The day was muggy and increasingly hot, and the earth steamed as the workers’ shovels turned it over and released the trapped moisture. Grey thunderheads stacked up in the sky to the west, but overhead it was colorless, a band of high cirrus sweeping leisurely across toward the distant, invisible mountains, as if in a different world from the dead stillness below. Uneasiness hung in the air, reluctant harbinger of a portending change in the weather; but irresolute over what the change might be. The hesitation might last an hour, or the rest of the day. In the interval, humanity continued to attend to its endless, petty affairs.
     The Müllers labored steadily in the growing heat until their father paused and tipped back his hat. Uncertain given the lack of direction, the six brothers did the same. Wilhelm, leaning on his shovel, observed his father looking at a distant tree, a great, spreading oak standing high over the surrounding fields, as it had stood for hundreds of years. It was impressive, he supposed. Thick, bushy, free of dead foliage or mistletoe, it reared high on its immense trunk, huge limbs easily brandishing their burden of gnarled branches and the twisting twigs with their bundles of small acorns and healthy green leaves. His father certainly seemed taken with the sight. Wilhelm, his concerns more immediate, gave it little more than the passing glance. Removing his own sweat-ringed hat, he wiped a sleeve along his brow and squinted down at the shadow, trying to estimate the hours of work yet ahead of them and whether it would be given them to finish, as their father had decreed, before the storm broke—assuming it did break.
     The coordinator of their activity continued motionless, the effort of hours momentarily forgotten in his apparent transport.
     “Will we cut it down this year, Father?” Wilhelm asked, in a spirit of perversity.
     August Müller turned on him, his visage darkening. “Why have you stopped, Wilhelm? Return to work.”
     The boy dropped his gaze. “Yes, Father.”
     Now the man noted how the rest of the boys had also paused, aping his own example. “How do you expect to get this field cleared to the road if all you do is admire your feet?” he barked. “Everyone—back to work!”
     “Yes, Father!” chorused all six boys, and they fell to with renewed effort as he looked on, shaking his head, dissatisfaction written deep into his face. They felt his brooding gaze on their backs as they labored away in a ragged row, and when they inevitably slackened, his whip crack of a voice: “Keep it steady! Must I show you everything?” Tearing his own shovel from the earth, Müller strode over to join them, attacking the ground at pace they could hardly match. But with time they all found rhythm, straightened their formation, and rapidly, quietly in a line several paces apart, busied themselves at their task for another hour.
     “Not there, Ernst,” Müller said at length to his youngest boy, breaking the silence. “You are too near the tree.”
     “Yes Father,” Ernst replied, and then added, daringly, “Why must we work away from the tree?”
     Wilhelm, who would not have dreamed of asking, marveled at his brother’s boldness. He But Ernst was their father’s pet.
     Müller, his earlier sternness ameliorated in the shared effort, indulged him with an explanation. “Crops grow poorly in the shade of the oak,” he said. “It is pointless to clear the ground there.”
     “Is that why Wilhelm wanted to cut it down?” asked the boy.
     Müller nodded. “Your brothers and I spent two years removing the other trees from our farmland.”
     “Why not this one, Father?”
     “It is special.”
     “What—?”
     “Enough questions. Work.”
     “Yes, Father.” The boy pushed his shovel into the earth before him and turned over a large clod, bound together by the roots of the straw. The others, having hesitated a moment, did the same.
     At last Müller glanced up to take the position of the sun in the sky.
     “We will stop and eat now,” he said.
     A common expulsion of breath traveled down the line as the boys grounded their shovels, broke formation, and stretched. Herman, whose turn it was, sprinted back to the wagon for the food.
     “Come,” Müller told the others. “We will lunch under the oak.” They fell into pace behind him.
     Soon they all sat against the great, grey trunk, Müller, Wilhelm, Ansel, Ewalt, Gustaf and Ernst, unconsciously ranged by age and size as they had been at their labor. Dry acorn husks and tightly curled leaves were strewn about them in the short yellow grass, with a flash of jays and chittering of squirrels above. An unexpected whisper of breeze touched them, refreshing after the hours of hard work they had put in since dawn.