PART 2 — THE HOUSE
Miss Ophelia steadied herself on her cane and held up a photograph of a house with half its roof caved in under a giant split oak.
That was my home, she said, after Hurricane Debby came through. The tree came down in the night and pinned me in my own bedroom. I could not move. I could hear the rest of it groaning, getting ready to fall the rest of the way.
Then a young man climbed up into what was left of that oak with a chainsaw, in the dark, with the whole thing shifting under him, and he cut a way through to me and carried me out. Minutes later the rest of the tree came down on the very spot where I had been lying.
The man Lawrence called a monkey swinging in trees had climbed into a collapsing oak during a hurricane to carry an old woman out of her own bedroom.
I asked everyone who saved me, Miss Ophelia said, until somebody finally gave me his name. Then she pointed her cane at Andre. When your sister brought me today and I saw that young man at the grill, I nearly fell out of my chair. That is him.
The yard went quiet. Lawrence, who knocked down whole forests for parking lots, set down his bourbon.
Andre just flipped another burger and said he was only glad Miss Ophelia was still with us. She said she was still here to eat his peach cobbler only because of him.
My son swings in trees like a monkey, his uncle had laughed. During a hurricane he climbed into a breaking one to save a life. That is what the chainsaw is for.