Necessary Angel

I

When we walked out to cut the old shagbark, I almost stumbled when I saw the flower hanging like a yellow hand. An orchid sprung from air, the sudden kiss of color, the thick-petaled yellow green, gorgeous as fruit, the intricate twisting ribbon shape sticking out, blunt as a question.

This should fall easy you said not gnarled as hickory can be

But even as I pulled on gloves I wasn’t listening. I was looking—that exotic yellow hand. Ordinary shagbark, its wooly hide stretched like a mammoth’s but over winter, thrum of mitochondria, cells splitting dividing, under snow multiplying, and not into wood or leaf but this, this gorgeous nonsense.

I could feel regret twist and curl, clenching hard its own bruised fruit. But before I could speak you pulled on the chainsaw. Stop I almost said wait . . .—my head was buzzing with the noise, the saw, frantic to begin. Stop, I almost said wait . . .

I’m not sure anymore if this tree should go my heart racing, tendrils flaring, rocking with sound, that one thought: secret tree tongue yellow petaled, yellow fingered, frail tree flower here

But you were trained to execute any necessary task; once three hundred people called you boss, you set the blade against the tree’s flank, down it sank spraying sawdust, each cut widened a vee-shaped gap until the trunk looked more a gap-toothed jack-o’-lantern than a hickory tree.

Bedecked, bedazzled, beyond hope, the tree towered grey. I couldn’t see the flower under the onslaught, but the leaves, green flags against the sky, held firm. Later we’d count the wavering rings, losing track at thirty-five. Casually you stepped back, set down the saw. All it took was a push.

The crash began as a whisper, grew to a waterfall of creaks and groans, ripping leaves. As if it were an athlete in a slow-motion playback, the great tree tilted and was down. Screech of limbs then a thump that shook the earth alive.

In the sudden rush of light and space I saw all that I would plant there now: the spires of arbor vitae, the fat boxwood and twisted cranberry, the green holly and prickly potato vine, the squat fuzzy cedar trees. All my good intentions flowering like lemon azaleas there where the old shagbark lay a great clumsy albatross wings splayed across the green.

How easy to cut and cut and not know how to stop, to forget that necessary hesitation, thinking only of what can be. I think it was your face, shadowed with resolve but sobered by the sight or was it the moment before the push, when you patted the shaggy trunk as if it were the flank of a favorite horse you’d just let out to pasture? Hot with shame, I watched you flick off the saw, carefully wipe the oil, put the cover on the cooling chain: I knew something now that I would never be able not to know.

II

All week I’d been listening to another saw—our neighbor down the road working his chainsaw, pressing it hard against bare trunk while the motor roars, a whole tree down in minutes, the crash gunshot clean.

He’ll never forget the stories his grandparents told how the first of them, laboring on the farms, were not allowed to sit in the pews. So every Sunday they climbed the steps of the Congregational Church, then climbed again to sit above, apart, unseen, on benches under the rafters, awkward as rutabagas, old Swedes with their huge boots, hands large with work, hearts larger still with raw unwashed dreams. No, he’ll carry that rage until the day he dies and each tree he sets his saw against is the smooth neck of privilege.

“I don’t like your kind,” he’d snarled the first time I’d met him on our road. He’d looked down from his truck and spat, pointing to the woods his woods his land his.

My easy certainty filled him with rage, or I had a look...