from his key ring and handed them over. He almost pulled them back a couple times.
“It’s out in the garage,” he said. “In the top of the right-hand cabinet, on the shelf above the string trimmer, the edger and the electric hedge clippers. The big key unlocks the cabinet, the little one fits the padlock on the chainsaw case.” His shoulders slumped and he looked like he was about to cry.
“We’ll take good care of your chainsaw,” Mick said gently. “I promise, we’ll bring it back safe and sound.” He meant every word of it, but a shudder ran down his spine when he said it. Mick Brannigan was learning to be wary of what the day would bring.
* * *
Neither of them said anything on the way back, but squatting in Hap’s front yard unlocking the tiny lock on Aubrey’s chainsaw case, Mick couldn’t hold back any longer. He held up the little lock, impaled on its little key.
“That boy is a bird,” he said, eyebrows raised.
“Yep. He’s persnickety, all right.” It was probably the only four-syllable word Hap knew, except maybe for watermelon and Alabama, but it was the right word. Aubrey was seriously persnickety. “I mean, what kind of fella would paint his garage floor with that shiny green paint? Looked like you coulda eat off of it.”
“Same kind of fella that would wear those orange pants, I guess,” Mick answered.
Summer of Light Page 5
