the garage door was closed, curtains drawn, no smoke from the chimney. Aldi’s old sedan was nowhere to be seen.
Rudy arranged the ropes and his harness, hauled out the 394XP for me to put gas and oil in.
“There’s no way he’s in there, right?” I asked.
“Don’t know, don’t care,” said Rudy. Without looking at me, he reached into his back pocket and held the cardboard piece high. “Got what I need from that stubborn idiot. Superstitious. Fucking sentimental. High-and-mighty educated man, looking down on the guy who’s got to do the shit job for him. Doesn’t want to get his own hands dirty. He’s got to keep them clean so he can wring them and be all saintly.” He almost sounded like himself.
“When’s the last time you ate?” I asked.
“Don’t start with me,” he said.
“I brought you some breakfast,” I said. “Pumpkin seeds. They’re good for men.”
“What the hell does that mean?” he asked.
“They’re good for your prostate,” I said.
“At a time like this, I’d rather have a fucking cheeseburger,” he said. “Or almost anything else.”
Rudy pitched the end of the bull rope up into the tree, tied the bowline. Down at the pond, I wound a cow hitch around an old stump, hooked up the come-along. When I came back up the hill for the rope, Rudy said, “I want you to stay clear of the area. We might have taken a lot of weight off this thing, but don’t be fooled. It’s big and it’s hollow and it could go anytime.” I went back down to the pond and scoped an escape route, which meant being ready to swim.
Rudy took the big saw in both of his hands, and approached the tree like an outmatched fighter. I heard the saw whine. I saw him send the bar through. I began to pump the come-along’s handle, keeping the rope taut so that the tree would fall the direction we wanted it to go, away from the garage. The plan was to aim the thing down Aldi’s front lawn, running toward the pond. We would spend a day or two bucking it up and stacking it.
The oak was a fifteen-ton mousetrap waiting to go. The saw blade worked, and the oak sent up a wail, creaking and groaning, so great was the pressure. I worked the handle back and forth, and the shriek of the tree rose up so that I couldn’t hear Rudy call to me. I heard no signal from him. Soon I could hardly hear if the saw was working or not. I saw his yellow hard hat shiny like a thumbtack against the base of that mass, that force of tree. The tree drowned everything out. The way I knew something was wrong was that the rope went slack.
The rope went slack, and the white oak began to fall, but it was happening much sooner than it should, and it was not going in the right direction, and for some reason I could see Rudy too well. He was close to me when he should have been distant. He was meant to be on the ground, but he was rising into the air, and his saw, the 394XP, was flung from him, a dandelion from its stem.
I didn’t understand, and then I understood.
Instead of breaking at the hinge where Rudy had opened it, the weight of the tree had pulled its roots up out of the earth like a primordial creature waking up and opening its mouth. Rudy, standing at the base of the tree, was carried up with the root ball. He rose into the air, his arms wheeling backward, his saw disappearing into the new cavern in the earth. Rudy was up, ten feet up, fifteen feet, more, before he pitched forward and came careening down the trunk of the tree as it fell. He skidded off the trunk and rolled to the ground. But the tree kept moving. The trunk hurried toward him. He was lying down and it was the white oak’s plan to lie on top of him. I was also a tree, rooted where I stood. It’s true there was no time, no real time to act, but in my dreams again and again I step forward and I catch the oak tree just in time. I catch it, and Rudy rolls free.
I did not catch the oak.
Instead, there was silence, a frozen frame, a pause where there should have been a crash. The world regained itself so I could