The Probable Future

Well, of course Jimmy knew that. And if the truth be told, he couldn’t quite explain what he was doing. He’d been snagged by love, when he was the last person anyone would expect to be a target. At any rate, Jimmy had never shown up at the appointed hour of his community service. Because of this, work on the old tree was progressing slowly. If Jimmy had been there, he might have been dizzy from the sound of buzzing or feared being stung as bees circled round, but Matt only paid attention to the wood. Oak was beautiful, one of his favorites, but he loved fragrant fruitwood as well. Peach-wood stayed on a woodcutter’s hands and he couldn’t wash the scent away. Applewood looked pink in the center. Plumwood had a heart inside its trunk; strike it once, and the whole tree would fall.

Matt had received several requests for the cut logs from this old oak—Mrs. Gibson wanted to make a bookshelf out of it, Enid Frost had requested firewood for the woodstove in the train station, old Eli Hathaway came round in his taxi and had picked up a quarter-sized piece of wood which he vowed he would keep in his pocket so that he could always touch wood for luck. Cynthia Elliot stopped by on her way to work at the tea house, and as she watched Matt cut up the logs, she had tears in her eyes. Cynthia had recently turned sixteen but she looked like a kid with those dozens of braids in her hair, still riding through town on her bicycle, bemoaning the fate of a tree. She’d walked past it in kindergarten, after all. She’d tangled a kite in its branches one summer and watched, terrified, as her brother Jimmy climbed so high to rescue the kite she thought he’d disappear into the sky. She’d climbed it the first time she’d run away from home, and had spent the whole night in its branches, convinced she would never speak to her mother again. But in the morning she’d felt comforted; instead of hitchhiking to New York or Boston, she’d walked home.

“Your brother’s supposed to be helping me out here, but I may just leave part of the trunk. It may still grow,” Matt told Cynthia, when he shut off his saw, removed his goggles and headset, and saw she was crying. “The one side, at any rate.”

Sure enough, half of the tree had unexpectedly begun to leaf out, weeks behind its season, but not entirely dead. Several grades from the elementary school had come on field trips to visit the oldest tree in the county. They’d practiced their cursive while writing letters to the mayor which protested the cutting down of the oak. The Friday before, the entire third grade had circled round the tree as Matt worked. The boys and girls had been holding hands as they chanted: One, two three, don’t make firewood out of me! Four, five, six, I’m more than a pile of sticks!

Another man might have felled the tree completely, despite such pleas, certainly it would have been easier, but Matt had decided he would try his best to salvage the half that was still somewhat healthy. He worked late, and on the weekends. People in town got used to hearing a saw, just as they became accustomed to bees flying through the air, a buzzing cloud that hovered above backyards and along lanes. There was a great deal of yellow in the air when Matt noticed someone familiar walk by. He took off his goggles, thinking they were obscuring his vision, but, no, there she was. Rebecca Sparrow stood on the street corner, wearing jeans and work boots, a backpack slung over one shoulder.

“You’re staring,” she called up to him, and indeed he was, even though by now he had realized the girl on the sidewalk was his niece, Stella.

“You look exactly like her.” Matt climbed down from the ladder that rested against the oak. “Have you seen the portrait in the reading room at the library? There used to be a miniature, given to Rebecca by its painter, Samuel Hathaway, but that was lost somehow.”

“Sorry. I haven’t been to the library.” That particular lie burned in Stella’s mouth, so she accepted a Life Saver from the roll that Matt offered, even though she hated him at the moment. What would he be to her if he and her mother wound up together? An uncle? A stepfather? Nothing at all? Maybe she should burn that thesis of his that was right now in her backpack. Maybe it would serve him right. They stared up at the old tree. The air was filled with amber pollen and bees.

“That’s an eyesore,” Stella said. “What an ugly tree.”

“Your friend Cynthia cries whenever she rides by.”

“She cries on a regular basis. She’s so sensitive she breaks out in a rash if she sees a sign for a lost dog. Everyone knows Cynthia is too kindhearted for her own good.”

“Unlike her brother?”

Matt continued looking at the tree, but he could feel the heat of Stella’s glare. All the same, he’d seen Jimmy mooning around after her. The last time Jimmy had been in trouble, the community service he’d been assigned was helping to clear the snow off the common. He’d been a taciturn and surly helper. Maybe it was just as well Jimmy hadn’t shown up for work; if Matt remembered correctly, the only thing the boy had said in his three days of service was Am I done?