The Other Shoe (28 page)

Henry Brusett got for his work, for himself, only the barbarous joy and vigor to be had from it. The world as he knew it was laid out so that a man might never carry his saw on the flat but must somehow move always uphill or downhill with it, and always through brush, but it was just this activity that had made him nimble and had built him a heart like a minor sun and a chest to house it, and when the other boys on the job stopped to share a bowl or snort a line off a Forest Service map, Henry Brusett never did, for he liked nothing so well as unfettered work and felt himself the athlete in competition with God, very lucky to be praised and compensated for his compulsion. He knew mornings when the wait for first light was almost unbearable, down in the smell of mossy dew, nothing particularly to think of until he could see to crank up his saw and start cutting.

He did not wear a hard hat, but he wore large rubber cups over his ears to protect them against tinnitus. He wore a sort of leather apron or chaps and considered himself, accurately, to be careful enough; he thought as young men do, that he'd be the one to go through untouched, and he never imagined himself as anyone other than the pristine, quick sawyer, and this confidence, which began and ended with physical bravery, had been well rewarded for many healthy years. But one night he caught a ride off the mountain with Billy Jackson, and
a brake line on Billy's Kenworth ruptured as they were coming down out of Garden Creek, and Billy managed just one downshift before his clutch was also useless, and then they were runaway, and with loaded log bunks bouncing along behind, they slammed around a switchback and onto a long straightaway to gather more speed—how serene the memory of sunflower stalks gliding past—but then the approach of that next sharp turn. Billy Jackson jumped and broke his shoulder and his arm. Henry Brusett smashed a kneecap landing, and mangled two toes in a good boot. Rocks in either case, both men had found rocks in the weeds beside the road.

There was no question then of waiting to heal very much, for Henry had no place to wait. His sons were already long in the tooth as dropouts by that time, and they ate from boxes they carried from room to room. They rarely left the house, but when they did, they would return smirking with the fruits of their operations; they stole a potato chip rack from a sandwich shop; they stole scrap iron and copper, burst tires; Davey stole a sack lunch out of someone's car just to throw it away and then laugh telling the story. Each of them watched a separate television all day, and his family came together only to squabble or to steal, and at home Henry Brusett enjoyed the esteem and favor of a lug wrench left in an easy chair. He was back at work when work still meant a bloody boot at every break. This made for protracted healing.

Never again would he be well balanced on his legs; he had learned to favor the injured limb and couldn't entirely unlearn the habit, and he was very much slower. He was awkward now, but he hired out to Monk River Lumber as a master sawyer to do thinning and selective cutting. His job was no longer a matter of reducing a patch of acres to stump and slash, but of harmlessly dropping trees among other standing trees, and he enjoyed the precision, the craft of it. The company valued his skill enough to leave him alone. He had the use of a fine
company truck to cruise their timber and the understanding that he would never be assigned to work with any crew. The company sent him checks and form letters that spoke of valued resources and implied to Henry Brusett that he and the trees he felled were being mentioned in the same hushed breath as Monk River's property. But Monk River's checks were large and regular.

He did not attempt home again, though he continued paying bills addressed to that location. Juanita told him that Davey had enlisted in the army, that Davey was in training, that Davey was discharged, and then in every subsequent call she said that there was still no word from their younger son. And Denny, she informed him, who was supposed to have an IQ of 126, had got himself put in a group home, a particular group home, in fact, that allowed smoking. Henry Brusett was to see no savings with the boys gone from the house. Juanita told him every time they spoke that her stomach was not good, and this regularly resulted in astounding expenses. She had tried everything for that touchy gut except to forgo her twenty cups of coffee a day. Henry Brusett, thinking he'd signed on for some of it, would call, and in all the years, the decades of calling, Juanita never once asked after his whereabouts, his well-being, his doings. He was to Juanita only another ear, and it might have been any ear, in which to pour her troubles. Still, he called her at decent intervals to hear his share of it.

Henry would see some benefit of that first wreck. Overnight he was in middle age, a time of life to which it seemed he'd be well suited. Moving slower, he found he paid better attention, witnessed a somewhat richer parade of events. Poor circulation in his blunted foot made it prone to chill and even frostbite, and in winter he could no longer work long hours out of doors. So, in those Octobers following his first accident, he would set up on the outskirts of some new town with his lathe, his collection of planes, drills, and routers. He started with making Quaker chairs. There would be seasons of shaping rocking horses,
of making gleaming cedar chests, and he was heartened by the discovery of this higher intelligence in his hands. But Henry Brusett was also discovering around that time that he was beginning to fall away from his species, that in virtually anyone's company he was suddenly aware of all his shortcomings and miserably unhappy with himself. To do a bit of commerce, he thought, should be a healthy thing, and so he had forced himself to do business and to take an occasional hand of pinochle or cribbage, and wherever he went he tried to have his morning egg at a diner with a regular trade, to meet people. Pointedly timid, he was fortunate in his encounters. He met with very much kindness but would have preferred to do without it. In all seasons he was his work, and he was at ease only in solitary labor, and there were times still, sometimes on the side of a mountain with a newly sharpened chain, when, with the thing snarling in his grip, he'd have his potent thrill again.

Early one May he was sent to clear an old roadway in Jimminy Gulch. The road had been dozed to briefly serve a logging site a generation earlier; closed and in disuse since that time, the track was now overlain with deadfall, set upon by volunteer growth, and it was obscure enough in its contours that company surveyors had gone ahead to redefine it on the mountainside with blue tape strewn like Hansel and Gretel's bread crumbs. Henry Brusett, the patient, hourly employee, was just as happy to advance not at all as to clear a hundred yards a day. Impertinent little pine had grown up in the road, and many of these were tall already, if scrawny, and all were fairly gleaming with a pitch that dulled and gummed his saws by noon each day. He would smell of these peculiar trees, of this particular pitch for as long as he worked Jimminy Gulch. Eventually the job, the road, took him up onto a slope overlooking a high desert valley of buff grass and sage, and here the sky was infinite and backlit. Here, day by day, the sky was cloudless.

At the road's end, a landing had been made; a turnaround for log trucks had been pushed well into the mountain and was still
circumscribed by a scabby wall of gravel, raw and unreclaimed. In making this wound the Cat had undercut a ninety-foot bull pine so completely that the best part of its root system groped out into thin air. Standing on nearly nothing, the tree stood, nonetheless, erect. Half-dead and in piebald bark, it had become tenement to beetles, squirrels, and jays. In an older calamity it had been split by lightning or somehow broken so that it had grown a forked crown. There were green needles, though, at the top of either crown. Under the suspended root ball, a tuft of red fur remained of the fox who had birthed and suckled her kit here. But the tree stood uncertainly above ground that the company intended once more for road, and so, with the arrival of Henry Brusett, its time had finally come.

He climbed the embankment and saw that, short of building a scaffold to it, there would be no way to notch the downslope side of the tree, so he got uphill of it, and he set about dropping it with one oblique cut down through the trunk. The wood was sounder than he'd expected, and his chain duller than he'd thought, and he wore through rather than cutting it; he made and breathed a powdery sawdust. When at last the tree did begin to tip, its immense leverage pulled at the roots remaining in the bank, and all in a moment the ground beneath Henry Brusett's feet was liquid, flowing downslope, and he was backstroking upon it, trying to check his fall, and his idling saw bounced by him, and then from above came the crack of one of those crowns breaking free, and he looked up to see that the broken part would not be following the graceful swoon of the tree, but the snag would tumble straight down at him. Without time even to hope for the best, he turned from it, heard pine needles gathering pace, and it hit him.

The snag did him a world of harm, but it never did knock him out. It was clear from the beginning that the tree was to spare him nothing. With vertebrae fractured and exposed, with a broken femur and his lacerated kidney bleeding in and out of him, he had walked a
half mile and had driven thirty more to finally pass out in St. Joseph's parking lot, near the emergency entrance. He'd been in the news for it, a human interest story, an impossibly lofty example of the local grit, but Henry Brusett made an embarrassed hero, for he was aware of no courage in himself. Then as now, and for as long as he might be given to live, he was only trying to feel a little better. He was obedience to pain, nothing more.

In the hospital he inhabited a twitchy, narcotic dream that gave over to agony every four hours as his shot wore off. He lived shot to shot. He lived, at first, on a diet of ice chips, as he was in surgery on successive mornings being reinforced with steel pins. Even in that first week, when he lay suspended in a harness face down above his bed with the gash in his back periodically aflame, the nurses would come round and approve his luck. To survive such a horrible accident? To have feeling in his extremities? He was very lucky, they told him, that he hadn't severed his spinal cord with all his shenanigans. Nurse Buchanan went so far as to say that he was a miracle, but Henry Brusett was a citizen of the scientific age, and he only wanted his shot.

Juanita never did visit him, though she must have known where he was; he was still in the hospital when he received some papers asking for his signature to consent to a divorce he wouldn't have thought necessary. They'd never formally married, so the formality now of becoming unmarried seemed a bit evil. In a separate note, the only one she'd ever written him—he didn't even know her hand—Juanita explained that she needed to sell some things to start her new life in Alberton with someone named Ted. She needed to sell the house on Blackbird Lane. She needed clear title. She knew he'd understand. She wished him the best of luck in all his future plans and urged him to get well soon. Henry Brusett, still half-encased in casting and gauze and gluey disinfectant, signed her paper. Why not? Juanita was the lesson he wished he'd never learned, and he was cheaply rid of her at
any price. How odd to feel any disappointment at all. He was left with what Juanita hadn't wanted or what he hadn't known they owned, and ordinarily he had his wits about him, and that, he'd supposed, might be enough.

As soon as he was able, he parked the ModernAire on a piece of ground where he'd once meant to have a hunting blind and a warming hut. With a settlement from workers' compensation, he drilled a well there, and then he moved to Fitchet Creek where he hoped he might privately heal. It was touch and go. He'd become the concern of bureaucracies, Social Security and Woodman Accident and Life with its sunny agent, Kline Interhoffen, and for a time they kept trundling him off to specialists; eventually, though, when all available experts had agreed that nothing useful might be rebuilt from what was left of Henry Brusett, he was made a pensioner and mostly left alone. Mr. Interhoffen assured him that, as Woodman's client in perpetuity now, he would never have to be uncomfortable. Prescription drugs, regardless of type or amount, were 100 percent covered under Henry's plan, and there were some very sophisticated therapies these days for dealing with, really, any discomforts people might have. Mr. Interhoffen asked only that he tell his family and tell his friends that Woodman really does pay up. Kline Interhoffen asked that he spread the word, as a satisfied client: If you're covered under Woodman, you should never have to suffer. “In this day and age? There's absolutely no point in it. But you have to have coverage, and that's why I like my job so much.”

Soon enough, Henry Brusett had made the acquaintance of a clutch of doctors who shared Mr. Interhoffen's progressive humanity, and, drugged, he went on, mending slowly, ever incompletely. The view from the ModernAire suggested he'd outlived his race—from his door he saw trees and sky and clutter of his own making, and all of it too close at hand. He'd been extinguished without being killed.

T
UBBY SAID THAT
the public defender did not seem to have a very good way with some of her clients, and she had been attacked three times in this very jail, so now there was a policy requiring her to be monitored when she met with them here, since there was only one working surveillance camera in the whole jail, the one in the holding cell. The policy was in place for the lawyer's own protection, but she'd still gone to court to try and get it changed, and the judge had denied the motion, and so it was the holding cell where they'd talk.

“That's just so you know, cuz—somebody's watching you the whole time you're in there, or they're supposed to be, and it's not that anybody thinks you'd do anything really . . . it's not that anybody thinks you're any weirder than anybody else, but just be careful, okay? No sudden moves. She spooks pretty easy, and you can't hardly blame her. That one guy split her lip dang near up into her nose, and for a gal, you know—woo—that really did not improve her looks. She's been a little jumpy ever since.” He pushed a thick brass key into a blue door. “Usually, they'll have a plea bargain cooked up, some take-it-or-leave-it thing for you.” Tubby liked civility in his workplace, and he spoke well of almost everyone there. “Maybe she can explain it to you. She tries hard, you'll see.”