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
