Timothy Johnston - The Current

Tom Sutter. Sheriff Sutter. The name conjured blue eyes and a small room and the taste of cigarette smoke and the feeling of choking on your own voice.

Lastly, and abruptly, as if she’d been putting off the true point of the letter and must write it quickly to get through it, she wrote, Danny, I’m sorry to tell you we buried old Wyatt too. It was his time, and his pain is over .

Old Wyatt, that old outlaw. Gone.

Whatever Holden was saying about his own childhood dog, he finished and fixed his eyes on Danny.

“I won’t ask you again to stay,” said Holden. “But I will say one thing since you’re going anyway, and just so you get the whole picture here.”

Danny waited. Billy snapped something hard into place.

“I did a check on you, Daniel Young from Minnesota. Not an all-out background check like I do on some guys. Hell, most guys. But you… you were kind of the opposite of most guys.”

Danny said nothing.

“I one time hired this guy, crackerjack framer, and six months later I find out he used to teach poetry at Princeton.”

Danny waited.

“So,” Holden said. “Before I hired you I got on the internet, and lo and behold.”

There was a rap on the door then and the door opened and the trailer rocked on its wheels and a man’s head appeared, but he did not enter. It was Jones, the foreman.

“Give us one more minute here, Vernon.”

“Sure thing, Ben.” Jones stepped back out and the door shut and the trailer rocked once more and settled.

“I was never charged,” Danny said.

“I know you weren’t. I can read.” Holden shrugged. “I just wanted you to know I knew, that’s all.” He sat forward and shifted his calculator to some better angle. “You go ahead and punch out and I’ll cut you a check.”

Danny stood where he was. He studied the inside of his cap. “I guess I just have one question,” he said.

“Why’d I hire you?”

He looked up. “Yes, sir.”

Holden sat staring at the old calculator. “My dad used to say a man can only prove himself once in this business, good or bad, and that’s while he’s your man. I’ve always tried to keep that in mind.”

Danny punched his time card and stood by as Holden entered the figures into the calculator and ripped the receipt from the machine, as he wrote out the check and ripped that from the book and handed it over.

“Stay outta trouble, Danny.”

“Yes, sir,” he said, and he turned then and found Billy Ramos watching him, and he said, “See you around, Billy,” and Billy said in his rubbery voice, “See you around, Danny,” and Danny stepped from the office and nodded to Jones—who nodded back and stepped into the trailer while it was still rocking and shut the door behind him.

THE OLD DEAD tamarack had been there long enough, stopped in its fall by the lower boughs of a balsam fir and doing the balsam no good either, so he gathered his gear and walked to the site just a few paces into the woods and broomed the snow from a crook in the branches of the tamarack and wedged the chainsaw there and broomed off the rest of the tree. Then he took up the snow shovel and cleared a path along the fall line, and when that was finished he fetched down the chainsaw again and stood studying the tree. Like a man saying last words, though saying nothing. No other sound but his own smoky breaths. Finally he looked up into the branches overhead for widow-makers and seeing none he pulled the choke and jerked the cord. The engine came to life and he worked the throttle trigger to keep it running. Cold gray Sunday morning and these woods his church. The revving saw the only sermon he cared to hear.

He lopped off the limbs, then dropped the tree into the path, and he’d begun bucking it into lengths when there was a flash of light in the corner of his vision and he stood to watch the white sedan pull into his drive and come to a stop. His heart pitching strangely because he knew the car—had seen it dozens of times around town, on the roads, in the time since Sutter had retired and gone civilian. The driver’s door opening now and a figure stepping out wearing Sutter’s sunglasses and Sutter’s canvas jacket, and where was this, where was he, was he dreaming? He removed the fogged safety glasses and looked again and as he did so Sutter turned his head and Gordon saw the dark ponytail and his heart swung back to its place and he shook his head at himself—old fool, what did you think?

He held still, watching her through the trees. She looked at the house and she looked at the outbuilding, and then she turned toward the woods and looked right at him and he realized the saw was still running, puttering low but puttering all the same in that silence. She raised a hand to him, then began making her way toward him through the snow. When she reached the woods where the snow was not so deep she paused to kick her boots one against the other as you would at someone’s doorstep, then she took off the sunglasses and continued on to the small clearing where he stood beside the fallen tamarack.

Her mouth moved and he cut the engine and set the saw down on the tree.

“Say again?”

“I said, Mr. Burke?” She was winded from her walk through the deep snow and trying not to be. Bright pink blotches on her pale face.

“I am.”

“I’m Audrey Sutter. Tom Sutter’s daughter?”

“I know who you are.”

The girl nodded. Looking right at him, her face so smooth and young but with Sutter’s blue eyes.

He said, “I’m sorry about your father.”

“Thank you. Thank you for coming to the service.”

“Well. Wanted to pay my respects. He was a good man.”

“Thank you.” The girl standing there with both hands in the big pockets of that jacket that made her look so small. Young, pretty girl. Look you in the eye. Looking to see did you mean what you said, so don’t look away, give the man’s daughter that much, at least.

She stepped up for a closer look at the tamarack. As if to inspect his work.

“Will you burn all this yourself?”

“Yes, I will.”

“You won’t sell it.”

“No, I won’t.”

She looked up into the branches overhead. A male cardinal landed on an upper bough, sending a small avalanche of powder falling without a sound. The bird whistling for its mate.

“You should have something on your head,” he said.

“I know.” The girl nodding, looking all around. She wanted to say something, had driven out here to say something, but he couldn’t help her say it and he didn’t know that he cared to hear it anyway.

“You like trees?” he said finally, and the girl looked at him.

“Do I like them?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“I like them,” she said.

“All right then, follow me,” he said. And he turned and began down a path through the trees, holding the boughs so they wouldn’t whip back on her, she following close behind in his tracks.

HE POINTED TO the trees as they walked and seemed to give them their names: Jack pine. Black spruce. Balsam fir. Hemlock. White pine. He told her his old granddad was a logger from the old days and knew everything there was to know about trees. Signed up when he was fourteen and worked every job there was, you name it: Chokerman, chaser, high climber. Faller. Bucker.

“He’d show you his scars,” he went on. “Just everywhere. His face. Showed me one time where a one-inch jagger—that’s a sliver of cable wire—went into his hand one summer and where it come out the next on his thigh.” He held a wing of black spruce for her until he was sure she had it.

“Funny thing is, I do believe a tree was the most beautiful thing in the world to that old man. When he looked at one he saw a hundred things all at once. Logging put clothes on his kids’ backs, food on their plates. That’s all there was to it.”