I called every tree service in three counties. I called the one in Columbia and the one in Fayette and the one in Mexico and two in Moberly. Every one of them said the same thing. They were booked into August, maybe September, with all the damage from the derecho. One man laughed when I told him how big the tree was, and said for an oak that size he’d want four thousand dollars and a crane.
Chapter Three: Three Days
So I called my boss and took three days of vacation.
I flag traffic for the county road crew. I’ve done it for nine years, ever since the hospital in Moberly closed and I lost my job in the billing office. It isn’t glamorous work. You stand on the shoulder of a blacktop for ten hours at a time in an orange vest, holding a paddle, while the trucks go by and the asphalt smokes and the sun cooks you. But it pays decent, with good county insurance, and it taught me how to work outside in the heat all day without falling over.
My husband has been gone eleven years. Greg was a lineman for the electric co-op, and he was killed in 2014 when a truck came over a hill too fast and hit his bucket truck on a two-lane road. Kenzie was eight. Since then it’s been the two of us, and that summer, it was me and Kenzie against that oak.
She is nineteen and studying to be a nurse at Moberly Area Community College, home for the summer and working nights as a CNA at the nursing home in town. When I told her what I was going to do, she didn’t argue or ask if I was sure. She just went to her room and came back out in her old jeans and a pair of my work boots, pulled her long brown hair back in a ponytail, and said, “Show me.”
I ran Dad’s old saw. It’s a Stihl 066 with a twenty-eight-inch bar, a big heavy orange monster he bought in 1989 to cut firewood, and it hadn’t been started since the winter before he died. I took it to the small engine shop in Pinckney Ridge on Monday night, and old Ray Fogle cleaned the carburetor and put a new chain on it and wouldn’t let me pay him for the labor. “That was Clarence’s saw,” he said. “I sharpened every chain he ever ran on it.”
Kenzie ran my small saw on the limbs, a sixteen-inch Husqvarna I use for clearing brush around the house. I showed her how to start it, how to hold it, how to stand so if it kicked back it wouldn’t come at her face. She listened to every word the way she listens in her anatomy class, and then she made me show her again.
We started at six-thirty Wednesday morning, as soon as it was light enough to see. I wore Dad’s old leather chaps over my jeans and my county hard hat with the face screen. Kenzie wore safety glasses and ear muffs and a pair of my work gloves that were too big for her.
We went through a gallon of mix before ten o’clock. That big Stihl drinks gas like a tractor. I’d cut through a limb as thick as a man’s waist, and Kenzie would come behind me and trim off the smaller branches and drag them to the burn pile in the pasture. Then I’d move on to the next one. The sawdust flew in clouds and stuck to the sweat on our arms and necks until we looked like we’d been rolled in cornmeal.
By noon my arms shook. I couldn’t hold a cup of water without spilling it. We sat in the shade of the porch and ate the bologna sandwiches Mom made us, and neither of us said a word. Kenzie looked at her hands, which had blisters across both palms where the gloves had rubbed, and then she looked at me.
“How did Grandpa do this?” she asked.
“He was younger,” I said. “And he had Dwight.”
She didn’t say anything to that. She just finished her sandwich and pulled her gloves back on.
By supper we had the top cut up and dragged off the lane. All the branches and the upper limbs, the whole crown of the tree, cut into pieces and piled at the edge of the pasture. What was left was the trunk itself, lying across the gravel like a fallen pillar, four feet thick and forty feet long, and the root ball standing up at one end.
I didn’t know how we were going to move it. I lay awake that night in Mom’s spare bedroom with my arms aching so bad I couldn’t sleep, thinking about that trunk.
Chapter Four: Amos
The second morning, I heard an engine coming down the county road.
It was six-forty-five, and Kenzie and I were standing at the trunk with our saws, trying to figure out where to start. The sound came from the north, a low rattling putter, getting closer. A truck turned in at the cattle guard and came slowly down the lane, as far as it could before the trunk stopped it.
It was an old Ford pickup, faded blue, with a log splitter hitched behind it. The splitter was the old kind, a gas engine on a little trailer with a steel wedge and a hydraulic ram, the kind you only see at farm sales anymore. The truck stopped. The door opened. And out climbed Amos Whitcomb.
Amos Whitcomb is eighty-four. He farmed the place south of Mom’s for fifty years before he retired and moved into town. He and Dad were best friends. They traded work every summer, hauling hay and fixing fence, and every Saturday morning for thirty years they drank coffee together at the Main Street Café in Pinckney Ridge with a bunch of other old farmers at the long table in the back.
