Monticello arranges itself around a courthouse square, and the roads leaving town roll off into Jasper County pasture and hardwood ridge until they run down toward the Ocmulgee. Benton Tree Service covers that country in every direction — pines behind the barn, a hackberry crowding the porch roof, oaks along a fence line that need lifting off the wire. Trimming and pruning are the patient half of the trade: take the right limb, leave the shape, let the tree carry itself through the next windy March. Removal is the other half, and it happens in pieces, quietly, with the garden fence still standing when the truck pulls out. After weather comes through and stacks limbs across a gravel drive, they clear it down to the dirt, because a place feels wrong until it looks like itself again.