Intervals of rest—on a rock, on a stump, and farther on, past where the woods thin and end and give way to a brief clearing of broom straw, against the moss-bound trunk end of a broken lone tree that hasn’t seen green for years. It’s all that’s left of the tree that felled the Drells. So the story goes, that tree outlived the forest it was seeded from until the afternoon so many years ago when heat lightning ended its sesquicentenniary life. So the story goes, a hiss across the sun aimed for a moving target and missed, and brought down this tree with the biggest boot of all. Every limb cracked off as it flattened to the ground, and so the story goes, flattening to a splatter beneath it the four generations of Drells. Four Drells felled in the middle of nowhere on a high summer day by a string of lightning hitting the only tree standing that they were napping under for shade, or so the story goes. Flummox Belvedere swore on the Good Book he saw it happen, but no one saw him see it, so no one knows for certain. Leave it to a hunch—that’s history. What is known is that so shaken was he by the randomness of the hand that hissed the sky, a punishment that seemed to follow no crime, that Flummox from that day on was never seen without his neck craned to heaven, always on the lookout for the next spontaneous act of judgment. The broken limbs from the tree that felled the Drells dried out first. Within the year, Flummox hung himself out to dry, too. Kennesaw’s old man came to know what happens when you take off a belt and fasten it around your neck and nail it to a beam in the barn and kick out from under you the only thing that keeps you from knowing what will happen. It was Kennesaw who found him; and he kept that belt, that strip of an unjust god that showed some mercy at last, kept it so he’d always remember.
The hole that Flummox’s box was dropped into was as close to hell as a hole could be dug. Hunko dragged a sledge out to the tree that did the felling and gathered all the limbs he could carry to begin building Kennesaw’s heavenly gates.
That it should also give Hunko something to hang his heart on was nothing Kennesaw knew of or needed to know; it was True who tipped him off to what Hunko was up to, though at the time it made no difference. Kennesaw all but forgot about the “gift” Hunko was hunkering over in his barn like a workshop elf, or so he said. He didn’t expect anything from Hunko nor of Hunko, and so he was neither displeased nor disappointed when the nothing he didn’t care about didn’t come.
We can’t all be kings, Kennesaw thought then. Not every man is special enough to prove himself special in the simplest acts. Some plant a seed and nothing grows; some measure a plank for sawing, measure it twice, and still saw wrong. There must be that kind among us, the ordinary failures, so that those of us who score the ordinary successes—plant a seed that grows, saw a plank that fits—are extraordinary by comparison. It was like that with Kennesaw and Hunko, his short shadow, years his junior and the mismatched son he might have had, had there been a few more years between them and had he and True given the Bliss-Belvedere drum one last good thump at a very early age. Hunko made those gates for him; it took him years to get them just right. How could Kennesaw have closed his heart to something like that? Special, and not special enough. Between them exists something so special no ordinary lockbox has ever been able to keep it locked from his memory for any significant length of time, and he can feel Hunko gaining on him by the second, as if the boy were following him to True’s.
Call it a sign or that sock in the eye you don’t bounce back from, but what happened that day with the felling of the Drells and the effect it had on Flummox adulted Kennesaw from his father’s son to his own man in a matter of hours, and put him on the path to the rest of his years with only one real regret trailing behind him.