“Drinking on duty—he didn’t dare call in. Plus, too many people heard him being provocative. Came over and pushed me off my stool. Plus, he needs a more personal kind of vengeance after his public humiliation.”
We drove for a while before I thought to ask, “Provocative how?”
He waved his hand dismissively. It was clear that he had enjoyed our adventure just now, Brer Rabbit outwitting his pursuers once again. He was humming, a totally non-sequitur tune like “Some Enchanted Evening.”
“What’d he say to you?” I persisted. I figured it had to do with race.
“Said I was fat.” Earnest barked a laugh. “Also that my girlfriend was ugly, that she was actually a guy.” He laughed some more, slapping his thigh. “She was ugly! Pancake makeup, bad dye job, three packs a day. But she wasn’t a guy. Anyway, you don’t talk like that. It’s rude.”
It took us until sundown to drop the main trunk. Earnest had to walk all the way around it with his chainsaw to cut through the bole. The last segment of the blunt-shorn pillar dropped with a whump! that literally shook the earth. Earnest sawed it into slabs.
“Just toss them on the truck while I finish,” he yelled. He was joking: on edge, the bigger bark-rimmed wheels stood as high as my chest and probably weighed three hundred pounds each. Instead, I raked and bagged the mounds of sawdust while he droned and roared on. When he was done cutting, he backed up the truck and, amazing me again, flipped the slices effortlessly onto the bed, one after another.
He treated me to dinner at a steak house in a commercial district on the outskirts of Burlington, out of Deputy Dickhead’s jurisdiction. After so many weeks in the woods, it felt strange to be surrounded by built structures, shiny cars, signs, floodlights, modern architecture, flat masonry surfaces, asphalt-covered ground. The place bustled, festered with humans and their vehicles. It struck me as at once futuristic and atavistic.
We sat at a booth in our honorable filth and dishevelment. He ordered the biggest piece of meat on the menu, I ordered a smaller version of the same, and we crammed food into our faces as he told me more about himself and the Brassards.
He was born in Wisconsin to an Oneida Indian father and a half-Menominee, half-white mother. His father had fought in the army during World War II, then returned and used the training he’d received to work as an electrician. They lived near the tribal lands but not on them, so Earnest grew up going to public school. Their small house was about twenty miles west of Green Bay, where the smoke from the Fort Howard paper mills blanketed the flat farmlands for days at a time. It stank like rotten cabbage, and because his mother hung the laundry outside to dry, he often smelled it on his pillowcases and sheets even when the air had cleared. He rather liked it.
I was a bit loopy with exhaustion, and Earnest was an easy guy to goof with. “You mean you’re … you’re part white?” I asked, appalled.
“Yeah. You wanna see which part?”
We laughed and he went on: Most of the kids at his school were “of German and Scandinavian extraction” and there were a few fights, but he didn’t think it was any worse than what white kids faced when they went to the mainly Indian schools. It helped that he was both “hardy,” which I took to mean tough, and “one of the eggheads,” the smart kids, in advanced placement classes. He had a younger brother, who died while driving drunk when he was around twenty, and a younger sister, who lived in Milwaukee and had a couple of kids.
“Married a white guy!” Earnest said, keeping the joke going.
I shook my head, saddened at the state of things.
Earnest pulled a bad number in the draft lottery when he turned nineteen, “joined” the services, showed talent, got a year of special training, and went to Vietnam in 1973.
When his tale got that far, he moved along briskly, mostly skipping two years and revealing nothing about what he did in the war. Met Brassard there. Came back to the States in 1975 as the USA ingloriously folded up its Vietnam tent, and spent some time on base as an MP, left the army. He went back to the Midwest to deal with his brother’s death, then moved east to get the hell away from there. Meanwhile, Brassard had returned from service and taken over his family’s farm and he needed help and Earnest was available. Earnest moved to Vermont, worked for him for a few years, then quit and made his money doing tree surgery.
“How come you keep working for Brassard?”
He chewed and swallowed before answering, taking his time as if the answer required some consideration. At last, he said, “Jim needs work done. Couldn’t afford to keep the farm if he had to pay somebody. Plus, I owe him. And I do 90 percent of my tree work in town and I get sick of it. I feel more at home out in the boonies. I’ve got my own bedroom at the house. Diz is a good cook.”
Earnest had made an even thousand dollars bringing the big tree down, and he’d given me two hundred for the day. His appearance at my campsite that morning had rescued me from a day of difficult second-guessing myself. I hadn’t had time to think about anything other than the work all day, and his good mood was still buoying me along.
“What do you owe him for?”
He looked at me soberly. “Nothing all that interesting.”
“So why are you reluctant to talk about it?”
“It’s nothing heroic, if that’s what you’re thinking. No battlefield dramas, Ann. In fact, it’s not flattering to either of us.” “Now I’m dying to hear it.” I put my chin on my hand and leaned forward across the
