The Pecan I Climbed After He Took the Truck

Down by the roof, the pieces got thicker yet. A round fourteen inches through and three feet long is about two hundred pounds of wood, and it does not want to go where you tell it.

I would tie it, cut a notch underneath, and finish from the top, and it would drop into the rope and swing.

Every time, Tully caught it. He would let it run a foot or two through the Port-a-Wrap to take the shock and then hold it still in the air, turning slow, before he let it down.

He never let one touch the shingles. Not one.

Around one o’clock I heard Opal’s back door, and I looked down. She was coming across the snow-patched grass in her coat, real careful, with a steel thermos under one arm.

“I’ll come down,” I said.

I came down my line and unclipped on the ground. My arms were shaking. I had not noticed until I stopped. Opal held out the thermos with both hands, the way you hand somebody a baby.

It was an old green one with the paint worn off at the shoulders where somebody’s hand had held it ten thousand mornings. The cup on top had a dent in the rim.

“That was my husband’s,” she said. “He carried it to the gas plant every day for forty-one years. I don’t let anybody use it.” She pushed it at me a little. “He’d want you warm.”

I poured a cup. It was black and strong and too hot, and it was the best coffee I ever drank.

Tully had a cup after me, and he said, “Yes ma’am, thank you, ma’am,” like his own mother was standing there.

Opal looked up into the tree with her hand at her throat.

“He planted that pecan the spring we married,” she said. “Nineteen sixty-three. It was a stick in a coffee can his daddy gave him off a tree down by the river. He put it in the ground the week we moved in, and he said, ‘Opal, we’ll be old people under that tree.'”

She was quiet a minute.

“And we were,” she said. “We were. He sat under it every evening the last summer he had.”

I did not say anything. I held the dented cup and looked at the tree, the half still standing with the light coming through the ice, and the other half lying on her roof like a man who had fallen asleep where he should not.

“I’m sorry I have to take it down, Mrs. Kimbrough,” I said finally. “The whole tree. Not today. But the crack goes into the trunk. It won’t stand another storm.”

“I know it, honey,” she said. “I knew it Saturday night when I heard it go. I just didn’t want anybody to take it from me in a hurry.”

She took the cup back and wiped the rim with her coat sleeve and screwed it back on the thermos.

“You’re not in a hurry,” she said. “I’ve been watching you.”

I went back up.

By two o’clock the people on the porches had come off the porches. I counted seven of them standing along Opal’s fence line in their coats when I looked down to call a piece.

Three older men, three women, a teenage boy with his hands in his pockets.

Nobody hollered or cheered. They just stood there and watched, the way people in a small town watch a barn go up or a well get drilled.