Aubrey’s chainsaw, razor sharp and finely tuned as it was, cranked right up. Being careful not to hit the same nail, Mick ripped through the rest of the tree trunk in a less than a minute, but when Mick felt the blade cut through the last of the trunk, instead of falling the way it should, the tree leaned ever so slightly the wrong way and brought its full weight down on the backside, pinning the chainsaw blade. Mick couldn’t budge it.
He killed the motor, straightened up and just stared at it.
Mick had done everything right—he was sure of it. He’d been cutting trees since he was a kid, and it was second nature to him. He had started by cutting a notch about a quarter of the way through the trunk facing precisely in the direction he wanted the tree to fall. Then he went around to the back and cut toward the notch from the other side, which should have eased the surface tension and let the tree shift its weight slowly until it fell, like every other tree he had ever cut in his whole life, toward the notch.
It should have. It had always been so, and there was no reason whatsoever to expect that the physical laws governing the felling of trees would be lifted in this one instance. But the heart of the old tree was black. A normal oak tree has a heart of pure, white, solid oak, but running up through the center of this one was a dead black place, all full of rotten leaves and squirrel droppings, and a black heart can be treacherous.
“Ain’t never seen nothing like that,” Hap said, his thumbs hooked in his galluses, staring up through the branches, looking for the first sign of movement. “She’s cut all the way in two and she still ain’t goin’ down.”
“I’ve never seen anything like that either. Just standing there.”
“Well, there ain’t nothin’ we can do now. Sooner or later she’s comin’ down, and all we can do is get out of the way.” They both knew better than to run. The safest place was right up next to the tree, where all they would have to do is sidestep the slow-falling trunk, whichever way it went.
The breeze had calmed over the last few minutes, but now the wind picked up and the limbs swayed. Mick grabbed the orange plastic handle of Aubrey’s chainsaw and tugged hard, this way and that, but it was stuck fast.
And then the tree started to turn. Standing straight up, the old live-oak twisted very slowly in the wind. Balanced perfectly on top of the chainsaw bar, it pivoted off of its own stump, uncovering its black heart while the body of the saw crawled underneath the growing overhang. Mick winced, watching helplessly as the bar bent almost straight down.
I can buy another bar for it, he thought. Then a big piece of orange plastic popped off the housing and whizzed past his feet as the chainsaw motor slowly disappeared under the overhang.
They both took a soft step back and looked on with a kind of reverence. They understood already that they were witnessing a new thing. The tree continued in its delicate pirouette, balanced perfectly on the saw blade, twisting itself around and gradually exposing the stump underneath until it stood poised at the very edge, held up by a mere sliver.
Then, with a thunderous, earth-shaking crash, the tree dropped off the side of the stump, straight down, piledriving the remains of Aubrey’s chainsaw into the ground underneath its heel.
And still it didn’t fall. The old tree stood straight up beside its own stump and kept twisting slowly in the wind, pushing up a little ridge of dirt around its base as it rotated like a monstrous weathervane, taking one last long look around.
The wind died. The tree stopped turning and hung there for a minute, dead still. Mick held his breath. There came a little groaning from the base as the old tree began to lean, very slowly at first and then picking up speed, right toward the middle of Hap’s house.
The sheer weight and mass of the trunk cleaved the house clean in two, slicing straight through to the floor and filling the air with noise—the tangled shout of splintering wood, the deep crunch of old brittle limbs breaking at the shoulders, the shattering of rafters and joists, the popping of studs. As the thunder died a white dust-cloud rose up from the debris and curled itself calmly around the jumble of tree limbs, broken plasterboard and roofing shingles. There was a small sound of breaking glass as a sliver from what was left of the front window swung free and fell on what was left of the front porch.
Mick stood there with his hands splayed on top of his head and his mouth hanging open for no telling how long, until it finally occurred to him that Hap was still right there behind him.
Hap hadn’t made a sound. He never even turned around. He glanced over his shoulder at his ruined house, once, the way anybody might look around out of idle curiosity to see where a loud noise came from, but he never even moved his feet. As the dust settled over the debris he just went back to staring at the ground where the tree had stood. It was a delicate moment for Mick, made even more awkward by Hap’s strange behavior. He didn’t seem to notice that his house had just been flattened, which struck Mick as the most frightening response imaginable. He eased up to Hap, hat literally in hand, his mind scrambling for the right words to begin an apology that might well take decades to finish. But it was too large—Mick couldn’t get a handle on it right away, so he ended up just standing next to Hap and looking where Hap’s eyes were looking.
Calmly sucking on a toothpick, gazing down into that big circle of hard-packed dirt where the tree had pulverized Aubrey’s prize chainsaw and mashed the unrecognizable parts into a greasy swirl, a smile crept onto Hap’s face as three words rolled out.
“Git ’em, Rudy.”
When the long silence got too awkward Mick stammered some kind of pale apology and then said, hopelessly, “What are we gonna do?”
Hap sighed, glancing over his shoulder at the house, and said, “I reckon we’ll need some tarps. And another blade for your chainsaw.” He turned then, and surveyed the wreckage thoroughly for the first time. All he said was, “That’s about a mess, ain’t it.”
Mick nodded, and tried again to apologize.
He shrugged. “It’s all right. I got insurance.” The toothpick switched sides and Hap’s face brightened with an idea. “Hey, Mick, you can build a house, can’t you?”
Mick grew up knowing how to swing a hammer, and he had framed his own house. “Well, yeah. Most all construction is just common sense.”
“And you said you was looking for work, right?”
He nodded slowly.
“Well, there you go. We’ll have to fix her.”
“You want the guy that just smashed your house to rebuild it for you?”
“Why not? The insurance company’ll pay you as good as anybody, and I’druther have you doin’ it as somebody I don’t know. You got yourself a payin’ job right next door, if you want it.”
* * *
There was plenty of daylight left. Mick went to buy a chainsaw blade and some tarps while Hap stayed there to shut off gas and electricity. He’d managed to remain calm around Hap, but Mick was acutely aware that he was in the middle of the worst run of luck since Job, and it was getting to him. Ever since Layne had started campaigning for him to stay home with the kids it was as if some invisible force had grabbed him in its fist like Cyclops and was flinging him against the wall, over and over. Up to that moment he had swallowed his frustration and just put up with it. He couldn’t unload on Layne. Whenever things went south Mick was the one the whole family looked to—the stoic, the one with the big shoulders—and he couldn’t very well gripe about his problems in front of a man whose house he had just turned into kindling. So he held it in, and the pressure mounted.
But as soon as he pulled out of the driveway on his way to the building supply place, Mick let loose. In his truck, alone, he screamed and spat and cussed, bounced up and down in the seat and banged on the steering wheel, even gave the bottom of the dash a couple of good swift kicks, venting a mountain of rage and coincidentally shaking loose a marble that one of the kids had dropped into the air vent three years ago. He shook his fist, pointed his finger, and poured out the full fury of his cross-graine
d, independent soul, railing against a wife he dearly loved but who had another think coming if she thought she was going to make a nanny out of Mick Brannigan. He railed against a homeless old man with no hands whose grin would not go away, and he screamed at any God who thought he could drive Mick Brannigan into a corner with one lousy lost job, a couple of weird accidents, a ground-up chainsaw and a smashed house. He would not be beaten down by a run of bad luck, he would not be painted into a corner while his options disappeared one by one, and he would NOT be forced into a life he did not choose for himself. As long as he had two good hands and a truck to carry him back and forth, Mick Brannigan would go to work.
Like a man.
The dirt road in front of his house ran fairly straight for about a mile and a half until it ended at the stop sign on Hampton Road—a small highway, but paved. Mick wasn’t quite done ranting and railing when his truck roared down the hill toward the stop sign, leaving a long dust cloud in its wake, but he screamed for an entirely different reason when he stomped on the brake pedal and nothing happened. He pumped the pedal four times fast and stood on it with both feet, and still he shot past the stop sign and across the main road at sixty miles an hour. The truck left the ground briefly as it rocketed off the embankment on the other side of Hampton Road, then tore up some pasture grass when the nose came down and plowed through a barbed-wire fence, right before it launched off of a second embankment and belly-flopped heavily into Earl Jones’s catfish pond. A flock of wintering geese, honking and squawking in protest, pedaled themselves into the air just ahead of a huge bow wave that rode up the mud bank on the far side like a miniature tsunami.
It happened so fast all Mick got was a series of mental snapshots—flying, screaming, plunging, a panicky fight with the window crank, brown water pouring in, swimming. There was just this furious series of insane snapshots, and then he was sitting on the bank staring down at that pond. He sat there hugging his knees for a minute or two before he even realized how cold the water had been. A fountain of bubbles boiled up in the middle of the pond, and a thin rainbow of oil had already started to spread across the surface. Curiously, the only part of his truck that remained visible was the tennis ball on the tip of the CB antenna still attached to the rear bumper, though the radio had been gone for years. The antenna reached precisely to the surface, so that the tennis ball sat there apparently unsupported yet oddly at peace on the turbulent pond.
He was freezing, and there was nothing he could do, so he got to his feet, turned around and set out for home, hugging a soggy denim jacket around him, his boots squishing with every step. Nobody passed him on the way, but if they had they would have taken him for a crazy man hurrying down the road all wet and bedraggled, hunched over and muttering to himself.
He walked briskly, partly because he was so cold and partly because, given the way things were going, he was half afraid somebody would pull up beside him and inform him that in his absence a great wind had come from across the wilderness and struck the four corners of his house and knocked it down on his family. But a long wet walk after a dunking in a muddy pond on a gray winter afternoon can change the way a man thinks, and Mick began to suspect he’d been putting himself in the wrong Bible story. Job, as Mick’s admittedly limited understanding painted him, was a pawn in a cosmic game of “What If.” Job got tossed into the frying pan as an experiment, to see how he would handle it. Mick, on the other hand, ever since the day of the accident, had lived with a gnawing suspicion that he wasn’t being tested at all—he was being herded. The people in his life, not to mention cranes, trees, chainsaws, and the brakes on his truck, all seemed, at least to his half-frozen mind, to be conspiring to force him to quit work and stay home with the kids.
So far, he had refused. But Mick thought about these things as he walked home with his teeth chattering and the back of his neck aching from violent shivers, and he wondered quite seriously whether such bizarre ramblings might actually be the voice of God. He wanted to attribute it to hypothermia, but he was fairly sure that anybody capable of thinking of hypothermia probably didn’t have it. Having been spit up onto the bank of Earl Jones’s catfish pond and sent squishing toward home with his tail between his legs and water in his ears, Mick saw before him the knowing smile of the Man With No Hands, and he began to think that maybe he wasn’t Job after all.
Maybe he was Jonah.
6
* * *
Caving in.
BY THE time he got back to the house Mick was a broken man. He wasn’t looking forward to telling Layne what had happened, so when he saw that the black Explorer was missing from the garage he felt like he’d been paroled. She had left a note on the kitchen counter saying she had taken the kids to the store to get Toad a new winter coat. Toad’s coats never could keep up—she went through two or three every winter.
There wasn’t time for a shower if he was going to get his truck out of the pond before dark, so Mick just rubbed himself warm with a towel, put on dry clothes and headed back over to Hap’s place.
Hap was out front with a shovel, happy as a puppy, prying pieces of Aubrey’s chainsaw out of the ground and dropping them into a burlap sack. When Mick told him about the truck he laughed so hard he had to stop digging and wipe his eyes with his hat. Leaning on the shovel, he stomped his foot to clear his throat.
“Well, I reckon we better go pull him out,” he said. “I hope you can fish better’n you can drive.”
* * *
The tennis ball marked the back end of the truck so they didn’t have to guess at it. Hap paid out slack in the winch cable while Mick rowed across the pond in a battered old johnboat and fished around until he snagged the trailer hitch with a loop of cable. It was the first bit of good luck he’d had all day. They winched the truck up to the edge of the pond, then snugged it to the back of the tow truck and dragged it to Hap’s place for an overhaul. Even if the sudden jolt of cold water didn’t crack the block, they were still going to have to break the motor down and clean it out.
“How come the brakes to give out?” Hap asked, shifting gears as the old wrecker rumbled up the dirt road.
Mick shook his head. “I got no idea.” He was staring out the window at the gray winter woods, wondering. Obviously, things weren’t making sense to Hap, either, so after a minute Mick just came right out and asked him.
“Hap, do you believe in God?”
He pondered this for no more than a second, then gave a little snort. “Don’t everybody?”
“I guess. I don’t know. Everybody sees it different.”
“I reckon so,” Hap said, in a way that somehow made it clear that it was okay to talk because he didn’t get it anyway. One of the things Mick admired most about Hap was that he could say whatever he wanted to the man and it was perfectly safe because Hap didn’t really listen. Layne took everything he said and broke it down, analyzed it, fretted and worried over it until he wished he’d kept his mouth shut. Not Hap. Most of the words people flung at Hap didn’t stick, which is precisely why, if Mick absolutely had to talk to somebody, he’d pick a man over a woman any day. Men knew better than to listen.
“It’s just, some people have this idea that God’s got his fingers in everything,” Mick said. “If Ben gets a bad grade Layne prays about it. You’d think God would have better things to do than fiddle with the study habits of a third grader. One out of eight million.”
“Uh-huh,” Hap said.
“That’s just silly, is what it is.”
“I reckon.”
“You can’t see God.” Mick meant for it to be his last word on the subject, but apparently Hap had been listening after all. He leaned forward, pressing his chest against the steering wheel, rolled his eyes up and looked at the swaying pine tops along the roadside.
“Can’t see the wind, neither,” he said.
Mick retreated, and was staring silently out the passenger window when they passed Aubrey’s place. He spotted the bumper of Aubrey’s white BMW through the garage d
oor and remembered with a sudden twinge that there was another grim task he would have to face before the day was done.
* * *
By the time they unhooked the truck in back of Hap’s house most of the pond water had drained out, leaving two nice-sized catfish squirming and gasping on the floorboard. Hap took them as payment for the tow and carried them out back to nail them up and skin them, apparently oblivious to the fact that his kitchen lay under a pile of firewood.
Actually, his kitchen was a pile of firewood. Mick wormed his way in through a tangle of limbs to get a closer look. There wasn’t much left. Hap had lived alone for the last five years, so his house was always a wreck, but now it was literally a disaster area. Cabinet doors, pots, roofing shingles, spoons, forks, shattered rafters, broken dishes and scraps of plasterboard were all tangled up with the busted remains of a maple dinette set under an impossible snarl of moss-draped oak branches and piles of fiberglass insulation. The refrigerator lay on its side, pinned down by a limb as thick as his waist, the door twisted half off. While he was gone Hap had cleared a path with an axe, and a wheelbarrow sat off to one side loaded with what looked like the contents of his freezer—mostly butcher-wrapped deer meat, hand-labeled with a felt-tip marker.
“See any plastic bags?” Hap’s voice said from out in the yard. He held up the two dressed catfish.
Mick spotted a drawer, separate from any cabinet, almost under his feet. He reached down, plucked a box of freezer bags from the debris and threw it out to Hap, who stuffed the catfish into a bag and tossed it onto the wheelbarrow.
“Reckon I can put this stuff in your garage freezer?” Hap asked.
“Sure. Looks like you’ll be staying with us for a bit anyway.”
He nodded. “I ’preciate it. It’ll just be for the night, though. We can tow Uncle Dub’s old house trailer over here tomorrow. That oughta hold me till we get her dried in.” A little silence fell, and then Hap said quietly, “What we gonna do ’bout Aubrey’s saw, pard?”
Summer of Light Page 6
