That was a scary image. “What did Jim think?”
“Of her family tree? Of her cutting loose of it?”
“Either. Both.”
He drew a deep breath, exhaled slowly through pursed lips. “At the time Diz moved in, Jim didn’t have too many choices. He was … we were having a tough time on the farm right around then. Various problems. Plus, Will was already on the way. Diz whipped us into shipshape, pronto.”
It would have been just a short step from there to Earnest’s wife and her death and the misfortunes of that era. But I just didn’t dare, not yet.
“I have a question for you,” I hazarded instead.
“Proceed,” he intoned gravely.
“Okay. This is about Goslants, too, but maybe it’s about … I don’t know, etiquette? Vermont tradition?” I told him about the poached deer, the guts in my woods, and watched closely to see his response.
“When was this?”
“Back in November.”
“Why didn’t you tell me earlier?”
In fact, I hadn’t known what to say about it—he had been gone when it happened, and by the time he returned I had moved onto the farm and the issue seemed less urgent. “Well, I talked to Will, I talked to Jim, they thought I should sort of let it go. Talking about Diz reminded me just now. And fall’s not so far off. What if it happens again?”
He winced his eyes shut, a sort of a please not this frown. The muscles in his jaw rippled. “‘Etiquette’ isn’t the right word, Ann. Homer and Fran are good people, but some of them are fucking dangerous woodchucks, PPP. You don’t want to mess with them, but you can’t let them take an inch or think you don’t have borders or limits. It’s a real bitch. God damn it!”
“PPP?” I thought he was talking about a drug, something like meth.
“Piss-poor protoplasm.” He glanced over to see that my puzzlement lingered, then translated primly: “A term I learned from Diz, meaning lousy genetic inheritance not conducive to high intelligence.”
“Earnest, that’s really offensive!”
“Diz should know, right? Would you have argued the point with her?”
“I don’t believe in that! In genetic destiny. It’s, like—”
“It’s like a good, politically correct, liberal, white, college-educated female schoolteacher believing it’s all socioeconomic, cultural deprivation, bias, whatever, and not getting the picture. That’s why I worry about you up there, at night, with those PPP fuckers just through the woods from you.”
My whole upbringing, and my training as an educator, rebelled against the idea that people fell into “types” determined by race or family history, and I was shocked by Earnest’s embrace of this genetic determinism, this eugenicists’ rationale. Also, it was the first time Earnest had ever chided me or derided my urbanite’s naïveté or labeled me in any way. I felt a gust of anger, then hurt.
“I am all those things—liberal, politically correct, college-educated, and whatever else you said,” I told him stiffly. “And I am not likely to change my outlook anytime soon.”
He didn’t say anything.
When I opened my mouth to speak again, my brain skipped a groove. “And there’s no reason to worry about me!” I bit off. “I can take care of myself.” Oddly, though, the thought pleased me: It was as if his derision had been a slap, and this a caress.
He just drove, his lips set.
It took another ten minutes to get to the job site, during which we spoke very little. Once we got there, we just let go of the damn discussion, though we both chewed it over in our thoughts. There was work to be done.
The tree was another monument, a tragic one. The silver maple is not like its cousin, the more common sugar maple. They grow huge, wider than tall, with grand random branches—really, multiple trunks—free-form throughout. In a good breeze, the leaves toss and flash their silvery undersides, in the right light a kaleidoscopic effect. This one, a hundred years old, fully leafed, robustly healthy, had been hit by lighting and now showed a white line of ruptured bark from its highest big fork right into the ground. It loomed over a garage on one side and a house on the other. At the top of the split, the weight of the tree had started to pry the wood apart, a widening gap of splintered strands, too far gone to cable together. The meat of the tree, I thought, is the bone of the tree. Earnest was right: In any kind of wind, the tree would split and crush anything nearby.
We unloaded the gear as Earnest explained our strategy for the felling. The clients, an elderly couple, came out to watch. Everybody was glum, and Earnest and I a bit brittle with each other. Clanking in his fetishistic leather and steel harness and burdened with coils of rope, Earnest paused before he started to climb, to stroke the big wall of bark with his hands. It was an apologetic farewell, like a compassionate veterinarian calming a horse he’s about to put down.
Then he climbed, and again I witnessed his miraculous transformation into a weightless being, an acrobat of the inner space of the tree. Swinging and alighting, climbing, rappelling, he reconnoitered its architecture for a time, then commanded me to start sending up the tools and big ropes. The clients watched until the first of the big branches swept down, crashing and fanning onto their lawn. A few minutes later, when I looked up from my chainsawing, I saw that they had retreated inside.
This was harder work, by far, than the elm we had done before. The branches, so light and airy on the tree, came down heavily, weighted with their leaves and innumerable small branches that I had to slash and battle through to make my cuts. At intervals, Earnest descended and drove off with truckloads of brush as I continued to saw. Even with
