That day, swaddled away inside my buzzing container, I used my classified password and I found the pipeline map. It looked like a restless worm, a parasite writhing across five states. Or it didn’t. Or it looked like something innocent, banal, businesslike. Or it didn’t even look like a pipeline at all, it looked like a timeline. The construction had already begun, and it was moving fast. You could see it on the map. The red line was where they were working. The green line was where they hadn’t got to yet but meant to get to soon. The red line pulsed farther south each day.

I scrolled down until I could see our county, the lines folded tightly together, layer on layer to signify the hills. Then I moved my finger along the screen until I found home. There was our twenty acres, which barely existed. In some people’s consideration it didn’t exist at all. But if I squinted I could just make it out, the ridgeline, the camper, the ducks, the garden, the house, the sugar maple trees, the old tires, the truck leaking oil, the scrap metal pile, the creek, the acorn barrels, the used condoms by the side of the road, Helen, Lily, even the damn snakes. I couldn’t see Perley. What I could see was that lime-green line, and where it cut through. Not to the right of it. Not to the left of it. Marie was right. They planned to aim that high-pressure gas straight down the center of Rudy’s nursery.

13

HELEN

By the big saw, Rudy meant the Husqvarna 394XP, with the bar so long that it pulled him to the ground. To use it, he had to brace it against his thigh. We stood in the early morning cold with Aldi Birch. The three of us gaped up at the ancient white oak dwarfing Aldi’s garage. “We’ll use the big saw when it comes time to fell it,” Rudy said. “But we’ll start small, way up top, limbing. We’ll take it down in sections, take off some of the weight, make it a little shorter. It’ll take us a while. Maybe a week. Maybe more. I’ve been thinking and not thinking about this job. Probably for years now.”