Resurrection

“The saw went back and forth like a hypnotist’s watch.”

Great-granddaddy’s saw had hung for years from a nail in the garage.  It was as long as my leg with half inch teeth, a big crosscut saw that I had always wanted to try—but I was always in a hurry and the chain saw was always convenient.  Until it broke.

       “A couple-three weeks,” said the man in the shop.  “We got a backlog.”

            I returned home.  There was an hour of daylight left from a fine fall afternoon.  Too pretty to stay inside.  I took the big saw down off its nail and headed for the woods. 

            In the creek bottom was an oak tree that had blown down over the summer in a storm.  I’d been working on it with the chain saw, starting at the top, and now all but the last twenty feet was stove-length firewood in a pile up by the house.  The last piece of trunk was twice as big around as my body.  It was still attached to the root ball, a seven foot tall witch head of sandy dirt with little roots dangling out of it like nerves.  The hole it had been ripped from was the size of a VW bug. 

            I started sawing a two foot section of trunk.  After five minutes I took off my jacket.  My sweater came off after five more. 

            Finally the first cut was finished.  I quartered it with the splitting maul and started back sawing.  Halfway through I stopped.  Great-granddaddy was a hell of a man if he did this all day.  The story was he used to rough out ties for the railroad, coming out of the woods with one under each arm.  Well…

I stood up, unkinked my back, wiped sweat from my palms on my pants leg.  An old splinter hurting under the skin.  That story about porcupines—how they gnaw tool handles to get the salt from human perspiration.  Was my sweat mingling with my great-grandfather’s down inside the handle?  His essence passing back into me through the open pores of my hand?

I returned to work.  It was easier now—I’d found a rhythm.  The saw went back and forth like a hypnotist’s watch.  Cutting through the growth rings, I imagined the past when trees larger than this covered the land.  You catch glimpses of what it must have been like sometimes driving in the country: oaks sheltering an old house site, the house gone, usually, except maybe for the chimneys.  Just four or five huge trees rising out of the soybeans.      

The second section dropped to the ground.  I split it twice, then picked up two quarters and started uphill to the edge of the field.  Lights were coming on in the subdivision.  It got dim as I walked back down into the bottom.  Sky through the branches sunset red—and a sound I didn’t recognize.  The woods suddenly quiet, as though something had cleared its throat, preparing to speak.

The sound—I found its source.  The tree was moving, the trunk slowly separating from the ground.  Dirt that had been caked into its bark sprinkled down, sand hissing onto dry leaves.         

The tree rose a foot…a yard…accelerating toward the vertical…then the root ball whumped back into its hole, a door slamming in the hill.   

It took awhile to realize that I had cut off enough of the trunk for the root ball to balance the tree back into the air.  Even after that fact penetrated, it coexisted peacefully with the idea that I had been present at the resurrection of one of the land’s old Gods.  I stood in the twilight thinking that while the last of the sand sprinkled down on the leaves.