The Hurricane

27

“Step through this loop first.”

An hour later, faces dry, Daniel’s father held a curl of webbing open at his feet. Daniel stepped through, shifted his weight to that foot, then did the same with the other.

“Now pull it up, just like a pair of shorts.”

“This’ll hold us if we fall?” Daniel shrugged the webbing up over his shorts, tugging down at the hem of them to keep them from getting bunched up.

“You could swing from this all day.”

Zola watched them from the front steps, sucking on a straw punched through a warm juice box. Every now and then, she tried making a call or sending a text. Now, when she put her phone aside with each network error, it was with a practiced calm, none of the frustrated desperation from last night. Her straw slurped at the bottom of the box.

“You’d better be real careful with my boys up there,” their mother said. She stood near one of the log piles, her arms crossed, a doubting look on her face. Daniel smiled at her to try and calm her nerves—and his. Carlton topped up the oil and gas on the chainsaw, then walked over and peered up the ladder leaning against the gutter. Hunter worked his homemade harness of knotted webbing on without their father’s help.

“Knot your line on the other line like this when we get up there.” He refreshed them on how to tie a bowline; the lessons taught on the houseboat years ago came flooding back, and the loss of the boat gnawed at Daniel. He untied and retied the knot several times while their father bent to secure a short piece of rope to the chainsaw. He stood, slung it over his shoulder, and went to the ladder first. The long, extended aluminum sides bent with his weight. He took the rungs slowly, getting both feet in place before reaching up with one hand to steady himself on a higher rung.

Once at the gutter, he lifted the chainsaw to a two-by-four he’d nailed in place across the shingles. He hoisted himself up and tied his webbing off to a loop of rope strung across the breadth of the house, from one side to the other. The loose bowline let him slide left and right and crawl higher up the roof, but should catch him if he slipped. Daniel watched, nerves tickling his stomach, as he waited for his dad to move out of the way. Then he went up the ladder after him.

The slope of the yard made the house feel more like three stories on that side, the unfinished basement letting out on the edge of the house around from where the tree hit. Daniel watched the bushes grow smaller as he went up. He reached the gutter and steadied himself while he tied the bowline. His dad watched while he made the twist, checking to make sure he did it in the right direction.

“Dear God, please be careful,” his mother said.

“Don’t take forever,” Hunter offered. Chen and Zola looked up from the limb they’d been dragging, shielding their eyes from the morning glare.

Daniel finished the knot and scrambled to the side, the edges of his sneakers clinging to the two-by-four. The ladder rattled as his brother started the climb up.

“Hold this in place,” his father said. Daniel turned and grasped another two-by-four held against the roof. His dad extracted a hammer from his tool belt, shoved a few nails between his lips, and pressed one against the wood. A few expert strikes from his hammer, and one end of the board was fixed in place. He slammed another home, then passed the hammer and final nail to Daniel.

Daniel took his time pounding the nail in. His brother made it to the top of the ladder and worked on his knot.

“Up we go,” their father said.

Daniel took another look down at all the gawkers looking back up. Carlton had started up the ladder, bringing them some more tools. Hunter followed their dad onto the next two-by-four, brushing up against one of the massive limbs bent across the shingles. Climbing up the roof was like ascending a manmade intrusion into a natural canopy. The leaves and boughs were in a tangle across the house that had seemed manageable from the ground. Now that he was up within it, Daniel saw the incredible task ahead of them.

“Here,” Carlton said. He handed up the clippers and handsaw that had been kept busy over the last few days, chopping up anything small enough not to bother with the chainsaw. Daniel took the long-handled clippers and passed the saw to Hunter. The two of them moved to the first limb while their dad adjusted the loop of rope they were all attached to. Clipping the smaller limbs, they let the branches slide down toward the gutter, some of them getting caught up on the two-by-fours. They kicked these off, and Carlton helped remove them from the top of the ladder.

“You might want to get down and take the ladder with you,” their father said. “Go around to the other side and we’ll lower the first big one.”

Carlton nodded and descended the ladder. Daniel and Hunter worked to clean the limbs on the way up, forging a path past their father and over the large boughs leaning against the house. Daniel still didn’t see how the tree was going to be removed. He imagined a large crane would be necessary.

As they climbed, the limbs branching out overhead shaded them from the sun. Now they had truly ascended into a canopy. Daniel passed a fat limb that had snapped in half, the yellow and jagged interior revealing splinters the size of baseball bats. Their father climbed up beside them with a litheness that belied his age. He seemed to have become younger with the transition to a tilted, dangerous world, as if he had lived there much of his life.

“Stop at the peak,” he told them.

Daniel and Hunter clung to a limb at the roof’s apex. Their dad adjusted the rope holding the three of them to their tethered harnesses. He then uncoiled the rope around his chest and tied a series of loops and knots around the massive limb draped over the house. The other end of the rope was wrapped around the main trunk of the tree several times.

“Hold this,” their father told them.

Hunter and Daniel obeyed. They were in their father’s realm. What he said mattered, had force. This fact was as dizzying as the heights.

They each held the rope, which was wound twice around the great trunk, then tied tightly to the limb with complex knots. Daniel leaned back on the rope, testing it and finding security in the way it held him to the roof. Their father climbed up and straddled the peak of the roof. He brushed a small limb out of his way. Daniel looked back and could see his mom staring up at them. She had moved further into the yard to see them better through a hole in the canopy.

“The friction of the rope will do all the work,” their father said. “Just hold tight.” He looked to both of them. Daniel glanced over to Hunter to see a serious calm on his face. “You ready?”

Both boys nodded.

Their father set the chainsaw on his knee and flipped a lever. He yanked the handle and the machine roared to life. A haze of smoke billowed out, and the saw grumbled angrily as their dad revved the motor. He checked with the boys one more time, then pressed the chain into the massive broken limb clinging to their house.

He cut in stages, working his way down to the core of the limb from two angles. When the last bit went, the limb sagged down on the rope, stretching it, but not far. The chainsaw fell quiet.

“Now play it out,” he told them.

Daniel let some slack into the rope, and his brother did the same. They had to flick the line to get it going, but then the limb slid down the steep incline of the roof, the scratch of bark loud on the rough shingles.

“That’s good,” their father said, peeking over the side. He guided their efforts, having them hold up when the tree reached the other gutter. He and Carlton talked back and forth, the rattle of the aluminum ladder heard on the other side. Following their father’s commands, they lowered the huge limb down to the wooden deck out of sight and far below. The rope sang out as the limb went over the edge, its full weight hanging. The coil of line around the tree bit hard, but gobbled hungrily at any slack they fed it.

Carlton yelled something.

“She’s down,” their father relayed.

The slack fed into the rope stayed there.

The three of them rested on the roof, smiling at one another. Daniel looked around at the canopy with a new perspective. He saw each large limb as a discrete unit, as a task that could be tackled in fifteen or twenty minutes. Their father moved to the next one in the way, and Daniel could even see how large chunks of the main trunk could be removed, careful of course not to hit the shingles with the chainsaw.

They set to work, pausing after the next limb to accept a thermos of water hauled up at the end of a line. After a while, the labor became routine, and the spectators on the ground began working to clear the smaller limbs as they were cut away and rained down. Daniel took special pleasure when he saw Anna down in the front yard with Edward, the two of them stopping by to see the progress. By then, he was moving around the tree and roof with ease, handling the lines as surely as after a long weekend on the boat. He and Hunter worked as a team, his older brother becoming something of an equal in the labor. And together, with their father, and under the admiring gaze of a girl he surely loved—however fast it had happened—they worked to clear the house his dad had long ago built. They worked until the only thing that remained was the tall trunk, stripped clean and leaning into the crushed dormer and the stove-in roof.

••••

It was late when the three of them finally undid their harnesses and came down the ladder, one by one. Their father was the last one off the roof, pausing to tie a serious tangle of knots around the belly of the old tree. He rattled down the ladder last, and then collapsed it and carried it out of the way.

“I appreciate the use of the Bronco,” he told Edward, who had returned with Anna for the last of the procedure.

“Absolutely,” he said, smiling through his beard.

Their father seized the line hanging from the tree and walked with it through the front yard to the cul-de-sac where the Bronco had been backed up between debris piles. He wrapped the line around the bumper, tied a loop in one side, then fed the other side through the loop. With a series of tugs, he yanked the line incredibly tight, taking the slack out, tying the Bronco off to the tilting tree. The top of the taut line just barely cleared the massive root ball sticking up from the ground, the circular pit of missing dirt sitting like a bowl beneath.

“Four wheel drive?” Edward asked.

Their father nodded. “And we’ll ride, just to add more weight.” He waved to the boys, then got in the passenger seat. Chen and Zola ran out and joined Hunter in the back seat. Daniel and Anna crawled through the open window and sat in the back, looking out at the tree and the taut line from bumper to bough.

“Easy at first,” their dad said.

The Bronco lurched forward, the tires groaning against the pavement, and the rope whined in complaint. It stretched, and the knot made a crunching sound as it adjusted itself.

“Stay to the side,” Daniel told Anna, suddenly fearful of the pent-up ferocity of the line. He imagined it parting and coming straight through the back of the car.

The Bronco growled forward another foot, and the line crackled. The car moved again, and Daniel saw a worried look on Carlton’s face, standing at the side of the root ball. He seemed to be shaking his head as if nothing was happening.

The engine revved; one tire spun a little; Daniel could smell exhaust, could hear the rope grinding against itself. And then something gave. He reached across the fearful void between himself and Anna, both still leaning away from the power of the line stretching off the bumper, and fumbled for her hand. The Bronco surged forward. Slack flew into the line, like it had parted, but it was from the movement of the tree. The line went tight again. Carlton and his mom flinched away from the root ball, then turned to study it.

Hunter whooped. It was hard to see, looking right at it, but the tree was moving. The root ball was lowering back to the earth. Without the heavy limbs, and with most of its upper trunk removed, the much lighter tree was being pulled down by its roots and by the growling Bronco. It suddenly lurched off the house and settled toward the ground, tilting dangerously, but then guided by the rope as Edward drove across the cul-de-sac. It ended up back where it once stood, pointing at the sky, a sad husk of a tree without its limbs, the mound of earth clinging to its roots returning to the large divot it had left behind.

The rope finally went slack, and Carlton waved. Even their mother was smiling as she looked back at the house with its one busted eye. The other kids in the car were cheering and hollering, and Daniel joined in. He squeezed Anna, who didn’t seem to mind that he was covered in bark and roof gravel and damp with sweat. They all poured out of the car to go and look. Carlton and their mom steered them away from the tree, as if it still posed some unsteady threat. Daniel gasped at the sight of the gaping hole in the roof, the interior of the house visible and open to the sky above. It was a wound, sure, a nasty shiner, but at least the offending blow had finally been removed.