by Pamela Morsi
Spence nodded. “I’m getting a brother in October,” he said. “My mom is pregnant.”
“That’s got to be great,” I said.
“Yeah, I think it’s going to be okay,” he said. “She and my stepdad are really excited. He has three daughters that are grown up and married and Mom has me. So this will be their first kid together.”
“The baby won’t be sharing your room, will he?”
“Not likely,” he said. “Mom and Wiktor have a big house in Sequoyah Hills. Six bedrooms. And Mom’s redoing the downstairs this summer to add a nursery onto the master bedroom suite.”
“Wow! They must be rich.”
Spence nodded. “My mom is really into money,” he said. “That’s why she divorced my dad.”
“Your dad doesn’t have money?”
“Not enough.”
“I guess divorce is pretty tough,” I said. “Your dad seems really nice,” I said.
“My mom is great, too,” he assured me. “And my stepfather is not like Mr. Bad, either. Everything is really okay. Mostly I feel fine about it. But I guess sometimes I just don’t.”
I nodded like I understood, but of course, I didn’t.
“Did your folks fight a lot?” I asked. “I mean before the divorce.”
He shrugged. “They argued a lot. But they always argued. It didn’t seem like fighting. I mean they weren’t screaming at each other. It was just the same arguments over and over.”
“About money?”
“Yeah. And Dad’s job,” he answered.
“She doesn’t like his job.”
“He didn’t do what she’d planned,” Spence explained. “They got married when they graduated college. Dad was a biology major and he was supposed to go to medical school. That summer, before he started, he got interested in ecology and decided to pursue a Ph.D. in environmental science.”
“And she didn’t like that.”
Spence shook his head. “She married him thinking he was going to be a doctor. She wanted to be married to a doctor. Now she is.”
I nodded. There was nothing else to say about it.
“So I guess your father is dead, right?”
“Yeah, I didn’t know him. He died before I was born.”
“We didn’t even know the Lelands had a son,” he told me. “It’s weird they never mentioned him.”
“They’ve got pictures in the house,” I said. “Tons and tons of pictures. I guess they have so many so they won’t have to talk about him.”
“What happened? Did he have some disease or something?”
I got up from the bed and began checking out all the stuff Spence had on the shelves along the wall. There were some books, board games, a disc player and some weird puzzles. There was a big blue geode that he used as a paperweight.
“My dad was killed in a logging accident,” I answered. “I don’t know much about it. My mom never says much and I just met my grandparents.”
“You could ask them,” Spence pointed out.
“I think everybody gets sad when he’s mentioned,” I told him. “I don’t want everybody being sad.”
“But you’d still like to know.”
“Yeah,” I admitted with a sigh. “I’d still like to know.”
Spence was nodding, sympathetic. But I knew that just like I couldn’t understand his parents’ divorce, he couldn’t understand having a dad who’d died before you were born.
“What’s this thing?” I asked him, holding up a weird toy that looked like a space-wars gun with an open umbrella on the front. “Is this how E.T. phones home?”
Spence grinned. “Not exactly,” he said. “It’s called a Nature Sounds Receiver. Dad got it for me. He thinks it’s really cool to sit around and listen to birds and frogs and stuff. But look…”
Spence took the thing out of my hands and headed out to his telescope balcony, motioning me to follow.
“Put the earphones on and just point it,” he said. “You can always pick up something.”
I adjusted the little black foam pieces on my head and pointed it toward the backyard. I could hear some unidentifiable scratching noise. I didn’t know if it was a squirrel or some kind of digging animal or what.
“Point it toward a house,” Spence said.
I moved the gun toward the left, past the garage at the Leland house. I was startled at the clarity of Mrs. Leland’s voice.
“What’s become more obvious to me,” she was saying, “is the followers of Reverend White didn’t have all that much to do with the congregation of Governor Winthrop.”
She hesitated. I realized she must be on the telephone.
“Yes, certainly,” she continued. “But all those meetings are carefully documented. You just have to take the time to search through the NEHS.”
Another pause.
“Well, of course I’ll help you,” she said. “But right now things here are in a bit of an uproar. My daughter-in-law is taking cancer treatment and her children are going to be underfoot for a while.”
A moment passed.
“Well, I’m just praying for a full recovery,” Mrs. Leland said. “The last thing in the world I’d want is to have these two girls living with us permanently.”
“It’s wild, isn’t it?” Spence said, beside me. “You can pick up whole conversations word for word.”
SONNY DAYS
14
By the time they brought Sierra home from the hospital, it became obvious to Sonny that even if he did save enough money to pay tuition, returning to college was not going to be easy. The baby had a sunny disposition and slept well. She had no health problems, not even colic. Still, keeping up with her was a lot of effort and Dawn was exhausted by the time he got home from work.
He was tired, too. But it was different. His bones ached and his arms felt like Jell-O. But she’d been talking baby talk all day and up to her ears in poopy diapers. He liked the time he spent with his daughter. And he felt it was important that Dawn got a break. The idea of jumping up to head for an evening class got pushed further and further into the future.
They rented a place in a nice mobile home park near the offices of the logging company. It was wooded and kid friendly. There were several young mothers who stayed home there all day. Most, like Dawn, had husbands up in the timber. Sonny was hopeful that she would make some friends. That didn’t seem to happen. Dawn was outgoing and friendly when they met people. But when anybody began to get close, she backed away.
“They’re not like me, Sonny,” she said.
“What does that mean?”
“If they knew me, they wouldn’t like me,” she said.
“Give ’em a chance,” he implored her.
Dawn shook her head. “Give them a chance to walk all over me? Not likely. I’ve got you. I’ve got the baby. I don’t need anyone else.”
That attitude bothered him, but he figured time would change it. And he had enough other worries going on that her lack of friends seemed unimportant by comparison.
The company Sonny worked for was acquired by a larger, more profitable timber concern. Things were changing on the job and it didn’t seem to be for the better. Instead of harvesting trees for hardwood flooring, they were now clear-cutting entire stands for the chip mills. The high-capacity automated plants would grind down trees for making paper, pressboard and rayon.
The feel of what they were doing, the atmosphere on the job, changed significantly. It was as if one day they were following in the footsteps of their forefathers in utilizing a resource. And the next day they were all drudging in an outdoor sweatshop.
Sonny asked Lonnie about it.
“It’s because we’re not working in the timber business anymore,” he said.
“The chip mills are part of the timber business,” Sonny pointed out.
Lonnie nodded. “I didn’t mean to suggest they weren’t,” he said. “What I’m saying is that we used to work for a company that was set up to make lumber. Now we’re in a corporation
that’s been set up to make money. Wood, coal, hemorrhoid creams, it’s all the same to them. Just methods for making money.”
Sonny was afraid he was right.
“What worries me,” Lonnie continued, “is the way we’re showing a profit. We follow the rules, but to the letter only.”
Sonny had seen that himself. They’d clear-cut an area with oaks, poplars, hickories and walnuts. They would fulfill their requirement to replant the stand, but they’d replace it with cheaper, faster growing pines, slowly but surely depleting the hardwoods of the area.
The new company treated the limbing and bucking sites with the same level of barely adequate adherence. They located the skid trails with more thought to the convenience of loading than the prevention of soil damage. And the patchy grasses they left for cover seemed insufficient to prevent erosion.
It was a different timber industry. Among the workers, nobody liked it. But when paychecks got fatter, Sonny, like everybody else, tried harder to keep his mouth shut. He put the extra pay into the savings account. If clear-cutting would pay college tuition, then it couldn’t be all that bad.
In truth, the changes he saw in the mountains sparked his interest in the industry. He was inexplicably drawn to learning more about it. He began to drop by the library to read logging industry magazines. He checked out every book they had on wood harvesting and timber.
“I think when I go back to school, I may change my major to forestry management,” he told Dawn one night.
She’d been quiet all evening. And when he spoke to her, she didn’t respond.
He assumed she was just tired and not paying attention. Sierra had started walking, which was good news. But mostly she ran instead of walked and Dawn spent most of her days chasing her.
“I’m thinking about changing my major when I return to school,” he repeated.
“I heard you,” she said, still not looking in his direction.
The silence lingered.
“Is there something wrong?” he asked.
“I went to see the doctor today.”
Sonny was immediately alert. “Has Sierra been sick? It’s not time for another checkup.”
“I didn’t take the baby to the doctor, I went myself.”
“Yeah?”
“I’m pregnant again.”
Sonny tried to keep his jaw from dropping on the floor as the bottom fell out of his world. Nausea churned at the back of his throat. And he felt light-headed enough to faint.
“I’m sorry,” Dawn said. She bit her lip, but couldn’t keep the tears from seeping out of the side of her eyes. “The doctor said there is no perfect method. This happens sometimes. I’m so sorry.”
“I’m…I’m not,” Sonny said bravely. “I’m…I’m delighted. I…ah…well, as an only child myself, I always wanted Sierra to have a sibling. This is great. I’m so happy. I’m so very, very happy,” he lied.
Sonny pulled Dawn into his arms and held her as the sobs broke through. He held her and the trickle of tears ran to a flood and she sobbed and shuddered as if the world had come to an end.
“There’s no reason to be brokenhearted about this,” he told her.
“I want you to get to go to college,” she told him.
“I will go,” he assured her, though he felt it was a lie even as he said it. “I’ll start back next year, or the year after. I have lots of time, Dawn. I have lots of time.”
For the next seven months as they awaited the birth of their second child, Sonny deliberately put all thoughts of returning to the university behind him. He took his saved tuition money and bought a used car. A four-door 1989 Dodge.
“A family needs a family car,” he told Dawn, who teased him about buying such a stodgy, grown-up vehicle.
And one of their first family trips in the family car was to the pound. The barking of the dogs bothered Sierra. But when Sonny handed her the little black ball of fur to pet, she giggled.
“I think this is the one,” Sonny told Dawn.
“I can’t believe you want to get a dog,” she said. “It’s so much trouble.”
Sonny nodded. “That’s what makes it worth it,” he said. “A dog keeps a family grounded. And they can be your closest friend.”
Dawn seemed uncertain.
“What are we going to call him?”
“I think we should stick with this mountain theme we’ve got going,” he said. “Let’s call him Rocky.”
Dawn agreed, but with a reluctant sigh. She’d never been around animals and didn’t know how she felt about them. Still, the puppy rode home inside the warmth of her jacket.
On the job, Sonny concentrated on learning everything he could. If he was going to live out his life as a logger, he decided that he’d be a really hardworking, exemplary one, like Lonnie.
Lonnie was the lead man on the eight-man crew and operated the feller machine. Sonny and Mitch were the fellers. They cut down the trees with chain saws or, occasionally, axes. Lloyd was the bucker. He trimmed off the tops and branches and cut the resulting logs into specified lengths. Hodge and Caney fastened chokes around the logs and used a tractor to skid them down to the deck area where Rob Pearson ran the loading equipment. Though this team exclusively cut timber together, they weren’t the only guys on the sites. Log sorters, graders and scalers, chasers and riggers worked interchangeably among the crews. Of course, there were the regular visits from the company office. And occasional oversight inspections from state and federal agencies.
Sonny didn’t mind the work. The day went fast. The pay was good. He tried to ignore the things that bothered him. The guys on the crew were all hard workers and easy to get along with. Most of them were struggling to support young families, just like himself.
It was a gray, October morning, nearly ten-thirty, when Sonny stood in the limbing and bucking yard, waiting for his next tree. Two crews had been working the hillside for several weeks. That morning they were almost down and working very close to each other. It made everyone a little jittery. There was too much going on at once, too many people working, so it was impossible to keep an eye on everyone and everything. Which is what safe timber cutting is all about.
Finally Lonnie had told his crew just to wait. They’d limb and buck what they had while the other crew did their felling. And then they could fell while the other team limbed and bucked. It might mean an extra long day for all of them. But it felt safer.
Now they were just waiting, passing time. This late in the morning all the coffee thermoses were empty. Smoking was not allowed this close to the cutting. And no one was comfortable enough to sit down. So they were just standing. Standing around waiting their turn.
“How’s your wife doing?” Lonnie asked.
“One more month to the due date,” Sonny answered. “But the doctor said she could come anytime now. Sierra was a little early.”
“Do you know what it’s going be yet?”
“Another girl,” Sonny said.
“You disappointed?”
Sonny shook his head. “Just so she’s healthy,” he said.
Lonnie nodded agreement. “I like girls myself,” he admitted. “At least when you bring them into the world, you’re pretty sure they won’t end up eating sawdust all their days.”
“There’s more women in the crews all the time.”
“Don’t bother me none,” Lonnie said. “But I sure want better for my own girls.”
“Me, too,” Sonny agreed.
“I want all my children to go to college,” Lonnie said.
“Yeah, I want that, too,” Sonny admitted.
It wasn’t a big surprise that he felt that way. It was what his parents had done. It had been what he’d wanted for himself. Strange that for the first time in all this time, he realized he felt exactly the way his own father might have felt.
He missed his dad. He missed their chess games and the holiday dinners. Truthfully, he missed both his parents. He wanted to see them, talk to them, share his life with them. And he want
ed them to know Sierra and the new baby. He wanted the children to know them and love them, as well.
“College is too damned expensive,” Lonnie said beside him. “I ain’t sure that one man by himself can do it. I don’t know if even New York’s Donnie Trump could afford to send six.”
“It’s a lot of money.”
“I’m going to try,” Lonnie said. “I don’t know if I’ll manage it, but I’m going to try.”
Sonny nodded, acknowledging the challenge.
“My two oldest girls will make it for sure,” Lonnie said. “I’ve got some money saved for them and they’re already looking into grants and scholarships.”
“That’s good,” Sonny said.
“The girls remind me of their mama. Smart, they are, and pretty to boot,” Lonnie bragged.
Sonny gave him a teasing smile. “You know, in a few more weeks, I think I’ll be able to say exactly the same thing about my two.”
Lonnie laughed out loud. “I’ll just bet you will,” he admitted.
At that moment there was a crack of timber. Sonny wasn’t sure what was unique about the sound, but he knew immediately, unerringly, that it sounded wrong, very wrong.
“Damned thing’s falling into our stand,” Lloyd complained from nearby.
Sonny looked up. A nearby feller had cut the top out of a tree. It should have landed on the far side in the area where the other team had been working. Instead it was headed for uncut trees just up the mountain from them.
“Holy shit!” Lonnie cursed. “Clear out of here. Everybody clear out!”
It happened so fast, yet in Sonny’s mind every instant was indelibly fixed. The falling tree fragment hit a standing tree, snapping a huge limb that kicked back in their direction. It came down and down and down. Smashing into other limbs on other trees as it came down toward them. Its destination the ground on which they stood.
There was yelling. There was running. He heard screaming. Lots of screaming. It didn’t sound like pain. It sounded like fear.
REAL LIFE
15
Mom’s chemo began. The world didn’t stop. The sun came out every day and there was no pact of silence. The first week wasn’t really so bad. It was as if she was going to be the same as always. She laughed and joked and said things that got on Mrs. Leland’s nerves. I began to relax. Maybe it was just medicine.