(So I sat down near the kid and started eating, figuring let him rest, when all of a sudden up he comes with a squall like a wild man, whopping himself all over. When he stops I wipe my face on my sleeve and point towards his gaping shirt he’s ripped half the buttons off.
“Something you learned in college, that strip act?”
“Whore of a bug bit me! Shit.”
“Why listen there. He can cuss too. Don’t that beat all?” I say and pick the second paper sack from the ground and hand it over to him. He’s still rubbing the ant bite.
“I don’t want that swill!” he yells, about half hysterical with getting woke up so unexpected. I grin at him. I know how he feels. I done that myself, asleep once and had a chipmunk get down in my boot . . . but I don’t say anything. I shrug and put the sack on the ground and go back to my own lunch. The kid’s embarrassed. The way I was this morning popping off at Joby. I don’t act like I notice. I’m eating, humming a little, leaning back against the mossy padding of an old spongy deadfall. Things been moving along smooth and nice and with lunch and all I feel pretty good. Good enough I think maybe I can say a word or two to the boy without sounding like I’m sentencing him to be hung. Only thing I need is some way to start.
I go to picking through my sack and arranging boiled eggs, olives, apples, and Thermos in front of me on a piece of wax paper. He’s acting like he’s going back to sleep and don’t want nothing to eat, but the sharp mustard-and-vinegar smell of them deviled eggs is ringing the air like a dinner gong. He sits back up and opens his own sack with one casual finger like, you know, he
might
. . . then he might not. “I guess I fell asleep,” he says, looking at the ground. It’s a way to let me know why he blowed up when I offered him lunch. A sort of explanation and apology. I grin at him and nod to let him know I catch it . . .)
Ah got a radiation burn
On my pore pore heart,
Joe’s radio insisted. A jay screamed at them, hot and hungry as it watched them eat. Except for Hank’s toneless humming as he chewed steadily at the venison sandwich, there was little other sound. From the truck where the other men ate, the bell-like combinations of talk and laughter and Western music stroked the air and reached Hank and Lee on rippling heat-warped waves. The radio played; the jay screamed. Sometimes Hank hummed along with Joe’s radio; other times he whistled derisively at the bird. Neither of the brothers spoke again while they finished their lunches; they ate facing each other, but their eyes never met; when Hank looked up from his meal he scanned the firs behind Lee with exaggerated absorption, measuring, falling, bucking, and even sawmilling each tree with his eyes. Lee didn’t look up. He concentrated on the packed lunch. It was obvious that this sack of food was another contribution from the girl he had yet to meet but who was constantly growing in stature in his estimation. The meal was prepared to keep a man going at a hard job—like a practical fuel for a machine—but there was also that extra touch again, that addition intended to lift anything, even a sack lunch, out of the commonplace. At the very bottom of the sack, wrapped in foil like a bright holiday surprise, Lee found a square of creamy brown candy filled with roasted filberts. Lee bit off a small corner and crushed it with his tongue. “Your wife’s candy?”
Hank nodded. “That’s why I generally eat apart from the rest of those snakes; they always looking to share Viv’s dessert.”
“It’s very good.”
Hank scanned the trees again for a moment, lips pursed in deliberation, then turned suddenly toward Lee and leaned forward. (Then while we were eating I just started talking . . .) Before him, his three fingers curled slightly as though he gripped an invisible object. “Listen, bub, what I did this morning? Let me tell you . . .” His voice was excited.
Lee listens with excitement to Hank’s intense words, eager to hear what Hank has to say about the morning’s choker-setting duel.
“. . . was top the spar where we are going to move. Oh man, let me see. . . .”
Hank’s crippled hand continues to grip the air as he strains for the right words.
“Let me see, see if I can . . .”
Lee looks on, expectant and impatient, while Hank takes a package of cigarettes; he tosses one to Lee and puts another in the corner of his mouth.
“. . . see if I can give you some idea. Now. The tree you want for the spar is the biggest tree on the biggest hill you can find. It’s gonna be like the main center tentpole of our circus. And it’s gonna be the last one cut on the hill, see, the last one up there after we clear off the rest of the show. Okay? I get into this rig . . . oh, twenty pounds of paraphernalia, maybe more; handsaw, ax, hooks, rope, and throw a line around me and the tree an’ up the big sonofabitch I climb, lopping off branches as I go.” (And I get started telling him about rigging the spar. Just to have something to pass the time at first. Figuring that if he liked watching that tree felled when we first got to the show, he oughta like hearing about topping, too . . .)
“As you go up, you take in the line, around the tree. It gets shorter as the tree gets smaller. You’re choppin’; one-handed; whack, whack, get the little limbs. Not many big limbs on a fir till right at the top but you still got to get the little ones, and keep an eye peeled where that safety line is because you get
that
with the ax, brother, wire center or no that could be
all
she wrote. Lots of climbers have chopped their line. That’s how Percy Williams bought it, husband to one of Henry’s first cousins. He cut his line. Hit feet first and jammed his legs all the way up to his shoulderblades. So you learn to watch out. Watch out those stobs we call gut-gougers. Watch out you get a good bite with your spurs or you slip and slide twenty feet and peel hide off your chest and belly and thighs like scrapin’ a carrot. And you want to know something else, bub? You’re scared as hell. They say that the first spar is the tallest but that’s all hokum;
every
one you climb is the tallest. And Christ, this sonofabitch is a good forty thousand board feet.”
(But see? When he looked at me, blank as ever behind those glasses, I realized he don’t have
any notion
how tall this makes the tree. And that I didn’t really have any way to tell him. And then it wasn’t just a way to pass the time: I was wanting to
tell
him something about what was happening, to wake him up and tell him to take advantage, dammit! Even if it meant popping him in the nose like the guy in Rocky Ford. So I repeated, “Forty thousand
feet!
” He nodded at me again.)
Lee begins to wonder if Hank is going to bring up the subject of choker-setting at all.
(I’m a long ways from convinced by that nod, but I go on anyway:
“Forty thousand feet!”
and hoped; this time he nods like he gets the picture and I go on . . .)
“Anyhow . . . you get to where it’s eighteen inches around and man, here comes the ride. Feel this breeze? Not so much down here, is it? But up there you’re weaving around like a drunk man. You lash yourself on with a couple loops of slack and go to work with the short saw. Zsh zsh zsh . . . till you feel it start to crack . . . start to pull . . .
eck, eckkk
. . . . Okay, now, see if you can get this: as that thirty-so feet of top above you cracks and
leans
, it bends the tree
with
it . . . till you’re leaned out, oh god, I don’t know, maybe fifteen degrees off vertical is all it is but it
feels
like you’re bent clean parallel with the ground! And when that top finally busts loose,
whosh
, back you come! And that tree waves you around up there like a football pennant.” (I still knew he wasn’t getting any notion of it—the feeling, the charge a man gets rigging a tree . . .)
Lee tries to step into the pause, starting to say something about his own particular morning in the woods. “I could have used a little of that wind down here. . . . Look.” He pulls his soaked shirt from his chest with a thumb and finger. “You wouldn’t have thought a Yale man had this much juice in him,
would you? God. Whoever that fellow on the other choke chain was, he gave me quite a workout.” And glances hopefully up at his brother . . .
(So I ask myself: how can I show him? how can I give him some notion? how can I snap him outa that fog without getting in some hassle with him?)
When Hank makes no comment Lee lifts a pant leg to show a lump on his shin like a blue egg. He touches it with his fingers, grimacing broadly. “There was a moment, just after I acquired this little gem, when I’ll have to admit I was just the teeniest bit tempted to chuck the whole business, chain and all, and let him have it. ‘You’ve managed to break your leg,’ I said to myself. ‘Do you want to try for a compound fracture just to keep ahead of that other fellow?’ Owee—” He blows on the wound. “Wowee, I’ll bet that’s a pretty color tonight. . . . See?” “What?” “Here . . .”
His attention drawn, Hank acknowledges the bruise with a preoccupied grin, but says nothing; the jay calls distractedly as Lee inspects the bruise on his shin . . .
When the day was half over I was sincerely a little proud of my stamina, and actually expecting Brother Hank to give some small praise.
Then suddenly Hank looks up from Lee’s leg, snapping his fingers.
(And then it came to me . . .) “Hey! I’ll show you want I mean, bub; look here.” (I hold out both my hands for him to see. As usual after topping I was all bunged to hell, raw and bleeding, and the gimp hand was swole across the knuckles like a piece of raw corned beef.) “See? that’s what I mean: I was for chrissakes
half-the-damn-way
up that sonofabitch before I remember, sonofagun! no gloves! Halfway up. See what I’m drivin’ at, now?”
Lee lets the pant leg drop and stares at the extended hands. The nausea that he felt after the noon whistle clamps again on his full stomach, but he fights it back.
But quite the opposite of praise, I received a rundown of all the extra jobs Hank had completed while waiting for me to catch up . . .
“You see what I’m driving at, bub?” Hank repeats his question and Lee forces himself to meet his brother’s eyes. “Yes, I believe I see what you’re driving at,” he answers, trying to keep the burning in his nose and throat from coming through in his voice.
(And when I ask him that he looks up at me really for the first time since he’s come home and says, “Yes, I see.” And for the first time since he’s come home I think by god we’re getting someplace. I think, He ain’t completely lost to us, after all. College or no, we can still find ways of making contact. I think, Yessir! we still got a lot going. Joby and Jan was full of beans. Me and the kid’s gonna hit it off just fine.) And the folly of my first half-day swept over me: He’ll always be running ahead for me to catch up. He keeps changing the rules for the run, or the run itself. He’s either running twelve years ahead of me, or the other direction, or claiming to be in a different race from what I am altogether. He challenges me to setting chokers, then after I’ve half killed myself informs me that he’s been climbing trees. . . . He will
never
give me the chance!
The whistle on the donkey shrills a quick shave-and-a-haircut, and Hank takes his watch from his pocket. “Hell. It’s goin’ on two. We farted away an hour.” He cups his hands to his mouth and shouts joyously toward the spar, “What say, Jooobee . . . ?” Joe Ben answered with shave-and-a-haircut on his whistle. Hank laughs. “That Joe . . .” He screws the lid back onto the Thermos. He scratches at his chin to hide a smile . . .
(That’s what I thought. But then something happened. I asked the boy, “Wellsir, bub . . . what do you think after a few hours on the end of a choker chain?”)
Lee has averted his face and is folding the rest of his candy carefully up in its foil. “I think,” he says thickly, “it probably ranks with the cleaning of King Augeas’ stables. I think dragging that ridiculous cable through berry bushes and thorn thickets is probably one of the most miserable, most tiring, most demanding and and and least rewarding jobs offered on this fucking earth if you want to know what I think of choker-setting!”
(And what he answered was, “You can take choker-setting and the whole business and shove it up your ass!”)
They stood, with Lee’s words still shaking the air between them; Hank squinting and taken aback momentarily; Lee trembling with outrage and trying to clean his glasses on his sweat shirt. And the jay, inspired by Lee’s invective, it seems, screeches louder than ever from a scrub cedar not far away.
(So there you go. Just when I thought we were in good shape. I just couldn’t figure it. Well, Hank old sport, I say to myself, this’ll give you something to puzzle over the second half of the day. And I headed on back to my rigging, leaving diplomacy to somebody else.)
When the jay stops Lee raises his glasses and looks through them at his brother. “And that,” he says with a shrug, “is what I think of your wonderful logging.”
Hank smiles slightly, studying the tall boy before him. “Okay, bub, okeedoke. So now I’ll tell you something. . . .” He takes his cigarettes from his pocket and places one between his lips. “Did you know that every woods-worker who ever barked a shin or broke a finger agrees with you?—when it comes right down to the nuts of it—agrees with you to a T? That it’s one dirty, tough, miserable way to live. That it’s about as dangerous a way to make your bacon as you can find. That sometimes you’d be better off chuckin’ the whole scene and just flopping down on the ground.”
“Then what possible reason—”
“Lee, I just gave you my reason. With that riggin’ story. Or as close as I can come to it. And my reason is pretty nearly Joe Ben’s reason or Andy’s or even that bastard Les Gibbons’. What I was just studyin’ about, though, bub . . .” he pushes the last of the scraps down into the sack and tosses the sack away down the hill “. . . was just what Leland Stamper’s reason might be?”—hitches his pants and starts away up the slope, leaving the question dangling in front of Lee. “Let’s go, you coons!” he calls across the distance toward the men around the crummy, clapping his hands together. “If we don’t get him this round, we’ll get him the next!”