The Killing Tree

by Rachel Keener

  I did her bidding. I gave Father Heron her message, and the chickens began to creep. But she waited for a sign that her chickens were safe. Waited for a reaction from a man who rarely reacted. I began to fear that she might have to wait forever.

  I picked up double shifts at the diner so that my only hours at home were spent sleeping. It was the diner in the valley. The only one that served beer, earning it the reputation of being a place where men hid out from their families on Saturday night and then ushered them in after church on Sunday. And the smokers were always going full speed on the weekends, sending me home smelling like a smoked pig. No matter how much detergent or fabric softener I used, it was a smell that married my clothes.

  After I graduated high school the month before, the diner became a welcome escape for me. Between serving up pulled-pork platters and mugs of beer, I felt connected to something outside of that tidy little house up on Crooktop. When groups of rowdy teenagers came in on Saturday night, there were brief moments when I actually felt like I was a part of their world. One where everyone ached to be older. So as the boys smoked and the girls showed off their push-up bras, I ran to smear on Plum Passion lipstick before sneaking them half mugs of beer. They would roll their eyes, swear about curfews or being forced to go to college in the fall. And then I would feel our difference. As they strolled out arm in arm, whispering, “Thanks for the brew, Mercy,” I knew how different we were. While they raced home to beat their curfew and count the days until classes began at the community college over the mountain, nobody waited at home for me and I had never even seen a college application. Though my grades were fairly decent, I knew college wasn’t an option for me. I didn’t have any money and it had never crossed my grandparents’ minds to send me. And even if money hadn’t been a problem, I had no idea how to go about getting into college. All the things I heard the Saturday night crew groan about—the tests, the application fee, the campus tour, picking a “major”—it was all foreign to me. So the highlight of my graduation was “picking a shift schedule” at the diner, since school no longer interfered with my work.

  I wasn’t angry. Anger is the child of surprise, and the fact that Father Heron never spoke the word “college” to me didn’t surprise me. As my black eyes stared back at me in my mirror, I knew that Crooktop had its fist around me.

  On Sundays the diner would become respectable. After attending First Baptist of Crooktop on the arm of Deacon Heron I would change into my grease-stained apron. The tipsy teens and seeking adults of Saturday night were replaced by children in pastel frills, mothers with hot-rolled hair, and fathers tugging at their neckties. The beer was exchanged for sweet tea. On my break in between shifts I would sit and watch them. The wife playing with the curl on her husband’s neck, the sleepy baby starting to cry. Sometimes I would imagine what it would feel like to go home with them. To be safely tucked away in the backseat of a four-door family car.

  The Sunday after Mamma Rutha ran away the diner was especially crowded. My boss, Rusty, was busy barking orders while we waitresses were busy taking them. When the crowd finally began to thin, I took a seat at the bar to count my tips. But my eyes drifted from my skimpy pile of change to a family in a back booth, and I soon lost count. There were three of them. And they sat together, on the same side of one booth. The man had his arm wrapped around the woman as she nursed a baby beneath a blanket. It was a picture so intimate that I felt both embarrassed to spy and forced to at the same time.

  “Pretty gross ain’t it,” Rusty said. “If the lunch rush wasn’t over, I’d tell her to step into the ladies’ room. You can get away with that stuff in a lot of places, but this here is a respectable eating establishment. The last thing families want to see is swollen nipples and hot milk right before they eat.”

  His words tried to sully the moment I had stolen from them. I asked him why, if this was an eating establishment, that little baby couldn’t eat right along with everyone else. He looked surprised, started to reply, but saw the look on my face and decided not to.

  “Well, simmer down, Miss Sass, and come have a smoke.” He grinned.

  “Can’t. Got one table I’m still waiting on to leave.”

  “See, Mercy, that’s the difference between having just anybody ask you to come and smoke, and having your boss ask you to,” he said as he called for another girl to watch my table.

  I never enjoyed my daily smoke session with Rusty. He was sweaty, fat, out of breath, and always calling himself the boss. But for the sake of a decent shift schedule I puffed away on his Camels and forced some conversation. Besides, I had seen Rusty get angry, seen him turn red all over and throw dirty dishes at the cooks. If all it took was a smoke break to keep me away from that side of Rusty, it was a small price to pay.

  “Busy day ain’t it?” he asked.

  “Sure is.”

  “Hot too,” he murmured.

  “Yup,” I answered, trying to sound interested as I leaned forward to light my cigarette.

  “Sorry about your grandma.”

  I didn’t respond.

  “Sure is a shame,” he continued, “poor Deacon Heron and you stuck with somebody so crazy. Just ain’t right to run off like that. I reckon nobody ever knows what old Rutha Heron’s gonna do next.”

  “How’d you know?” I asked softly.

  “Shoot, Mercy, you know that everybody in the valley knows about everything up on that mountain, just like everybody on that mountain sees everything going on down here in the valley.”

  I had long since quit trying to excuse Mamma Rutha to anyone. So I sucked in my breath and held the hot smoke until I thought my chest would explode. My eyes started to water.

  “Mercy, I didn’t mean to make you cry, sugar,” he said softly as he placed his greasy hand on my knee. My eyes fell to it, red and puffy, cupping my knee.

  “It’s the smoke, Russ. There’s just too much pig smoke in this air to be smoking cigarettes too,” I said as I jerked myself up, throwing his fat fingers off of my leg.

  “But it’s damn fine pig smoke! The finest pig smoke in these here mountains!” he yelled out after me.

  Back inside the diner, my little family had left. As I wiped down their table I thought about Rusty’s hand on my leg. It seemed so different from the gentle embrace of the man who had sat at the table I was cleaning. It seemed greedy. Most of my experiences with men came from Father Heron, and the rest came from my conversations with Rusty. The other girls at the diner said that he wanted me. That he wanted to be my boyfriend. The thought made me queasy.

  “Wanna ride home?” he whispered over my shoulder.

  I wanted to say no. But how could I feel superior to Rusty, manager of his daddy’s pig-smoking diner? I waited by his truck while he locked the building up. He usually closed early on Sundays, so the sun was still out. I looked up at the sky, but I didn’t see much of it. The view from the valley always made the sky look like a puzzle. Pieces of green and brown mountain closing off and locking in the blue and white.

  “How do you breathe?” an outsider asked me once. “It feels so claustrophobic,” she explained, “looking up only to see more land, and no open air.”

  Her words sent me digging beneath my bed for an old shoe box stuffed with magazine clippings of the ocean. I had collected them for years, ever since my second grade teacher told me there was a body of water deeper than Crooktop and bigger than all my mountains put together. I sorted through my clippings and noticed for the first time that yes, my sky was different. Peeking between swells of land once rich with coal. My sky was a busy one. Not the empty sky filled only with an occasional white puff and a bird. There was movement in the sway of the trees. In the daring trespass of the mountaintops. In the shadow of the hawk. It was a living sky.

  The squall of Rusty’s horn pulled me back to earth. “C’mon, dreamer, let’s get outta here!” he yelled.

  I tried not to wince as the vinyl of his seats scorched the back of my legs. The thought of his hand on my knee made
me uneasy and embarrassed around him. Figuring that the more I puffed the less I was expected to talk, I asked for a smoke.

  “Gawd o’mighty!” he swore. “This heat’s hell on earth.”

  As I agreed with him, I added to myself that so was his truck. Smelling of stale Camels, sweat, and pig smoke, his truck made my stomach turn. He pulled up by Father Heron’s mailbox, grinned at me, and started to speak.

  “Thanks for the ride. I better get in and check on my grandfather,” I said, jumping out of the truck. I could feel his eyes watching me run. I took special care not to sway my hips as I ran to the backyard.

  Father Heron sat whittling on the back porch.

  “Brought you some supper,” I told him.

  He didn’t look up, but I wasn’t expecting a response. I sat for a long time staring at him. Sitting there whittling. Looking old. Maybe even feeble, with his mussed-up white hair, tinged yellow from pipe smoke. Sitting a little slumped, his round belly straining against his belt. The man who as a child I swore could smell my fear. I wondered what he’d do if I challenged him, whether he’d become my felled Goliath. I imagined standing over him, patting a pocket filled with five smooth stones.

  But I was a coward. I wouldn’t even bend down to pick up stones for my pocket, much less build a sling.

  “Rusty asked about Mamma Rutha. He said everybody knows. He said he heard some of the deacons at church mention that maybe we should have a search party for her, in case she’s lost. Said it would be like a mission, you know, reaching out in Christian love to a lamb lost in the wilderness. He wanted me to tell you he would be willing to help, since you’re so busy you can’t really be expected to be her shepherd,” I said, carefully watching him as the rhythm of his knife steadily slowed.

  My dance was short. But the shrill sound of metal pounding metal that woke me the next day showed me that the steps were perfect. I peeked out of my little window and saw Father Heron hammering metal rods down into the ground near his garden, the one that we harvested. A few feet from where he was standing I saw a bundle of chicken wire. He was building a new chicken coop.

  It had only been a few years since he had planted a new garden. The baby ears of sweet corn had just ripened, and Mamma Rutha had stood guarding her garden from any harvest, butcher knife in hand. Father Heron swore at her and quoted scripture about how the ground was cursed for man’s sake, that he may toil in it and eat from it. His voice rose and stressed the word “eat.” She never moved. All through the day and night she stood planted amidst her corn. Whenever Father Heron approached her, she would calmly raise her knife and whisper, “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, an arm for a stalk, a hand for a fruit.”

  Father Heron wisely chose his limbs over sweet corn. And that day another garden was planted. One that wasn’t sacred. One that wasn’t sung to or blessed. One that to his great frustration, and the amusement of the valley, was never quite as bountiful.

  Once the coop was built, I heard him start his old Chevy and head down the mountain. I knew that he was going to get his chickens. Unhappy chickens. Chickens that Mamma Rutha could cook without tears. Chickens I had never tasted, but already knew would not be as good as the old ones.

  I was in a good mood at work that day. I freely accepted Rusty’s offers of smoke breaks. I didn’t even count my tips. And when Della, my best friend, came to the diner I let her convince me to go to the docks that night.

  Della and I had been friends since my freshman year in high school. We bonded through shared misery. High school had taken me by surprise. For eight grades I had faced the same school and same faces every day. My first day at high school left me breathless. The cafeteria seemed bigger than the whole building of my old school. I went through the lunch line that day only to face endless rows of tables and strange people. How was I supposed to pick where to sit? Where had all my old friends gone? After glancing at my plate of pasty lukewarm spaghetti, I tossed it in the garbage can and ducked outside. I leaned hard against the brick wall, feeling its support.

  “Wanna apple?” a voice spoke.

  “No thanks, not hungry,” I replied to a tall curvy girl, with hair as red as the apple she held out.

  “Don’t blame you. Me neither. Lunchtime is a ridiculous tradition. I don’t observe it out of principle,” she said, looking at me with approval.

  I was unable to resist asking her to explain, and she told me that eating involved a celebration of death—death of the apple, death of the cow, preventing death of the human—and that therefore hunger alone and not tradition should justify meals.

  Della continued to defy tradition throughout high school. She bloomed into a beauty that frenzied the boys. But like me, she never seemed to fit in the world of her classmates. Instead, she preferred to hang out with older boys. She cut as much class as she attended. And she despised the “tradition” of grades, as “useless numbers that only limit us.” She craved attention the way I craved to be hidden. Often teased for being a drama queen, she justified her sassiness by calling herself a revolutionary. Fifteen-year-old Della was a wannabe hippie, two decades too late, in a region too removed, and with a face that wore too much makeup. But despite her boisterous ways, she had a glow. A glow that outshone the dirt floor that she was raised on. Della’s father was killed in a mining accident when she was three, leaving behind a hungry mother with five children. All of her siblings fled the mountains the day they became old enough to escape their mother’s clutch. But not Della. Even after she quit high school the day Mr. Hillbert called her writing style “too inflammatory,” I knew that she would stay. She had promised me so.

  It’s hard growing up alone on a big mountain. So when we found each other at fourteen, we gulped a sigh of relief and swore we’d always stick together. “Girls like us have to love each other,” Della said. “Ain’t no one else around to do it.”

  She was always in some sort of trouble, either as the victim or the perpetrator. She changed boyfriends as frequently as she changed her hairstyle. In fact, she had a theory about that. She always said that you could predict a girl’s love life by the way she wore her hair. A girl that was always willing to spice up her look with new colors, new cuts, and new styles wasn’t afraid to spice up her life with a new man. And a girl that was always content with the same old look would be willing to settle for the same old boy. So with every new man, she got a new do. Whether it was golden streaks or a swingy bob, a new man meant a new Della. And according to her, that was the problem with my love life.

  “I’m telling you, Mercy,” she’d say, “as long as you stay straight, long, and brown that’s what your love life is going to be, boring. You gotta spice it up. I could put some real wham into your life if you’d just let me put a few streaks in your hair.”

  But it wasn’t my love life that was on her mind the day she ran into the diner to beg me to come to the docks with her. With fresh highlights in her hair, I knew that she was eyeing a new fling. Going down to the docks was never my idea of fun. But her timing was right. If my good mood could make me a willing smoke pal for Rusty, it could certainly make me game for some of Della’s sport. So I told her I would meet her at eight, to give me time to run home and find Mamma Rutha.

  Chapter III

  Underneath the June apple tree, freshly cut flowers were laid across the chicken grave. Mamma Rutha was sitting by her garden, singing to it.

  “I’ve missed you,” I told her as she cupped my face in her leathery hands.

  “My Mercy baby,” she said, smiling. She patted her lap and I laid my head across it. My eyes closed as her hand gently tugged through the tangles in my hair. There was someone to love me again. Even if it was crazy love. It was finally home.

  “I found a new blackberry thicket. Do you remember the baby deer and his momma that used to come eat from the garden? Well he’s clean grown up now. Starting to get little points for antlers. He showed me the blackberries.”

  I opened my eyes and looked at her. Her hair spilling in cu
rls and tangles around her. Her blue eyes shining. No one would know that she had spent fourteen days in the wilderness.

  “Where do you go?” I asked.

  “In the mountain.”

  “Do you have a shelter?”

  “I have my sisters, the oaks,” she said, smiling. “And a soft bed of brown mountain earth. The mountain takes good care of me, don’t you worry.”

  She was a fairy-tale grandma who spoke of sister oaks and blackberry thickets. Her life was a poem. But sometimes the poetry was too much. I craved some real answers.

  “Mamma Rutha,” I said as I sat up and faced her, “you were gone for two weeks. You never came home for food. You didn’t have a blanket. But you look fine.”

  She didn’t respond.

  “Is there somebody else up there?” I finally demanded.

  “God,” she said, the smile fading from her face. “You know that.”

  “Who else?” I asked, just as Father Heron appeared.

  He stopped and looked at us. He was pleased she was home, though he’d never voice it. It was another milestone on his list. Rescue wife from the wilderness—check.

  Mamma Rutha’s hands froze in my hair.

  “Evening, Rutha.”

  “I put your barbecue in the fridge,” I told him, trying to distract them from each other.

  “I was thinking we could have some chicken . . . one of my chickens, tonight,” he replied.

  I looked at Mamma Rutha. Would the new chicken coop work? Were all chickens sacred?

  “Sounds fine, Wallace,” she said calmly as she rose to her feet. “Mercy baby, go pick some okra.”

  Father Heron stood looking at me after she went inside.

  “Thank that boy Rusty for his kind offer to help with the, uhmm, the situation. Tell him that I took care of everything.”