The rope went slack, and the white oak began to fall, but it was happening much sooner than it should, and it was not going in the right direction, and for some reason I could see Rudy too well. He was close to me when he should have been distant. He was meant to be on the ground, but he was rising into the air, and his saw, the 394XP, was flung from him, a dandelion from its stem.

I didn’t understand, and then I understood.

Instead of breaking at the hinge where Rudy had opened it, the weight of the tree had pulled its roots up out of the earth like a primordial creature waking up and opening its mouth. Rudy, standing at the base of the tree, was carried up with the root ball. He rose into the air, his arms wheeling backward, his saw disappearing into the new cavern in the earth. Rudy was up, ten feet up, fifteen feet, more, before he pitched forward and came careening down the trunk of the tree as it fell. He skidded off the trunk and rolled to the ground. But the tree kept moving. The trunk hurried toward him. He was lying down and it was the white oak’s plan to lie on top of him. I was also a tree, rooted where I stood. It’s true there was no time, no real time to act, but in my dreams again and again I step forward and I catch the oak tree just in time. I catch it, and Rudy rolls free.

I did not catch the oak.

Instead, there was silence, a frozen frame, a pause where there should have been a crash. The world regained itself so I could look at it again.

When I did, I saw that Rudy had not been crushed, but lay panting, nose nearly touching wood. The uppermost spire of the trunk had got caught up on younger oaks that grew next to it, a tangle we had hoped to avoid by felling it at an angle. The massive oak hung suspended in the air. As I would have it in dreams, Rudy rolled free.

He let out a string of curse words and yelled to me, Get back get back get back.

“I am back,” I yelled. “You get back,” and we both ran. We ran to the knoll at the head of Aldi’s driveway. We dropped to the ground and just breathed in and out for a while.

“What a mess,” he said. “We shouldn’t go near that thing again. You couldn’t pay me.”

“What about your chain saw?” I asked.

“She can have it,” he said.

“She?”

“The Mother Earth,” he said.

“What are we going to do?” I asked. “We can’t leave the tree hanging there.”