NOTE: If you haven’t been following this from the beginning, and if you want to know the full sequence of events, start with the introduction. Click on Archives on the right.
I catch up with Rank Majors and Albrecht Intaglio, after passing his Hummer, parked on the side of the road. They stand outside Daisy’s place under brilliant sun. It warms our faces, with backs to the gusting wind, blowing at thirty degrees. Many houses still have piles of brush for pickup at the roadside. Over three weeks ago, ten inches of wet snow stuck to, broke, and bent countless tree limbs to the ground, snapping and splitting them at the trunk. The heartwood wood exposed and splintered; the phloem layer broken. There is no alternative but to cut behind the break.
Power went down for a day and a half as ice, fallen lines, and trees blocked the streets.
Albrecht looks up at me from under his black Stetson.
“Daisy isn’t around.”
“No, I saw her at the traffic light on Maxwell Avenue about twenty minutes ago.”
“Well, I offered to help her clear all those broken branches.”
He points to a tangle of brush blocking the footpath to her front door.
“Thought you two were through.”
“I am still available to help, you know.”
“Anyway, last time I saw her she was working at Tenniel’s.”
“Oh, the store, right?”
Daisy’s old Ford Taurus wagon hisses through a shallow puddle towards us.
She stops, opens the door a little, and speaks through a yellow surgical mask.
“Hi guys, you come to see me?”
Albrecht steps over and puts a hand on top of the door.
“Yeah, I came to clear brush, remember?”
“OH! Was that today?”
“Thursday, as I recall. That is today.”
“Well, thanks, Albrecht. Looks like you have plenty of help.”
He turns to me and to Rank whose ring tones sound from a pocket of his cammies.
“Are you two up for helping?”
Rank shakes his head as he reads a text.
“Not today, can we do this at the weekend?”
Albrecht pulls on the door.
“Hey! Don’t open it any further, I am not getting out here. Going to park in the driveway.”
“Why don’t you just open the window?”
“It doesn’t work.”
“How long you had this thing?”
“About fifteen years. It’s only got about a hundred thousand on it.”
Daisy pulls the door shut and parks at an angle on her driveway to avoid a fallen hickory branch.
We all walk over, and Rank picks up a broken branch covered in fungus and throws it aside. It breaks with the force of his movement and only half is propelled into the azalea thicket, tangled with privet, by the driveway. The rest crumbles at his feet.
“Daisy, I thought you had gone to teach at the store.”
She gets out of the car with a warn Prestige University tote bag full of groceries. The door makes a loud cracking sound as it closes.
“Hi Fred, I am afraid that thing is going to fall off every time I use the door.”
“You will have to get in on the other side!”
“That one has been jammed ever since I got hit on the ice in the Hadron Shopping center parking lot.”
Albrecht walks around inspecting the car.
“That was last Winter, wasn’t it?”
“Yeah, it was the only patch of ice in Northern Virginia!”
“When did you last check the odometer?”
“I don’t. It’s stuck at around a hundred and two thousand.”
“How long has that been?”
“Albrecht, I don’t know!”
“Well, I mean how do you know how many miles you have on this thing?”
“Just forget it, okay?”
“Albrecht continues his inspection.”
“Front tires are bald.”
“I said forget it!”
Daisy walks past him towards her back door weaving around a section of fence that collapsed under the weight of ice fallen from the roof, taking the gutter with it. She looks back.
“I’ll be out in a minute.”
Rank is grinning at Albrecht.
“Well Albrecht, I guess she isn’t teaching at Tenniel’s today.”
“No, I guess not. What’s she do, over there?”
“Like I said, she is teaching art by Zoom.”
“How do you know that?”
“I was in there, a while back.”
“What did you go to an Art store for?”
“I wanted to check out my drone. It got stuck in a tree outside.”
“Art, you said, what kind of art?”
“Drawing and painting and computer art, I think.”
Albrecht is looking up at some crows arriving in the heights of a sycamore across the street. We listen to their calls as one comes over to perch on Daisy’s snow-capped chimney.
“That snow stuck to everything it fell on.”
“Yeah, here’s what we get for living in the woods.”
Rank ignores the crows.
“What happened to Boyd, anyway?”
“How should I know, Rank?”
“You guys were working pretty close together for a while.”
“He’s gutless!”
Daisy comes back the way she came with lopper and secateurs. Her blue and white striped overalls are tight over her thick purple turtleneck sweater, her bracelets out of the way underneath.
“So, guys, are you ready to work?”
Albrecht picks up a twig, throws it to one side, and adjusts the angle of his Stetson to shade his face.
“Albrecht, why don’t you wear a mask?”
“Why? I am not a bandit!”
“You know what I mean.”
“No masks, no jabs.”
“Don’t think Daisy is with you on that one.”
“No Fred, but our messaging is keeping the heat on.”
“Your messaging?”
“Yeah, masks and jabs, I don’t want any part of it.”
“A bit risky, isn’t it?”
Rank steps closer.
“Our liberty is at risk!”
“Our liberty?”
“Right, freedom from government coercion.”
“Aren’t we talking about public health?”
Daisy trims small branches off a sagging redbud limb at her side. Frozen snow falls off on her sleaves. Albrecht, who stands next to her, turns to Rank.
“The thing is, Rank, we have to keep the libertarian spirit alive here.”
“At the expense of people’s lives?”
“Fred, liberty is won and preserved by sacrifice and that is still true today.”
“Taking a needless risk on the virus?”
“That is the small scale. On the large scale where the world is run, we can ride this issue back into power.”
“Propaganda!”
Albrecht starts toward his Hummer but pauses.
“Keep them distracted. That’s the thing.”
“Them?”
“Our voters.”
“Don’t you want your voters to be healthy enough to vote?”
“Very few people die of the virus.”
Rank shifts his weight as if to deliver a blow.
“Yeah, most of them die of the jab!”
Daisy stops trimming to face Rank.
“That is absurd, and you know it!”
“Daisy, the total is approaching a million.”
“Yeah, one million people with a virus and no jab!”
Rank kicks some rotten wood out of his way.
“I don’t buy it.”
“Listen, the virus isn’t a problem. It’s an opportunity!”
“Tell that to the sick and the bereaved, Albrecht!”
“No, I mean politically.”
“What do you mean politically?”
“Like Albrecht just said, we are getting a lot of mileage out of this thing.”
“What thing, Rank?”
“The mandates and coverups.”
Daisy gets back to trimming the redbud’s split and frozen branches.”
“Oh, you two are blowing smoke!”
“I wish we had never politicized the health business.”
“Fred, get real, my man! We are in a fight for the soul of our Nation!”
“Right Albrecht, people don’t want to be shoved around.”
“Come on! Are you going to help, or yak, yak, yak?”
Daisy leads the way back to the street where a Juniper is leaning across the road with lower branches frozen in the shade of a shallow puddle.
Albrecht looks it over and fetches his chain saw from the Hummer. He pulls on the starting cord, and it smokes into the lowest of the sagging branches.
The sun melts ice on the sunny side of the street and the water refreezes when it reaches the shade of the sagging juniper. Albrecht finishes cutting another branch and drags it onto the driveway.
“You are blocking my access!”
“Don’t get excited Daisy. I’ll cut it up later.”
“Later? When? today, tomorrow, next week?”
“He starts the saw again for another cut. Rank waves goodbye and walks off into the wind, with his black watch cap pulled down. Daisy moves close to me, to be heard above the noise of the saw.
“These two got their minds scrambled!”
“That’s politics.”
“Yup! Two authoritarians talking about liberty.”
I help Albrecht by dragging the next cut branch over to the driveway.
He cuts the last obstruction and brings it over with one hand and puts down his silenced saw with the other.
“Yeah, that one is badly off balance.”
“What?”
“Your tree.”
“Yeah, like certain people, Albrecht!”
“Oh, sure! stability is an illusion.”
“What about stillness?”
“Meaning what, Daisy?”
“I am talking about a meditative state.”
“When I was a kid, my mom used to tell me to stop wriggling.”
“Were you hyper-active?”
“No, I was brimming with life, that’s all.”
“Well, I suggest you meditate.”
“That’s a bunch of hocus-pocus. You want to end up like India with millions of degraded poverty-stricken people doing nothing. Just sitting in the streets begging?”
“No Albrecht, I am serious. You need to reflect. Center yourself.”
“Daisy, remember Swamy, I should say, ‘Swampy’ Rajneesh?”
“Sure, he was crooked.”
“Right! He was a winner! He got rich out of it, didn’t he?”
“He fooled a lot of gullible people.”
“Don’t be fooled yourself by all that idle stuff. Throw away that mask and get active!”
Daisy keeps her mask in place. She hands me the loppers and gets the secateurs out of her back pocket.
“Yak, Yak, Yak, let’s get on!”
