Desmond read the number again, with his finger running under the numerals, like a boy reading a menu in a foreign language. He is sixty five, a short, pink, neat man in a green blazer and a clover pin, with the loud good humor of a man who has sold insurance for forty years, and his good humor had gone out of him all at once. “Earl,” he said, “is this number real?” “It is,” I said. “Eight million, four hundred thousand dollars is what they paid me. The line you are holding says one hundred forty two thousand. That is the price on the truck my nephew is trying to sell.”
Down on King Street the bagpipes had reached the corner, and a long skirl rolled up through the open windows. Nobody on the porch moved. Patsy came forward from the doorway, in her green dress and the pearls of her mother. My wife is sixty six, a trim, quick, red haired woman with a nose full of freckles and a firm Irish chin, and she came to stand next to me. “Dez,” she said, “I want you to hear something. I told Earl to wait. I begged him to tell you in June. He said no. He said he wanted to see what you would say to him if you thought he was only a man with a vest.”
Connor was standing at the end of the porch, next to a table of green cupcakes, holding a pint glass with both hands. My nephew is thirty three, a bearded, broad shouldered, cheerful man with a climbing harness callus on each palm, and he looked at me with an expression I had seen on dogs that have eaten something on the counter. “Uncle Earl, I was going to tell you,” he said. “I had a job in Mount Pleasant. A big oak. I did not have the money for a bucket, and your truck was sitting. I told Big Mike you had signed off.”
An orange parking vest hung on a porch rail during a parade and gave one tree climber the afternoon to bring his nephew back to the rope.
“Connor,” I said, “the oak in Mount Pleasant. Was it healthy?” He blinked. “No. It had a cavity. It was leaning over a house.” “Did you rig a line?” “Uncle Earl.” “Did you set a second anchor?” The pint glass shook in his hands. “I used the bucket. I did not need a rope.” I took a step toward him. I did not raise my voice. “I have buried three friends who thought they did not need a rope. Do you know what a cavity in a live oak does under a load?” He swallowed. “It lets go.”
Desmond made a small noise. He sat down on the porch rail beside the green beer, and he looked, suddenly, like an old man. “Earl,” he said, “I did not know any of that. I did not know the work was dangerous. I thought it was just trees. Trimming. A man with a saw.” He rubbed his eyes. “I called you the stump man for forty years. I thought I was calling you a clown.” He looked up. “I think I was calling you a hero, and I could not say so.”
That caught me off guard. I stood on the porch in my orange vest, which I had not taken off, and I found that I could not speak. Patsy took my hand. “Earl,” she whispered, “say something.” But what I wanted to say was too large. I only nodded at Desmond, and he nodded back, and for a moment the parade was passing, and the pipes were loud, and two old men were looking at each other across a porch in Charleston, finally, after forty years, without anything between them.
I told Connor what he would do. The bucket truck, the chipper, and the stump grinder would be returned to the yard by Big Mike that night. The buyer, a utility services company out of Raleigh, would drop the matter. And Connor would take the climbing course the buyer offered for new hires, six weeks, on the ground, with a hard hat, a harness, a rope and a second anchor. “And if you pass it,” I said, “I will climb the first tree with you. A small one. I will hold the line.” Connor put down his beer. His lip was trembling. “Okay,” he said. “Okay, Uncle Earl.”
The parade passed. The crowd on King Street roared at the last float, a papier mache leprechaun forty feet tall, and Desmond stood up, wiped his eyes, and said, “Earl, may I buy you a corned beef sandwich? I have never bought you anything.” I said that I would like that. We sat on the front step with paper plates, in our green and our orange, and talked about hurricanes. I told him about Hugo. He told me about the claims. We found out we had been to the same houses.
Connor passed the course in October. He was the oldest man in the class, by nine years, and he took it so seriously that the instructor sent me a note. On a Saturday in November, I stood at the base of a young live oak in a park near the harbor, and he went up with a rope and two anchors, and a pulley, and a handsaw. He moved the way I used to move, and a little more carefully. I held the line. When he came down, his face was shining. “Uncle Earl,” he said, “it is so beautiful up there.” “I know,” I said.
They put my name on a plaque in the training yard in the spring, at the insistence of Patsy, and Desmond made a speech. He made it badly. He cried through the middle and used the word stump three times, each time with a kind of reverence, and the crowd of young climbers in their orange helmets clapped like thunder. After it was over, he came to me and said, “Earl, I wrote it on a napkin. May I give it to you?” I unfolded it. In his small, neat hand it said, To the stump man, with respect. I have it in my wallet.
