Ray Dunbar

Ray Dunbar lived on a dead-end road a mile south of Mill City, in a single-story house with a metal roof and a shop out back and a yard that was mostly gravel and dogs. Two dogs — German shepherds, old, gray-muzzled, lying in the gravel by the shop door in the morning sun. They lifted their heads when Wren pulled into the driveway and then put their heads back down because they were old dogs and old dogs understood that most arrivals were not threats.

She had found Ray's address through the phone book — the physical phone book, the Linn County directory at the Mill City post office, the phone book that still existed in small towns where people still had landlines and still answered them. She had called the night before. A woman had answered — Ray's wife, Carol — and Wren had said her name and there had been a pause and Carol had said, "Glenn's girl," and Wren had said yes, and Carol had said Ray would be home in the morning and to come at nine.

She knocked on the door. A man opened it. He was the man from the Polaroid, twenty-two years older — the beard gray now, the face weathered beyond the weathering that had already been there in the photograph, the body still large but softened, the shoulders rounded, the chest settled. He was wearing a flannel shirt and jeans and the work boots of a man who wore work boots every day regardless of whether he was working because the boots were what his feet expected and anything else would be a lie.

"Wren Matsuda," Ray said.

"Mr. Dunbar."

"Ray. Come in."

The house was clean and dark, the curtains drawn against the morning sun, the furniture the furniture of a life lived in one place for decades — a couch with a blanket on the back, a recliner with the leather cracked on the arms, a television, a shelf of DVDs and VHS tapes, a shelf of books about fishing and hunting and logging, the books of a man whose life was defined by what he did outdoors and who read about what he did outdoors when he was indoors. Carol was in the kitchen. She brought coffee and set it on the table and left and the kitchen door closed and Wren understood that this conversation was between her and Ray and that Carol had the discretion to know this without being told.

Ray sat in the recliner. Wren sat on the couch. The coffee was black and strong and the cup was ceramic and heavy and the coffee tasted like the Pacific Northwest, which tasted different from Connecticut the way the air smelled different, the water different, the coffee beans probably the same but the water different and the water was what you tasted in coffee, the mineral content, the pH, the source.

"You look like him," Ray said. "The eyes. The hands. You've got Glenn's hands."

Wren looked at her hands. They were her hands — small, strong, calloused, the nails short, the knuckles scarred from bark and chain and rope. She had never thought of them as Glenn's hands. She had thought of them as hands shaped by work, her work, the climbing and the cutting and the rigging. But the shape — the long fingers, the broad palm, the angular wrists — the shape was genetic, inherited, Glenn's hands reproduced in his daughter, the tool-holding hands passed down like the tools themselves.

"Thank you for seeing me," Wren said.

"I've been expecting you for twenty years. Figured you'd come eventually. Figured you'd want to know."

"Know what?"

"About your dad. About the work. About what happened." Ray drank his coffee. He held the cup in both hands, the way Dale held his coffee, the way men who worked with their hands held hot things — with both hands, the warmth soaking into the palms, the gesture a comfort as much as a function. "What do you want to know?"

"Everything."

Ray set his coffee down. He leaned back in the recliner and looked at the ceiling and began to talk.

"Glenn and I fell together for six years. Same crew, same company — Freres Timber, out of Lyons. We cut units in the North Santiam drainage, the Little North Fork, the Opal Creek area, the Elkhorn. Mostly Doug fir. Some cedar. Some hemlock. Old growth and second growth, depending on the sale. The old-growth sales were the big money — the trees were huge, the volume per acre was off the charts, the mills paid a premium for old-growth logs because the grain was tight and the wood was clear and the lumber was worth twice what second-growth lumber was worth."

"How big were the trees?"

"The biggest we cut were six, seven feet on the stump. Two hundred, two hundred and fifty feet tall. Trees you couldn't put your arms around. Trees that took two minutes to bore-cut through with a thirty-six-inch bar. Glenn used a 660 — the big Stihl, the magnum — and even with a thirty-six-inch bar he'd have to cut from both sides on the big ones, bore in from one side, walk around, bore in from the other, meet in the middle. The back cut took ten minutes on a seven-footer."

"And the undercut?"

"Axe. Glenn always did the undercut with the axe. Most guys used the saw for everything — faster, less effort. Glenn used the axe because he said the axe gave him better control of the notch geometry. He was right. His notches were perfect. The hinge was always the right thickness, the face was always the right depth, the tree always went where he aimed it. In six years I never saw Glenn put a tree on the ground in the wrong place. Not once."

Wren thought about the falling axe on the bed in the motel room, the edge she had sharpened in December, the handle worn smooth by the hands Ray was describing, the tool that had made the perfect notches, the tool that had controlled the geometry of the fall. The tool that she owned and had never used for its intended purpose and that Ray had seen Glenn use a thousand times.

"Was he careful?" she said.

Ray looked at her. The question was the question she had been carrying for twenty-two years, the question that Jesse had answered in the kitchen on Christmas — your father was careful too — and the answer had been the widow-maker, the truth that carefulness had a limit, that attention had a horizon, that the dead branch in the canopy was above the horizon of even the most careful faller.

"Glenn was the most careful faller I ever worked with," Ray said. "He looked up before every cut. He checked the crown for deadwood. He kicked the bark to check for beetle kill. He read the lean. He planned the lay — the direction the tree would fall — and he cleared his escape route before he started cutting. Two routes, always, forty-five degrees back from the fall direction, both sides, so he had options. He carried a mirror on a stick — a mechanic's mirror, the kind you use to see under a car — and he'd hold it up and angle it to look into the crown, to see what was up there, the widowmakers, the hung-up branches, the deadwood that might come loose when the tree started to move."

"He had a mirror."

"He had a mirror and he used it every time. Every tree. He'd spend five minutes looking at the crown before he started cutting. The other guys gave him grief about it. Called him the dentist. He didn't care. He said the five minutes were cheaper than the funeral."

Wren's chest tightened. The five minutes were cheaper than the funeral. Glenn had said this. Glenn had known. Glenn had been careful in the specific, precise, systematic way of a man who understood the danger and respected it and worked within it and believed that the system he had built — the looking, the mirror, the escape routes, the notch geometry — would keep him alive.

"What happened that day?" Wren said.

Ray was quiet for a long time. The clock in the kitchen ticked. One of the dogs outside shifted and its collar jingled and then the quiet resumed. Ray was looking at a point on the far wall, a point that was not the wall but was the past, the specific past, September 18, 2004, the day that had been a day like every other day until it was not.

"It was a Thursday," Ray said. "Unit 7, North Santiam drainage. Doug fir. Big stuff — five-footers, six-footers. We'd been on the unit for a week. Glenn was working the northeast corner. I was a hundred yards south. I could hear his saw. You could always hear the saws — in the canyon the sound carried, echoed off the walls, the whole drainage full of the sound of saws, two or three crews working at once, the sound constant."

He stopped. He drank his coffee. He set the cup down.

"The tree he was cutting was a six-footer. Maybe two hundred and eighty feet. A big tree but not the biggest we'd cut that week. He'd looked at it. He'd used the mirror. He'd cleared his routes. He made the undercut — the axe, like always, the notch perfect, I saw it afterward. He made the back cut with the saw. The tree was going. The lean was right. The hinge was holding. The tree was falling where he aimed it."

"And the widow-maker."

"The widow-maker was in the tree next to it. Not in the tree he was cutting. In the tree next to it. A dead limb in the crown of an adjacent fir, sixty feet up, maybe eighty. When Glenn's tree started to fall, the crown of his tree brushed the crown of the adjacent tree — the branches touched, the way branches touch when a tall tree falls through a stand, the crowns interacting, the branches pushing and pulling. The contact shook the adjacent tree. The dead limb in the adjacent tree shook loose. It fell."

Ray stopped again. He looked at Wren. His eyes were wet but his voice was steady, the steadiness of a man who had told this story before, who had told it to investigators and to insurance adjusters and to Jesse and to himself, the story worn smooth by the telling the way the axe handle was worn smooth by the holding.

"The limb was maybe eight inches in diameter. Thirty feet long. It fell from eighty feet. It hit Glenn on the left side. The hard hat took some of it but the limb was too heavy and the angle was wrong and the hat cracked and the limb hit his head and his shoulder and he went down."

"Was he —"

"He was unconscious when I got to him. Thirty seconds. I heard the sound — not the tree falling, the tree had already fallen, the tree was on the ground — I heard a different sound, a sound I knew, the sound of a widow-maker hitting something that wasn't ground. I ran. He was on his back. The limb was across him. I pulled it off. I called on the radio. The crew came. The foreman called the helicopter."

"How long?"

"Twenty minutes for the helicopter. They airlifted him to Salem. He was alive when they put him in the helicopter. He died at the hospital. The impact — the doctors said the impact fractured his skull and there was bleeding in the brain and the bleeding was too much and they couldn't stop it."

Wren sat on the couch in Ray Dunbar's living room in Mill City, Oregon, and heard the story of her father's death told by the man who had been a hundred yards away when it happened, the man who had pulled the limb off Glenn's body, the man who had stood in the clearing and watched the helicopter take Glenn away and had known, had probably known even then, that Glenn was not coming back.

"The limb was in the adjacent tree," Wren said. "Not in the tree Glenn was cutting."

"No. Glenn checked his tree. Glenn always checked his tree. The mirror, the looking, the five minutes. He checked his tree and his tree was clean. The widow-maker was in the next tree. Eighty feet up in a tree Glenn wasn't cutting. He couldn't have seen it. The mirror wouldn't have helped because the mirror was for looking up into the crown of the tree you were cutting, not into the crown of the tree next to it. The limb was invisible from his position. It was behind the crown of his tree, hidden by the branches, and it only became a problem when his tree's crown brushed the adjacent crown on the way down and shook the limb loose."

"So there was nothing he could have done."

"There was nothing he could have done. I testified to that at the investigation. The OSHA inspector agreed. The finding was an accident — an unforeseeable hazard. No negligence. No violation. The company was cleared. The foreman was cleared. Glenn was cleared. It was an accident."

The word accident was the word that Jesse had used. An accident. The word that closed the investigation and settled the insurance claim and ended the official inquiry and left the unofficial inquiry — the one that Jesse and Wren conducted in their own minds, in the dark, in the years that followed — permanently open, permanently unanswered, because the word accident was a word that described what happened without explaining why, and the why was what the mind wanted, the why that would make the death make sense, the why that did not exist because the death did not make sense, because a dead limb in an adjacent tree shaking loose in the wind of a falling tree and hitting a man on the head was not a thing that made sense, was not a thing that could be prevented by carefulness or planning or experience, was a thing that happened because the forest was complex and the complexity exceeded the capacity of any person to predict, and the death was the result of the excess, the gap between what a person could know and what the forest could do.

"I want to see where it happened," Wren said.

"I can take you. The unit's grown in — twenty-two years of regrowth, the trees are fifty feet tall now, you can't see the stumps from the road anymore. But I know where it was. I'll know when we're standing on it."

"Tomorrow?"

"Tomorrow."

Wren finished her coffee. She stood. Ray stood. He was taller than she had realized — six two, maybe six three, the height visible now that he was vertical, the body large even in its aging, the frame built by the work the way Glenn's frame had been built by the work.

"Your father was a good man," Ray said. "He was a good faller. He cared about the trees he cut. I know that sounds strange — a man who cut trees for a living caring about the trees. But he did. He knew the species. He knew the ages. He'd count the rings sometimes, on the big ones. He'd kneel at the stump and count the rings and shake his head and say how old the tree was, and his voice would have something in it, not sadness exactly, more like — acknowledgment. Like he was acknowledging what he had just ended."

Wren felt her throat close. She felt the pressure behind her eyes. She stood in Ray Dunbar's living room and felt the tears coming and did not try to stop them because stopping them was a form of compartmentalization and she had been compartmentalizing for twenty-two years and she was in Oregon now, in the place where the wound had happened, and the wound was open and the tears were the sap and the sap was what flowed when the bark was breached.

"He counted the rings," she said.

"He counted the rings. Not every tree. But the big ones. The ones that were three hundred, four hundred years old. He'd kneel at the stump and count and then he'd stand up and look at the stump and then he'd move on to the next tree. He never said what he was thinking. He just counted and moved on."

"I count rings," Wren said. "I count them on every tree I take down. I kneel at the stump and I count the rings and I read the record — the droughts and the storms and the injuries. I read the tree's life in the stump."

"Then you're your father's daughter."

"I know."

She drove back to the motel. She sat on the bed next to the falling axe and cried for twenty minutes. She cried the way the sap flowed from a wound — steadily, without drama, the flow driven by pressure, the pressure built up over years, the years of carrying the axe and the saw and the work and the silence and the not-knowing. She had not known that Glenn counted the rings. She had not known that Glenn acknowledged what he had ended. She had not known that the grin in the Polaroid was not the whole story, was not even most of the story, was a snapshot, a single frame, the expression of a moment in a life that contained other moments, moments when Glenn knelt at a stump and counted three hundred rings and shook his head and felt what Wren felt at the Blackwell stump, the weight, the gravity, the awareness of what had been ended.

She had carried the assumption for twenty-two years that Glenn had not felt it. That Glenn had cut trees and grinned and moved on. That the grin was the truth and the notebook was the truth and the truth was that Glenn was a man who cut trees without feeling what the cutting meant. She had built her professional identity on the distinction between her work and Glenn's — she read the rings, she cared about the record, she felt the weight, and Glenn had not. The distinction had allowed her to do the work. The distinction had allowed her to carry the saw without becoming the person she feared — the person who cut and felt nothing.

And now Ray had told her that Glenn counted the rings. That Glenn knelt at the stump. That Glenn's voice had something in it — acknowledgment. The distinction she had maintained for twenty-two years was false, or incomplete, or more complicated than she had allowed, and the complication was this: Glenn had felt it. Glenn had felt what Wren felt. Glenn had cut trees and felt the weight of the cutting and had kept cutting, had gotten up from the stump and moved to the next tree and made the undercut and the back cut and the tree had fallen and he had moved to the next one, and the feeling had not stopped him, the weight had not stopped him, the acknowledgment had not changed the work.

This was the thing she needed to understand. Not whether Glenn had felt it — he had — but what it meant that the feeling had not changed the work. What it meant to feel the weight and keep cutting. What it meant to count the rings and move on. What it meant to carry the awareness and the saw at the same time, the two things that seemed incompatible but were not, the two things that Glenn had carried and that Wren carried and that were perhaps the same thing, the inheritance not just of the tool but of the contradiction, the ability to care about the thing you were ending and to end it anyway.

She washed her face. She ate dinner. She looked at the falling axe on the bed and thought about Glenn using it to make the undercut, the perfect notch, the axe biting into the wood of a five-hundred-year-old Douglas fir, the steel entering the bark and the cambium and the sapwood and the heartwood, the chips flying, the notch opening, the geometry precise, the hinge forming, the tree about to fall, and Glenn kneeling at the stump afterward and counting the rings and shaking his head and acknowledging what he had done.

Tomorrow she would go to the place where it had happened. Tomorrow she would stand on the ground where Glenn had stood. Tomorrow she would see the stump of the tree he was cutting and the stump of the adjacent tree, the tree whose crown had held the widow-maker, the limb that had fallen eighty feet and hit her father and ended his life at thirty-four.

She went to bed. The river ran. The axe lay beside her. She slept.