The Pecan I Climbed After He Took the Truck

Elwood did not raise his voice. He told me he never raised his voice in his life except at a ball game.

“Mr. Holloway,” he said, “my cousin lives across the street from Opal Kimbrough. Opal taught Sunday school to every child on that street for forty years, mine included when we lived in town. Is it true you took this truck off her roof this morning to come out here?”

Vance stood there with his hand on the outrigger lever. Shad told me his daddy did not say anything for a long time.

Then Vance said, “Her job wasn’t going anywhere. Mine was.”

And Elwood said, “Well, mine’s not going anywhere either. It’s been broken since Saturday and it’ll be broken next week.” He took out his checkbook, right there by the truck.

“I’ll pay you for today, all of it, the full day. Then I’d like you to take the truck home. I’ll wait for the woman who climbed that pecan.”

Shad brought the bucket down. He told me later he did not know until that minute whose job it had been.

His daddy had told him that morning that the other rental fell through and he had found a way to free the truck up. He had not asked how.

Shad got out of the bucket and stood in front of his father in Elwood’s yard with his whole crew watching, and he said, “Dad. Was that Darcy’s job? Was that Mrs. Kimbrough?”

Vance did not say yes. He did not have to.

Shad told me his daddy stood there with that check in his hand for a long time, and then folded it once and put it in his shirt pocket and got up in the cab.

He drove the truck home with the boom down, and the three boys from Henryetta rode home in the back of Shad’s pickup, and nobody said a word the whole way.

“So that’s what I did,” Elwood said on the phone. “I’m not proud of embarrassing a man in front of his son. But I wasn’t going to have my oaks cut with that truck today. Now, how soon can you get to me?”

I looked at the pecan rounds on Opal’s lawn, and at Opal on her step in her coat, and at Tully with the rope over his shoulder.

“I’ve got to finish Mrs. Kimbrough first,” I said. “The rest of the tree has to come down, and there’s freezing rain coming Thursday night.”

“I’d expect nothing else,” Elwood said. “Call me Friday.”

I gave Opal back her phone. She did not ask me what he had said.

She looked at my face and then she put her hand on my arm, just for a second, and went back inside.

When I turned around, the older man at the fence who had helped Tully drag the round was standing right behind me with his cap in his hands.

“Ma’am,” he said, “I’ve got a hackberry on my garage that’s been sitting there since Saturday. The fellow I called says the second week of February. Could you look at it?”

And then the woman behind him said she had an elm over her fence. And the man behind her said his whole silver maple had come apart over his driveway.

Leota said she had a red oak in her backyard that was not on anything yet, but she did not like the sound it made in the wind.