The Pecan I Climbed After He Took the Truck

One of the older men walked over and helped Tully drag a big round to the pile without being asked, and then walked back to the fence and stood there.

A woman in a red stocking cap went inside her house and came back with a box of doughnuts and set them on the hood of my pickup.

Then she went back and stood at the fence with everybody else.

Later I learned her name was Leota. She had lived across the street from Opal for thirty-eight years, and they went to the same little church on the edge of town, and Opal had taught her boys in Sunday school when they were small.

I did not know any of that yet. I just knew the doughnuts were there when I came down, and that nobody said a word about them.

At three o’clock I was down to the last of it. The split end of the leader, the butt, was still lying on the roof where it had landed, maybe nine feet of it and sixteen inches through.

It was the heaviest piece in the tree, and it was the piece that was holding the roof down.

That one I could not do with the little saw. Tully tied my big saw onto the tag line and I hauled it up hand over hand and hung it off my saddle on a lanyard.

A big saw hanging off your hip forty feet up feels like a second person climbing with you.

I set the rigging carefully. The lowering line went around the butt at the balance point, where I judged half the weight was on each side, with a timber hitch and two half hitches.

I had Tully take up all the slack and then a little more, until the rope was humming.

“It’s going to move when I cut,” I called down. “It’s going to want to drop and swing toward the house. You hold it.”

“I’ve got it,” Tully said.

Then the hard part. A split leader has all kinds of loads in it. The top side is pulled tight like a bowstring and the bottom side is pressed together.

If you cut the wrong side first, the wood can split up through your cut and kick, and a piece that big can break a man’s leg or come straight through a roof.

So I read it. I took a long time reading it. I looked at where the split ran and where the bark had wrinkled and where the bark had pulled tight.

I cut a small notch on the bottom side, just enough to take the bind out, and then I set the bar on top and went in slow.

The wood creaked. Then it groaned, a long sound like a door in an old house. And then the whole butt of that leader lifted off Opal’s roof as if it weighed nothing, hung on the lowering line, swung out over the yard, and stopped.

Tully had it. He held it there in the air, turning slow, eight hundred pounds of pecan, and then he let it run down a foot at a time until it settled on the lawn with a thump I felt through the trunk.

Nobody at the fence said anything. One of the older men took his cap off and held it a minute and put it back on.

I shut off the saw and hung it on my lanyard and sat back in Daddy’s saddle, forty feet up, and just breathed.