Orin Holman pondered the mystery of the downed tree, thinking perhaps it was two trees and that he was free of guilt. He had moments in his life when being the good Samaritan had gotten him into trouble, and this was one of those moments. Perhaps aiding his neighbor was not his business, he mused, but then he put that silliness aside. It was the risk one took in caring. A sister in church once teased Orin for his kind ways, "No good deed goes unpunished!"
Orin's neighbor Charlie Smith had had a serious car accident. He was laid low in the hospital and his chores were going undone. A storm had brewed the weekend after the collision on Blackberry Hill Road and had brought down some Ponderosa Pine onto Charlie's alfalfa fields. He called Charlie's wife, Estelle, who had agreed that the tree Orin could see from the roadway was a problem, and Orin volunteered to bring the snagged tree down and to cut it up, and he offered to pay for the wood as a gesture to Charlie, and Estelle agreed to that arrangement.
But Charlie had other neighbors with similar inclinations and what happened, from Orin's perspective, was that Estelle ended up agreeing to the same arrangement with another neighbor, Stan Spleed. In retrospect Orin saw that Estelle had a hundred other things on her mind, and that the guys in the neighborhood were doing what any trauma junkies would do, rushing in.
So, later that week Orin had some spare time and went to the Smith place and brought the tree to the ground, out of the snag of several oaks. He limbed up the trunk and bucked it, piling the debris into a brush pile to burn at the next wet occasion.
When he returned five or six days later the brush pile had been burned and some of the trunk had been removed. Orin was curious, but just thought someone else was also helping Estelle cope with the land. He didn't know whom.
That night he called Estelle who told him Stan was working on a tree too, but that it was down by the red barn. Orin never bothered to call Stan to clarify. And, again, in retrospect, he didn't know why the neglect was sowed; he marveled at how it came to fruit. Orin continued on the pine as time allowed, driving his tractor and wagon down to haul away the wood he's just cut up, stout rounds he had to wrestle around, some so big he used a come-along to get them on board.
For Orin it felt good to help his neighbor, to be cleaning up the woods and pasture, knowing Charlie would appreciate all of it, a kind of insurance should he go down on his luck.
Then, the last afternoon of this project he arrived to find more rounds cut. And split! At the time he couldn't guess who was helping him out like this, but that's the way he saw it, and, alas, in retrospect Orin felt like a complete dope, so naive, so gullible toward the truth as he saw it at the moment, never landing on the possibility that Stan's tree and Orin's tree were one in the same.
When Stan called the next afternoon, steaming over the phone, simmering a rant about the splitting he had done and how he had always trusted Orin, Orin ate crow, listened, and when Stan had talked himself out, hung up.
The next morning Orin loaded all the wood he had harvested and paid for from Charlie's pine, or Stan's pine, and returned it to the site of the other tree, Stan's tree...as a benevolent God intended it.
Leaving the Smith place, his empty wagon in tow, Orin looked back over his shoulder. "Humph!"
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