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Jackpine Savage  (Part Two Click Here)

Josh Amidon

“A good man,” said Suck, “a little gnarly maybe, but taken well before his time.” We suffered over him a while, then he told me how we could make it right.
     The two of us spent nearly every night of that winter in his frigid garage, drinking through the aluminum Grain Belt beers, dulling and sharpening his wall full of tools, a fuzzy radio broadcast creeping about the place like the white of our breath. And in the spring when we finally raised it up on the base, everything felt different—that’s how everyone explained it, anyway—softer somehow, and younger. Maybe it didn’t make up for what I’d done, but it was something.

The only motel in the two blocks of downtown Littlefork doubles as beauty salon, a fax center, “and a B & B if you want any breakfast,” says Norma, the maroon-permed old woman behind the counter when I check in.  She studies my license, her brows knitting together behind huge bifocals. “Oaten Noblett?” she says, “Why, you’re kin! You probably don’t remember, but I’m your granny’s Mack’s second cousin!”
     I move to shake her hand but she comes around the counter, grasps my forearm and pulls me in for an awkward hug. “Awful sorry about your dad,” she says.  “With those deep-set eyes you look just like him, just like the good Scandinavian you are.”
     “It's okay. I barely knew the guy.”
     “You know I met you when you were just a little fella. Now, where you been all these years?”
     The drive was almost exactly 2,000 miles from the desert, sidling across the Oklahoma and Texas panhandles, then rushing north up the endless Midwestern plains. Up on the northern edge of Minnesota’s Iron Range, the trees became so numerous and dense they nearly blotted out the light. That’s when I knew I’d made it, that I’d finally returned to rainy river country in the north woods of Koochiching County.
     My dad was a logger in the north woods. My grandpa, he too was a logger, lived right here in town before he was dragged to death by his horse.  I never cut a log in my life, never grew up here like I was supposed to, never even touched a horse. I drove here in a four-cylinder Hyundai.
     Norma shows me to my room down the hall.  The shower is no more than a trickle from the faucet, the bed a trundle twin.  Sunk into the springs, I reread the note before I shut off the little table lamp. Due north to claim your birthright, boy. He must have written it right there at the end.

On the street the next morning the sky’s a Canadian Honker gray, the mist drizzling cold and I figure I’ll have to grow a beard quick. In front of the door to granny’s old Lutheran church, a hand-written sign on a trash can reads Melvin’s Movie Emporium: Drop Here. The gas station where my cousins and I used to play foosball is abandoned, the front windows broken and pump-hoses dangling limp like broken limbs. Next to the post office the town sign reads Population: 820, just like last time I was here. That was 20 years ago, back when I was ten, about the time the lumber mill coughed its last phlegmy cough, and kids were bused in from all the neighboring towns to the one school that stayed open.
     I head to the hardware store. Before going in, I stop and look at this worn wood sculpture standing in the little lot next door. It’s a log about ten feet tall, carved into the figure of an old-school lumberjack and bolted onto a stump pedestal with the name Jackpine Savage chiseled into it. The paint’s faded on his flat-brimmed cap and checkered shirt, and one of his boots is discolored with wood rot like it’s been gnawed on by an animal. His sleeves are rolled up to reveal wiry forearms, one enormous hand holding an ax next to his face, the other clinging to a suspender like it’s afraid it’s going to fall off. A truly huge, drooping mustache makes his face look sallow, like he hasn’t eaten well.  Someone’s knocked one of his ears off too, and the bare wood shows through like I’m looking into his brain.
     In the hardware store I wander to the back for the saw gear, pull the list out of my jeans. Chaps, ear and eye protection, gloves, helmet. There still isn’t anyone at the front when I bring my stuff over, so I ding the bell and an old fogy limps out from the back.
     “I’m looking for Suck Rostie,” I say.
     “Looks like you found him.” The old man’s grip is strong and his knuckles feel like golf balls. His smile is crooked, a tooth short on the top.
     “I’m Oaten.  My dad, Colby Noblett, he should have—”
     “Lucky boy come to claim his prize! Didn’t think you looked much like a trucker.”
     “Truckers still make their way through town these days?” I ask.
     “It’s a logger’s route, ain’t it? Your uncle Gilly still stops in from time to time.”
     Uncle Gillette. I still have the Polaroid of the two of us staring out the side window of his semi. I’m on his lap wearing a too-big baseball cap, eyes pinched tight like I’m about to get punched. I figure the whole truth about a person is clearest when you’re just a little kid. I was afraid of my own shadow.
     “What’s he hauling these days?” I didn’t even know he was still alive.
     “Logs,” Suck says, “what do you think? I’ll go get the saw for you.”
     He disappears into a back room, comes back holding the thing in one hand, leaning like he’s about to tip over. The chipped red and white body is stained a dingy black-grey, the nose of the bar way longer than I’d imagined. The overhead lights play on the jagging razor teeth of the chain—looks like a leering animal, ready to latch on and maul something.
     “Sure is a beaut,” he says, setting it on the counter. “Had one just like it myself, back in the day. I polished her up just like your dad said in his note. She’ll be quite the sight, sitting up over your mantle.”
     I grasp the handle, feel the smooth wear mark from the hand that held it all those years. My knuckles white, the veins pressing to the surface of my skin, it’s a pale imitation of his grip.  “I’m planning on using it.”
     “Using it?” Suck looks me once over. “You got some kind of death wish or something?”
     “No. Just going to cut down some trees.”
     Suck shakes his head mournfully. “This thing’s a relic, Oat. Surly as a dump bear and heavy as one, too. How about I point you to a gentler option over there on the back aisle.”
     “This is the one I want to use,” I say.
     He takes off his glasses, blinks at the ceiling and lets out a heavy sigh. “I doubt the thing’ll ever start. Let me fill her up with some fresh gas and oil out back and we’ll see if I can get her to turn over. I’ll swap that bar out for a shorter one, too.”
     I shake my head.
     “Boy, a bar that long’ll kick back and take your nuts off before you know what’s what! I don’t mean to judge, but you don’t look much like a woodsman.”
     “Logging’s in my bloodline.”
     Suck’s wiry gray eyebrows curl up into his brow. “Your blood,” he says, “may well line the forest floor before you’re done.” He swipes my card anyway. “You know, before I got your old man’s note, I’d forgotten he ever had a kid. Old Colby had his troubles alright, but the man knew his way around a saw. Almost took his leg off the once, but I guess he wasn’t quite himself at the time.”
     He wasn’t himself—or maybe that’s exactly what he was. “I was there that day,” I say. “I’m the one who got him to the hospital.”
     It was a thinning project out on Stop Island. I was hunting around the forest for a slingshot I’d lost the summer before when I stumbled over dad gasping in the bushes, sweat and sawdust caking his forehead. “Saw kicked me a mean one,” he said, and it’s then I noticed the big stain growing at his knee. I motored the Johnson seven-horse back to the shore, drove his truck as best I could to the hospital with him lying in the truck-bed with the dog. I remember watching the doctor stabbing that huge needle through, the way it pulled his skin up and away from the bone, those quick breaths he took through his teeth. He passed out at some point, but that could have been the booze. The doctor told mom it was a miracle he didn’t bleed to death, that he’d walk with a limp the rest of his life. Turned out to be the breaking point for her. We fled for Phoenix, to the desert hot and boring after all those trees. There were no cousins or granny to visit, no snow to shovel, not even leeches or wood ticks to worry about. All those years and I barely heard from him until last week when I got the box, addressed in his scrawling hand. Inside was the favorite old jacket of his. On top of this, the folded paper with the news.

The saw’s so big it rides shotgun, with the seat pulled all the way back so it can fit. I take the turnoff past the cemetery, walk out a ways into the forest, set my stuff on the ground next to a big, downed tree. I turn the knob to choke, yank hard on the cord. It only wheezes and cuts out. I do this several more times. Five sweaty minutes later it’s flooded just like Suck warned, and I have to wait. The second time, it rasps and barks, then catches. I finger the trigger and a great cloud of gray-purple belches from the black-stained muffler. The sound is a hundred animals shrieking together, the whine itching my eardrums right through the soft orange plugs. I engage the chain and finger the trigger again, feel the wind rushing from the blur of circling teeth.
     I set straight into the meat of the trunk. The second it gets to the hard stuff under the bark it nearly pulls right out of my gloves. On the next try, I lead too much with the nose of the bar and it kicks back, just about catching the denim at my shin. My heart’s beating so fast I feel sick. I take a few deep breaths, then ease the teeth into the side of the trunk again. This time it sails through the wood like it’s soft cheese. The smell of that sawdust, the big plume of it up and over me—I work it down until I’m close to the ground, pull the bar from the cut, then do the same thing again a few feet further down the trunk.
     Suck was right about the weight; I’m only a few cuts in when my shoulders start to ache. I set the saw down, lie back in the dirt and take my helmet off. I unbutton the chest pocket of dad’s old jacket and pull out the instructions I printed off the internet, open them to the tree-falling page.
     Propped up on my elbows, I survey the stand of trees before me. They’re tangled enough to just about blot out the gray daylight. That’s when I see him: off to the side standing all alone, the gnarliest, ugliest old bastard of them all. He’s got a wayward lean, and strange gap breaks in his bark like something’s been pecking hard at him. As big as he is, I figure he’s suffered the hard brunt of the winter winds his whole life in this place, the icebox of the nation.
     I walk over and bring the saw back to life, turn it sideways like the picture in the instructions shows. The teeth bite hard into him, the chips flying up around and behind me. I’m just about through the face cut when a black smoke rises from the bar. The chain seizes for a second, circles slowly one more revolution, then seizes again. Thinking it only needs a little force, I muscle the bar deeper into the tree, and there the chain stops for good. The engine cuts. I can’t start it up again, and no amount of yanking can coax it free. Right then the sky breaks into droplets and soon it starts pouring. I have to tie dad’s jacket around the engine of the saw and flee back to my little car.
     The rain has stopped by the time I pass the front of the hardware store and I can see through my windshield the Gone fishing! sign hung on the door. Further down the road I call out to Norma inside the motel. “You know where I can find Suck?”
     “I expect he’s out in back of his house.”
     I take the backwoods route like she said, and find the path down to his place on the river. Suck’s there on a bench, a small stick in his hand, gazing out into the dirty water sweeping by so slowly. There’s a rod on the ground at his feet, its hook empty. I walk up close, stand next to him. He doesn’t look over. On a near tree I notice a homemade plaque, words and numbers burnt into the wood and stapled underneath a square of clear plastic, a faded picture of some four-eyes kid.
     “Who’s that?” I ask.
     Suck’s without his hat, his scalp showing through the lines of hair he’s combed over. He passes his fingers over his head, looks to the tree and laughs softly. “Have to swap the photo out every spring,” he says. “Course, everything fades in the light.”
     I walk closer. It’s a black and white. The boy’s wearing a buzz-cut and a broad grin on his face. Nathan Rostie, 1968 – 1973.
     “It was right here,” Suck says, nodding out toward the water. “We warned him, both his mother and me. Thought he understood, but I guess that’s another place I was wrong.”
     I take a seat next to him. Suck Rostie: The Man Whose Boy Drown in the River. Has to be the worst nickname the world’s ever known—even worse than Suck—no one ever saying it, just what everyone’s thinking. He throws the stick in the brown water and we watch until it disappears.
     “Well what can I do for you?” Suck finally asks.
     “I got a major problem. The saw is stuck, probably soaked and rusting out as we speak.”
     Suck laughs through his missing tooth. “Tree bind up on you?”
     “What?”
     “When a tree sits back on that bar, boy, he clamps down harder than a walleye come to spawn.” He turns to me: “He’s a several ton animal—set into him wrong, and he’ll make you pay.”
     “I was wondering if you could come help me get it out.”
     “Now?”
     “I don’t want to leave it out overnight.”
     Suck flexes his hands several times, scowling. “I don’t remember you buying any wedges earlier. Let me go grab some, and then we’ll head out.”

Suck’s truck is so rusted out the sidewalls are nearly more air than metal. A jangling sound comes through the cracked window as he drives. He talks the whole way, stories about the granddad I never knew, “the late, great Chickesaw Noblett,” with a major focus on how the man was a tremendous liar. Bullshitter, he calls him, and like it’s some kind of special honor.
     We get out, and I lead him to the tree. The saw’s stuck there like a sword through a body. Suck glances between me and the saw like one of us is a great joke teller. “Screwed your cousin pregnant on this one, didn’t you? And that’s a heck of a face cut you got going there—planning on taking her all the way across the Canadian, or what?” He walks to the tree, leans against its side, and looks into the sky. “Ever take a gander up before you started?”
     I pull my instructions from dad’s still-damp jacket. “Doesn’t say anything about that here.”
     “What’s that you got there?”
     “Some… reminders. For falling a tree.”
     “Felling, son. You fell a tree, and if them papers don’t have you gauge the lean, you might as well shove ‘em up your nose.”
     “Gauge the lean?”
     “Check to see how the tree’s leaning, you dumb cluck! You might have noticed how the only way the thing could’ve moved was right back on your saw. What in Koochiching County were you cutting into this old gent for, anyway?”
     “The way it stood off to the side here, I figured it’d be safer. You got to admit he’s pretty ugly, too.”
     “Ugly? This old guy’s probably responsible for the birth of half this forest! On top of it all, he’s still green—had years of productive life out in front of him. Probably sat right here more than a century, then you come along, Mr. Big City with your sport-falling dreams.” He shakes his head. “What you’ve done here is good as homicide—if your dad knew, he’d puke in his urn.”
     “I’m sorry.”
     Suck digs into his pocket, starts chomping on a piece of jerky. “You and me, we’re gonna have to find a way to make this right. Say anything about a case like this in that set of directions you got?”
     I scan the limp pages in my hand.
     “Just joshin you there, our route’s clear as day: grab the smallest wedge and that mallet I brought, and pound her into that cut you made.”
     With Suck’s guidance, I get the wedge so deep I can’t go any further. There’s a new give when I pull again on the saw, but it’s still not coming out.
     “Slow down, Speedy. You’ll want to get a bigger one into the other side, then we’ll start the saw up. It’s lots easier to pull her out with a turning chain.”
     I pound the second wedge in. Suck gets the saw started but when he fingers the trigger, the chain just barely moves. He shakes his head like he’s truly annoyed, turns to me and yells, “PUSH!”
     I push against the tree as hard as I can, Suck jerking the saw back and forth, and finally it comes free. He turns it off and we pant a while.
     Suck nods at the saw: “See how it’s all black and purple on the end there? You just about burnt the nose off. Gonna have to replace it after all.”
     “That’s my dad’s bar.”
     He looks up at the darkening sky. “I’d like to take the poor guy out of his misery tonight, but it’s too dark. We’ll have to come back tomorrow.”
     I look up at the old tree, watch its slow sway, the creaking groan as it moves in a gust of wind. “Hey listen, Suck, I’ve been thinking you’re right—I don’t want to kill that tree.”
     Suck spits. “He’s standing dead, boy. We could leave him here to the winter winds, but I reckon it’s kinder to spare him that.”
     Back in the passenger seat, I’m making lines with my finger into the oil and sawdust caked on the saw’s casing, when Suck slaps me on the shoulder: “You’re gonna get gas all over your pants, ya tool—put that thing in the back.”
     “My dad used to smell like gas. That’s how I knew he’d come home.”
     “S’pose that’s true.”
     “How well did you know him?”
     “Good as anyone, I guess, but that’s not saying much. Your dad, he turned into quite the recluse, out on a crew most the year, otherwise alone in that god-awful hunter’s shack deep in the woods. Lord knows how he survived the cold. He’d come by the bar from time to time.” Suck downshifts as he turns to me. “Your old man had a streak of wild in him like a timber wolf. Shy around people, but real snarly after he’d dipped into the booze. Got so we had to call Mallard at the station first thing, let him know whenever your dad turned up. ‘Get some coffee down your gullet,’ we’d tell him, ‘Jackpine Savage is on the town.’”
     “Who is Jackpine Savage, anyway?”
     “Far as I can tell,” he says, “they modeled that old thing after your dad. That, or it’s just the other way around.”
     “But what’s it mean?”
     Suck smiles, then hesitates a moment, his face changing. “It’s nothing, Oat, just a dumb term for the lumberjacks in these parts.”
     We drive the rest of the way in silence. As I’m getting out at the motel, he pops me in the arm: “How about you and me take my saw out tomorrow? We’ll practice being logger’s with it, and when you think you’re ready, we’ll take care of that old guy from today.”

On my bathroom sink, a note from Norma says I’m welcome to beans and wieners in the kitchen pantry. Next to the beans is a near-full bottle of cooking sherry. I unscrew the cap, take a swig so sweet it makes me grimace. I still pour myself a glass of it, get the beans and wieners going on the gas stove. I step over to the fireplace. It’s been a while, but I build it just like I was taught: the thin kindling squaring out the bottom, split logs angling over the top, lots of holes for air. I light the match and watch; smoke, and a clear smell as the burning pine-pitch crackles and hisses the fire to life.
     I sit on the soft recliner and spoon straight from the pan. The dried sweat’s tight on my face, a fresh smell of sawdust all over me, the sherry bringing a warmth to the back of my neck. After staring into the dancing flames a while, get to thinking about that bar Suck said Dad used to visit.

Outside in the past hour it seems to have turned to winter, the big, bright flakes floating soft and silent. They glimmer as they swoop beneath the single streetlight on the corner. I walk down the center of the street, a small-town quiet like I’ve never known, the plumes of snow rising and falling from my every step.
     The sign on the door says Offsale Liquor, but the place doubles as a bar. Inside, a grizzled string of men in sweat-stained hats turn to look me over. The smell is like a locker room, the fake-wood paneled walls lined with animal heads and plastic-looking fish. I order a beer and Wild Turkey at the bar and take them to a table in the back.
     After a second round I get up and wander past at the pictures hung up on the wall. They’re of groups of men, all of them grinning in bright orange camo, beers and rifles in their hands, and one of them holding up a tongue-lolling, black-eyed animal by its antlers.
     “You need something?” comes a voice over my right shoulder.
     It’s this big, black-bearded guy who looks like he’s come over to keep me from stealing something. “Yeah,” I say, “Colby Noblett up here anywhere?”
     He grins, the wiry mustache hairs scratching his yellow teeth. “Jackpine? You’re not gonna find him in any of these. Not in town, neither; he’s guarding over someone’s mantle now if you didn’t know. Who’s the old coot to you?”
     “Why do you call him that?”
     “What, coot?”
     “No, Jackpine.”
     “Jackpine Savage?” he laughs. “Didn’t think you were from here. Jackpine’s that big wooden dildo standing down the street.”
     “But what’s it mean?”
     “It’s like a hick-fool, some north woods Redneck, guy just as soon stick an axe through his foot as to try to hump a doe.  Old man Noblett, what a mess he was. What do you care about Jackpine?”
     “He was my dad.”
     He jerks his head back slightly, then moves a hand over his beard a couple times. “So that makes you Oaten,” he says, his beard widening with the huge smile. “I’m Ned—Ned DeLack. We used to play together when we were little, you know.” He claps me on the back, and nods in the direction of the bar. “Half the guys there are cousins of yours of some kind. Come on over, and I’ll buy you a drink.”
     Ned DeLack—kid had armpit hair in the 4th grade.  “Thanks,” I say, “but I got to get going.”
     Ned’s grin falls away. “Look, sorry for what I said about your old man. I worked with him a few seasons,” he says. “He was a true wizard with that saw.”
     “Don’t worry,” I say, “I barely knew the guy.”

Outside, I find Suck just closing the door on his truck. He doesn’t notice me until he’s shuffling toward the door.
     “Calling it a little early, ain’t ya?” he says.
     “My dad was a big joke around here, huh?”
     “Where’d you get an idea like that?”
     “You backwoods guys have a real nice way of treating people.”
     He holds out his hands, lets them fall against his legs. “Sometimes you gotta laugh, son—sometimes it’s all we have left. Come have a drink with me.”
     I shake my head and start moving down the street through that clean, light falling snow. The cold wet comes through the toes of my boots—tomorrow the roads will be a messy, ugly brown. A block later, I’m looking up at the old, wooden lumberjack, the white gathering on the top of his mustache making him look surprised, or just stupid. I bend over, pack a snowball tight and icy, but miss him by a mile. Moving in close, I crane my head up toward that face of his still staring out into the darkness. The sky’s opened up, the stars glimmering over his head.
      It’s the only thing I have to give you. Would of liked to do better but there’s a neck long wrung.
     Something achy about a man who’ll step into a noose rather than face another day of it. I think I know something about that ache of his, figure it’s racing through my blood like the razor teeth of that saw and anything else I may have inherited.
     I lean in, get my arms around his waist, push my shoulder into him a little bit, and drive with my legs. There’s a crack and I stumble hard, but when I look again, nothing’s left but a foot and daggered splinter of a leg on the stump. It’s a miracle I didn’t impale myself. Jackpine Savage lies off to the side, face-down in the snow. I turn him over and lie there in the mush with him a while. I watch the sky, the white breath pluming from my mouth, how it disappears into the black.
     About the time the points of cold wet start sneaking against my skin, a sound of voices snaps me out of it. Some of the boys from the liquor store have come outside, yelling and carrying on like every other night of their lives. I watch them get into a few trucks and hurry off into the dark. I figure I better get moving, that there’s going to be some kind of hell to pay for what I’ve done. I roll Jackpine over, have just levered him across the stump base when I hear the sound of a truck. When I turn the headlights are bright in my eyes, the slow chug of the engine idling as smoke exhaust rises from back.
     The driver’s door comes open.
     “What you got there, boy?”
     It’s Suck, eclipsing the headlights as he limps over to me. He stops, stands there waiting, but I can’t speak—frozen still in all that bright white.
     “We better load him into the back of the truck,” he says.

I slept the night on Suck’s couch. Next morning, he took me into the woods, showed me how to bring down the gnarled, massive tree. Once he’d come crashing, the pops and snaps sounding long after the ground stopped rumbling from the weight of it all, I dropped to a knee beside him, let a good bit of myself flow into the soil black and slushy with the last night’s snow.
     “A good man,” said Suck, “a little gnarly maybe, but taken well before his time.”
     That’s how Suck explained it. But there was more, like the drive out to the end of an old, dirt road. A long, slow walk, Suck always a limping half-step ahead of me. We entered a one-room cabin. On the floor, a mess of camping gear and a mattress with a couple dirty blankets on it. A woodstove in the corner with a blackened, dented pot on top of it. In front of the single, cracked window, a piece of plywood made a desk or workbench, now home to nothing more than leaves and dirt. That’s all that was left. That, and this one faded picture hanging on the wall: a man, with his hand laid huge on the head of the boy beside him, both of them squinting through deep-set eyes. The boy looks almost scared, but he’s smiling, the two of them standing together between the trees.