by Faith Hunter
Daddy sat in his truck, but I turned off the Chevy and Sam and I got out, moving along the line of light to the wall. The roots on this side had been cut through with chainsaws. The draping branches had been clipped and sawn. The tree itself smelled of herbicides and gasoline and soot. Someone had tried to poison it. Burn it. Cut it down. Yet still it grew.
Sam stood in the headlights, his shadow rising up the wall, broad shoulders hunched, hands in his pockets. Staring at the tree. “We’uns had to brick it up,” he said.
“Why?” I asked.
“It attacked a little girl. Tried to bury her. Mindy said it wanted blood, but we’uns don’t sacrifice to trees.” The last part was spoken with humor, as if he was trying to make a joke out of something that wasn’t funny.
I stared through the snowflakes at the place where I had been healed not so long ago.
“Is Mindy—”
“I’ll take care of Mindy,” I said.
“Good. She may need to come live with you’un someday. To keep her safe.” When I didn’t respond, Sam went on. “The tree. It grew thorns. And the leaves cause a rash, like poison oak. It tries to spread, puts out runners, sends seeds into the air. They come up everywhere. We’ve found thorned saplings and infants as far away as fifty feet. The Perkinses have a small front-end loader. They bring it in and dig ’em up for us. Then we burn them. The tree keeps coming back, no matter what we do to it. The tree just won’t die, not even after we salted the ground.”
The song in the church ended, and I heard a man’s voice speaking. Prayer, I figured. “What color is the sap?”
“Bloodred. It ain’t an oak no more. It’s freaky.”
My lips trembled into a smile at the modern term coming from my brother’s mouth. And I remembered the roots that Occam had cut from my body. They had bled. The sapling on my own land had bled, thorned and bloody. I had changed this one, giving it access to my blood, mutating it during the process of healing. Ephraim had gotten here through the ground in which he was trapped. And had used the tree on the church grounds to learn how to grow his own tree at the site of his death. Maybe to mutate it again, to grow something even more different. I had changed Ephraim too, when I killed him. We were all linked now, somehow. And I needed to find a way to destroy the Brother and his evil trees. “Yeah, I reckon I can see how that might be so,” I said, knowing I had fallen back into the church-speak of my youth, and realizing that here, at this time and in this place, it spoke to the bonding of family. Of true sibs. Despite the tree Daddy thought I had cursed. “What’s the long-term plan for getting rid of it?”
“We’uns hired Kobert’s Earthmovers and Mining to bring in a bulldozer, one of the kind that does top-down mining. We’uns going to drill a hole in the trunk, put a stick of dynamite in, and set it off. Then we’ll dig up the roots, haul the whole thing out, every leaf and limb and stick of it. And burn it until nothing’s left but ash.”
I nodded, remembering the branches I had burned last night, feeling the chill and wet, as oversized snowflakes settled on my head and shoulders and melted onto my scalp, wetting my clothing. “Cut off the branches first so nothing goes flying with the dynamite.”
Sam nodded, pursing his lips slightly as he considered why that might be a smart thing to do. “Freaky,” he said again.
“Don’t leave anything on the ground for long. When you dig up the roots, don’t let the rootlets or the cut branches touch the ground. Load every branch and leaf and root up on to something made of metal, maybe a metal-bed truck or dump truck. Cart it to a place that’s stone, like the quarry, with no soil or water. And drench it fast with gasoline. Burn it hot until it’s nothing but ash. Then make sure you police the grounds here and there twice a day, every day, and dig up and burn anything that looks remotely like it. Fire. Fire will kill it.”
Sam nodded, staring at the branch that hung over the wall. It seemed to be growing even as we watched, the leaves, which never fell on a live oak, thick and heavy, a green so deep it appeared to have hints of red in it. “What is it, Nell?”
“I don’t know.” I tilted my head to Sam. “But I got a sapling that looks somewhat like it on my property. No leaves, just bare wood. No real bark either. I cut off the branches last night and they bled, and when I left them on the ground for a bit, they rooted. Too fast to be normal. But when I burned them, they burned true. I’ll be cutting it down and burning it when I get back.”
“You’un need help, you call. I’ll bring some gas.”
“You always did like fire.”
He slid a look my way. “Begging your pardon, Nellie?”
“Um-hummm. That campfire that took off and burned down a field of hay on the Vaughn farm when you was maybe fifteen, sixteen? Even John and Leah and I heard about that event. I always figured that fire for you.” When Sam didn’t reply I said, “You ever confess?”
“I did. Got my backside tanned right good.” He sounded rueful, and at the same time almost proud. “I had to work a whole summer of twelve-hour days to pay the Vaughns for the hay I ruin’t.”
I shivered hard and knew I couldn’t postpone this anymore, so I changed the subject to the important part of my visit. “I need to touch the tree, Sam,” I said.
“Why’s that, Nellie?”
“You might not want to know the answer to that.”
Sam stared at the tree for a while, thinking that over. Likely thinking about Mud and her telling him the tree wanted blood. Looking from the tree to me, his expression told me he was remembering my gifts with growing things when I was a child. How the church wanted to burn me at the stake. Adding in my comment about him being a fire bug when he was a kid. The things sibs knew and accepted and kept quiet about.
The fall of snowflakes thickened and landed on my uncovered head with soft plops. Melted snow dripped down my scalp and neck and into my collar. In spite of the snow and the heavy clouds, the day lightened. I wiped my head, but I didn’t move otherwise, giving my brother time to think. This was too important. “You’uns ain’t no witch,” he said firmly, the syllables steeped in church patois. “The mamas had the townie witches test you.”
“They did. I’m not.”
“How much does this have to do with you’un making most anything grow? How much does it have to do with the way Mindy can do the same thing?”
My brother had decided to take the bull by the horns, as I had with Daddy. I wasn’t sure if I was happy he had grown some or disappointed that he decided to grow now, about this tree and Mud and me. “Can you handle the truth?”
Sam chuckled softly at the movie reference, which he actually got, and shoved down on his fists, buried in his jacket pockets. “After the things I saw with the colonel and his progeny, I reckon I can handle most anything, sister of mine.”
“Then yes. I’m not human. Mindy might not be human.”
He made a soft mmmm sound, not surprised at all. “What about the rest of us?”
“So far as I know you’re all mundane and boring.”
“Tell that to my SaraBell. She thinks I’m amazing.”
“Ick and eww. TMI, brother,” I said, wondering if he knew that reference.
“TMI. Listen to us culturally aware adults talking in a God’s Cloud compound. So. You’un need to touch the tree. What’s that all about?”
“I can tell things about plants. Can’t explain it.” I pointed to myself. “Still not a witch.”
Sam said, “I can look at the sky and breathe the air and tell what the weather’s gonna do by morning even before the weather report. I can tell when the frost is coming a week before. When we’ll have too much rain and risk washing out crops. When we’re going to have a drought and how long it’ll last. Like that?”
“Yes. Like that.” And my heart may have skipped a beat at the acceptance in his tone and the calmness with which he confessed to a paranormal gift that normal, mundane h
umans didn’t have. I said, “You know how the tree attacked the little girl? Well, it might attack me. If it does, I need you to cut me free, even if you have to take some skin.”
Sam pulled a small knife from beneath his jacket, a gut-hook knife with a four-inch blade, designed for skinning and gutting deer. I remembered the Christmas he received it. I was still living at home, which would have made him less than fifteen. Even in the gray dawn light I could tell he kept the blade wicked sharp.
I wiped my hand dry inside my pocket and walked closer to the walled tree. I reached up to a branch hanging over the wall. With one finger I touched a single leaf. Nothing happened—no branches grabbed me to yank me over the wall, no roots wrapped my ankles to hold me down. I ran my fingers across the leaf, learning its shape. It felt slippery, thick, like a succulent, and it had faint, spiny ridges on the blade and margin like an aloe leaf. I moved my finger to the petiole, which was thicker, denser, heavier, and more elastic than an oak’s. The tree was storing water and nutrients in ways no live oak ever could.
I closed my eyes and sank into the tree. Not a deep read. Not a full scan. Just a brush of awareness across its surface. Bright. Hot. Spiky. Intense. My breath felt harsh with fear and with awareness of the thing I touched. Not a tree. Something else.
I pulled away and withdrew three steps, looking up at the boughs, which were gnarled and twisted like a live oak, rising into the sky and reaching down over the wall to the ground. The tree was more than it had been. But it hadn’t tried to take me down or grow roots into my body or trap my feet in the soil, so that was something.
“Okay?” Sam asked.
“Okay.” I heard him close and pocket his knife. “And before you ask, I’m not sure what I felt. I need to think on it a mite.”
“All right. You’un seen enough?”
“Yeah.” I wiped my hand again inside my pocket where it was dry. Behind us, Daddy turned his truck and drove away, taking the extra illumination from his headlights and leaving us in the dark. “Tell me about Daddy,” I said.
Sam turned and walked back to my truck, his legs cutting through the headlights and snow. I followed and got into the passenger seat. Buckled up. Waited. Sam got in the driver’s side and got the engine running, the truck’s heater pumping warm air onto my feet. We sat in the dark, not looking at each other. It was church etiquette. When important things needed to be said, eye contact was kept to a minimum, likely a trait gained from multifamily living and the impossibility for real privacy in the homes.
He leaned forward, his arms resting across the steering wheel, staring out at the tree. “Daddy looks bad, don’t he?”
“You know he does.”
“He won’t talk about it. Mama Carmel says it goes back to the shooting and that he needs more surgery to correct what’s still messed up in there. She made him see the townie doctor that saved him when he was shot. A general surgeon. He did some tests—X-rays and a scan of some kind. The surgeon agreed with Mama Carmel. Said it was likely one of two things. Scar tissue—fibers holding things together that shouldn’t be held together. Or some tiny little bleeder that keeps breaking open and spurting blood inside, causing more damage, though the doctor admitted that he didn’t see such a thing on the scan. He wants to go back in and see what’s what. Do what he called an exploratory.”
Sam leaned back and put the C10 into reverse, pulling out across the slushy white carpet of snow. The tracks we had made upon entering were nearly gone, but Daddy’s new tracks were dark in the fast-melting snow. My head was completely wet and cold, even with the heater running full blast. This was a wake-up call to put winter supplies into my truck, including a scarf, gloves, a hat, extra socks, a blanket, food, and water. “So when’s that?” I asked. “The surgery?”
“Daddy won’t have nothing to do with getting cut on again. Says he’ll get well or he won’t. God’s will.”
“Daddy ain’t right bright, sometimes.”
“Love my daddy. Respect him too,” Sam said. “But I can’t argue with that assessment of the current state of his intellect when it comes to doctors. All the mamas got more brains than him.”
“They need to gang up on him. You all do. I’ll come back and help. In the real world they call it an intervention.”
“Real world?” Sam shook his head at how far I’d fallen away from the church. I could read on his face that he wanted to talk to me about my salvation, but he pushed it away for now, for which I was grateful. I didn’t want to fight with my brother about God. “You think an intervention will work?”
“No. But it might get him to thinking.” Sam didn’t reply. “And if that don’t work, sic Sister Erasmus on him.”
“Why her?”
“Don’t know why, but Daddy respects Sister Erasmus. Even John did, and John didn’t respect or listen to nobody except Leah. If Erasmus told Daddy he was cutting the fool, he might listen.”
Sam nodded as we pulled back to the house. “You coming in?”
“Not this time. I gotta go to work. Tell Mama I’ll let her know when I can make a family dinner. I want to meet the woman who was dumb enough to marry you.”
“You’ll like SaraBell. She’s something else. Redheaded and saucy. Eyes blue like the sky and skin like the finest cream.” He thought a minute. “I reckon you know it, but I’ll say it anyways. The only way Sara’d agree to marry me was for us’uns to get it done legal. We’uns went to the justice of the peace in Knoxville.”
I was proud that my brother had taken him a wife of legal age, according to the law of the land. Something inside me relaxed, what the churchwomen called “heart ease.” “Mama told me. Good for SaraBell. And good for you.”
“That ain’t all, and Mama and Daddy don’t know this part, so keep your mouth shut. I had to promise SaraBell, no other wives and no concubines.”
I kept the shock off my face with an effort, and my voice neutral, though that was even harder. “How do you feel about that?”
“I’m a man of my word. I love SaraBell to the ends of the earth and back. So it ain’t no hardship. Mama won’t be happy about not having a passel of grandkids to raise, though. ’Specially with you’un leaving the church, childless and without a husband. And you’un widdered so young.” He glanced at me and away. “She wants you to find a good man. She’s of a mind to introduce you to one or another fella in the church. Casual-like. As if by accident.” A small smile touched his face, telling me he knew how easy that would be to see through.
I put a hand on his arm and tugged his jacket until he looked me in the eye. “I done been married, and for all the wrong reasons. I ain’t gonna get married again. Probably not never. The Nicholsons all need to know that. I ain’t a churchwoman no more, Sam.”
“That right pains my heart, Nell, knowing you done slipped so far from the Lord.”
“I never said I slipped from the Lord. I just don’t worship him like you’uns do. Not no more.”
Sam frowned but nodded and opened the driver door. “I’ll think on what you said, Nellie.”
“Good. Tell Mama about dinner.”
“Will do.”
I slid across to the driver’s side and heard softly, from the front porch, “I love you, sister mine. I ain’t always showed it, but I love you.”
“I love you too, Sam. Always have.” I closed the Chevy’s driver door and pulled away. It was early, but I needed to make some calls, even if it meant waking up some people. I dialed and drove from the church compound as the sun broke through the clouds, and the phone was answered on the other end by a voice that sounded wide-awake.
“Nell! You sleep less than I do!”
“Hey, Jane. I slept, but got up about three. I’m guessing you’re still up from last night, what with your vampire job and all.”
“Sleep? What’s sleep?” We both laughed and she said, “What do you need?”
As if she kn
ew that I’d never call just to chat. Like Jane, who worked 24/7, most everything in my life was about work. Jane Yellowrock was the only rogue-vampire hunter turned Enforcer for a Master of the City in existence. She was also a paranormal creature, and the person who had confirmed for me that I wasn’t human, and then told me it wasn’t a mortal sin to be what I was born being, that mortal sins were a matter of how we lived, not how we were born. She worked in New Orleans, and kept vampire hours. She was a Cherokee, and she had lived in the Appalachian Mountains for years. If I had a semifriend outside of family and work, Jane would be it. I admired the woman, and while part of me feared her, another part of me aspired to be as strong and self-contained as she was.
Jane knew a lot of things about a lot of paranormal creatures and paranormal events, and she didn’t mind being asked questions, as long as she wasn’t in the middle of killing something. If she didn’t know the answers to my questions, she would find them and call me back.
“You’un heard about the strange things going on up here? People sick? Having psychotic episodes? People drowning? Killing each other?”
“We heard. Sounds like magic.”
“You’un ever hear anything like it before?”
“No. But I have people I can talk to, if you want.”
She meant vampires. Witches. Maybe even were-creatures, though I had plenty around me who didn’t know diddly-squat about this situation, not any more than I did. But I had placed this call and I wasn’t one to avoid or waste a potential source. More important, I trusted Jane. So I broke the cardinal rule and said, “Yes. If you would be so kind.” With very few misgivings, I told an outsider who had no security clearance what was going on. And asked all my questions. There were a lot of them. Jane hung up and made some calls, asked those questions for me, and called me back far faster than I expected. I was still driving through rush-hour traffic when my cell dinged again. She had indeed found me answers, some in known fact, some in mythos, some in what Jane called “experiential evidence and testimony.” Some that were mighty strange.