It sickened me that I had let myself become such a miserable wreck, had let a creep like Matt, or Omar, jerk me around, let myself become that vulnerable, that weak. When I left for the Vermont woods, I wanted to get the hell out of there. I wanted to punish myself, and I wanted some goddamned hardship that would toughen me up enough that I would never ever get so lost and so weak.
Chapter 10
Which at least partly explains why, despite the increasingly clear hopelessness of my little experiment, I didn’t leave right away. I had burned every bridge behind me, and my past seemed too spoiled to return to. I had acquired a Pavlovian aversion to Boston and the person I had become there.
Also, it seemed that every time I made up my mind, something would offer an argument for staying.
A few days after Cat left, I awoke to another brilliantly clear day. Up here they have a saying: “Don’t like the weather in Vermont? Wait ten minutes.” There had been a little shower during the night, which now brought up the wonderful smell of soil from the forest floor. The leaves glistened, and the morning’s negligent breezes brought down an irregular patter of heavy drops from the tree canopy. The forest seemed pleased with itself, like a cat after it has groomed its coat satisfactorily.
I was sitting on my fireside log, listening to the day as I blew across the top of a cup of instant coffee. I was missing Cat and wondering gloomily at my meandering life, when I heard a voice call from below: “Are you decent?” It was Earnest.
I checked. I had put on running shorts and a dirty T-shirt, and I had been scratching at the blackfly bites on my ankles, leaving red welts. “As much as I’ll ever be,” I called back.
A moment later he came into the clearing, wearing a khaki T-shirt and army pants and a Castro-esque hat tipped back on his head. He tossed himself down, at his ease on the ground across the fire pit from me.
“Too late to meet your friend, I guess. Too bad. Diz says she’s a real firecracker.”
“That she is. You’d like her. You want coffee?”
“No, just drank a quart of it down below. So … what’s on your clock for today, Pilgrim?”
I had been asking myself the same thing. “Sounds like you have a suggestion.”
“I’ve got a problem that I’m hoping you’ll help me with. It’s a paying proposition.”
His regular assistant for his tree surgery business had called in sick—most likely hungover, Earnest thought. He’d called others, with no luck, so he was desperate for someone to help him bring down a big tree in Essex Junction. When he described the job—a huge old elm in someone’s backyard—I warned him that I had brought down only a few trees in my life, all of them in the past month, none of them thicker than my arm. I doubted I should help with a tree near a house.
He dismissed my concerns with a wave. “All it takes is brains and brawn and good luck,” he told me.
Working for Earnest: Caravanned behind him up to Essex, left my car at the park-and-ride near the interstate, rode in his big truck—not his regular pickup but an old warhorse of a stake-sided dump truck—out to a suburban residential district. Big trees along the streets, including some elms that had miraculously survived the midcentury blight. They were going one by one, Earnest explained, and today we were going to take down a behemoth that had started dropping branches on a house.
Earnest was in an ebullient mood, his big face shiny. He drove with a huge thermos of coffee in one hand, handing it to me to share occasional swigs, and explained that if this went as he hoped, he’d make out like a bandit and I would get a generous cut.
When we pulled up at the client’s house, I saw that the old elm was truly a monument. Its massive branches rose and curved up and out in the shape of an inverted umbrella or the bell of a trumpet, overhanging the house and the power lines. Earnest backed the rig up the driveway, shut it down, and got out to appraise the scene.
“You getting pretty good with that chainsaw up at your camp?” he asked.
“Not so bad, I guess.” Despite my minimal experience, I was proud of my growing mastery of the whining, ripping thing. I hated the stink, but even that had its uses: the blue smoke kept bugs away. “But I—”
“Well, let’s get to it. First we gotta unload the gear.”
There was a lot of gear. The most important tools of the trade are the ropes: huge coils of inch-thick oiled sisal that chafed my forearms as I dragged them off the truck’s dented steel bed. I could hardly carry them. Earnest had brought along a bundle of leather straps with steel fittings, thick as draft-horse tack. Back to the truck for the chainsaws. I grabbed the first one, about the size of mine, then saw the other two: engines the size of a lawn mower’s, bars longer than my arm.
“I’ll saddle up if you bring the rest of the stuff,” Earnest told me.
I lugged the saws to a part of the lawn well away from the tree and laid them out in a neat array as Earnest instructed. These were the surgeon’s tools, and they needed to be ordered and ready to his hand. Back to the truck for cans of gas mix and chain oil, a hard hat and headphones for me, a metal toolbox, smaller ropes.
“Saddling up” meant putting on gear that would delight a leather fetishist. He started with a heavy belt around his waist, two thick straps connecting front and back through the crotch, leather suspenders that crossed his chest and back, carabiners here and there rattling from grommets. Then he buckled leather greaves onto his shins, each mounted with a steel spike that extended well below the inner arch of his boot. A heavy canvas strap about ten feet long, with clips attached at intervals and at each end: He hooked one clip into a steel loop on his belt and slapped the doubled-up remainder of the strap over his shoulder. As he girded himself, he meticulously inspected each strap, buckle, fitting.
“I’m a relic,” he explained. “This is how they did it in the Stone Age. Nowadays, a team of guys come in with a cherry picker, go up and knock off a branch here and there. Ground guys chip the little stuff as fast as it comes down, blow it right into the truck. Load the big stuff on with a grabber. I can’t afford the equipment, only way I get clients is by undercutting their prices. And having the skills to do the ship-in-a-bottle jobs.”
Under the tree, he explained that I was going to be his rope man, who has two primary duties. One is to send things up to the tree man as he needs them: chainsaws, other ropes, whatever. You tie them to a slender rope and he pulls them up. I figured I could manage that part.
The other is handling the big ropes to direct the fall of the branches he cuts off.
“How do I do that?”
“It’s easy. I climb up to the branch above the one I’m cutting, put the rope through a crotch so it works like a pulley. You hold one end of the rope, I tie the other end to the one we’re going to drop. When the branch starts to go, it’ll swing, and your job is to hold it up until it swings to where it’ll fall clear, won’t hit the house. Or power lines.”
The idea appalled me. “Earnest. I’ve never done anything like this in my life. I don’t think I should—”
“Yeah, if you get it wrong, it could be a major fuck up. I’ve had helpers drop em right through the roof. One guy brought down the phone lines for half a block.” He cackled, putting on a redneck twang: “He don’t work for me no more.”
“I’m not strong enough!”
“Outdoor living has built up your constitution. You’ll be fine.”
I protested again, but he wasn’t listening. Burdened by his leathers, he waddled over to the tree, carrying one end of a light rope that I’d coiled on the ground. He swung his canvas strap around the trunk at shoulder height—the tree was easily four feet thick—clipped it to his waist belt on the other side of his body, leaned back hard against it, and began to climb. He stepped up, stabbed his ankle spikes firmly into the wood, shifted his weight to his feet, leaned in, flipped the strap up, leaned hard against it, stepped up again, jab, jab. His arms
and shoulders rolled and swelled each time he hoisted himself. With the leather and metal fittings and muscles, he looked like a Roman gladiator girded for arboreal combat. In less than a minute, trailing his thin white rope like spider silk, he was at the first big juncture of branches, level with the peak of the house roof.
“Okay. Big rope.” He flicked a ripple down the little line. I lugged over the carefully coiled rope, and Earnest gave me instructions on how to tie the right knot. “No. Yeah. No, no! The other way—under. There. No, the other loop.”
“You should have shown me before you went up!”
“Oh, come on. You like the challenge, admit it.” He was in irrepressible high spirits, coffee in his blood and a mountain of a tree to take down.
Once I had it right, the big rope rose up and up until it was in Earnest’s hands. Seeing him up there, I began to understand the true size of the tree. Each of its main branches was thicker than the trunk of the biggest tree on my land, and looking up into it felt like standing in a centuries-old church, vaulted and ornate. It was dying but still had enough green on it to make this inner landscape a lovely, dappled, airy place. We earthbound people tend to think of trees in terms of their trunks; when we’re kids we draw them as upright cylinders with a solid ball of green on top—lime lollipops. In fact, a tree is a thing of air, a thing with an interior. Birds probably think of trees as lattice-filled balloons anchored only mysteriously to earth.
Earnest climbed higher and higher until he found a spot he liked. He tossed the heavy rope through a crotch above him, grabbed the end as it swung back. Then he startled me by leaping delicately into the air. He arced away through the air-forest to another branch. At the right instant, he let rope slip through his hands so that it deposited him just where he wanted. Then he pulled the end of the rope back to him and did it all again.
I watched from below, astonished. This man was built like a fifty-five-gallon oil drum. On the ground, he walked with a bearish stride, a weight that was easy to mistake for clumsiness. When he worked with the cows, he often seemed to rely on strength more than finesse. But in the tree, he became weightless and graceful. He moved around easily, swinging and alighting, climbing quickly, balancing effortlessly as he gathered in rope. For five minutes, he glided and swooped through the lacy canopy in complete freedom, until he had reconnoitered every branch, every angle, every anchor place.
“Okay. Send up the Stihl,” he called.
That was the smaller of the two big saws. I tied it using the loops as he directed, and he pulled it up.
To move around on the branches, he’d been running the big rope through a loop in his harness and holding it with both hands to let out line. Now he tossed the rope through a high crotch, tied one end to a branch about the thickness of my thigh, and dropped the other end to me. He told me to keep at least twenty feet of it behind me so I’d have slack if I needed it.
“Okay. Get ready to boogie.” He positioned himself at a fork on one of the big branches that stretched out well over the house.
“Earnest, I can’t! It’ll go through the roof!”
“It’ll swing toward you because of the angle I cut and where I set the rope. You hang on hard until it swings clear of the roof, then move toward the tree and play out rope as fast as you can, before it swings back. But don’t just let go of the rope, then you don’t have any control. Just step quickly forward and let it slip through your hands fast when it’s the right time.”
I was terrified. But I couldn’t protest again, because he lifted the chainsaw in one fist and started it with a mighty yank of the other hand.
The chain bit into the underside base of the branch, spewing a waterfall of chips. A wedge of wood dropped down. Abruptly, the branch bobbed and shivered, as if it had felt pain or a sudden presentiment of its fate. Then another minute of sawing, from the top side, and the branch convulsed and began to fall, pivoting toward me. It groaned and swung like the arm of a construction crane, gathering speed as Earnest cut through the last fibers.
Then it was free and its weight came onto the rope, dragging me toward the tree. I held it back as well as I could, and when it seemed right, I let it slip. The branch bowed to me and swept down and crashed to the ground. The cut-off end had stayed well up in the tree, but I was able to ease it down without killing myself.
Earnest shut off his chainsaw and looked down with satisfaction. “Not bad for a rookie!”
“I gotta go pee,” I yelled back at him.
“Use the back door. Nobody’s home, but they said they’d leave it open.”
“I was kidding, damn it!”
I began sawing, starting from the twig end. And that was the rhythm. We would drop a branch, and I’d cut it into sections that would fit into the truck, while Earnest flew to a different part of the tree and made his next set. Each time, I would drag the debris out of the way before the next branch came down, so that we didn’t end up with an impossible tangle and the danger of snagged ropes.
We had started at around ten, and by three o’clock we’d taken three truckloads of smaller branches to the town stump dump. The great trunk of the tree and its main branches, tragically shorn, remained upright, but it was time for lunch. I had packed a peanut butter sandwich and a banana. Earnest had bought an enormous sub from a stop-and-shop cooler, and a bag of chips big enough for both of us. He also had two canvas-wrapped army canteens, having kindly filled one for me.
It was nice sitting there on the broad flat seat, windows open. Earnest possessed a massive serenity, didn’t need to talk all the time: “It’s an Indian thing,” he had told me. Silence was easier with him than most people. My back ached, and my lunch looked inadequate. We both stank of sweat and oily exhaust.
“How’d I do?”
His cheeks were full, so he just nodded, pretty good.
Between bites, he told me more about the art of tree pruning and felling. I asked him where he learned to do it, and he joked about the Indigenous Peoples’ deep knowledge of nature, ancient lore handed down from father to son. He loved making these digs at Whitey’s romanticization of Native Americans. Rain dances, tepees—I’d started telling him to cut it out, and he enjoyed that just as much.
Actually, he had learned by working for a tree surgeon out in Wisconsin, during high school.
We’d been eating for a couple of minutes before he thought of taking a drink. He opened one of the canteens, tilted it to his lips, and immediately spat it out.
“What?”
“It’s hot! Sitting in the sun all this time.”
I didn’t care, but Earnest wouldn’t drink it. He fired up the truck and we headed off to find some ice.
We pulled up at a crossroads general-store gas station on the edge of town. A half-dozen customers’ cars were parked in the lot, and along the side a dozen beaters were lined up with their prices and virtues posted on signs behind the windshields: Loaded! 150K. $2,995. Earnest went inside, then came out and took a big bag of ice from the quilted silver cooler.
When he got back to the truck, I asked him why he hadn’t just bought a cold drink.
He shrugged as if it had never occurred to him. He ripped the plastic with a thick finger and took out a cube. He intended to put it into his canteen, but it wouldn’t fit—just sat there obdurate on the round aluminum opening. He looked irritated for a moment and then did one of the most amazing things I’d ever seen anyone do.
The ice cube was balanced on the mouth of the canteen. Earnest held the canteen with his left hand and then, with his right index finger, drove the cube into the hole with one sudden, precise stab. The cube disappeared and ice chips showered the cab. He did it six or eight times, then sloshed the water around. My lap was covered in a light snow.
He took a trial sip and nodded. “Better,” he said.
He didn’t seem to think he’d done anything out of the ordinary, but I was speechless. I
had just witnessed an astonishing act of strength and skill, each blow so savagely hard yet so well aimed that his finger went knuckle-deep into the hole after the cube. One rigid finger, held at right angles to his fist, stiff as a railroad spike.
We went on eating. After a while, I asked, “So what did you do in the army?”
“MP. That’s Military Police, basically where you have to break up bar fights among the enlisted men.”
“I take it you got some martial arts training.”
He had a huge mouthful. When he’d swallowed, he said, “Some.”
I didn’t probe further. When we finished, we balled up our wrappers and threw them into the trash can. Then we were on our way back to work.
We had barely swung out of the parking lot when Earnest stiffened, swore, and shifted gears quickly. He was staring at his side mirror.
I looked in the mirror on my side but didn’t see anything alarming.
“Fuck!” he snarled. He pounded the steering wheel. “Fuck!”
“What?” I craned around to look again. This time, I saw a police cruiser making a three-point turn in the parking lot. We were about half a block away now, and Earnest was flooring it, the old truck roaring and rattling. “What, the cop?”
He didn’t answer.
A UPS truck cut off our view of the parking lot, and the moment it did, Earnest yanked the wheel and we took a hard right onto a side road. “There, dickhead,” he growled at the police car. He smiled evilly because the truck and the line of cars following it had trapped the cop in the lot. “But he’s on the radio right now, you can bet on it.”
I got scared then. I had no idea what this was about, and I had no desire to get in trouble with the law through some guilt by association, aiding and abetting, accessory to a crime, or something. I craned around but didn’t see any sign of the cruiser.
Earnest swung a hard left at the next intersection, then barreled down a dirt road that dipped into a steep valley where the forest came up around us. We crossed a narrow bridge, came up the other side, rumbled along for a mile, ripped through a four-way stop without slowing, then turned past an abandoned barn and slowed to cruise past farms and auto junkyards. Earnest calmed. A final big puff bulged his cheeks, and then he chuckled.