Chapter 2
Chud-chudda-chuck-chudda.
Fifteen minutes later, the three of us stood in Molly Winter’s prize-winning pumpkin patch using a gigantic two-handed antique bucksaw to cut down the pole that was holding up Molly’s laundry line. Actually, antique wasn’t an old enough word. The saw looked nearly freaking prehistoric.
“This’ll fix her for sure,” Dulsie said. “That petrified old she-bat.”
Molly was our school librarian. She was a large, frumpy woman who wore dresses that might once have been tents. As far as I could tell, Molly had been gifted with the magic ability to find whatever book you were looking for, even if you didn’t know what you were looking for.
Chud-chudda-chuck-chudda.
I didn’t have any particular grudge against Molly or her clothesline pole, but Dulsie sure did. You see, Molly had told Dulsie she couldn’t come into the library painted the way she was, which at the time was a chessboard pattern, complete with a pair of plastic pawns she had tied to her ears with string. Getting her ears pierced was another one of those over-my-dead-body rules of her dad’s.
“Well, how would you like to see me painted?” Dulsie had asked Molly, which went over like a baked-bean bugle-fart.
Chud-chudda-chuck-chudda.
The saw blade chudded, chucked, chattered, and bounced at first, skipping over the wood grain instead of cutting straight through it, until the teeth finally sank into the deeper timber and the cut began to properly take.
“Come on to her, boy,” Granddad Angus prompted. “Muckle onto this saw good and proper.”
There were days when Granddad Angus needed subtitles.
There were days when all the subtitles in China couldn’t help.
Granddad Angus almost never said anything that didn’t mean something else. The man talked in code. When he said, “come on to her,” he really meant “bear down hard,” which was just another way of saying “muckle onto this,” which was another way of saying “get cracking and come a daisy onto her.”
Have you got that straight?
Me neither.
“Are you sure this saw is sharp enough?” I asked.
“Sure as glue,” Granddad Angus said. “I spent the last week setting the teeth on this old misery whip to the perfect angle. This saw will cut a thin fog from the broad edge of a cloudy morning.”
“You’re not cutting fog,” Dulsie pointed out. “You’re cutting down a clothesline pole.”
I took the opportunity to point out that some people—namely, my dad—might look at what we were doing as an act of criminal vandalism.
“You’re both wrong. What we’re doing is having an adventure,” Granddad Angus replied. “And adventure is a long-winded way of saying fun.”
“So are we having fun yet?” I asked.
“Fun is what you make of it. We’re not cutting down a clothesline pole. We are freeing up a caber that has been disguised all these years as a laundry accessory.”
A caber is a tree trunk, as big and as tall as a telephone pole, that is meant to be run with and thrown end over end as a test of strength. If you ever figure out why someone would want to throw a telephone pole, let me know. I just don’t get it.
“If you say so,” I replied, still not convinced.
“We are what we are until we become something else,” Granddad Angus explained patiently. “That is the magic of evolution, time, and change. This pole used to be a Jack pine until someone cut it down. We’re just freeing a caber that’s spent a lifetime trapped inside a clothesline pole that used to be a Jack pine.”
I was sure what Granddad Angus was saying made perfect sense in some alternate universe, but I still didn’t get it—and I didn’t really need to. He was my Granddad Angus and my very best friend and I would do just what he asked me to.
“Let’s get to the timbering,” he said. “Lean on your end of the saw and I’ll haul on mine. Dulsie, you keep watch. If this pole falls on us and kills us both dead, it’ll be your job to bury our remains under one of these pumpkins.”
So I leaned and he hauled and I let him pull me along. I stopped arguing and got into the spirit of the thing and before too long that old saw stopped chucking and chudding and settled into a groove.
I’m not saying the cutting was smooth or consistent, you understand. The fact was, that old saw sounded like an asthmatic bulldog working out a case of terminal lockjaw on an arthritic mailman’s ankle bone. I couldn’t believe Molly Winter could sleep through a racket that was ten times worse than bagpipes, scalded cats, and a snowplow scraping down a frozen gravel road.
All at once the pole gave way to gravity and came crashing straight down. Granddad Angus dropped the saw and caught the pole with both of his palms, and ran backwards, hand-over-handing the caber down to the dirt—at least until he tripped over me.
I hadn’t planned on tripping Granddad Angus. I was too busy trying to duck down and get out of the way of that two-hundred-pound, timber-tumbling, clothesline-pole people-squasher to make any kind of plan. Fortunately, the pole missed both of us and broke its fall on Molly Winter’s prize-winning pumpkin patch, which, given the mess we’d made, probably wasn’t winning too many prizes this year.
“What a mess,” I said, staring at a dozen or so freshly flattened jack-o-pancakes.
“Those pumpkins look more like squash, right now,” Granddad Angus replied, thoughtfully stroking the salt and pepper of his beard.
“I’m going to get blamed for this, too,” I predicted.
“Me too,” Dulsie said, looking over her shoulder towards Molly’s darkened house. “I hope my dad doesn’t get too mad at me.”
“There’s no need to blame anyone,” Granddad Angus said. “Squint properly and you’ll see this is nothing more than a freshly planted field of Nova Scotia Jack pine pumpkins. Come next year, a newborn Jack pine will shoot up from that spot, sprouting limbs full of fat orange pumpkins so big and so round and so orange that the coyotes will howl every night thinking that they’re staring up at a tree full of full moon.”
Have I mentioned Granddad Angus’s wild-as-the-wind imagination?
“That is about the single stupidest thing you’ve ever said,” I pointed out, not wanting to encourage such flights of fancy.
“You sound like your father,” Granddad Angus said. “You don’t really mean it.”
Don’t really mean it?
I guess I didn’t really mean it when I told Granddad Angus that sticking postage stamps to a fresh mackerel, addressing it to the Department of Fisheries, and dropping it into a mailbox to complain about their latest policy was not all that clever a plan.
I guess I didn’t really mean it when I told Granddad Angus that painting sunflowers on roadkill didn’t qualify as beautifying the town.
And I guess I didn’t really mean it when I told Granddad Angus it was a bad idea to put wagon wheels on a dory, hop inside, and roll the dory-wagon straight down Dead Dog Hill with only a hockey helmet and three pillows duct-taped to his behind for protection.
“What sort of a story is your life going to be if you don’t learn to turn up your imagination every chance you get?” Granddad Angus asked. “That’s the problem with you movie-watching, video-game-playing, cell-phoning kids these days. You haven’t learned to turn on the lights in your imagination yet.”
And that’s right about when Molly’s bedroom light turned on.