…holding his phone up toward the sky, turning slowly in a circle, as if the signal might drop out of the clouds. The big white pine had come down across the path with a sound like a cannon shot, and one thick end of it had rolled onto the leg of my husband, pinning him to the dirt. The chainsaw lay in the leaves, still ticking. Jim was awake. He was gray as paper, but his eyes were open, and he said in a calm, dry voice, “Gail, honey, I believe I have done something stupid.” I dropped to my knees beside him. “Vern, what are you doing?” I shouted. “Come help me lift!”
The husband of Darlene, a thin man of seventy with a bad heart of his own, stared at me with his mouth open. “I have been trying to call,” he said. “There is no signal. I did not want to move him. I read you are not supposed to move the injured.” “Vern, put the phone down,” I said, and my own voice surprised me. “Find me a pole. Any pole.” He ran into the brush and came back with a long, stout branch. Together we jammed it under the trunk and leaned with all our weight. The log shifted a few inches. Jim cried out, and I dragged him free by the shoulders, and we lay there, three old people in the pine needles, gasping.
Vern ran up the trail to the road, and by some miracle there was a deputy in a patrol car at the end of the lane, looking for a lost kayaker. In ten minutes, a county ambulance came bouncing down the dirt road, and two paramedics knelt beside my husband with a splint and a blanket. Jim joked the whole time. “Is it bad?” he asked the young man cutting his pant leg. “It is a clean break, sir,” the paramedic said. “You are lucky the log did not roll all the way.” My husband turned his head to me. “Gail, I told Darlene I would clear that tree before the weekend,” he said. “I should have waited for the man she hired.”
A heavy pine log left across a trail gave one wife the weekend to bring her husband back to the dock in Duluth.
I rode to the hospital in Duluth in the back of the ambulance, holding the good hand of my husband, and I made my decisions on the way. Jim would not be clearing another tree, hauling another log or running another chainsaw for his sister, ever again. He had spent seven summer weekends cutting storm damage on her property, and Darlene would pay for a professional tree crew to finish the job. She would also pay for his hospital bills, his cast and his physical therapy. And she would drive down to our house herself, with a casserole, and apologize to him in person.
The doctor at St. Luke set the leg that night. It was a clean fracture of the shin, and it would heal, he said, in about eight weeks. Jim lay in the bed with his foot up on a pillow and a grin on his face, as pleased as a man who had survived a war. “Gail, I did not even feel it until later,” he said. “It was just a thump. Then I thought, well, there goes the weekend.” I laughed, and then I cried. “Jim, you are seventy years old,” I said. “You had back surgery two years ago. You promised me.” He squeezed my hand. “I know. I am sorry.”
Darlene arrived at the hospital the next morning in her new pontoon captain hat, trailing her husband like a boat. She stopped at the foot of the bed and looked at her brother for a long, quiet minute. “Jimmy, I did not know about the tree,” she said. “I thought you came to relax.” Jim shrugged on his pillow. “I came because you said it was too much for Vern,” he said. “It was.” She took a breath. “I have been so wrapped up in the cabin and the dock and the boat that I forgot you were my brother and not my caretaker.” She gripped the bed rail. “I am so sorry.”
I watched Darlene at the end of the bed, a plump, anxious woman of sixty five, and I realized with a surprise that she was frightened. All summer, she had told herself that a loved one working beside her was an honor to him. She had never imagined that it would cost him a leg. I stood up and offered her my chair. “Darlene, sit,” I said. “You are not the villain. You are just a sister who forgot to ask.” She sat. She put her hand on his. They did not speak for a long time, two white haired people holding hands in a hospital room, with the afternoon sun pouring through the blinds.
The money consequences were handled with grace. Darlene paid every hospital bill, the full cost of the physical therapy and the crew that cleared her lot, a total of nine thousand, four hundred dollars. She also sold the pontoon boat, quietly, and told us she had never really liked boats. When the cast came off in August, Jim walked to the mailbox on his own, leaning on a cane, and he waved at the neighbors like a politician. Two weeks later, Darlene and Vern came for dinner, and Jim took the first slice of her pie.
In the name of the father of my husband, Arne Lindgren, who passed eighteen years ago and who cut pulpwood on the North Shore for forty winters, I started the Arne Axe Fund. It pays for licensed tree crews, protective gear and first aid training for older homeowners and cabin owners in St. Louis and Lake counties who cannot safely handle a storm cleanup, and for the family members who feel obliged to help. In the first year, we cleared storm damage on sixty three properties. A retired logger of eighty four, watching a crew drop a pine safely, said, “I wish somebody had done this for me thirty years ago.”
In July, we drove back up to the cabin for a weekend. Jim sat on the dock in a lawn chair with his cane across his knees and his fishing line in the lake, while Darlene brought him a plate of blueberry pie and a cup of coffee. A crew of three young men was working in the woods behind the cabin, and the sound of their saws rolled across the water, steady and safe. Jim lifted his coffee toward the pines. “Gail, that is how a tree ought to come down,” he said. “With somebody who knows what they are doing.” He winked. “And with me far away.”
