The Pecan I Climbed After He Took the Truck

From up there I could see the whole street. All the broken limbs in the yards and the blue tarps on the roofs and the pecan rounds stacked on Opal’s lawn, pale on the cut faces, and the roof of her house with nothing on it but a few twigs and a lot of ice melt running down to the gutters.

It was three forty. The sun was getting low and gold over the houses to the west.

We had about two hours of light left, and we had done it with time to spare.

That is when Opal’s kitchen door opened.

She came out on her step holding her cordless phone up in the air toward me, the way you hold something up to show a child across a room.

“Darcy,” she called. “It’s Leota’s cousin. Elwood. He’s the man out past the lake. He’s the one whose trees Vance is cutting.”

I looked at the woman in the red stocking cap at the fence. She did not look away.

“He wants to talk to you,” Opal said.

I came down. I took my time coming down, because you do not hurry on a rope just because a phone is ringing.

I unclipped and took off my helmet and walked across the lawn and took the phone out of Opal’s hand.

“This is Darcy,” I said.

“Ms. Holloway, my name’s Elwood. I’ve got about five acres out past the lake and fourteen of the prettiest post oaks you ever saw, and every one of them is broken.”

He had an old man’s voice, slow and dry. “My cousin Leota says you just took a tree off Opal Kimbrough’s roof with a rope.”

“Yes sir,” I said. “Me and my groundman.”

“She says there was a bucket truck on that job this morning, and the man who owns it took it out from under you and drove it to my place.”

I did not answer right away. I could see Tully coiling the bull rope, not looking at me, listening.

“It’s his truck, sir,” I said. “He can rent it to who he wants.”

There was a pause on the line. I could hear something behind him, a saw running a long way off, and then the saw shut off.

“Well, that’s a fair way to say it,” he said. “I’ll tell you what I did, and you can think what you like about it.”

This is what Elwood told me, and later Shad told me the same thing, and later than that Vance told me himself, standing in Opal’s yard. So I believe it.

Leota had called Elwood about one o’clock, while I was drinking Opal’s coffee on the lawn. She asked him whose bucket truck that was in his yard.

He told her it belonged to Vance Holloway, and his son’s crew was running it.

Leota told him what she had seen at ten twenty that morning. She told him there was a woman forty feet up in Opal Kimbrough’s pecan with a rope and a saw, because the truck in his front yard had been pulled off Opal’s roof for more money.

Elwood said he thanked her and hung up and sat in his kitchen awhile with his coffee getting cold.

Then he went out at about three thirty, when they were between trees, and walked up to the truck.

Vance was running the outriggers. Shad was in the bucket. The rest of Shad’s crew was down on the ground dragging brush, three young men from Henryetta, and they all stopped when they saw the old man coming.