Cherry

By Christo­pher Linforth

A stand of cherry blossom trees lined the garden of my childhood
home. My parents always said that the explo­sion of pink had sold them
on the house. By the time they split up a few years later, when I was
thir­teen, disease had struck one of the cherry trees. I con­tin­ued to live
with my father in the house, and I could see the tree from my bedroom
window. Its bark had turned dark and bulbous, and the leaves had
black­ened and fallen to the ground.

At some point during that spring, my father cajoled me into helping
him in the yard. Since my mother eloped with the neigh­bor, my father
had aged badly. His shock of silver hair was unkempt and wild, and his
body stiff, his knees shot. He leaned awk­ward­ly against the diseased
cherry tree and con­sult­ed his gar­den­ing manual. He diag­nosed the
problem as black knot fungus.

“I’ll pay you to cut it down,” he said.

I was a wiry teenag­er, but I had little muscle. I spent most of my
free time playing com­put­er games and reading detec­tive novels. I
loathed the out­doors: the bugs and the dirt and the cold. Still, I had
no money. My father refused to give me an allowance, and my mother
couldn’t afford to send me any. She was saving to buy a new house.

“How much?” I asked.

“Thirty.”

Though I had no expe­ri­ence in cutting down trees, I knew I could
ask for more. My father would strug­gle to wield a saw or ax. I thought
for a moment we could do it togeth­er. But my father didn’t want to
hang out with me; he wanted to get drunk.

“Forty,” I said.

He ges­tured to the tool shed, then went inside the house.

I lugged out a hand ax and bow saw. I figured I would just cut down
the trunk and my job would be done. I pressed the bow saw against the
bark and stroked back and forth. A few shav­ings peeled away. The blade
was heavily rusted, some of the teeth missing. I tossed the saw into the grass.

I raised up the ax and swung at the shallow groove. Thin, angular
chips flew out.

All after­noon I hacked at the trunk. I soon got hot and sweaty, and
I took off my hoodie and tied it around my waist. I carried on hewing
the tree, but the ax edge was now dull, almost useless. Then my father
appeared at the living room window. He clutched a glass and raised it
when he saw me. A sagging grin seemed stuck per­ma­nent­ly on his face.

By the time I reached the heart­wood, I had stopped glanc­ing my
father’s way. I was exhaust­ed. My arms and shoul­ders ached; my hands
were red-raw. I knew if I couldn’t take the tree down, he wouldn’t pay
me. He was cheap, always had an excuse. My mother had snarled that
many times before she found herself a new man.

I decided on a new approach and fetched some rope. Months
before, I had watched a lum­ber­jack on TV steer a dead pine to the
ground. It had seemed simple, yet the details of that doc­u­men­tary were
fuzzy now. I looped the rope around the bough and my waist. I leaned
back and dug my heels into the dirt. I strained and heaved on the rope.
There was a loud snap. The tree lurched, then started to fall. I dropped
the rope and dodged out of the way. The cherry tree crashed onto the
lawn; rotted blossom swirled in the air.

Before long, my father came up behind me. I could smell whisky on
him. Most days he got through a glass or two of Johnnie Walker. “You
need to cut off the branch­es and bundle them up.”

“No,” I said. “Just give me the money.”

“Finish the job.”

“I almost died.”

“Be a man.”

“Like you?”

“Yeah, like me.” He laughed and turned away. He was hur­ry­ing back
inside. No doubt to fix himself another drink.

I picked up the ax and headed to the largest cherry tree. The
branch­es spread thirty feet across, and I stood beneath the canopy,
shaded from the sun. A riot of pink blossom was just begin­ning to
bloom. I swung the ax into its trunk again and again, expos­ing slivers of
its brown-white sapwood. A few pink petals fell around me.

My father stum­bled out of the house, his cheeks red, an empty glass
in his hand. He cried out for me to stop. I felt indif­fer­ent to his plea.
I remem­bered him saying some­thing similar to my mother before she
left him. I ripped off a thick strip of bark and swung the ax once more,
leaving it wedged in the tree. I glanced back at my father. He said he
would put the money on the kitchen table.