Steve Hamilton: Blood is the Sky

The nest was hanging from one of the birch trees. They had already been smoked out the night of the fire, the nest partially caved in by the spray of the fire hoses. They were trying to rebuild, just like I was, but they had run out of time. Now half-crazed by the cold weather, most of them near the end of their natural lives, they saw me moving around below them, rattling around with my chain saw. They decided to go down fighting.

I slapped two off the back of my neck, another off my arm. “Crazy fucking things! Get away from me!” The next one caught me right on the cheek and that was it for me. The day was already going bad enough.

I had my extension ladder there, figuring I’d need it eventually, so I braced it up against the birch tree and climbed up with my ax. I was just about to swing at the branch. I was going to take the whole thing down with one good whack, and then I was going to soak the nest with gasoline and set it on fire. Knowing me, I would have emptied the can, a full two gallons of gasoline, and then I would have thrown a lit match right in the middle of it. All the leaves on the ground would have gone up at once and I’d be running around with my pants on fire and both eyebrows singed right off my face.

I stopped myself just in time.

I took a deep breath and climbed back down the ladder. I dropped the ax.

It wasn’t worth it. Watching the nest burn, sending the rest of those hornets to hell. They’d all be dead in another week, anyway.

It was a lesson I had taken most of my life to learn. Sometimes you have to let things go.

The rain came. The dark clouds stayed in the sky. I went back to work.

I had come back up here in 1987. My marriage was over and I was off the police force, with a dead partner in the ground and a bullet in my chest. I came up here intending to sell off the land and the six cabins my father had built, but I didn’t do it. Somehow the Upper Peninsula was just what I needed. It was cold and unforgiving, even in the heart of summer. There was a terrible beauty to the place, and I could be alone up here in a part of the world where being alone was the rule and not the exception. I moved into the first cabin, the cabin I had helped him build myself, back when I was seventeen years old. I stayed up here and lived day to day and never thought I’d have to face my past again.

That didn’t work. It never does.

Hours after I called it a day, I could still feel the buzz of the chain saw in my hands. There was a deep ache in my shoulder, right where they had taken the other two bullets out.

“What was it this time?” Jackie said. He slid a cold Canadian my way.

He was talking about my face, of course. There was a nice little swollen knot under my eye. Whenever something goes wrong, I end up wearing it on my face.

“Hornets,” I said.

“How’s the cabin going?”

“It’s a little slow.”

He nodded his head. He didn’t say a word about how late it was in the season or how much of a fool I was. Jackie understood why I needed to do this.

“You know who could help you,” he said.

I knew. I took a long pull off the bottle and then set it back down on the bar. “I’ve got to get some sleep,” I said. Then I left.

I was just as sore the next morning, but somehow everything felt different. It was all coming back to me, the way you let the chain saw and the ax do the work, the way you work with the grain of the log instead of fighting against it. The logs started fitting together the way they were supposed to. I had the walls two logs high by lunchtime. Of course, that meant it was getting harder and harder to wrestle the logs into position. I’d have to start using the ramps soon, and eventually I’d have to set up some kind of skyline. That would slow me down.

Hell, maybe Jackie was right. There was one man who could really help me.

But I’d be damned if I was going to go ask him.

My father had bought all the land on both sides of this old logging road, nearly a hundred acres in all. He built the six cabins and lived in each one of them off and on over the years, renting out the others to tourists in the summer, hunters in the fall, and snowmobilers in the winter. When I came up here and moved into the first cabin, I kept renting out the rest of them. It was a good way to stay busy without having to go anywhere.

A few years after I moved in, somebody bought the couple of acres between my father’s land and the main road. I was a little worried about what the new owner might do to that land. I had visions of a triple-decker summer home, with every tree knocked down so they could maybe get a view of the lake. But it didn’t happen that way. It was one man, and I watched him build his own cabin by hand. If my father had been around to see it, he would have approved of this man’s work.

I got to know him eventually. You don’t live on the same road up here with one other person without running into each other. I’d plow the road for him. He’d give me some of the venison from his hunts. He didn’t drink, so we never did that together, but we did share an adventure or two. I even played in goal one night for his hockey team. The fact that he was an Ojibwa Indian never got in the way of our friendship.

Until one day he had to make a choice.

I didn’t hear his truck pull up. With the chain saw roaring away, I wouldn’t have heard a tank battalion. I happened to glance at the road and saw his truck parked there. Vinnie Red Sky LeBlanc was standing next to it, watching me. He was wearing his denim jacket with the fur around the collar. I had no idea how long he’d been there.

I shut the chain saw down and wiped my forehead with my sleeve.

“You’re gonna go deaf,” he said. “Where’s your ear protection?”

“I left them around here someplace. Just can’t find them.”

He shook his head at that, then walked right past me to the stacks of logs. Like many Bay Mills Ojibwa, you had to look twice to see the Indian in him. There was a little extra width to his high cheekbones, and a certain calmness in his eyes when he looked at you. You always got the feeling he was thinking carefully about what to say before he said it.

“White pine,” he said.

“Of course.”

“Where’d it come from?”

“Place down near Traverse City.”

“I thought I saw a truck going by,” he said. “That was what, Wednesday?”

“He was supposed to be here Monday.”

“Couple of these logs I wouldn’t use on a doghouse,” he said. “Like this one right here.”

“I know. I was gonna put that one aside.”

He slipped his hands under the log and lifted it. He was maybe three inches shorter than me, and thirty pounds lighter, but I wouldn’t have wanted to fight the man, on the ice or off. He carried the log a few steps and tossed it in the brush.

“That’ll be your waste pile,” he said. “I see another one right down here.”

“You don’t have to do that, Vinnie. I know which ones are bad.”

He went over to the cabin, knelt down, and ran his hand along one of the logs. “You know which ones are bad,” he said, “and yet this one right here seems to be part of your wall already.”

“When did you become the county inspector?” I said. “I didn’t see it in the newspaper.”

He let that one go. “Can I ask why you’re doing this by yourself?”

“My father did it by himself.”

“Did he start building in October?”

“I know I’m not going to finish it,” I said. “I just had to start. I couldn’t wait until spring.”

He smiled at me as he stood up. “Patience was never your strong suit.”

“Vinnie, you always loved this cabin. You told me once you’d buy it off me for a million dollars. You remember?”