The elderly couple made us pitchers of lemonade with ice in it, and I was glad we weren’t in Deputy Dickhead’s jurisdiction. But the labor was unrelenting. No rest breaks, no time to converse. Earnest had set as our goal for the day the removal of all the branches; he planned to come the following day to topple the main trunk.
Toward evening, I was so exhausted that I almost told Earnest I had to quit, couldn’t do it, was afraid I’d cut off my own leg. But as long as he kept going, I felt I had to stick it out. And just as it got too dark to continue, we loaded the last branches onto the truck, strapped them down, found places for the tools, and rattled away.
“PPP,” he said as soon as we hit the bigger road. “You’re right. It’s a rotten way to say it. It’s a pretty horrible idea. Like original sin or some other bullshit you’re supposedly stuck with from birth.”
“Yes.”
Clearly, it had been bothering him all day, and now he was wrestling with how to express it. “When I was a kid, my mother called people like that ‘accident prone.’ That’s observably true of your neighbors.”
“I wouldn’t know. Jim says so, yeah.”
He sighed again. “Diz could’ve given you the genealogy of some of them up there, in detail, and I suspect you’d see patterns that posed risks to genetic inheritance. And yes, I’m sure socioeconomic factors play a major role, too. When you’re poor and dropped out of school at fifteen and maybe aren’t very bright, who are you going to marry? Marie Curie? Albert Einstein? It comes around full circle in the next generation.”
“You’re taking a very academic approach to explaining this.”
“Because I’m talking to a white, college-educated, politically correct schoolteacher and I’m trying to speak her language.” He said that carefully, without scorn.
“Okay.”
“So let me rephrase it. Some of the people living uphill from you often demonstrate ‘a lack of good judgment.’ They’re about a mile away, straight through the woods. They know those woods better than you do. And it sometimes … gives me pause.”
I nodded.
He looked over at me as he drove. “Can we leave it now? Is it done?”
I nodded.
He still wasn’t sure, so he reached over and we shook hands to seal the deal that it was done.
We found a steak house near the interstate for what I now understood to be a ritual celebration of a hard day’s work getting done. We got some glances from the other customers, but I felt righteously proud as we walked in, in our honest filth and stink.
We read the menus. We both commented on how, when you’re hungry, really hungry, your mouth waters just from reading descriptions of the meals.
I ordered a pint of beer along with my food and only after the waitress had left did I remember Will’s tales of the bad times on Brassard’s farm.
I looked up at Earnest, alarmed, and blurted, “Oh! I’m sorry!”
“For what?”
I gestured randomly, table, menu, disappearing waitress. “Beer. The beer. I forgot—”
“I take it somebody told you some history. Will, huh?”
“I’ll have her take it back. I forgot!”
He shook his head as if I were a lovable but dim child. “Ann. Ann. Amazingly, in the last thirty years I have witnessed people drinking beer and even enjoying it. I drink one myself now and then. I am not an alcoholic, not even a perpetually recovering one. That’s more Jim’s situation. I just … avoid it a bit.”
I nodded. “Okay.”
The waitress appeared with a basket of sliced hot bread; Earnest folded a slice around a couple of butter pats and stuffed it whole into his mouth.
“Why didn’t you tell me about Charlotte, about all that?”
“What’s the point? Thirty years ago.”
What was the point? I wondered. I was curious, yes, but was that any reason to expect someone to spill about difficult personal events, no doubt painful in their recollection? At that moment, I realized there are different kinds of curiosities. There’s the idle variety, and mine was not. There’s the prurient sort, which mine was certainly not. Rational, scientific inquiry, no.
That left the it matters to me kind.
Then the waitress presented me with my beer. Amber, bubbles rising merrily, it filled a heavy frosted mug, and it looked glorious. I was dying of thirst. I glanced up at Earnest to confirm his amused approval, and then I picked up that mug and gulped and it was bliss. The bitter hops cut through the oily chainsaw taste in my mouth.
“What was she like?” I asked.
He exhaled slowly. “I don’t know. You replay memories enough times, after a while it’s just memories of memories, don’t connect with anything real.” He tipped his head to think about it some more. “Mainly, what I remember is the feeling of being with her. Then the feeling of being without her. But it’s not something I think about every day. Almost remarried a couple of times, as my recent egg-timer adventure demonstrates. Dodged the bullet each time.”
I just nodded and swigged some more beer.
After a little while, Earnest asked, “Was Char part of your five-item agenda?”
I was astonished that he remembered my morning preamble. “Yes.”
“What else?”
“A matter of ten grand nobody but Diz thought to tell me about.” I took another swallow. “That I didn’t ever thank you for.”
“Goddamn Diz. Just another way to make you feel shittier than you already felt.”
“No! Really, she just sort of stumbled into it, we were milking and she mentioned it. To say how great a person you were.”
“Diz said that? Huh!”
“‘Saint Earnest.’”
He grinned to himself. “Who’d a thunk?”
“Back to the ten grand.”
“She said something almost nice about you, too, you know.”
Truly, I rocked back in my seat. “What?”
He frogged his lips, hesitated. “Well, I
