What Luck, This Life. Kathryn Schwille

pants leg. I put his other hand on top of mine, on the controls. “You see,” I said, “we’re a team.” Some of the apprehension left his face and he looked into the sky, where he must have thought we were headed. “Higher, Daddy,” he said. Soon, he let go of my jeans, and my heart sank a little.

      The tree that held Michael Kirkland was already showing the bumps of first bud. Tulip poplars go bare early in fall, are among the first to green up in March. I think of them as bullish, optimistic trees. Their tough wood made good canoes for the Indians. This one had broken long ago, and two branches had grown together to make one. Inside the new branch would be a layer of bark, an inclusion where cells would have knit themselves together into a woodworker’s treasure of swirls and iridescences. A tree will always try to heal itself. The forest floors are full of death, but the trees themselves, they breathe life and claim it. A boy could be drawn to that, couldn’t he? Frankie made good grades in those boring classrooms. He had secrets he shared with no one. At twilight he went into the woods and sat on a log. What was wrong with that? The living trees spoke to my son; the dead ones spoke to me.

      I needed to take out one big branch to get closer to my charge. Reaching for my chain saw, I looked down at my life—my heroic brother just below me, and at the edge of the meadow, my beautiful son. As far as I knew they still loved me, in their innocence of who I was, of who I was about to become. My son looked up to me, and my brother trusted me. I was living on borrowed time. I was not yet, to them, infested with rot.

      The chain saw ripped through the interfering branch and it tumbled to the ground. I moved the bucket closer to the astronaut’s body. The smell was sharp, but not yet foul. In the dark tint of his face shield, I saw a reflection from above, the jagged end of a limb that did not survive his fall. The crows had been on him; there were droppings on his chest. If only, I thought. If only this were the hardest thing. I reached around Michael Kirkland’s waist and pulled him toward me. He wasn’t stiff. Inside his suit, broken bones bent him in the wrong places. I laid him as best I could across the box, and held on for the journey down.

      I like the texture of bark, the feel of wood in my hands, the staunchness of a tree that is connected and enduring. In a piece of wood a man can sense the forbearance of all that has come before, and the juice of this earth, with a sensuality not unlike lust. I craved a man with such steadiness, though it would be years before I realized it.