looked right at him and he realized the saw was still running, puttering low but puttering all the same in that silence. She raised a hand to him, then began making her way toward him through the snow. When she reached the woods where the snow was not so deep she paused to kick her boots one against the other as you would at someone’s doorstep, then she took off the sunglasses and continued on to the small clearing where he stood beside the fallen tamarack.
Her mouth moved and he cut the engine and set the saw down on the tree.
“Say again?”
“I said, Mr. Burke?” She was winded from her walk through the deep snow and trying not to be. Bright pink blotches on her pale face.
“I am.”
“I’m Audrey Sutter. Tom Sutter’s daughter?”
“I know who you are.”
The girl nodded. Looking right at him, her face so smooth and young but with Sutter’s blue eyes.
He said, “I’m sorry about your father.”
“Thank you. Thank you for coming to the service.”
“Well. Wanted to pay my respects. He was a good man.”
“Thank you.” The girl standing there with both hands in the big pockets of that jacket that made her look so small. Young, pretty girl. Look you in the eye. Looking to see did you mean what you said, so don’t look away, give the man’s daughter that much, at least.
She stepped up for a closer look at the tamarack. As if to inspect his work.
“Will you burn all this yourself?”
“Yes, I will.”
“You won’t sell it.”
“No, I won’t.”
She looked up into the branches overhead. A male cardinal landed on an upper bough, sending a small avalanche of powder falling without a sound. The bird whistling for its mate.
“You should have something on your head,” he said.
“I know.” The girl nodding, looking all around. She wanted to say something, had driven out here to say something, but he couldn’t help her say it and he didn’t know that he cared to hear it anyway.
“You like trees?” he said finally, and the girl looked at him.
“Do I like them?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“I like them,” she said.
“All right then, follow me,” he said. And he turned and began down a path through the trees, holding the boughs so they wouldn’t whip back on her, she following close behind in his tracks.
He pointed to the trees as they walked and seemed to give them their names: Jack pine. Black spruce. Balsam fir. Hemlock. White pine. He told her his old granddad was a logger from the old days and knew everything there was to know about trees. Signed up when he was fourteen and worked every job there was, you name it: Chokerman, chaser, high climber. Faller. Bucker.
“He’d show you his scars,” he went on. “Just everywhere. His face. Showed me one time where a one-inch jagger—that’s a sliver of cable wire—went into his hand one summer and where it come out the next on his thigh.” He held a wing of black spruce for her until he was sure she had it.
“Funny thing is, I do believe a tree was the most beautiful thing in the world to that old man. When he looked at one he saw a hundred things all at once. Logging put clothes on his kids’ backs, food on their plates. That’s all there was to it.”
He stopped and she came up beside him in a place that looked like every other place in the woods: the boughs of the trees with their burdens of snow, the shapes of fallen limbs under the snow and sometimes the branches reaching up like hands. Tracks of creatures everywhere.
“There it is there,” he said, and she looked where he was looking. Trees and more trees. He pointed. “That one there.”
She looked again. “Is that a white pine?”
“Yes, it is.”
The tree rose straight and bare until about her height, then opened like an umbrella in gray-green boughs, soft-looking boughs, then came to a point high overhead.
She looked at him, but his eyes were up in the tree’s branches. He said, “She asked me one time how fast did a tree grow and I said I don’t know and she said was it faster than a little girl and I said I don’t know but there’s one way to find out. So out we come and she walked around and around till she found this one. Just her height back then.”
Audrey looked at the tree again. At its highest it just caught the sun, and the whole tree seemed