The Pecan I Climbed After He Took the Truck

He did not wave at Opal, who was standing in her kitchen window in her housecoat with her hand flat against the glass.

I stood in the yard and listened to the truck go down the street, all that hydraulic rattle fading off toward the highway, until all I could hear was the ice dripping off the gutters.

Tully said, “Darcy, I’m sorry. I didn’t know what to do.”

“You did right,” I told him. “It’s his truck.”

That is the plain truth of it, and I have had people ask me since why I did not stand in front of the bumper or call somebody.

The truck was his. The rental was day to day and we both knew it. A fight over the keys in a widow’s front yard would not have lifted one pound of pecan off her roof before Thursday.

And I had already called around. I had called every man I knew with a bucket or a crane in three counties on Sunday, when the job came in.

Every one of them was booked through the end of the month on storm work, most of it for the power company or for people with more money than Opal.

So I walked back to my pickup. Behind the seat, in a canvas bag that still smelled like bar oil and his tobacco, was my daddy’s climbing saddle.

I should tell you who I am, so this makes sense. My name is Darcy Holloway. I kept the name after the divorce because my business cards already had it on them, and because by then I had made it mean something on my own.

I am thirty-six. I have been climbing trees for money since I was nineteen, when my daddy put me on the end of his rope one summer because his last groundman had quit to go roughneck in the oil field.

I have been certified as a climber since I was twenty-eight.

Daddy climbed in this county for thirty years, most of it before anybody around here owned a bucket truck. He did it with a saddle, a climbing line, a lowering rope, and a hand saw, and later with a little chain saw that weighed about as much as a sack of sugar.

He died two winters ago of his heart, in his own chair, with his boots still on from feeding the cows. He had bought that saddle new the spring before.

I had worn it every climbing day since, and I checked every stitch and every buckle of it every Monday morning, the way he taught me.

After Shad and I split up four years ago, I started my own crew. It was me and whoever I could keep.

Tully had been with me two years, which in this line of work is a long time, and he was the best groundman I had ever had.

I could not afford a bucket truck. A used one in decent shape runs sixty or seventy thousand dollars, and I have never had that kind of money sitting around. So I rented Vance’s by the day when a job needed it, and I climbed the rest.

Vance gave me a fair rate for four years, and I want that on the record too.

He liked me. I think he liked me better than he liked his own son some days.

When Shad and I were married, Vance used to say I was the only Holloway who could tie a bowline without looking.