BooksBarbecue
Back Stay and Fight
Chapters (28)
  1. Title Page
  2. Copyright Notice
  3. Dedication
  4. PART I
  5. 1
  6. 2
  7. 3
  8. 4
  9. PART II
  10. 5
  11. 6
  12. 7
  13. 8
  14. 9
  15. PART III
  16. 10
  17. 11
  18. 12
  19. 13
  20. 14
  21. 15
  22. 16
  23. 17
  24. 18
  25. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
  26. Also by Madeline Ffitch
  27. A Note About the Author
  28. Newsletter Sign-up

And he began to shake and fling himself around and make a noise like, Yayayayayayaya, and I put on my ear protection, and I aimed at that foot of oakwood, and I sprayed Rudy’s cut with shot, reloading from Rudy’s box of shells. I sprayed it until the cut gave way, breaking the trunk in two. Then the lower part of the trunk, freed from the weight of its upper half, levered itself up into the air and rocked back on its roots, closing the creature’s mouth, sending up clouds of dust and leaves, sealing Rudy’s big saw down into the earth forever. Just like that, the oak stood straight up again, the jagged stub gaping upward, its roots back in the ground. The top half of the tree tore through the underlayers, clawing its way to the ground with the noise and the weight of an avalanche. Thunder. It hammered debris down on Aldi Birch’s roof, but it missed the garage. By less than two inches, but it missed. Rudy whooped and began to laugh, and I dropped the gun and jumped up and down many times, hollering, until I fell backward to the ground. Rudy threw himself down next to me, and we lay there looking into the forest and into the sky and then we turned to look at each other.

My heart was still and blank. I felt no regret and no loneliness, no worry about Perley or about the future, no attachment to anything except to the narrow escape from death.

Rudy and I looked at each other. He was propped up on his elbow, my hands were behind my head. I noticed for the first time his Adam’s apple, nearly hidden under all that hair, his eyes the same stupid color as mine, gray with an orange ring. We looked at each other.

Then we heard the yell.

Here we are dealing in matters of scale. We had been so focused on the sheer girth and weight, the incomprehensible muchness of Aldi’s ancient oak, that we had failed to notice how heavy and destructive a normal oak tree branch can be. When the old oak was freed, it had torn a branch off one of the younger oaks. It was this young branch that punched a hole in Aldi’s garage roof, that dealt Aldi Birch a glancing blow to the left hip as he stepped out his door.

14

PERLEY