XLV
“Is this it?” shouted The Foreman.
He was looking over his shoulder at the figure that stood in the ruin and debris of the forest. The figure, a demon, nodded. It didn’t budge from its location. And it didn’t look like it was celebrating whatever title it had just predicated.
“You see this, boy?”
The Foreman ignored The Accountant all together. He passed him as if he were a mushroom or an ant hill. The two men stood side by side with one looking at the other, and the other looking at the biggest tree he had ever seen in his life.
“You want I should mark it, boss?”
One of his assistants, a naïve boy who was as enthusiastic as he was - dumb as fuck, came tripping over the rows of stumps, almost spilling his tin of yellow paint entirely.
“By the grace of God, if you come near this tree boy, I will dismember your entire family.”
The boy’s brothers grabbed him by his shoulders, and his uncles took him by his legs. They dragged him back into the clearing and sowed him into the dirt. They didn’t hurt the poor boy; he was just an excited pup. But they did apply what was an excessive amount of weight on his back and an awkward twist to his wrist and his ankles, not so much to hurt as much lessen his agrarian spirit.
“Sorry, boss,” said the boy’s relatives, almost three-quarters of the hundred-strong lumberjacks.
The boy himself had his mouth stuffed with dirt, but he uttered the same.
The Foreman composed himself. He looked up at the tree once more, running his sight along every inch until the incredible height where his sight could run no more. Such was its stature.
“This here is what it is all about,” said The Foreman, resting one palm against the tree’s bark; touching it with precarious gentility, as if it were an injured shark. “This is where life began,” he said, listening for the tree’s pulse. “And this is where it will end.”