Free Circle View by Brad Barkley Page A

work, after he has seen her pay the preacher five dollars, and already in his mind are the seeds of his leaving—not to college or vo-tech as she and Garrett had always hoped, but away in the night seven years later in his daddy’s car, its tires gone soft from parking so long. She never blamed him for leaving behind any of it, but he must have always thought she did. And now this boy the age he must have been then, that night he left or the day at the graveside tugging his collar in the suit that needed the sleeves let out a little. But everything runs together and she can’t remember.
    â€œYou need work done, lady?” he asks. “Your grass needs mowing bad,” he says, then looks away. Etta looks down at herself and pulls closed her housecoat.
    â€œIf you got a saw I’ll pay you to cut down these trees.” She can’t remember if this has occurred to her before, to cut them down. Police took the hatchet and never brought it back to her. She wonders if this boy can hear the trees, what they might say to him.
    â€œThese trees?” he says, as if in answer to her thoughts. He straightens his ball cap, red lightning bolts machine stitched on the front. “When I was a little kid we called those Spooky Woods. Everybody thought you was a witch or something.”
    â€œWell, they don’t mean a thing to me. Trash trees.” She lifts her chin and reaches for the missing belt on her housecoat. She closes her eyes to see herself all the ways others see her: Miz Cayce, the witch, the old crazy lady .
    â€œThere’s a bunch of ‘em anyhow,” he says, scratching his head under his hat.
    â€œTwo dollars apiece,” she says, trying to remember if there is any money in the house. She thinks of the blueglass tobacco jar in the kitchen where Garrett stored away his dollars for six years, saving to buy more land for more trees, and how for six years Garrett Junior stole out of the jar, she the only one knowing it and never telling, never letting on, like it was some secret conversation between them. After the gun in Garrett’s mouth she put the money in still, and still he took it for the seven years until he left, but during that time it never meant anything, a secret kept from no one.
    The boy rummages the cart to find a chain saw and starts it up. She watches him bend and guide the saw (slowly, as if he is leading a dance partner) into the base of the first tree in the staggered row. The saw deepens its noise, spitting out white chips and blue, lingering smoke, the chips covering the boy’s shoulders and the hair that sticks out from beneath his cap. When he is almost through the first trunk the saw screeches, kicks back at the boy, and dies. The silence that follows whistles in Etta’s ears.
    â€œHit a damn knot or something,” the boy shouts. He shrugs, and the sawdust falls from him. She remembers now, like water unwaving itself. Garrett coming through the door with the tiny crabapples crushed in his fists, his mouth gaping as if his words have fallen out of it. She knows the smell of crabapples—a sticky-sweet molting—from her girlhood, as she knows it now mixed in the smell of chain oil, as she has known it always, as if by chance alone it is the odor of her living. Garrett says nothing, but rubs at his face as if to wipe away tears that won’t come, smearing the jam of the crushed apples in his red beard. She has to remember back to think of the gun still hidden under the dusty shoes in the box of letters on the floor under her bed. Her first thought is Where are the McIntoshes? but then she understands that they are not anywhere, that what Garrett had bought from the man on the same day she hid the gun was the absence of McIntoshes. He walks out through the back of the house, flies swarming at the crabapple mess on his face. She hears bellowing from Garrett, then hears the hatchet he bought to prune back the branches of his apple trees