The little lawyer, as if not wanting his client to speak for himself, interposed, “My older sister, she know Deirdre. She told her the land all empty.”
“It is not empty,” I said. “I own it.” I shifted my ground, perhaps disastrously. “There’s lots of empty land, since the war.” I was conceding an abstract squatters’ rights, to entice them to go elsewhere.
“Less lately,” the leader told me, with his deadpan facticity. His lips seemed stung and numbed by the words he was forced to utter. “Less now than there used to be. People movin’ around.”
The youngest one, whom I had appealed to as an image of my touching, grateful grandson, with a sudden wide wave of one thin and limber arm gave a pronouncement almost poetic: “All these trees and dead rocks, they’re not doin’ anybody any good.”
“They’re doing me good,” I told him in a grandpaternal tone. “Me and my wife. They’re part of our living space.”
My tone, or this curious term, made the lawyer of the group snicker again, and then as if to cover up this lapse he pleaded, his widening eyes focused on my face and daring me to look away, “We was thinkin’ just a little watchin’ post for the summer. Cold weather come, nobody can use it, promise.”
“Watching post? What would you watch?” This was my instinctive reply, but a wrong one. I should have instantly rebuffed the seasonal inroad. I was rusty at haggling.
The older one smiled, or at least his blunt, numb appraisal of me and my potential as an obstacle softened. “A lot of stuff goin’ on” was his answer.
“He means pedestrian traffic,” the lawyer said. “You may not know it, man, but tons of people use this path as a way to the water. We’d be doin’ you a favor. We’d be keepin’ people from gettin’ up to your house.”
“All these favors for free?” I asked-another mistake, a sarcasm taken as a concession.
“You said it,” the spokesman eagerly agreed, his eyes staying fixed on my face in a kind of shining impudence. “No charge, absolute protection. We’ll be makin’ the place more tidy, too. Cleanin’ up all this crap.”
It was an area which I visited, as my physical activities became more restricted, no more than once or twice a year. When we first moved here, Gloria and I walked to the beach every week and roamed the woods stacking brush and planning bonfires. No more: this site was mine only by law. A litter of beer cans and plastic soda bottles had built up.
The leader reached down and picked up the hammer. In his plump olive fist it became a weapon. He said to me stolidly, “You ask Deirdre and Phil.”
“No,” I said, sounding prim and excited even in my own ears. “I will speak to my wife about this. And the police.”
“Uh-huh.” “Sure.” “You go do that, mister.” All had spoken, to reinforce one another; the three boys drifted closer together to make a dense unit that, by some force of anti-gravity, propelled me, my face hot with anger and fear, back up the hill. As I climbed the slope, which was slippery with dead needles, my heart labored and raced. Around me in the fresh leaves raindrops began to tick. Rain would chase the interlopers away, was my cowardly consolation.
But I did not, yesterday, describe the incident to Gloria. I did not want her to know more about Deirdre than she had already guessed. The house was healing. Even the useless old coffee-maker that had been stolen had reappeared in a lower kitchen cabinet, tucked behind the extra soup bowls. I did ask her, though, if she would like to borrow the shotgun back from the Pientas. I told her I had seen deer scat in the woods.
Now in the suburban streets where some kind of order is still maintained, and even in the yards of those houses which are abandoned and boarded up or else burned-out shells, the vibrant magenta of crabapple outshouts the milder pink of flowering cherry, the dusky tint of redbud, and the diffident, sideways-drifting clouds of floating dogwood petals. The stunted old apple to the right of the driveway, much topped to keep it from intruding on the view, puts forth a scattered show of thin-skinned white tinged with pink, like an English child’s complexion. The lilac racemes, once tiny dry cones the color of dead grapeskins, are turning large and soft and pale. Nearer to the house, the fattening azalea buds are bright as candy hearts.
However luxuriantly the crabapples down in the village are blooming, there is one in our side yard, toward the Kellys’, that is half dead. Gloria, in a dictatorial whirl restoring the order that I had let, in her absence, slide, asked me to cut it down. “Give it a chance,” I pleaded.
“It’s had its chance,” she said. “Do it, or I’ll call the tree service and they’ll charge three hundred welders and another three hundred to feed it into the chipper. You’re always complaining about money, here’s your chance to save some.”
“Suppose I cut my own hand off.”
“You won’t,” she said, in a tone of stern dissatisfaction.
Reluctantly I descended into the dank and spidery basement, sharpened the chain saw link by link with a dull round file, and adjusted its tension with a wrench and screwdriver. It has taken me years to get the trick of this adjustment; the clamp on the blade is out of sight, so one must feel one’s way, as with sex or (I imagine) a root-canal job.
Quick-moving spring clouds shuffled sunlight in and out of the cool breeze off the sea. Being half dead meant that the tree in its other half was alive, with a pathetic dutiful effort of sap and cell division pushing a scattering of buds toward the cloudy, gusty sky, even as the lower branches snapped off like a mummy’s fingers. As the saw-voracious and smooth-cutting in its first minutes, its bite juicy with fresh bar-oil- sliced off the dry lower limbs, I came to higher, smaller branches still moist, with green cambium, and I called Gloria over before I proceeded. She looked where I showed her the round wounds oozing water, and sighed: “Ben, you never pay attention, but every year we go through this. Some boy with the yard service cuts out the dead wood and we decide to let the rest go and see if the tree will thrive. But it doesn’t. It doesn’t thrive. Some bug is at it. Or it just isn’t happy in this spot; it’s never been happy. Too much salty wind, or the ledge is too close under the soil, or something. Cut it down. Now is the time. We’ll find something else that will be happier. Probably an evergreen-a Douglas fir or a blue spruce.” Seeing me still hesitate, with an expression on my face that must have been pained, she said, with one of the few smiles she has granted me since her return “Sweetie, you’re overidentifying. You can’t be sentimental if you’re going to maintain a property. Here’s your choice: let everything go to wrack and ruin so the value of the place drops to next to nothing, or else put this very unhappy crabapple out of its misery.”
There was a pleasure, actually, in slicing up the helpless tree, amputating inwards, as the severed limbs accumulated in a high tangle on the lawn, and then cutting up the trunk in fireplace lengths as it stood there, a tall stump. The saw resisted, binding in the wet wood. The poor tree was still sending up sap to phantom buds. I dragged the limbs to the burning pit and stacked the trunk lengths in the garage, to be split some winter day. I too was half dead, but my other half was still alive, and victorious. The tree had gone from being my brother to being my fallen enemy. I gloated over its dismembered corpse, and resheathed the dull chain-saw blade in its sheath of orange plastic spelling STIHL.
This was days ago, in the tentative buddings of another season. Today, summer arrived, though it is still May. In Boston, the television said, the temperature hit ninety, and was close to that along the North Shore: the air of a different planet has taken over. The refrigerator works up a sweat. The sea seems sunken, greasy, like the concave underside of a silver ingot. The lilacs explode into pale violet and go limp, so that the branches sag out toward the driveway, brushing the sides of the delivery trucks that grind their way up through a haze of exhaust and pollen. Gloria goes off to Boston in a slinky summer dress that clings to her hips. She leaves it to me to put up all the storm windows remaining and to pull down the screens, and to install the air conditioner in our bedroom. It waits all winter in the closet under the attic stairs, beside the old bureau-a relic of my marriage to Perdita and one of the few items of furniture in the house I can call my own. When I wrestle the air conditioner up into my arms it has put on ten more pounds of weight; lugging it through three doorways and settling it in the open window, where it precariously rests on the aluminum fins that seat the combination windows and screen, stretches the outer limit of my strength. But the year I cannot lift it will bring my death closer in a quantum leap, so I manage to succeed, grunting and cursing and even exclaiming orgasmically in my spurt of muscular effort.