Men in the Making Read Free Page B

organic. Something dies—even a tree—it rarely goes willingly. It wants you to smell what it was in life, or what it could have been if you'd had the sense to let it go on living. It wants you to remember. Trees, like angry husbands and wives, always want the last word.
    When I was ten, my father held me in front of him at Uncle Weldon's processing house in Odessa. After Dad had me choose the calf, my cousin Frank loaded a bullet into a special sledgehammer, and when he swung there was a dead, dull sound—no resonance—like maybe he'd dropped a wrecking ball into quicksand. Later, with the calf hanging from a hook inside, my uncle pulled a knife up through the smooth hide of the animal's underside and stepped back as the bulge of intestines slumped forward with a sucking sound and plopped onto the slick cement floor. What I remember most was Dad's breathing, the way his chapped lips clamped shut below his wiry mustache, the way his nostrils flared as he inhaled, sucking the smell of the animal into his lungs, keeping it alive awhile longer inside him.
    Usually, for me, it's the same with trees, but lately it doesn't matter. The rain is freezing in midair and the stripped logs in the mill yard are sealed with skins of ice. It's winter in Logan County, Arkansas, and you can't smell a damn thing.
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    This evening, before Red and I took care of the smell in the debarking drum, on my way to Lonnie's wake the clouds were gray slate, perfectly smooth, spitting pebbles of sleet down on the countryside. The trees beside the road stood coated with ice, polished skeletons with bark-brown marrow. My driver's side headlight has been out for a week, and the dark and the ice on the road and the thought of coming face-to-face with Lonnie's mother were all mixed up like frozen slush in my gut.
    Dangerous as it was, I stomped on the gas and rolled the windows down, and for the ten-mile stretch of highway I sped cold and half blind and sliding through turns toward town. I told myself that I just wanted it done, that I'd make my appearance at Wickman's Funeral Home and get it over with so I could head to my house and pour a whiskey and have a seat on the back porch. But what I really wanted, I suppose, was what I've wanted all winter—to be normal, a forty-seven-year-old lumber boss with a son gone off to college in Texas and an ex-wife who runs a nursery in Abilene. To forget about this poor kid who got himself killed in my debarking machine. I wanted the clouds to clear so I could sit in the sun on top of Magazine Mountain. I wanted my oldest boy back, wanted him alive. And I wanted like hell to smell the sticky insides of trees.
    Now, if you were there in that truck near the edge of town, with sleet stinging your face and the highway ice slapping against the fender wells, and you decided you'd had enough of this maniac driver you'd somehow become and did what I was tempted each mile to do—that is, turn the truck around and let Lonnie's family and friends tend to his wake—you'd drive five miles west, just shy of halfway back to the mill on Highway 10, and then, near the foot of the mountain, on the other side of the road near a stand of pin oaks, you'd slow down, hang a right just after the yellow mailbox. From that point on, you could put it in neutral and coast all the way to the barn, half a mile, the grade just steep enough to pull you home, gravel dredged from the Petit Jean River crunching under your tires the entire way, and when a few hours later, after Lonnie's wake and after a trip to the mill with Red, I made it home to join you on the porch for a drink, I'd give you the nickel tour and tell you how the place used to be a farm. Chickens and pigs mostly, and corn.
    I'd say that the old boy who sold it to me kept rambling on about the soil. "Uncommon dark for these parts," he'd said, spitting tobacco through the gap of his teeth. So proud, he seemed, and sad to be selling, that I didn't have the heart