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the smell.
    There were new houses going up, too, in those days, but these were union jobs and the men didn’t work on Saturdays. These houses were for the families who were moving in then a couple of miles to the west of us on the upward slope of Shelter Bend Hill, at the rate of a dozen or so per year: the new managers from IBM’s expanding transistor plant in Islington. They were commissioning broad-chimneyed brick Colonials or turreted Queen Annes with brick for the first story and lapped cedar for the second. My father did the rough-in and the hookups. It was all still Metarey pipe, of course, and Metarey brick and Metarey lumber, too, and although the construction trucks said
O’Shaughnessy-Erie
in white script across their green doors, we all understood that this firm, too, was part of Liam Metarey’s empire.
    One day my father asked me to help on a sewer that had broken on the Metareys’ own land. This was in the spring of my second year at Franklin Roosevelt High School. The sewer had been pierced by the roots of the estate’s great bur oak, a majestic, horizontally drafted tree whose lowest limbs reached from the ridge of the main lawn all the way across the entrance road to the top steps of the porch. “You know what that means?” my father said to me at breakfast one Saturday.
    “What?”
    “It means we have to dig with a toothbrush.” He took a sip of his coffee. “And we have to cut with nail clippers.”
    “Not bad money for cutting nails,” answered my mother, who kept the family budget.
    We had risen before dawn and she had cooked eggs and hash. On the stove ledge now she was fixing sardine sandwiches for my father and me and examining a sheet of stationery that had been engraved with the image of the same oak we were about to work under. I could tell she was reading the terms of payment.
    “It’s a ten-foot trench, I’d guess,” said my father. “And in the heat of the day.”
    “Then you should be getting started then, shouldn’t you?” said my mother.
    “Right you are, love.”
    And that was what we did then, before it was even light. The drip line of the tree reached well past the sewer, and when we arrived at Aberdeen West my father set to work with a lantern and an iron spike, testing the ground for roots. The big house was still dark. My father was whistling “Roddy McCorley,” but softly, and now and then he glanced up at the windows. When he was finished with the spike, we began digging, but before we were even down as far as our boots we had to switch from shovels to spades, wedging their narrow heads between the roots. They were everywhere. His whistling stopped. He gently pulled back the end of a tendril but as soon as he let go it dropped back into the hole. He stood looking at it in the rising light, which was still pale but already warm on my back. “What would you use here, Cor?” he finally said.
    “Half-hitch?”
    “Not gentle enough. Mr. Metarey’s paying us not to hurt the tree.”
    “Two half-hitches and a round-turn, then.”
    “That’s what I would use,” he said. “Or a double-loop bowline.”
    It was almost noon before I could stand as deep as my waist in the short section that we’d dug. I hadn’t seen Christian, who was in my class at school, but soon after we’d started, her sister, Clara, had come out and sat on the front steps, not twenty feet away from us. She was reading a book. Occasionally she would set it down, close her eyes as if to think about something, then pick it up again. I’d always been a hard worker, but I couldn’t help being aware of her.
    The pipe still lay another foot or two below us. Around me, a net of tendrils hung gently in the set of slings I’d been making from mason’s line. A web of thicker, arterial roots still stretched across the channel, though, as intricately crossed as the tree’s crown, and at this depth we had to bend over to dig in them. My gloves were already soaked.
    As I took one off to free a root