The boys dig into the ground with spades; the lake breathes with with canoes and sailboats; the minister watches. He finishes a Lucky Strike, grinds it into the earth, lights another. The cabin looks naked now, he thinks. The canopy over the makeshift picnic area, over the path to the frog pond, over the shallow ravine, is mostly gone. Some of the remaining trees bear spray-painted X's — the elms do — and the rest feel out of place in their newfound majority. He calls encouragement to the boys, and goes to his car for his notebook. He has an idea for a sermon. The cicadas hiss.
The boys: the boys tie their hair back with string and push it up with kerchiefs; the boys rank and compare their catalogues of nascent sexual experiences. Their voices are not yet guttural; their palms still soft, their delineations wishful. They handle the saplings roughly: basswood, Russian olive, black walnut. One boy is saving for a car; one boy is in love with the minister's daughter. (And later, years later, a girlfriend will joke about this — "The minister's daughter? What - did you take her to Lookout Peak in your Chevy? Did you roll up her sleeves when you saw her walking past in a hoop skirt? Did you share malts? Gawd!" — and he will remember this day with a pinprick of kept romance.)
The minister sits gingerly on the picnic table, his pant cuffs rising, but not past the sock. The sermon begins, "As I was weeding my garden," but the words won't come. He realizes that, now, he can see through the woods, past the dirt road you take to get to the cabin, to the main road. He realizes that fewer crows will caw. His wrist starts to ache. He realizes that the noise of the neighboring cabins, through the woods, will be clearer — the limber collegiate guitarists hammering A chords, fingerpicking subsonic pleas to the sprawled sorority fawns, tossing Busch cans at lightning bugs. The cicadas hiss. He looks at the box of saplings, half-empty.
Hey boys, he calls. Do you want a smoke.