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Sculpture - A Short Story

by Richard Katz

"What do you call it?"

"It's a sculpture."

"No, Morgan, I mean, does it have a name?"

"Oh, yeah. 'No Leaves.' It's called 'No leaves.' It's a sculpture of a tree, right? The guy who did it -- Paul, Paul Horesby -- made a pretty decent living for a while -- for an artist, anyway -- making metal trees. Metal tree sculptures. With leaves. He made sculptures of trees with tree limbs and leaves for casinos in Atlantic City. Back when they opened'em, in '76 or whenever it was. With leaves, man! He made all these leaves, little metal leaves, just a zillion of'em. One time he made a whole truckload of'em, they were like vines, with a zillion leaves on each one and we put'em in a truck and shipped'em to Atlantic City, and the casino guy called up and told Paul that all the leaves fell off. So Paul -- Paul was Norwegian -- just shrugged. I said, 'Paul, what are you gonna do?" -- and he just shrugged again, and said 'It's nothing. I go put them back on.' So he loaded up his torch, and he went to Atlantic City, and welded them back on. Anyway, this thing here, he built it for himself, in his spare time, out of pipes and rods here and -- well, hell, you can see that, just look at it -- and he built it with no leaves. Not leaf number one. So that's what its called -- 'No Leaves.' It was for himself."

"Interesting. Where is this guy?"

"He died, Warren. Motorcycle wreck. Out on Bear Creek Road. That's how I got it."

"Oh."

They both paused, out of reverence for the dead.

"So now what are you going to do with it?"

"I'm gonna put it up on that stump."

"No kiddin'? You're going to pick it up and put it on top of that tree they cut down right over there?"

"Yeah."

"That's cool."

They paused again.

"You wanna hear how that stump over there got to be a stump?

"Yeah, sure."

"It used to be a tree. And then the lady who lives in that house right over there, when she moved in there about two years ago, she hired some guys to cut down that tree, and those two trees over there, and all those trees over there. And you see how they're ten, fifteen feet high? They're stumps but they're ten feet high, or higher."

"Yeah, I noticed that. Why is that?"

"I don't know. Maybe she saved money on the deal. Funny, 'cause it seems to me the tricky part is always cutting down the high part, where you gotta climb way the hell up there, and you gotta use ropes and stuff. I don't know that much about treework. Seems like chopping down the tree trunk would be the cheap part. Anyway, she left all these trees, or tree trunks, like ten, fifteen, twenty feet high. Like that trunk over there, that sumbitch must be ten, twelve feet."

"Not a trunk, is it, really; more of a bole, perhaps."

"A bole. I been thinkin' about that ever since she cut'em down a year or two ago, that we don't really have a good word for what those things are."

"Interesting. Never actually seen anything like them before. What does one call just the trunk of a tree? It's not a trunk -- perhaps it would be called a trunk if it were lying on the ground. And it would be a trunk if it were part of a real live tree, but like that? I don't think it's called anything, to tell you the truth. Stumpage, perhaps."

"So anyway, she saws down this poor tree, leaves this stumpage standing there ugly as sin, fifteen feet high. For a year! And get this, she covered it up with black plastic. Wrapped it up in black plastic. Besides being an ugly fifteen foot high stump, she's got it wrapped in plastic. Drove my old lady nuts, this monstrosity wrapped in black plastic, right out here in front of our house. Plus, 'a course, all the slash she left all over the place. In front'a God and everybody. So now I gotta get involved, 'cause my old lady says to me every day, 'Can't you do something about it?' and every day I say, 'What am I supposed to do? I didn't cut the goddam thing down.' And the next day the same thing. So this goes on for like a year. The City came and hauled off the slash and trash -- sent her a bill, I understand -- she yelled at the Public Works guys, somethin' about how they were haulin' off her landscape materials. Buncha stuff the Inspector called 'cellulose debris'. You know, wood and wood chips. A termite farm. It was at least a year, maybe more than a year, maybe even a year or more after the Inspector hauled off the slash and sent her a bill. So finally I call this guy I know who cuts the trees down for the City -- this thing here's on City property, you know -- guy named Joey. Got his own company. Joey always says to me, 'Morgan, you can only cut'em once. You know, you cut it down, that's it, but if you don't cut it down, you can go out and trim it forever.' And send the City a bill. Cool. Joey's got a good gig. So for two hundred bucks, Joey sends one of his guys out there, and the guy's gonna saw it down. I marked it with a can'a red spray paint, like you can still see there -- level. Not level like level with the ground, 'cause this here's a slope, right? I mean I actually got out a water level and marked that big sumbitch all the way around, level and flat, and Joey's guy tries to follow the line, but he couldn't handle it, and then Joey himself shows up, roars up in his pickup, and he grabs the guy's big four foot chainsaw from him, and he sharpens the saw, and he saws it just as level and flat as that parkbench over there. Right on the money. Then Joey roars off in his pickup again. This guy saws the fallen stump on the ground into pieces -- 'buck it up for farwood' he says -- and then I spent all my spare time for the next week chopping up all the rounds into firewood and carting it off to the shed. See that stump now? See what it's covered with?"

"Bark."

"Shingles. I saved all the bark, and cut it up into shingles. So there's this stump, and I covered it up with shingles made out of bark. Kind of the synthetic and the natural wrapped up into one. Know what I mean, the manmade and the natural stuff?"

"I think so."

"That's a concept. So that's when I thought of this tree sculpture. When Joey made that big cut, this stump here got flat as a tabletop. 'Plinth,' I said to myself. A Plinth! This lady next door massacred the tree, Joey rehabbed the tree into a nice platform, just like you see it there, all tricked out with those bark shingles, real custom. So I got the idea, go get the tree sculpture and put it on the tree that got cut down."

"Neat. Brilliant."

"To achieve a sense of closure."

"Closure. Of course."

With that, the theoretical melded into the practical. Morgan set to work. He stood up a twelve foot oak 2x6 -- a real stiff board -- and got Warren to hold it for him, next to the stump. Morgan hauled out a rusty coffee can with a dozen or so gigantic spikes in it from the pile of tools and supplies in the bed of his pickup, and grabbed a 32 oz rip hammer from under the carseat. He drove the first spike through the oak board with tremendous blows of the hammer, and deep into the stump. After two blows, the head of the nail looked like a waffle; after ten blows it was macerated.

After he had thus erected the 2x6, Morgan grabbed three more spikes and hammered them through the face of the board, to secure it to the stump. He then grabbed another three spikes and hammered them a foot and a half or so apart into the board's long edge. He left these last three spikes sticking about halfway out to make a ladder. He climbed up to the third nail and hammered two more nails into the endgrain of the wood, a good thirteen feet in the air. With his foot perched on the top nail, he sank the last two spikes deep into the endgrain, leaving an inch or two projecting out of the top.

Morgan climbed down his impromptu ladder, and buried the rip end of the hammer into the stump with a swift vicious chop.

"A sturdy piece of work," said Warren.

"It ain't no grand peeanna," Morgan said. "But what the hell. It'll hold."

Morgan picked up a wire rope sling from the pickup bed and carried it up the ladder nails. He threaded it between the two nails at the top.

"Hand me that snatchblock there, wouldja, Warren? Thanx," he said.

Warren looked around the bed of the truck for a moment, pushing things aside.

"Warren, it's that rusty piece'a shit that says 'Skookum' on it. It's a pulley. Yeah, that one. Just hand it to me."

"This thing's heavy, Morgan. Are you sure about this?"

"There ya go! Got it! Of course it's heavy. It's heavy duty, man. We're heavy duty. This outdoor art crap is a real ballbuster, I tell ya. This here is a heavy duty thing to do. Don't let anybody tell ya any different, neither, goddam it! This ain't no fuckin' keychain ornament we're putting up here, nossirree Bob ...!" Morgan kept blathering in this vein, all the while wrestling with the cumbersome snatchblock. Finally he had the snatchblock secured by its collar to the two swaged loops of the sling, held in place by a clevis that he had put in his pocket before climbing up the three nail-steps of his homemade 2x6 oaken ladder. Before he dismounted, he opened up the snatchblock, to get it ready for reeving.

Back on the ground, he ran the end of a skinny polypropylene rope through one side of a two wheeled pulley, then climbed back up on the stump and ran the rope over the pulley of the snatchblock. "Hey, Warren!" he said, "wouldja hand me the other end of that rope?" His friend fished out the end of the rope and reached it up to him.

"It's got a loop at the end of it. Is that okay?" asked Warren.

"Just right," Morgan replied. "Just what's needed."

Morgan snagged the bite at the end of the rope on one of the nails he had driven into the endgrain of the 2x6. He climbed down again, this time all the way to the ground.

"Forgot somethin'," he said, and immediately climbed back up to close the snatchblock and latch it shut. "Just like in the woods," he said.

Morgan pulled all twenty feet of the rope through his pulley system. He carried the moveable pulley -- the one with the supernumerary sheave -- to where the tree sculpture lay, five or so feet from the tree stump. Finally he got out two small clevises and short piece of chain. He used a clevis to attach one end of the chain to the eye of the moveable pulley. He wrapped the other end of the chain around the tree twice, and passed the bolt of the clevis through its last link to secure it to itself.

"Now see, here's the tricky part, Warren. The rigging. If I chain it way up here, near this branch up here, the chain won't be likely to slide up and down. Certainly not up. And down, down'd be against gravity. And gravity, hell, Gravity's the Man! But then she'd be top heavy and you wouldn't be able to get it high enough to place the bottom of it on this here stump. I think we want to be rigged more near the middle, the center of gravity like, but then it'd be kind of unstable. Elegant, though. This here is one'a those problems, ya know, where you kinda gotta know the answer before ya start. ''Pickin'', ya call it. 'Makin' a clean pick.'" I'm gonna go for the elegant solution here, Warren. I'm gonna guesstimate that this cocksucker's gonna go up nice and easy if we chain it up with a loop right about here, and then I'll go yank on that rope and all you gotta do is guide this ol'boy up offa the ground here and up onta that stump there. Piece'a cake."

"Okay," Warren replied, reaching for the loop in the chain that encircled the tree's metal trunk.

"Warren," Morgan barked, "don't do that! Keep your hands away from that chain. Just -- here, let me make that real simple." Morgan picked up a ratty looking length of rope and tied it to the bottom of the sculpture. "Just hold onto this rope, Warren, just keep it from swinging. You don't wanna get too close to one'a these sumbitches when it's on the hook like that." Morgan hauled on the pulley rope, took up all the slack, then planted his feet firmly against the stump and heaved hard on the rope again. The metal tree jumped a bit. It moved not so much up, as sideways. For every fraction of an inch it was raised, it took the opportunity to come horizontally closer to the stump.

"That's called a fairlead," said Warren.

"How the hell'd you know that?"

"I saw it in a movie. Then I saw it in the dictionary."

"Now you seen it for real. The real deal. Here, watch -- let's fairlead it on over here. C'mere, sumbitch," and he heaved on the rope again. The four hundred pound sculpture bumped heavily against the ground once, then dragged itself lightly across the earth, picking up speed slightly as it went. The mass of the sculpture gradually aligned itself more vertically with the fixed pulley at the top of Morgan's ginpole. The ground finally fell away completely, leaving the piece suspended, banging gently and bumping lightly against the stump. It was nearly horizontal, off level by just a degree or two.

"Wish my kid was here," Morgan remarked. "He oughta see stuff like this. Learn how to do things in the real world, ya know?"

"Yeah," said Warren. "Where is he?"

"He's with his mom. Let's get this dude up on there. Hold that rope, Warren, so she don't start swingin' around and you'll have to try and catch it by hand. She's heavy, ya know." Morgan leaned on the rope, and pulled it hand over hand, raising the metal tree a few inches each time. Soon the sculpture was high over the stump, and a little off to one side of it. "Okay," Morgan went on, " now all you gotta do is pull that rope of yours downward and inward, and then I'm gonna lower this baby right onto the landing pad."

Warren tugged on the line, tentatively at first, then definitively, reorienting the tree until it was nearly upright and suspended over the stump. Suddenly, the tree broke loose of the double loop in the chain and slipped a good eight inches straight down. Warren jumped at the sharp creak of the chain, tripped on an exposed tree root, and tumbled six feet down the hillside. The tree had dropped to within a fraction of an inch of its intended landing zone on the stump. Morgan lowered it just a hair or two, and it rocked just a bit, and then all the tension went out of the ropes and pulleys and the tree was resting on the stump, standing nicely straight up. Or as straight as a figurative metal sculpture of a tree can be said to stand.

Morgan fished three more spikes out of his rusty coffee can, fitted each one with a fender washer, picked up his hammer, and set the spikes into the wooden tree trunk so the metal tree wasn't going to go anywhere soon.

"Now comes the good part," Morgan said, burying the rip end of the hammer in the tree trunk and stepping away from it. "Admiring it."

Warren followed him, down the little hill, and all the way across the street. Morgan turned around and gazed.

"Beautiful, man! Fuckin' beautiful!" He paused. "I may not know what I like, but goddamit, I know what art is."

"Yeah," said Warren, "it's nice. Looks good there."

"Beer?" Morgan asked.

"Sure." Warren replied.

"Just stay there, man. You been a big help. I'll get it," Morgan said. He trotted across the street, picked out two cans of beer from the cooler in his pickup, and walked back to where Warren had moved to get a different angle on admiring their sculpture installation.

"Whaddaya think?" he asked, handing over a beer.

"It's nice. Cheers!"

"Yeah, l'chayim."

"You're pretty good at this," Warren said.

"Yup," Morgan replied. "I've done it once or twice before."

"Really?"

"No, Warren, that's just a manner of speaking. Me and Al, we put up tons'a this shit."

"Al Rice? Slow Al?"

"Yeah."

"What happened to him? Haven't run into him lately."

"No, I don't suppose you have. He's dead. Got murdered in his studio. About eight, ten years ago."

"Really? Who did it? They catch the guy?"

"Yeah. They caught the guy. He was a murderer. He killed a guy before. In Arizona. A real bad apple."

"What happened?"

"I don't know exactly, 'cause I wasn't there, but the story is that this guy was makin' a lot of noise out in the street and carrying on, and Al was workin', and he went and asked the guy to cool it. So the guy drew a knife, and a gun, and ol' Al got shot and killed."

"That's horrible."

"That it is. He built that sculpture over there, the one with the pipes and the curlicues near the top and that triangular element layin' on that big flat rock."

"He built it like that, with the big flat rock and all?"

"Uh, no, matter of fact, he didn't. He had a piece of cast aluminum down there, near the base, and a big hunk of cast glass, kind of glued to the metal, but somebody musta stolen it. So I figured, well hell, that bigass piece of rock could stand in for the glass. You know, sand, glass, stone -- that elemental stuff. And then of course, there's the way the angle of that big iron plate with the rectangular holes kinda matches up with the inclination of the big rock. And then of course there's the way that spot of rust on the rock matches up with the rust on that bracket I had Gunther make at the welding shop, so's I could put it back together after the bolts stripped. And then see how the rough edge of the bracket matches up with the craggy part of the rock, just to the left of that rusty patch --- just nestles on in there -- well, ya gotta get closer to see that, but take my word for it, that there's damn near Japanese. Planned it that way. Yeah, sure I did."

"Hey, Morgan, I don't want to interrupt your explication, and your connoisseurship's real good, man, but I think you have a problem."

"What's that?"

"Look over there."

The lady who lived in the house up the hill, whose name was Carol Metz, was standing no more than ten feet from the sculpture, glowering. She looked over at the two men, meanly, turned abruptly, and went back into her house.

"Doesn't look good," Warren continued. "She's pissed. What've you got goin' with her?"

"Nothin'. I haven't said more'n a few words to her ever. Nothin' at all, especially since she chopped down those trees."

"She's really pissed, Morgan. Maybe you better go talk to her."

"Hey, Carol, what's up?" Morgan called.

Mrs Metz didn't say a word. She dug her foot into the ground a bit, then turned and left.

"Now what the hell was that all about?" Morgan asked.

"I can't imagine. She was sure steamed, Morgan. That woman was fit to be tied. You should go talk to her."

"Aaah, the hell with her. She just doesn't appreciate art. Or trees, maybe. She doesn't appreciate trees. Wood, or metal, or otherwise. Don't worry about it."

"Morgan, she left her door open. She looked like she was gonna call the cops, or something."

"For what, Warren? Installing a sculpture?"

"I don't know. Why don't you go talk to her?"

Mrs Metz stormed through the front door, armed with a man-sized crowbar and a crescent wrench.

"Hey, Carol, what ... What's with the crowbar? Hey! Carol!"

She said not a word. She marched up to the sculpture and attacked the big spikes at its base with the crowbar. When she couldn't get a purchase on the nails, she banged on the crowbar with her crescent wrench. She got a piece of one, then took a big bite with the bar and pulled the nail a good inch out of the stump. Morgan went and stood near her, interjecting his questions midst the screech of the prybar and the clang and bang of the wrench.

"Hey, Carol! Don't do that. Just stop a minute, willya? Come on, Carol, just stop a'heavin' and a'hoin' a second and let's talk this out. You don't wanna do that. That's stupid. Hey! Leave it alone."

"I won't have it," Mrs Metz said loudly. "I'm going to get it out of here."

"No, don't do that. That's stupid, Carol. Leave it the fuck alone!"

Creak! went another nail, then another. "I never wanted you to cut that tree," she shouted. "I was going to carve that tree." Mrs Metz grabbed the metal tree by it's trunk, and rocked it violently back and forth.

"You wanted to carve it up," Morgan yelled, "you had enough time to carve a whole goddamned totem pole fer Christ's sake."

Mrs Metz was trying to free the tree sculpture from the last spike. The bottom plate of the sculpture buckled and bent. The nail bent too. She attacked it with her bar, and pried it half the way out.

"I'll call the police!" shouted Morgan.

"Go ahead," said Mrs Metz. "You just go right ahead and call whomever you wish. I know just what they'll do -- I'll just say that you and I had a big argument and then they'll just say they're going to keep out of it. They'll just say it's a neighborhood spat. And that will the be the end of that."

Morgan was completely taken aback. She was probably right, of course. It had the ring of truth to it, because she was just reciting something that had happened already, in the old woman's past. She pulled the last nail, and savagely wrestled the tree sculpture off its pedestal. The tree fell five feet to the ground. A branch snapped off, and landed a good six feet further away in the dirt. Morgan noticed that just that one little branch, with its fork and two little twigs attached, was a fair sized piece all by itself. Mrs Metz dragged the light end of the sculpture another five feet further, and then dropped it into the mud.

* * * * *

Morgan did call the police, one week later. The police came out and talked to everybody, including of course Mrs Metz. They interviewed Warren by telephone. The police filed a report, and just as Mrs Metz had predicted, the prosecutor wrote it off as a neighborhood quarrel and dropped the matter completely.

* * * * *

The metal tree sculpture had an interesting life after that. Morgan never touched it again, just left it lying on the ground five feet from its plinth, and he never spoke to his neighbor, Carol Metz, again. One day Mrs Metz, on one of her few forays outside her door, was walking right in front of the falled tree sculpture and slipped. She told her doctor that "All of a sudden my feet just went out from under me." She went around with Ace bandages on her right knee after that. She became reclusive, fearful of the fallen steel tree. She couldn't stand to look at it, just down from her front door as it was. It drove her quite mad. She died only a year and a few months later.

Morgan's son, Harald, played on the lying-down tree sculpture his whole life and never knew any different.

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