As we wound back home, I felt Dad’s preoccupation, however well he tried to hide it, like a yoke growing heavier on my 12-year-old shoulders. His steps had quickened as soon as the house came into view through the half-bare trees.
In his own adolescence, my father had worked on dairy farms and in garages. He still preferred a welding torch to a walking stick. On this Saturday morning, however, he had forgone tinkering in his basement workshop to join me in quiet observation in the woods, my sanctuary. I was anxious for him to find even a small bit of magic in the forest, to come away from our excursion in the woods with some reason to return.
But our walk had lacked novelties, and his tools and projects beckoned. My gaze rose in search of a diversion, a counterforce to his workshop’s pull. The nest appeared then, a sun-dappled beacon: oblong and newspaper-colored, hanging 30 feet from the ground in a red maple.
“Wasps!” I yelled to Dad.
He paused and looked over his shoulder. I pointed up toward the canopy. His green eyes followed my finger to the nest ensconced among the lingering October leaves.
“Wow – I wouldn’t want that falling on my head,” he said, then took another step homeward.
“Wait,” I said. He turned to me. I crouched and gathered several small rocks in my palm. “I can bring it down.”
He looked up at the nest again. The brim of his black felt hat cast a partial eclipse across his face. “Why?” he asked. “They might be alive in there. Seems against your code.”
“It’s empty,” I assured him. “There’s no activity around it.”
He pondered. His eyebrows rose. “Let’s see it.”
My nerves tightened as I twisted into my throwing motion. As I flung the stone, I wondered if his breath stalled in his chest, as mine did. The long supporting branch gave a dull thud and a jolt. The stone dove into the underbrush somewhere in front of us with a brief rustle. The nest trembled but remained hanging.
“Shoot,” I huffed. I didn’t look at Dad. I knew the expression that awaited me, the one that said, “Try again. Don’t give up so easily.” It was there when I wobbled on a bike, misapplied a solder, flailed at math.
I slung the second stone. It punched through the nest’s upper-right corner, dust and flakes drifting earthward from the hole, but my target held out. I looked at Dad. He was evaluating the nest, the unfinished job.
Pitching in Little League had taught me what a strike felt like as the baseball left my hand. I knew my third attempt was a good one. The stone severed the nest from the tree branch, and the woods seemed to hush as it plunged to the ground, landing in the leaves with a muffled crunch.
For a moment we stared, breathless, at where the nest had fallen. Dad moved first. I followed him, passing through the sunbeams that sifted through the canopy. We approached cautiously, as though we had witnessed a meteor crash to earth, fearful of the alien plague it might unleash.
The nest lay broken. A wall of cracked comb as wide across as my stripling’s chest peeked out from behind its split paper exterior. Dad knelt, reached into the wreckage, and extracted a piece of the comb. He inspected it, peering into the empty chambers, holding it up to the sun. Then he put it to his nose and breathed in, closing his eyes. His mouth turned up into a grin. He opened his eyes and looked at me: “Smell.”
Into my nose flooded the musk of old and handcrafted things: fetid yet sweet, the aroma of life and decay. Dad sat back on his heels. I leaned forward and pried the nest apart. From inside I raised up a translucent cross-section of comb untouched by the fall. It was a geometrical wonder, each hexagonal chamber perfectly symmetrical, the work of wasps manic with industry. They were builders, like he was.
I presented it to him. He took it from me without a word, still grinning.
That comb sat on a shelf in his workshop for years, then it came with me to college and finally to my first apartment. There, long after my last walk with Dad on that land and anywhere else, the comb fell from its perch when I brushed past it thoughtlessly one morning. Lighter this time, it descended onto floorboards instead of ocher leaves, crumbling into weightless pieces.
I collected the remains in my hands and stared at them. I put them to my nose. They carried the same resinous fragrance, the same power they had 15 years earlier: the bit of magic I had sought for Dad, a thrill that connected us to those woods and to each other.