“Right, right.” She focused on the saw again. She moved down a couple of feet, positioned the running chain, and started to cut.
With that one done, he said, “Red button.”
She pushed the red button, and the chainsaw settled into stillness and silence. The wind had stopped, and the whole world seemed to hold its breath.
“You’re incredible,” he said.
Lenore laughed again, and she lifted her chainsaw and shook it. “I cut up some wood!”
“All right,” he said, chuckling. “You think you’re ready to cut down a tree?”
She looked over to the woods. “I don’t know. You’re going to have to show me.”
Brandon grinned. He’d texted her yesterday during the first few minutes of church, and they had a date set up for that night. And lunch with Duke and Zona…Brandon pushed the whole afternoon out of his head. After all, he needed to focus with a chainsaw in his hands too.
Not only that, but because of their first date, they’d agreed to quit working at five-thirty, and he’d pick her up at her place at six-thirty. He still had several long hours before then, and he had no time to be stewing over Arizona and her mothering way.
He went with Lenore over to the edge of the trees. She came right to his side, and Brandon could admit that everything about her was attractive to him.
“We’re going to start with some of these small ones,” he said. “We’ll use them for the chicken coop, and we can add them to the wood pile too. They’re pretty little, so it’s not going to take much to get them down.”
He stepped over to the first tree, which had a trunk only about four inches in diameter. “Sometimes we can just strip the branches, cut a little notch, and push it over,” he said.
He yanked the cord on his chainsaw, and it came to life. He rolled the blade up the edge of the bark to cut the lower branches, where he then grabbed onto them and tossed them away from him.
That done, he silenced his saw again. “Then, what we’re going to do is we’re going to put a little notch on one side. This is the direction the tree is going to fall.”
He paused and looked at her. “Got it? You put the notch where you want the tree to fall.”
“Notch where I want the tree to fall,” she said. “So we want it to fall out into this open area, right?”
“Right,” Brandon said.
He side-stepped around the tree. “So I’m going to notch it on the front there, right where I was standing.” He powered up his chainsaw and cut down in at an angle. “This is the top cut, and we do it on an angle.”
He pulled the saw out and added, “Then you cut straight in to meet it. That’s the bottom cut, and it makes a notch.” He made the bottom cut, then straightened and toed the notch out with his boot. “See?”
Lenore nodded, and he moved around to the backside of the tree. “Come on over here, Lenny. You gotta be out of the way. The tree is going to fall that way.”
She scurried behind him. “Right.”
“With smaller trees, sometimes you can just push it with your foot,” he said. “Or we can start to cut right across from the horizontal part of the notch.”
He bent down and placed the teeth of the chainsaw against the trunk. He only had to go in about an inch before the tree leaned into the notch and started to tip.
“You keep cutting,” he said. “When it’s going for sure, you pull straight back.”
He pulled straight out and turned off his chainsaw. The tree landed with a thud on the ground in the exact direction he’d wanted it to go.
“These little ones aren’t that big of a deal,” he said. “You don’t flail around with your chainsaw, but if the tree’s coming at you, you gotta get out of the way.”
She nodded. “I can get out of the way.”
“All right. You want to try this little one?”
He nodded down two feet to the next tree with a four-inch diameter trunk. Lenore moved around to the front of it, and Brandon stood off to the side, out of the way.
“Top cut,” he said. “It’s about forty-five degrees. Then straight in for the bottom cut. Pull that notch out.”
