by Summer Wood
Too wet, Len said.
So the contractor fussed and fretted and set his crew to work on a kitchen remodel where they tripped over one another and on an otherwise uneventful Thursday started a fracas that left one guy fired and another sidelined on workers’ comp. The contractor drummed his fingers. He had four solid guys left and a deadline for completion that would cost him a hundred bucks for every day he went over. Probably dry enough now, he told Len.
Maybe, Len said. But then it rained again for one full week and they had to wait that out.
And then suddenly it was springtime. Len went out in the morning and smelled the air. Wrecker came walking up the drive and saw him poised there, pensive, his chin lifted and his gaze taking in the surroundings, and knew something was up.
“What?”
“Good morning to you, too,” Len said. He looked at him appraisingly until Wrecker, uncomfortable, stood straighter. “What do you think. Is it time to cut that tree?”
Wrecker’s face brightened a beat faster than he could shuffle and yawn to hide it. “Depends,” he said, his voice still sleepy. “You figure the rains are over?”
“Window of opportunity. Help me load the gooseneck.”
Together they tied on to the long trailer the saws and the big winch and the logging chains and everything they’d need to take the tree down and carry it back, in multiple loads of manageable pieces, to Len’s yard for milling. They piled into the cab of the heavy diesel and started down the mountain. They stopped in Mattole for coffee and Len got on the telephone. Meet us out there, he told the contractor.
Thank you Jesus Mary and Joseph, the young man whispered.
He had the crew there to help. By the time Len and Wrecker arrived, there were half a dozen men milling around in eager anticipation. In a land of big trees, the only ones that rivaled this in size were sitting protected in the government groves. The grandfathers of these men had cut trees this big and bigger, thrown their brawn and hubris against the massive forests and held dances on the stumps. It was a lost era of plenty, of flapjack and ham breakfasts and untrimmed beards, of locomotives and mules. Len looked around drily. Styrofoam cups littered the roadside. “Just one tree,” he said. “Won’t take but the two of us to bring her down.” The men shuffled their feet and looked around sheepishly, but they remained. Everyone wanted the moment of falling. Everyone wanted the thud as the trunk hit the ground.
Len and Wrecker set about their work. A tree this size—nearly two hundred feet tall by Len’s estimation, with a trunk it would take three grown men to girdle, arms outstretched—ought by rights to come down in pieces, Len reminded the boy. Safer. Easier to control. Better all around. And impossible, in this case, with that landslide higher up that left no way to get the crane in above. The best they could do was to plan the fall, working the slope and the soil and the tree’s shape, to lay her down as gently as they could. See, there? Len pointed and gestured and mapped his plan so the boy understood. Wrecker watched and nodded. Yes, he got it. Yes. And then Len watched him clamp the tree spikes to his boots, rig his ropes, and climb into the upper branches to trim selectively and fine-tune the weight.
Yes, Len said softly to himself. Like that. Exactly.
Felling any tree was a dance with gravity. No kind of science alone could predict which way a tree could twist, and Len knew to lay a hand on the bark, to listen to the roots. It wasn’t magic, just common sense and a kind of intuition that developed after nearly forty years in the field. Anybody could muscle a tree down. All it took was a chain saw and enough gas in the can to keep its noisy little motor running. Of course, anybody could be crushed by a wayward fall, too. Anybody could be impaled by a sharp branch. Anybody—no matter how careful, how experienced—could hit a pocket of compressed twist in a limb that caused the saw to buck and twist its teeth into the operator’s thigh. Len had the scars to prove it.
Anybody, Len thought as he watched Wrecker work his way back down, could have a moment of inattention and tumble from great height.
Len’s breath came easier when the boy was safely grounded. “Nice,” he told him. The boy nodded. A streak of pitch discolored his cheekbone. Len could swear he’d grown taller while aloft.
“Have at it, old man,” Wrecker said, grinning. He pulled the cord start on the thirty-inch McCulloch and settled the engine, passed the saw to Len, and stood back.
Len eased its whirring blade into the thick bark of the tree. The motor pitch dipped and a stream of pale dust spewed from the cut. He lifted the blade back out, repositioned it over the first cut, and angled down until the two kerfs met. Then he removed the blade and stilled the saw. Wrecker passed him the small ax and Len set his feet again, his hands gripping the ash handle. He swung and the sharp head bit into the trunk. When he pulled it out again the wedge came with it.
“No turning back now,” he said to the boy.
Len worked the trunk methodically, whittling chunks from it in strategic places and deepening the cut behind the direction of fall. The wind was still but it could come up at any time, and he worked steadily, aiming to ground the tree as quickly as he safely could. Down on the road came the murmur of idle conversation, someone’s sharp laugh punctuating the hum. Len kept his mind focused on the tree. He ate what Wrecker brought him and never let the tree leave his sight. It was a wild card, standing, and he knew better than to turn his back on it. He sent the boy downslope for tools; he had him sharpen the chain and refuel the tank. When he got close to dropping it he sent Wrecker below with instructions to stay there. “And don’t let nobody else close, neither.” There was blood in his eye. “I don’t care what they say. Until I yell the all-clear, you keep them on that pavement.” He made the boy promise not to move from his post. Just because the tree was on the ground wouldn’t mean it was safe, he warned him. Len’s face was ruddy and his pale lips rode it like stripes of gristle in a tough cut of meat. “Could roll and crush you. A slope like this? Ugly. You want to know ugly? Ugly.”
Len waited until the boy scrambled down to the road and made the others gather a good distance back. He felt the sweat cool on his back in the spring breeze. Then he lifted the saw and made the last few cuts and the great tree foundered and fell.
The saw stopped and for a moment there was silence and the held breath of every person watching. They couldn’t see Len from where they stood. The sun was shining and dust motes rode the air currents. Then a growl, as though low in the throat, and a puff of breeze as the canopy swayed, and the growl rose to a grind and then a tearing, more like a shriek, as the massive tree began to fall and the men watching took another step back and a wind barreled toward them, the weight of the tree moving quickly through air, the trunk turning like a cat to correct, a split second of splinter as the remaining branches broke the fall and then a deafening crash, a tremendous thud, a tremor in the earth they felt in the soles of their feet as the giant came to earth.
The men rushed forward. Len was nowhere. They hastened up the slope.
Wrecker stumbled back when the tree began to fall. He planted his feet to steady himself and after some gaping seconds the shock waves galloped across the ground to climb his legs and rearrange his chest. He absorbed the blow into every cell of his body, felt it change the chemistry of his brain, shake into shape some amorphous category of soul. And after the noise abated still he stood and let the slow seep of warmth—the afterglow of destruction—feed his muscles and flush his face.
“Kid.” The big nose and generous face of the contractor loomed into Wrecker’s field of vision. “Better get up there. Your old man’s a little tee’d off at the moment.” He peered at the boy’s dazed expression. “Kid? Something the matter with you?”
Wrecker shook his head clear. He brought his gaze to focus on the road, on the gravel, on the knees of the contractor’s jeans. He looked up at the man’s eyes. He shook his head again and let the tremor continue down his spine. Something enormous had fallen and he had been a part of bringing it down. He felt weirdl
y superhuman and insignificant at the same time and he wanted the feeling to last and when it wore off he wanted to destroy something else to get it back. A drug had entered his bloodstream and he was frantic for more of it.
For one brief moment he had let go of himself. Just for then, for that one violent, rending, concussive moment, he had not had to hold himself up.
“Boy?” The contractor reached out and grabbed Wrecker’s arm. “Take it easy, there, son. Why don’t you sit down for a minute. Get your breath.”
Wrecker snarled and shrugged him off. Then he rushed up the slope toward Len.
CHAPTER TEN
Melody had laid down some rules. She’d had to. It wasn’t an activity that came naturally to her, but at fifteen the kid was big and headstrong, and unless they came to an understanding about what she would allow and what she would not and what would happen if he overstepped those boundaries, the petty disagreements that arose frequently between them could turn into full-blown shouting matches. Shouting matches and—whatever, and, honestly, it was a territory she didn’t want to explore. Whatever. Like what? Like he’d take off? Join the army? Stop talking to her? Like she’d say something she didn’t mean but would never be able to take back? One second he’d be sweet and funny and considerate and wise beyond his years and a second later he’d be a million miles away, sullen and unreachable, or he’d flare up in some hotheaded display of poor judgment, or sulk over some insult she hadn’t even intended. Sometimes her hand itched just to reach out and smack him. Sometimes her hand itched to grab the front of his shirt and drag him close for a hug. Most of the time she couldn’t do either, hug him or hit him—he moved too fast. Too fast away. Ruth blamed it on hormones but Melody suspected it was contagious. He’d got it from her. When she’d been that age? Pushing sixteen? She’d been a monster. Justified by circumstance, maybe, but still way beyond the pale.
There were two rules, and they were straightforward. The first—BE NICE—was something they agreed would apply to both of them, and was subject to a margin of error of roughly fifteen percent. Either one of them could fuck up and be forgiven as long as it fell within the tolerance. So far, the rule was a success. Backing off just that little bit brought them closer. They were learning the arts of compromise and negotiation, and maybe even the hormone thing was smoothing out a little.
The second—PASS YOUR GRADE—was more complicated. Also more simple. Len got involved. Wrecker could pass tenth grade and continue to work for him, Len decreed, or he could not pass it and find some other line of work.
Melody got out of Wrecker’s way, the day that news was delivered. The boy was out of his mind with fury. The next day he was ashamed, and that was even more brutal to watch, almost impossible for her to stay sidelined. On the third day he was morose. And then she very tentatively approached him with an offer of help, and he (bristling and insulted, and who could blame him?) rather ungraciously accepted, and together they struggled through the home-school segments he’d had trouble with.
He passed them.
Today was celebration, plain and simple. They had no need for rules today. Wrecker had finished his exams the month before and had been on a run of nice since then, with only a few fairly isolated shithead moments. She’d had a few herself and he’d forgiven her those. Today was a special day. June 30, 1981, his sixteenth birthday.
“Sweet sixteen,” Jack said, and let out a long, low whistle. “Glad you called me.”
Melody and her brother were slouched against a picnic table in the backyard behind the farmhouse. Every few years Jack would motor in unannounced, gunning his two-seater BMW over muddy washboard and ruts, half sliding down the abandoned drive to park as close as he could get to the farmhouse, and he and Wrecker would be inseparable for however many hours Jack had mysteriously allotted to the visit. Then he would disappear again. Sometimes gifts for the boy arrived in the mail. No card, no message. But who else would send a new set of handlebars to replace the mangled ones he’d destroyed in a jump?
Wrecker and his friends were building a fire in the barbecue pit, while Jack shouted random bits of bad advice from his bench seat. Jack could hardly move. He’d driven down from Seattle two days before with a bushel of oysters packed in ice in the trunk of his car and the bright idea to take Wrecker backpacking—bushwhacking, he figured—across the King Range and down to the coast. Melody found this hilarious. Jack was an urban boy whose tenting experience was limited to Boy Scout camp before they threw him out for bad behavior. He had a shiny new backpack and a bedroll still in the bag from Abercrombie & Fitch. Wrecker had done his best to protect him. As long as Jack stayed away from skunks, Wrecker had promised, he’d get his uncle home in one piece. If Jack got skunked, he was on his own.
Melody glanced at her brother. Crippled, but he’d recover. Jack got the family looks. Rangy, fine-boned—the Irish trumped everything else in him. Melody had hazel eyes, eyes the color of brackish water, but Jack’s were as blue as Wrecker’s. The skin around them was wrinkled from too many hours squinting at legalese, but even at thirty-five he had a boyish, devil-may-care expression, and a dimple in his chin that sealed the deal with women. He couldn’t make love stick any better than she could, though. Two marriages that went up in flames and a guilty conscience that resulted in alimony for both women.
Jack’s visits tended to correspond with his divorces. He’d come for the first time post-Amanda when Wrecker was ten, stayed a few days, took the boy on a wild spree in Eureka—arcades, movies, the batting cage, enough junk food to bring on gale-force vomiting and a headache that didn’t abate until Jack was gone—and Wrecker loved it. They were well matched. Jack viewed a gap in any conversation as an opportunity to rebuild the world with words, and Wrecker was a quiet boy who paid attention. Melody wished Jack would spend more time with Wrecker, but her brother had no staying power. He looked good and talked a blue streak but it took a special combination of guilt and self-interest for him to stay in the game once his initial curiosity wore off. His relationships with women proved it. His first marriage lacked that combination; his second tanked when his wife discovered he’d been supplementing their marital bliss with visits to call girls when he went away on business and one time—once only, he swore, only that once—when they traveled together on vacation. He was fastidious about work, preparing his briefs diligently and following up on contacts and opportunities, but his personal life intruded in unsavory ways. He was busted for soliciting sex with an undercover policewoman in his office during working hours. He conducted an affair with his boss’s wife. There weren’t many bartenders in town who didn’t recognize his mug, or welcome him by name when he sauntered through their doors. But there were no records of liaisons with underage girls (good, Ruth said crisply), no arrests for public drunkenness, no injuries attributed to his compromised condition. He coached a Little League team—the Tewksbury Tigers—and showed up sober. The kids loved him for his irreverence, his sense of fun, and for what they rightly felt was his acute interest in their well-being and sports prowess. He had good intentions and the wherewithal to follow through. But when the next season rolled around, the Tigers were looking for a new coach. Jack gave them one successful season and then pulled up stakes and moved across the country, an irate husband of one of the players’ moms in hot pursuit. All of this, and more, he reported to anyone who would listen.
“Gentlemen, ignite!” Jack called. He lifted his mirrored sunglasses and added, “And lady. My apologies.” He tilted his head toward Melody. “What’d you say her name was? The cute girl.”
“Sarah.” Melody found it hard to believe this girl—perky, goodhearted, dumb as a rock—would be sixteen in a few weeks, too.
“Oh!” Jack shouted, as the kindling caught and the fire roared. “Houston, we have blast-off!”
The buckeyes were small, still, the round nuts loading the branches of the backyard trees. The thermometer said 88. It hadn’t rained in three weeks. That was normal for this time of year, the grass edging toward
amber, the cows lowing over the washes, new fawns, still wearing their spots, scampering with their mothers through the pool of Melody’s headlights when she drove home at night. Ruth had heard a mountain lion scream three nights in a row. A fox had made off with the last of Johnny Appleseed’s elderly chickens. Melody’s neighbors’ crops ripened in their fields and under their grow lights. There was money to be made hand over fist in the bud market, and Melody wasn’t tapped in to any of it. There was one main reason for that.
Willow was with Len and Meg at the other picnic table, fighting a breeze to lay down a tablecloth. Ruth had control of the kitchen and was running some kind of potato salad factory in there. Melody watched Willow grip the cloth edges and laugh as Len let the wind tickle his edge out of his hands. Willow was laughing more, lately. Meg laughed too, standing to one side, her fist clutched to her mouth. Meg was easy to love. Willow—she was harder. They were such opposites, Melody and Willow, stuck to each other by the shared bonds of respect and affection and property and history and antagonism. It rankled that Willow was so often right. But she’d been wrong about Wrecker, hadn’t she? Maybe she was wrong about the cultivating, too. Willow had been adamant when they’d bought the place. She would associate neither her name nor her money with Bow Farm unless Melody could assure her that there would never—under no circumstances—be illegal plants grown on the acreage. Inside or out. Hither or yon, over hill or dale, comme ci, comme ça, Melody thought—and a good thing Johnny Appleseed kept his patch well hidden when he’d been financing his covert activities that way.