Shiloh and Other Stories - Bobbie Ann Mason [50]
“We’ve been round and round on this,” Glenn says to Dolores.
“I’d help out, but my herny’s too bad,” Boyce says. Boyce wears a truss and walks oddly—holding in the device that holds him in.
“It’s O.K.,” says Glenn. “These guys know what they’re doing.”
“You wouldn’t need them experts. Me and you could bring that thing down.”
“We should have done it years ago,” says Glenn. “The roots are eating into the foundation.”
“I never heard you complain about that tree before,” says Dolores.
Glenn laughs in a way that embarrasses her, as though he were apologizing to his father for his wife’s sentimentality. The night before, when she couldn’t sleep, Glenn asked her why she had been so touchy recently.
“Maybe you’re going through the change,” he suggested.
“How is that possible?” she wanted to know. “I’m not but forty-one.”
“My sister-in-law’s cousin went through it at the age of twenty-eight. Nobody could stand to be around her.”
“That makes her a freak,” said Dolores. “I’m not going through any change. Besides, the change comes later nowadays than it used to.”
Glenn fell asleep soon after, and he did not know that Dolores lay there and cried until she could feel the tears run down on her breasts.
—
Petey turns in the driveway on his bicycle, racing just ahead of the tree service truck.
“That kid’s just begging for trouble,” Dolores says.
Two men are in the truck, and two others follow in a van. The word JERRY’S on the door of the truck is painted in fancy lettering, with the Y drawn as a tree, its branches and roots curving around the name.
One of the men wears a T-shirt that says CELESTIAL SEASONINGS, MORNING THUNDER. He hunkers against a maple tree and pokes sprigs of Chattanooga Chew Chew into his mouth.
“That’s the climber,” Glenn says to Dolores.
The other men begin unloading equipment—shiny red chain saws, orange hard-hats, long poles with forked ends. While Glenn talks to the men, Dolores crosses the yard to watch the climber. He takes one look up the tulip tree, gauging its height, then begins to shinny up. He has a coil of rope and a leather harness with him. He has long hair and a bristly mustache.
“He’s climbing without spikes,” one of the men says to Dolores.
“He climbs like a monkey, sure as you’re born,” says Boyce, with an admiring whistle.
“You just wish you could get up there with him,” says Dolores.
“Don’t I, though?” says Boyce, grinning. “Remember the time me and my brother Emmett cut down that dead pine? That thing split in two and we thought it was coming after us both. We run ever which of a way.” Boyce laughs in little gasps.
The climber is high in the branches, near the top of the tree. The leaves jiggle and dance. Then he lets down a rope and hauls up a chain saw, which bumps against the trunk as it ascends. Dolores can see elbows sticking out of the leaves, and she glimpses the climber’s T-shirt, a bright red and blue, a stranded kite. She has a crick in her neck from looking up.
Dolores warns Petey to get his bike out of the driveway. “It’ll get smashed.” She adds, “So will you if you don’t watch out.”
Petey bares his teeth, pretending he has fangs. “I’m the baby Jesus,” he says.
“And I’m the devil,” says Dolores.
A sound splits the air. The climber has begun to saw. A small branch floats down through the leaves. It is tied to the rope.
“Kindling wood,” says Boyce.
“We’ll put it all in the chipper,” says Jerry McClain, the man in charge of the crew.
Glenn is helping the crew with the rope, and Boyce has settled down in an aluminum folding chair under a maple tree. He is relaxing with his cigar, just as though he has come to watch the trotters at the fair.
“He’s a free-lance climber,” one of the crew members says to Dolores. “I would have done it, but I saw that tree and said, ‘No, sir.’ That tree’s something else. You couldn’t get me up that sucker. You never know what poplars will do, that high. They’re funny trees.”
The telephone is ringing in the kitchen, and Dolores runs inside to snatch it up on the fourth ring. It is Tammy, her newly married daughter,