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| R.D. Carroll Excerpt from The Green Fuse . . . The oak started into its fall—a slow-motion lean, cracking as it began to teeter, hinting at a twist. I shut down the saw and stepped back, pulling off my headgear. I’d done everything right to fell that tree. So I stood there looking up at it, helmet in one hand, silent saw in the other. A few degrees into its fall the oak seemed to bind and hang there at an angle for a second. Then the butt of the trunk suddenly slid off the stump, thudding the ground so heavy my toes vibrated. At the same time, it twisted wildly, like a drunk giant reaching to hold himself up, and swung way around in the wrong direction, back toward me. I started stepping away smartly, and would have made it, when a main branch, a kind of tree in its own right, snapped off clean and fell dead at me. Next I knew, it was night and the creek was talking. I shut my eyes
and heard tree names: cedar, willow, black oak. Then daylight, and I
saw the old man jacking up the big limb with a railroad jack. He pulled
me out from under it and leaned me up against the main trunk of the down
tree. It stretched across the road and into the creek.
R.D. Carroll’s fiction is rooted in
experiences as newspaper reporter and columnist,
prison
teacher, art writer, woodcutter, bookseller,
boxer,
paratrooper, and formally practicing Rinzai
Zen Buddhist. He has published stories in Hardboiled and Heaven Bone,
and recently finished his first novel. |