the streets, walking past the clubs, wondering if I wanted a part of what happened inside. What would life be like with no one watching? Turned out it was nice. It wasn’t long after this day that I moved. It’s been seven years now; things have worked out.
“No,” I said finally.
Grady didn’t look convinced. “Because if you do,” he said, “you just need to say so. Frankie, he thinks it’s because of him. He thinks the whole thing is because of him. It’s how kids do. And he’s more insecure than most.”
“Did he tell you that? Did he tell you we split up because of him?”
“You know he gets that look, like he’s not even here. He’s checked out and gone somewhere else. Where’s he gone, Wes? What’s up with that?”
“So he daydreams. It won’t hurt him. His grades are good.”
“Holly says he’s bored senseless in that school,” Grady said. “Right out of his gourd.”
“Let’s just get to work,” I said. I never would have asked Grady to take my place in Frankie’s life, or help fill the gap when I left town. I’d hoped he would, it just didn’t turn out that way.
I followed my brother into the brambles, through brush with vines so tough they’d trap a horse’s legs. Grady held a head-high briar aside for me—the kind we called a blanket-shredder, with inch-long thorns that could ruin an eye. “Look up,” he said. “Over your head, two o’clock.” What I saw was an orange suit with a leg dangling out of it, as though the fabric had been ripped away. When we got closer, I could see there was no foot at the end of the leg. The torso was cradled by two branches in a deep crook, about sixty feet up. The astronaut’s pose was awkward, but the arms of the tulip tree had received him with dignity, above the eager sniff of scavengers. He still had his helmet on, and I gave thanks that no one had to look around for that, maybe with his head inside.
“None of them burned,” Grady said, gazing up, shading his bleary eyes from the sun that poked through for a moment. “Not a body part so far.”
The skin of the dangling leg was dark, we could see that from where we stood. “African-American,” I said.
Grady nodded. “Michael Kirkland. Payload specialist. Somebody found the foot by a mailbox yesterday.” He rubbed his face with his hands. “Can you get the rig in here?”
I looked around for a path. The trees were thick. “Over there,” I said. “We take down that sweet gum, I can squeeze through between those two beeches.”
“I know you hate this,” Grady said.
“Why me?” I said. “Chandler’s got a bucket truck. You know how I am.”
“I could go up instead.”
“There’s insurance rules. Nobody goes in the bucket who doesn’t work for Horton.”
“If it helps any, there’s no one else I trust this much.”
“To do this?”
“Yeah. And not to jaw about it.” He tipped his head in the vague direction of the black SUV. “They don’t want this in the newspaper. That deputy you passed out at the road, he’ll keep the media out. Not forever, though.”
“Cecil Dawson, wasn’t it?”
Grady shrugged. It was Dawson who’d taken my brother to lunch last month, the day after the Kiwanis met to pick a high school queen for the Piney Woods Festival. At the meeting, Grady had pushed for Vanessa Johnson, a five-foot-eight beauty with brains and grace. But the Kiwanis said they weren’t ready for a young woman with nut-brown skin to lead their parade down Main Street and sit with the mayor at the Saturday barbecue. Grady had delivered a tongue-lashing: Half the town’s school was African-American—get over it. At lunch the next day, Dawson leaned over his plate of green beans and baked chicken and said sourly, “We thought you were one of us.”
I eyeballed the distance between Michael Kirkland and the ground. “What if I get up there and puke?”
“You won’t. Think about the mechanics. It’s an object you have to get out of a tree, a puzzle you have to work out. He might be stiff.”
“Christ. I hadn’t thought.”
“Do what you have to do. He can’t feel anything and the NASA guys, they just want him down. You don’t have to tell anybody how it happens.”
I got the chain saw out of the rig. The tree I needed to take down was only about twenty years old. Sweet gum wood isn’t much good for carving but the bark is deeply ridged, which makes it handsome, I think. I made my quick cuts, and when the tree had fallen, I gave thanks I knew how to do something in life. Better than what was to come—today, next week, next year.
I moved the bucket truck into position and climbed in, setting the chain saw in its usual spot, as if this were an ordinary day, where I might have a water bottle stashed in the corner. I could have used one now. Adrenaline had shooed the NyQuil fog, but dread had left my chest heavy and my throat hurting more. I pulled the lever and started to climb. When Frankie was five, I’d broken the rules and taken him up. He could barely see over the top of the box and I could tell he was apprehensive. As we started to move, he grabbed for my pants leg. I put his other hand on top of mine, on the controls. “You see,” I said, “we’re a team.” Some of the apprehension left his face and he looked into the sky, where he must have thought we were headed. “Higher, Daddy,” he said. Soon, he let go of my jeans, and my heart sank a little.
The tree that held Michael Kirkland was already showing the bumps of first bud. Tulip poplars go bare early in fall, are among the first to green up in March. I think of them as bullish, optimistic trees. Their tough wood made good canoes for the Indians. This one had broken long ago, and two branches had grown together to make one. Inside the new branch would be a layer of bark, an inclusion where cells would have knit themselves together into a woodworker’s treasure of swirls and iridescences. A tree will always try to heal itself. The forest floors are full of death, but the trees themselves, they breathe life and claim it. A boy could be drawn to that, couldn’t he? Frankie made good grades in those boring classrooms. He had secrets he shared with no one. At twilight he went into the woods and sat on a log. What was wrong with that? The living trees spoke to my son; the dead ones spoke to me.
I needed to take out one big branch to get closer to my charge. Reaching for my chain saw, I looked down at my life—my heroic brother just below me, and at the edge of the meadow, my beautiful son. As far as I knew they still loved me, in their innocence of who I was, of who I was about to become. My son looked up to me, and my brother trusted me. I was living on borrowed time. I was not yet, to them, infested with rot.
The chain saw ripped through the interfering branch and it tumbled to the ground. I moved the bucket closer to the astronaut’s body. The smell was sharp, but not yet foul. In the dark tint of his face shield, I saw a reflection from above, the jagged end of a limb that did not survive his fall. The crows had been on him; there were droppings on his chest. If only, I thought. If only this were the hardest thing. I reached around Michael Kirkland’s waist and pulled him toward me. He wasn’t stiff. Inside his suit, broken bones bent him in the wrong places. I laid him as best I could across the box, and held on for the journey down.
I like the texture of bark, the feel of wood in my hands, the staunchness of a tree that is connected and enduring. In a piece of wood a man can
