Nine Hundred Firs and a Forty Dollar Funnel

Noon

At noon we had four hundred and forty on the tally. Nobody stopped for dinner.

Opie’s wife came up the road in her car about half past twelve with a pot of soup beans and two pans of cornbread and a gallon of sweet tea, and set it all on the hood of Opie’s truck.

We ate in shifts, two men at a time, standing up, with our gloves stuck in our back pockets. I never sat down.

My arms had quit hurting about eleven o’clock and gone to a deep, dull burn from the shoulders down that I knew would be worse tomorrow.

My mother would not eat until she saw me eat.

So I stood at the funnel with a square of cornbread in one hand and pushed with the other shoulder, and she watched me, and she ate a few spoonfuls of beans out of a paper bowl.

I had worn my old red and black flannel jacket, the heavy one, and by noon I had sweated clean through it and it had frozen stiff across the back where it was in the shade.

The sky was a hard blue all day, not a cloud in it, and cold.

That is perfect tree weather. You want it cold. A fir cut in cold weather and netted cold holds its needles all the way to Christmas.

If Kip had to pick a day to do this to me, at least he picked one God had made for loading.

My tan leather gloves had worn through on the inside of both thumbs by one o’clock. Aurelio’s had gone at the palms.

Thurston ran to the barn and brought back a box of new ones, cheap yellow cotton ones, and we just pulled them on over the old.

The Hymn

Around half past one my mother started humming. I do not think she knew she was doing it.

It was “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms,” the one Daddy used to sing in the truck on loading days, flat and too slow, with his window down.

Aurelio did not know the words, but he knew the tune from fifteen years of hearing my daddy and then me sing it at that landing.

I saw his lips moving along with it on the far side of the funnel, every time he pulled a tree through.

None of us said anything about it. We just kept on. But I believe it was easier after that.

Something in the rhythm of the old hymn matched the rhythm of the push and the pull, and the count came faster all afternoon than it had all morning.