The Guardians

Raleigh stood in the morning sunlight under the big maple with a chainsaw in one hand and a heavy splitting maul in the other looking at his friend of 30 years. ’Course I got mix, he said. Next to the lawn-more in the back. Says mix on the side and don’t forget the bar and chain as well.

Lawn mower, Silas said. It was an old joke between them. Raleigh was big and round-shouldered and had brown eyes that went flat and unseeing when he was thinking about something else. I’m a librarian trapped in a prizefighter’s body, he liked to say. An out-of-shape prizefighter. Silas came back with fuel mix and bar and chain oil and his maul. He was 60 but moved with the precision of an athlete and checked the corners of every room he walked into as if he always expected something to happen. Why the fuck are you always looking around? Raleigh demanded once at breakfast, but Sally shushed him. She had a soft spot for Silas as if he were her wayward son.

Well, he looks like a sociopath, Raleigh said.

All the tools went into the back of the truck along with the old cutting chaps with the gash across the right leg where the Kevlar had saved his knee joint 20 years ago. The bed was still matted with dead leaves from the previous fall. Silas grabbed the door gutter and swung himself into the passenger seat and Raleigh climbed in on the driver’s side and started the truck and found the old ruts that skirted the overgrown fields. Silas had visited Raleigh out here through girlfriends and deaths and illnesses and presidents and wars, but now everything suddenly seemed like a very long time ago.

The house faced west toward a semicircle of mountains with meadows stretching up their flanks past stone walls that ran into the woods, the lower maples and oaks still in their colors but the upper ridges dead-brown and ready for winter. When they were young men, Silas and Raleigh had climbed to the top of the ridge, passing through the fallen stone walls and the sugar maples and then the dark groves of red pines and finally to the views—west toward the ridges and mean little towns of the Delaware headwaters and east toward the prettier country and bigger farms of the Schoharie. They’d built a fire and gotten drunk talking about how their lives were going to go and had woken up just before dawn with the fire dead and big aimless snowflakes sifting through the treetops. He and Raleigh had started stiffly down the mountain, still drunk and their plans gone.

The girls good?

Little one’s just starting to read, and Sarah’s in third grade and doing fifth-grade math, Silas said.

They affected by what’s going on?

Of course, Silas said. Raleigh waited for more, and eventually Silas went on, Mostly they’re worried about their friends and their plans and everything. They’re little girls. They’ve already got more friends than I had in my whole life.

Raleigh and Sally never had kids, because they couldn’t, and sometimes Silas could almost feel those unrealized children flitting overhead to remind everyone of the little triumphs and sorrows that had never happened. Of the love that had never found anywhere to go.

The whole point is just for them to grow and break your heart, Silas eventually said. That’s what no one realizes until it’s too late.

Every time Raleigh hit a bump the chainsaws leaped from the bed and came back down, and Silas would say, Fuck, Rawls. Raleigh guided the truck uphill through the high field and stopped by a dead ash the color of bone that loomed out of the woods. They got out and laid the saws on the open tailgate without speaking and gassed them and oiled them and re-tensioned the chains. They never spoke while they worked unless they needed to. Silas choked the big Stihl and pull-started it and got it running and engaged the chain brake with the heel of his hand and then set it on the ground, where it sat shaking eagerly. He clapped on his earpro and waded through the overgrown field to the ash and cleared a work area for himself—a way to get out if things went wrong. There were a few rocks underfoot that he pitched into the woods and then he faced the tree with his feet apart like a boxer. A chainsaw made him slow and methodical in a way that nothing else ever had.

Raleigh never complimented Silas, because they knew each other too well for that, but he enjoyed watching him work. The calculation and lack of urgency until everything tipped. Silas made the top and bottom cuts and kicked the wedge out and ringed the backside of the tree to mark his level. It was dense wood, dead and very hard, and the trunk was at least two feet across, big enough to bury the big saw. When a tree goes, you see it first by the tiniest widening of the kerf, a slight offset to the angle. You don’t see it in the canopy. With the tree balanced on the last bit of holding wood Silas felt young again, as if the entire world were waiting for him to make his move. He re-slotted the saw bar into the kerf and revved the saw and touched the cut, which was all it took, and then switched off the saw and backed up with his eyes on the canopy. Death comes from above, his father always said. The big tree creaked and objected and slowly, heavily started dropping with the backcut gaping open in a kind of shock and a full 10 tons of wood crashing sickly to Earth after a hundred years of defiance.

The sound rolled through the woods and then the forest was quiet for a few moments as if paying respects to its dead. Silas propped the saw bar on the toe of his boot and palmed the handle so that it stayed balanced, and the two men stood in the new gash of sunlight. Dust rose and swirled where the tree had once been. Silas’s father had been a logger in Montana and put himself through college setting wire chokers on mountainsides in the Absarokas, and Silas was now 10 years older than his dad had ever been—cancer, dead in three months. His mom and dad were divorced by then but she was still with him at the very end, and she never recovered. Silas was overseas at the time and stayed there, and his mother was gone a couple of years after that.

A cord, minimum, he said, maybe more, but you’ll have to split all that big stuff. It’ll be a lot of work.

Raleigh walked past Silas out of the weeds and brambles and pull-started the small saw. He began limbing out the crown while Silas worked the other end with the Stihl, cutting clean rounds that thudded into the weeds. The biggest part of the trunk hung off the edge of a drainage ditch, so he didn’t have to do an undercut or worry about dulling his chain. After half an hour he and Raleigh stopped to drink water out of a big mason jar in the truck and then sat on what remained of the trunk like elephant hunters of an earlier era. Silas lit a cigarette and they sat without talking and Silas smoked and then crushed the butt out on the dead tree.

I’ve always loved those things, he said, jutting his chin at the fieldstone cairns in the field.

I put those up almost 20 years ago now, Raleigh said.

I know that.

There were four cairns, taller than a man and weirdly animated for piles of rocks; if you looked away and then back again, you could almost think they’d moved. They stretched across the top of the meadow 50 yards apart, looking east past the house. Raleigh called them the Guardians, and Silas pictured his friend shirtless and bent on a July day lugging huge stones through the field grass, half mad and slick with sweat. It had been a tough time for Raleigh back then, Silas knew. When he and Sally had finally given up, he went inward and she went outward, he liked to say, but their hearts stayed in the same place.

This property, man, Silas said, shaking his head. How much are you up here?

Pretty much full-time since I retired, Raleigh said. Sally’s in the city most of the time—her friends, her volunteer work.

What do you do when you’re up here?

I don’t know, he said. This.

You ever get lonely?

Not in the way you mean, Raleigh said.

What way is that?

Raleigh thought for a moment. Hollow, he finally said. Like there’s nothing inside you to keep you up.

The Guardians cast their stone gaze down the valley, their shadows swept behind them as if into a headwind and the October morning hot enough for insects and heat to rise off the fields. The house was set prettily at the mouth of the valley, an old post-and-beam with most of the original angles and roofline gone and a sunroom and deck now facing the wide embrace of the hills.

Silas had had children late in life—very late—and now his sole concern was to see his girls into adulthood. How do you tell an 8-year-old that much of her father’s life was just a series of impulsive swerves that deprived her of having a father for as long as little girls should? After Silas finished his cigarette, he stood up and pull-started the saw. He worked his way up the trunk, cutting 14-inch lengths to fit into Raleigh’s woodstoves, wedging the top of the cuts with a maul or a piece of wood to keep them from binding the saw. When he was done, he stood and looked around at the carnage and walked the big saw over to the truck and grabbed the maul. He moved slowly through the exploded tree, splitting the rounds into quarters or sixths. Raleigh did the same, and their maul-swings thocked off the treeline and past the Guardians and across the meadow without rhythm or urgency.

The two men worked silently for an hour, and then Raleigh tossed his maul over to the truck. I’m done, he said. It would have been a good day’s work at half their age. They filled the bed with split wood and piled the tools on top and climbed in. I don’t ever remember an October that felt like midsummer, Raleigh said. I don’t remember a fall that didn’t come with at least a good freeze and a little snow.

Silas didn’t like talking about the changing climate, because it frightened him. Everything frightened him lately, which was strange because when he was young, almost nothing had. He’d just feel himself go empty until nothing mattered. Once, he’d spent an afternoon waiting to be shot by teenagers at a checkpoint that had bodies scattered all around it but in the end, they just returned his windbreaker and cigarettes and told him to be on his way. That was in West Africa, where most of the really bad stuff had happened, but even that hadn’t affected him much. Just some bad dreams and a strange new hot temper that felt surprisingly good when it showed up.

Raleigh took a different route home that crossed the fields below the Guardians and dropped into a streambed—now dried to a trickle in the drought—and climbed the far embankment. There was flood wrack caught up in the timber and bittersweet thickets, and Silas commented that the creek must be quite a sight when she was running high.

If you fell in, you’d get flushed straight to the bottom of the valley, Raleigh said.

He stopped the truck in front of the woodpile and they walked the saws and mix into the garage and left the wood and the mauls for later. The house was cool and calm with skylights and handsome oak floors. The kitchen open in the modern style and centered around a hardwood island with a set of copper pans above it. A cream-colored cast-iron stove waited for winter in the sunroom. Silas pictured two feet of snow piled against the floor-to-ceiling windows and the field and ridges quilted and muffled and white in the distance. Raleigh came back from the kitchen with two cans of beer, and they sat on the nice furniture, sawdust still plastered to their skin, and took a few sips. That was good work, Silas eventually said. Good hard work.

How are things in New York? You and Helen okay?

No, but we will be.

You think there’s any chance of reconciling?

None.

Sally talked to her the other day.

I know she did.

It seems like she misses you.

I miss her too.

What are you going to do?

You’re lookin’ at it, Silas said.

Raleigh tipped his beer back and swallowed and brought it back down. You ever thought about going back overseas?

Wouldn’t do it for any price at all. Like literally, there isn’t a number.

Seems like it would be easy.

It would be.

Is it the girls?

Partly, but I also don’t want to get killed doing something that won’t make any difference. The world’s just gonna keep doing whatever the world’s gonna keep doing.

What about the time they were going to shoot that guy, Raleigh said. And you—

He didn’t finish, because Silas was looking out the window, and Raleigh knew him well enough to know he was now watching shrouds of monsoon rain coming off the ocean and thundering across the zinc roofs and ropes of water twisting through the red clay streets and young fighters, children, in the backs of pickup trucks soaking wet with their guns and their useless ponchos. Or something very much like that. After a while, Silas cleared his head with a shake and looked back at Raleigh.

I saw a man bring his little boy into a clinic, Silas said.

Raleigh didn’t say anything, because he knew he didn’t have to.

Way up in the north in the highlands, it wasn’t even during the war but it might as well have been. The boy had malaria and his dad was carrying him in his arms and running as fast as he could. The boy was shaking and had these big bright eyes that were already sort of looking off at the next world … Even I could tell he wasn’t going to make it. And the dad was just frantic. He laid his boy down on a cot and the rain was hammering all around us and the generator was out so there was nothing but kerosene lamps.

Raleigh took a drink, and something unwelcome flicked across his face—a tug at the corner of his mouth, a quick blink.

The doctor just gave the kid aspirin because there weren’t even enough antibiotics for the people who had a chance, and the father saw that. The father knew. And the boy swallowed the pill and asked if he was going to heaven and the dad said, No, you’re staying right here with me. But he was crying when he said it and the boy knew as well. He’d stopped shaking for some reason and his eyes were very bright and he took his daddy’s hand and just—  

Silas stopped speaking because he couldn’t anymore and tried again after a few moments but still couldn’t and so he gave up, and the two men just sat avoiding each other’s eyes and watching the day stretch out and lie down outside.

It was almost dark, and Silas spoke quietly into the receiver of the wall phone because Raleigh was asleep in the next room.

Hi, Helen.

He waited through the silence and then said, I’m just calling to check on the girls.

They’re fine, Silas. Would you like to talk to them?

That’s okay.

Silas, why are you calling?

He didn’t know what to say. Because I miss you, he finally said.

I miss you too.

I’m up at Raleigh’s and it just made me think of you.

Helen didn’t answer.

It just made me think maybe we could still all come up here together like we used to.

That’s not a good idea, she said. You know that.

Silas looked through the plate-glass doors at the failing day. Helen, you have no idea how sorry I am.

I know you are, Silas. But here we are now and it’s okay.

Silas took his cigarettes out to the deck and sat down in an Adirondack chair. The sun’s last effort lay raftered in red and gold across the peaks and the valley was already in darkness. He shook a cigarette from the pack and lit it and inhaled and leaned back and slowly let the smoke out. He didn’t smoke at home and he didn’t smoke for months at a time but when he smoked, he smoked.

A chevron of wake spread across the pond and died out before reaching the shore, a beaver at her last tasks. Silas smoked and watched her in the collapsing light. His eyes finally wandered up-valley to the Guardians and then back again, and that was when he noticed it: a slight movement. A shift in things. He pulled his glasses out of his shirt pocket and rubbed them with his sleeve and put them on. He checked the pond again, now suddenly in focus, and then stabbed his vision back up the valley. The Guardians were motionless while he looked at them but moved when he looked away—just enough to get somewhere without getting caught.

Silas shook his head and smiled like he was in on a joke but after a while realized he wasn’t in on shit. The great stones kept their resolute formation across the field but steadily, heavily were headed toward the house. Silas tried to tell himself he was just playing with the idea, but fear trickled thinly from his guts into the tops of his thighs. The woods were beautiful, and he’d never really stopped to think about that; the whole weekend he hadn’t stopped to think about it once. He looked back at the Guardians with their blunt faces and wondered whether he should keep staring so they’d have to stay put. Eventually he’d have to look away, though, and that’s when they’d move. The stones have all the time in the world, Silas thought. They’ve got so much time, they don’t even know what time is.

Silas stubbed out his cigarette and turned his attention to the beaver. She was still working. Should he wake Raleigh up, he wondered, or just let him sleep? Would he want to see this? The Guardians would be in his house by dinner. What will it be like when they arrive? Silas wondered.

What will happen when all their houses are filled with stone?