Charlie Thrush's land was a dozen miles southwest of Fredercksburg. His home, made of native stone, sat near the center of a small valley laced with spring-fed streams and was heavily wooded with chinquapin and live oak. A thread of sycamores crowded the banks of the largest creek that ran the length of the valley.
Even though Charlie was not a rancher, he'd always liked the idea of it, and after he and Louise had lived in their new home for several years, he'd quickly settled into the life of a gentleman rancher.
This afternoon Charlie had a fairly simple problem to deal with. For the last four years an old dead sycamore had stood solitary and forlorn near the back corner of Charlie's office, a three-room building nestled in a sycamore stand seventy-five yards from the main house. Charlie had been meaning to cut it down every year after it died, and now its skeletal presence had become symbolic, a kind of nagging reminder of his procrastination. Finally he put it on his “to do ”list for this month, and today was the day he had set aside in his mind to finally get the job done.
He had meant to get started early while the day was still cool, but he had gotten sidetracked in the peach orchard, and by the time he thought of the tree again it was late morning and he realized he wouldn't get to it until after lunch.
It was a hot postnoontime, with the sun standing still in the meridian, when Charlie headed for the tool shed with a couple of Mexican laborers who had come through a few days earlier looking for work. They'd heard that Charlie was clearing the underbrush around an oak mot spring several hundred yards from the house. Charlie had put the men to work and was letting them live in a shack not far from the spring. But the truth was, they'd turned out not to be very good workers, and he'd decided he was going to let them go. But yesterday he'd told them he wanted them to help him cut down the old sycamore. He'd let them go tomorrow.
With the men carrying the sixteen-foot ladder and Charlie lugging his twenty-inch Stihl chain saw, they headed for the tree. The Mexicans raised the ladder as high as it would go and leaned it against the sycamore in the fork of one of its largest bare branches. They steadied it while Charlie serviced the chain saw and then clipped the saw to the harness he'd made for carrying the saw up into trees when he worked alone.
Working a chain saw from a ladder could be exhausting, so he had rigged the harness so that he could turn off the saw and let it hang from the strap, freeing his hands to reposition himself and steady his footing when he started on another part of the tree. For a man his age, it was slow work.
He climbed up the ladder, steadied himself, and started the saw. He revved the throttle trigger a few times until the saw idled easily, and then he started cutting, reaching up to cut the higher limbs while his energy and muscles were still fresh.
As the limbs tumbled down, the Mexicans gathered them on the ground and dragged them over to one side. It went fast since the limbs were bare of foliage, and he was soon ready to shift the ladder to another position. But then something went wrong.
Just as he was about to cut off the saw, the throttle trigger snapped and the saw revved up to a whining full-throttle scream. Bracing himself against his thighs on the ladder, he reached over with his other hand to the kill switch. But it didn't work. It slipped back and forth freely without cutting off the engine.
With the engine screaming, he moved the chain brake forward with his forearm, but the chain kept churning; the brake bolts were too loose to engage it.
Then Charlie felt his ladder move.
He looked down and saw that the two Mexicans had attached a rope to one of the legs of the ladder and were standing back out of the way. One of them was slowly pulling the ladder out from under him. It was like seeing a bird fly backward or a coyote climbing the sky. It didn't relate to anything logical at all. It just looked ridiculous.
He yelled at them: What the hell are you doing?! What the hell?? Hey!!
In an instant, with the heavy chain saw screaming in his hand, the horror of possibilities flew at him:
If he dropped the saw to hang on to the tree limb with both arms, the saw would swing from the harness and the torque of the whining engine would pull the chain into him, spinning crazily, cutting his legs off…
If he hung on to the limb with one arm and the chain saw with the other, eventually his strength would give out and he'd fall, and from this height he'd surely tumble onto the churning chain…
If he could step up another step and rest the saw on the limb before the ladder was pulled out from under him, he could unclip the saw from the harness and let it fall free…
He stepped up one step even as he felt the ladder going sideways out from under him, and for an instant the screaming saw teetered on the limb and then slipped over on the other side as the ladder was jerked away.
It all happened in one smooth, fluid stream of action, not in discrete moments, but in one continuous flow of time. It is said that at the moment of death the sense of hearing is the last to go. He couldn't really say. The sensation of the shrilly whining chain ripping wildly into him was startlingly painless. It eviscerated him, thrashing about inside him, the torque of the engine whipping it about like a frenzied, live thing, reaming him out as if he were a gutted deer hanging in a tree.
He smelled the hot engine spewing oil and gasoline.
Numbness came quickly, and he wasn't sure how or when he let go of the limb with his arms. He was aware of his body whirling around and around, entangled with the pitching saw. He was aware of being whipped about. He actually heard the liquidy sound of himself being flung and splashed.
He thought an arm went with a swipe of the chain.
He saw sunlight and earth and the Mexicans looking up and watching, their expressions curious but not surprised. He saw the trees and the woods and sunlight and even dark spatters flying through the air.
Somewhere in his midsection something separated and pulled loose and fell away.
The whining was vicious and deafening. His lungs flew out of his mouth. His sight failed. It wasn't so bad; and the screaming faded away, too, and though he felt nothing, he was aware of the sensation of swinging.