by Lucy Auburn
Most of it. I could guess what “it” was, now that I’d heard the church girls. Fighting past my nausea, I thanked him for telling me, and let the rest of the trip to his family’s house pass by in silence.
Wifi on the Johnson farm was spotty, so I struggled to search social media for some sign of what Wally was talking about. I looked up “Silas Wilder” and got nothing of use; there was a Silas Wildes who played basketball in Kentucky and got all the hits.
So I tried “Silas Taylor Wilder”—again, nothing. Finally I searched “Coleridge scandal” and fell down a rabbit hole that led me to a blog called Legacies with the tagline: “How they get in, and what they leave behind. Covering scandals at private schools, prep schools, and boarding schools for almost a decade.”
The blog had been active up until 2017, at which point it went dark. That it’d been going on for so long surprised me; I thought blogs went the way of the dinosaur as soon as the first celebrity joined Twitter. But there were constant, in depth articles with a huge comments section, most of it anonymous.
Entries covered doping athletes, bribes to school officials made by rich parents, underground cults, underage drinking, and of course plenty of sex. The scandals covered both coasts and even a few prep schools in between, as well as the occasional post about a school in London or Sydney.
They were extensive, common, and absolutely breathtaking in that none of the people covered in any of the scandals seemed to get more than a little slap on the wrist and a brief suspension at worst.
It was hard to imagine all of this lying low for so many years, but the blog had gone dark just as accountability culture—and cancel culture—grew its legs. Maybe in a world of Weinsteins and Cosbys, a few handsy teenagers didn’t matter much.
But they did when they were the next leaders of the free world. Scrolling back to 2014 and beyond, I found plenty of people who were even now graduating with degrees and getting handed keys to the family fortunes. Here was a pharmaceutical company CEO whose greed started in a west coast prep school; there, a swindling entrepreneur who’d faked her grades with daddy’s money before she was even out of braces.
Seeing all of it, I didn’t have to imagine how the blog creator had gone other ways. Years had passed; whoever they were was probably long out of school by now. And nothing had come of any of the investigations or publications of scandals except popcorn-eating commentary by a couple hundred online strangers.
It was interesting stuff, but none of it would tell me what was going on with Silas. Coleridge was a two year academy for juniors and seniors heading off to college; anyone still there in 2017 would be gone by now.
As the storm grew to a deafening siren sound and we took shelter in the basement, I had one more brief moment of wifi on the stairs. So I did the thing I’d been dreading: I searched for my brother’s social media handle online.
A few tweets loaded before the signal went out.
I heard what @WildestBoy did at a party... why doesn’t the admin care? Oh right, diversity admissions for white trash.
LMAO Dean Simmons wants the poors to look good so he won’t kick a rapist like @wildestboy out
“Thorough investigation” my ass... did the administration even watch that video!!?? It’s clearly @wildestboy
My parents send me to Coleridge because it’s the best of the best. If it’s no better than public school what’s the point? Expel @wildestboy. Nut up or shut up, fucking cowards.
I didn’t scroll down to try to get the rest to load. Instead I tucked my phone into my pocket and joined the Johnsons, including Wally’s little sister Beth and his parents, at the scarred oak table in their basement. Candles were lit, a battery-powered lantern was turned on, and Beth started pulling out board games for us to play while we waited out the storm.
I glanced at Wally, who was fiddling to the controls on a radio with the volume turned down. Only static came through the speakers. “Any signs of him yet?”
“Not yet.” He pursed his lips, fussing with the antennas. “But like I said, I’m sure he’s safe in that Ranger station. Probably even safer than we are—it has concrete walls in the underground shelter.”
I murmured noises of agreement, but I wasn’t so sure. The frantic, animal part of me wanted to run out into the storm, funnel clouds be damned, and find Silas. That side insisted he was scared and alone out in the woods, certain to die without me at his side.
The rational side of me, that grew up with a brother who survived anything, knew that Wally was right. Silas had been headed in exactly that direction before we split up, and he wasn’t the type of fool to ignore a funnel cloud on the horizon. He was probably in some concrete basement, tipsy on beer and eating disgusting MREs.
I told myself he was nowhere near the tree.
I didn’t want to consider why he might go there.
The storm cleared suddenly, leaving only its destruction behind to prove that it had ever visited. Wally’s dad walked outside and held his phone up to the sky to get a signal and load the news. Grimly, he announced, “It touched down.”
“Where?”
“West of here.”
A lump formed in my throat. My family’s house was west of the Johnson ranch. I looked at Wally, and he headed towards his truck.
“C’mon,” he said as he opened the passenger side door for me and stepped aside, “let’s go see what’s still standing.”
As we drove down the road, at first it was a peaceful, familiar sight. Leaf litter scattered the asphalt in front of us; thin branches that had fallen on the road broke beneath Wally’s truck tires. The sky was turning from a dark and fierce color to a light grey, then a washed out blue covered by thin white clouds.
I’d seen Wayborne after a storm enough times to know that this was nothing new. There was mud on the ground; the trees looked bare without their extra leaves and branches. In a few places they’d been torn to bits by the descending tornado as it left its wrath behind, but that was nothing less than to be expected. It was like the world around us had been gently tossed then set back down again by a giant hand. There was a good chance that the tornado never even touched down on any residential streets.
Or so I hoped.
But then we turned the corner, down Mayberry street that led to the little road where our house was, and my heart jumped up into my throat.
There were people on either side of the road, their boots muddy, hair tied back, tired expressions on their faces as they dragged ruined belongings out of their houses and dumped them near the curb. The destruction was inconsistent. One house would be mostly standing, a few shingles missing, water draining from the front porch, while another just next door was a pile of old timber and broken glass. Neighbors with less damage walked to houses that were gone to move broken beams and shattered dreams aside so they could find out what was underneath it all.
Children crying. Mothers sitting near the curb, heedless of the dirty ground beneath them, clutching the few precious things they still had, eyes hollow. Houses turned into little but basements; dogs trotting down the sidewalks, subdued. A group of neighbors heaving up a downed refrigerator to free a cat who’d picked the wrong hiding place.
“Wally.”
“I’m going as fast as I can.” His knuckles were white on the steering wheel. “Can’t exactly mow these people down.”
The crowd in the road dispersed slowly. I wheeled down the passenger side window, stared out at them, feeling feverish and desperate. Spotting someone I knew, I called out, “Millie! Have you seen...?”
She shook her head, red hair dark at the crown from rainwater. “I haven’t been around the corner.” Lips pursed, she looked over her shoulder then back at me. “Maybe you’ll be one of the lucky ones.”
I thought of Daddy standing on a chair, screwing in a light bulb, pressing his fingers to Papa Edwin’s initials on a thick beam of wood holding the ceiling up above our heads. I prayed.
It felt like it took hours to turn the corner and park at the e
nd of the driveway that led to the Wilder house, but it couldn’t have been more than a handful of minutes.
At first I didn’t recognize it.
Because there wasn’t a house there anymore at all.
The driveway led up to the porch, and then beyond that nothing but the remnants of the foundation. There was no big front door, no late ‘80s addition, no clapboard siding or dark grey roof. All of it was gone, not just destroyed but lifted away, from the beams Papa Edwin hammered together to the drywall he hung himself.
All that was left was the front of the porch and the two car garage, which was absurdly still intact. I had to blink at it a few times just to really make sure I was seeing it right.
Wally said something, but I didn’t hear him. As I opened the door and slipped out onto the ground, it occurred to me that the Wilder home was around the corner, nestled in the trees and set back from the road, separate from the rest of the neighborhood.
For all I knew I was the first person to check on them.
For all I knew my parents and my brother had been swept away along with the debris.
I stumbled up the front drive, heart beating a frantic rhythm, eyes searching vainly for a sign of them. And then: the garage door opened. Mom came storming out, her face uncharacteristically angry. Dad’s pickup truck backed out of the garage, then rolled to a stop right in front of me.
The driver’s side window rolled down. Leaning out, Daddy studied me and Wally, mouth tight. He nodded at me, once, as if he was acknowledging something.
Then he just said, “Move out of the way.”
I stumbled to the grass and watched him reverse the truck the rest of the way down the drive, switch gears, and pull out onto the road. He drove so fast that mud churned beneath his tires and sprayed to either side.
Bewildered, I didn’t know what to think. It felt like he was driving away completely. Forever. Maybe he was; I still don’t know. I haven’t thought of him much since that moment. My heart is broken into too many pieces to devote one to his mad mood swings.
As soon as he was gone Mom strode down the driveway, feet bare, hair a reckless tangle. She threw her arms around me and held me tight; I tucked my chin into the soft place where her neck met her shoulder, taking in the smell of the storm’s destruction and her knockoff perfume in equal measure.
“I was so worried about you,” she murmured. “Thanks for taking care of her for us, Wally.”
“Yes ma’am.”
Pulling out of the hug, she swept my windblown hair from my eyes and asked, “Where’s Silas?”
I exchanged a frantic look with Wally. “He’s not back yet?”
She frowned. “I thought he was with you.”
“The Ranger station isn’t far away.” I calculated the distance in my head, the time we’d spent driving back from Wally’s house, and decided he should’ve been home long ago. “He has to be there. Doesn’t he?”
In answer, Wally pulled his radio out of the car, face grim. He turned the knob on the volume all the way up. He radioed into the station, then waited for a response.
None came. He radioed in again.
And again.
And again.
Until I reached out to stop his hand, shaking my head, frantic tears already spilling down my cheeks. “He must not have made it to the station.”
Wally blinked at me. “Where else would he be?”
I knew in that moment exactly where he was.
Chapter 9
There’s a tree in Wayborne that sits on top of a hill, in a clearing where only the dead speak.
It’s a beautiful old live oak tree with thick branches that reach up to worship the sky and dip down low at their ends. They hang so close to the ground that they would brush against the heads of children who might play in their shade if the tree weren’t a cursed and hallowed place.
The tree is a gorgeous thing. Tangled with moss and as thick as half a dozen men or more, it begs to be photographed and painted, to have picnics held beneath its curved dome and poems written about the first kisses that happen in its shelter.
But it’s not just any tree.
It’s the Hanging Tree.
When I was a child, Silas and I found the tree and climbed its branches, laughing and screaming, our knees scraped and hands coated in moss. Jade followed us, but being sensible chose to sit in the shade of the tree and read one of her paperback books.
A little while later her mother came up the hill and found us hanging from the tree like wild monkeys.
And she yelled at us so loud we nearly fell from its safety.
I don’t remember exactly what she said; I do remember that she told us to get down, to get down right now, right this instant, you wild Wilder kids, get down from that tree or I swear. By the time we made it to the ground she was calmer, but there were tear tracks down her cheeks, and Jade looked lost and alone.
As we stood before her, unsure what we had done, she asked, “Do you know what tree this is?”
I shook my head, but Silas piped up. “It’s the Hanging Tree.”
“Why do you think they call it that?”
“Because you hang from it,” he said, quite boastfully and sure of himself, like all little boys.
“No.” Grace got quiet; she looked at us the way you look at a grave. “They call it that because they used to hang people from this tree until they were dead. Then they buried them here, right beneath the ground—if they bothered to bury them at all. Some of them they let rot, and the wild animals ate them until there was nothing left.”
I remember being disgusted and confused by this. I remember Jade asked what the people had done, why they were hung, if they were bad people. Grace didn’t answer right away. Instead she took us to her house in her sedan, with a stop in the middle to get ice cream bars from a truck, which we weren’t allowed to unwrap until we were safely sitting on her front porch, far from the leather interior of the car she saved up for years to buy.
Finally she told us, in a serious voice, “They were hung because of the color of their skin.”
We never asked again.
We never climbed the tree’s branches again.
But we did go there sometimes, Silas and me; Jade came every once and a while, but she said the place gave her the spooks. For us Wilder kids, it was a strangely peaceful place, one we knew we weren’t alone because the spirits of the dead still haunted it. Unlike the cheery inside of our home with its photos of happy family members on the mantel, the dripping boughs of the old tree knew what had been done beneath their shelter, and it seemed to weep with guilt over it. Even the crooked slant to its trunk was weighed down with memories of the dead. It felt truthful in its wretchedness.
At some point when we were in middle school the city council put a plaque in front of the tree, with the name of all the people who’d been hung there. The plaque calls inhumane capital punishment a “grave injustice,” without mentioning that the mobs who hung the victims were white men whose surnames are our street names, and there are old photos in attics on the north side of town of grinning mobs standing feet from the bodies that they lynched.
I wonder sometimes if I’ll ever find a photo like that with my Papa Edwin’s face in it. He would be a child, but there are children in some of those photos, sitting on the shoulders of their fathers to get a good look.
At a corpse.
A corpse.
They also call it a copse of trees; one letter difference. So little stands between the living and the dead, just like so little stands between our two sides of town. The laws can be changed, but the river never will be, and neither will the tree and its victims.
As Wally pulled up to the side of the gravel road that was the closest a car could get to the tree, he looked over at me. “We can wait for your mom to show up in her car. She shouldn’t be long. Or... or I can go first.”
“No.” I shook my head. “You stay here. Mom will need help getting up the hill. She isn’t... she isn’t strong.”
I didn’t mean in that way, but it fit as well as anything. My mother’s knee, like whatever strength lived inside her, was flimsy; it buckled easily beneath the littlest weight. Instinctively, I knew that she shouldn’t be the first to see what waited at the top of that hill.
A foolish part of me wanted to believe that I’d find him climbing the branches, or sitting under the shade, waiting for me. He would look up and smile, then walk towards me, shading his eyes with one hand. Pointing towards the sky, he’d say look, the sun is out; it’ll dry up all the rain.
But like I said, it isn’t that kind of tree.
As I walked through the thick woods, on a path roughly marked by stones in the ground, I knew.
As I reached the foot of the hill and began climbing up it, my thighs burning, I knew.
And so. I was halfway to the top when I saw. In the distance. Far enough away that I could almost pretend it wasn’t.
If I stood there, I thought idly, I could live in the in-between forever, and make denial my peaceful home.
My feet moved anyway.
I climbed, further and further, to the crest of the hill. To the downward slope that the tree set its roots in, sure and steady, unbent and unbroken by the storm’s wind—but just a little crooked in one direction.
That close, I saw. I could not deny. I took a deep breath. I looked at his body as it swayed back and forth. I studied the rope and wondered, in a distant manner, where he’d gotten it, how he’d tied it, what he’d done to get far enough off the ground that it snapped his neck.
Waiting for the tears to come, I realized that the inside of my body was a cruelly hollowed thing, dry now after all the expectation on the ride in Wally’s truck. Nothing came out of me.
There was nowhere to go but forward. The tree branches, low and full of leaves, brushed against me as I walked. Water was still dripping from their trembling edges. It felt like the tree was crying for me.