“If you will help me, it will all be right again,” I whispered.
He stood in the doorway, his hand still cradling the picture that I had stolen.
“She wants you to help me,” I cried. “I stole them dogs, Father Heron. Me and Mamma Rutha. Not the mater migrant. Let him go. Help me, Mary’s daughter.”
“You are not her daughter,” he whispered.
“I am,” I cried.
“You are nobody’s,” he said, never pulling his eyes from her picture.
“I am Mary’s,” I sobbed. “And you can help her, by helping me. Change your mind. Set him free. We’ll disappear, we’re already married. You’ll never be shamed by me again. I am Mary’s.”
“You have nothing of her.”
“I have her nose,” I cried. “Look at it, Father Heron. And I think I have her hands. Look.”
I turned my face toward him and held my hands before him. Praying that he would find something to love. Praying that he would see her nose, her hands, when he looked at me. I gently took the picture from his hand.
“Look,” I whispered. “See the way her nose is a little too round? Now look at mine. They’re the same, aren’t they? And look there at her hands. Look at the one she’s holding on her hip. See how little it is? With its narrow palm and slender fingers? But then look at how her thumb is wide at the knuckle. Now look at mine. Almost the exact same, aren’t they? And look at my eyes, Father Heron. Look at how they’re shaped like beechnuts. And the color of coal. They’re yours. You’re looking at your eyes. I’m from you too.”
He took the picture from my hand and looked at me, looked through me. I focused all of my strength on summoning the image of her. I thought of her, barefoot in the woods, with her honey hair and eyes snapping with color. I thought of her, and I hoped that my hair looked lighter, and that my eyes flashed happiness.
“Please help Mary’s child. You can make it as if that day never happened.”
“Don’t you pretend you know anything about her,” he said, his voice breaking. “And don’t ever speak of that day again. If you value your skin, don’t ever. You know nothing about that day.”
“Maybe,” I whispered. “But I’ll die without him. And then you’ll have killed me too. For Mary’s sake, help me.”
He sighed, and I almost sensed a breaking point. There was such power in her name. There was such strength in the ability of those letters to sweep a tide of misery over us. Grief over the fact that she died. Hate over being left behind, alone. Anger, that all either of us had left of her was her name. Her name joined us together. More than our eyes ever had. More than our blood ever could.
“Please,” I whispered. “Tell them it was all a big mistake.”
There was nothing left to say or do. If I would ever be his child, if he would ever look at me and see her, it would be then. If he would ever do just one kind thing for her name’s sake, that was the moment.
His back was to me, and still I knew that his eyes sought comfort in the weathered wood of his shed, and hid from the aching limbs of the apple tree. His eyes sought anything that wasn’t Mary’s nose, Mary’s hands, his eyes. His back was to me, but I still heard his cage close tight again. He didn’t speak a word, and yet I understood everything. Mary was dead, and I might as well be too.
“I don’t need you,” I sobbed. “I will tell them that I did it. And Mamma Rutha will tell them too. I may go to jail, but he won’t.”
“They’ll never believe you.”
“When Mamma Rutha confesses too they will. Mamma Rutha will agree with everything I say. That will be two people saying they stole them dogs. The judge will listen. Trout will be freed. You don’t have to help me. I can go to jail to free him. All I need is Mamma Rutha.”
“You can’t have her,” he said lowly.
“Yes I can. She loves me.”
“You can’t have her,” he repeated.
“She isn’t yours. She hasn’t been since you killed her child,” I cried. “She will confess.”
“If you ask her to confess to the dogs, you will lose her forever.”
“She isn’t afraid of you. You can’t hurt her,” I cried.
“Ask her to confess to the dogs, and I will tell.”
“Tell what?”
“The truth.”
“About what?” I whispered.
“That she killed your momma.”
Chapter XXIX
There was another mirror. That’s what happened when Father Heron spoke those words. She killed your momma. He held up his mirror before me. I didn’t want to look, and yet I couldn’t close my eyes. They locked upon her, the twisted ugly one within his mirror.
She’s not real, I told myself.
“I don’t believe you,” I whispered to him. Lies lies. Mary lies. “You’re lying,” I said. “Because I heard her.” Daddy, please! Please let me in, Daddy! “That day, in her belly, I heard you kill her.” Please open the door! “And you have no proof,” I whispered. “If you tell them, they won’t believe you. Just like I don’t. You have no proof.”
“Ask her. She’ll tell you. Just like she’d tell them if they asked. Ask her how she killed your momma.”
I began going over everything I had always known about my momma’s death. I sang to myself the songs I had heard Mamma Rutha sing to the moon. With Sorrow’s eyes her daughter cried. With stolen blood my daughter died.
I found Mamma Rutha by the stream where the morning glories once grew. I sat next to her and looked at her. I couldn’t see murder in her, like I did in Father Heron.
“How did she die?” I asked, knowing that she would understand who I spoke of.
“Under the apple tree,” she said.
“Father Heron killed her?”
“Yes,” she said, her hand dropping to feel the cool water.
“Because she was having me. He says you did it.”
Her hand stirred the water.
“I know,” she said calmly.
“How can he say that?”
She looked at me, and for the first time I began to see the death in her eyes. Not murder, like I heard in Father Heron’s silence. But a death of great anguish.
“How did she die?” I asked again. She looked back to the water and pulled her hands from it. Her fingers ran over the earth, and into it. Feeling the grit of blackness between them. She shivered, and then grew still.
“Without a soul, a body is just waiting to die. Needing to die. In misery ’til it does.” She stopped and looked at me. Her hand touched my face, and she smiled.
“She loved trees,” she said. “Was blessed by ’em. As soon as she could walk on her own, she headed for the trees. Watching how they stretched their limbs. Watching how they’d reach for the sun. She’d raise her tiny arms above her head. Look, Momma, I’m a tree. And I’d call her my little sapling. Mary, my baby sapling.”
She wasn’t looking at me anymore. Her head was tilted up, her eyes following the lines of the trees near us.
“All of the mountain loved her,” she continued. “All of the mountain sang to her. And she would sing to you in her belly. Rock my baby in the treetops. Maybe you remember? She laid herself beneath a tree, you know. Ran to it when he killed her. It was her love for him that made the killing hard. When he stared at her from the other side of the door, she loved him. And prayed for him to love her enough to open it. And when prayer didn’t work, she begged him. Maybe you heard her? His hate choked her soul. But she knew where she wanted to be buried, and she ran to the closest tree she could find. The apple tree. I found her body there. He chopped her down. My baby sapling. All of her was shaking. And cold. Her eyes were white all over. They never even saw me. Blood was everywhere. On the bark of the tree. On the apples that rotted on the ground. Her lips, soggy with pain. Her body cried out for its soul. And there was nothing left of my Mary. Just a body that couldn’t hold in its own blood. A body that couldn’t see, couldn’t breathe for the hate that smothered it. I called to her soul. I sang t
o it. But it had been choked. All that was left was white eyes wild with agony. Eyes that didn’t know me. They asked me to make it stop. They knew the soul had been killed. I pulled you from her. And I held you up to the sky. Look Mary, I screamed. Your baby, Mary, reaches for the sun!”
Mamma Rutha was standing now. Next to the stream with her arms raised toward the sky.
“The body couldn’t hold the blood inside,” she said. “And it was in misery to die. I cut my hand and I held it over her mouth. Trying to pour blood back in her. Won’t a momma do anything, give anything, her blood even? But the body wanted to be with her soul. It wanted to stretch towards the sun. It was all I could do to help her. So I took her to her soul.”
I looked into the stream and I saw the mirror again. Framed by the vision of Mamma Rutha, with arms lifted to the sky. I recognized the ugly twisted woman within. With howling white eyes and lips soggy in pain. With a body unable to hold its own blood. It was the soulless Mary, before she was carried to the sun.
Chapter XXX
The courtroom surprised me. It was smaller than I had expected. With a low ceiling and an uneven shape. Smelling like a room that once held men covered in starch, but was now filled only with the dusty scent of old wood and waxed floors. With only an American flag and a plaque of the Ten Commandments for decoration. There was nothing great about the room. There was nothing that spoke of the agony it held. Or of the hope. Its walls never realized the significance of everything they framed.
I hadn’t known what to wear. I wanted to look respectable enough to be believed. But not so respectable that I couldn’t be a common criminal. I ended up wearing a church dress, not the dusty rose one and not the purple and white one. It was deep blue and plain. And I pulled my hair back off my face, because I didn’t want to look girlish. I was afraid that if I looked young and sweet, a judge might pity me, and prefer to send Trout to jail over me. And I left my lips naked. I didn’t want to look pretty. I wanted to look guilty. Believable and guilty. I glanced at my dress as I sat in the courtroom, and I felt the shabbiness of my life.
I had been nervous all morning. Remembering all the Perry Mason shows I had ever watched. The way an audience would pack the courtroom. The way the newspaper would take everyone’s picture on the courthouse steps. The long speeches of the lawyers. The feverish emotion of their arguments. The looks of shock that would sweep the entire room when someone unsuspected would declare her guilt. The sound of the gavel as the judge would cry, “Order! Order in my court!” to silence all the whispers. I would cause all of Crooktop to lose order when I declared my guilt.
Two men strode in with heavy steps. One was young, and one was old. Their backs slightly bent with the weight of the briefcases they shouldered. The old one’s case was worn and tattered, with papers bursting from the unzipped top and bulging sides. The young one’s case was still thin and shiny, looking as if he took great pains to polish it every morning. They matched their cases. The old one looking tired and pasty. His belt had long given up the fight against his belly, which spilled over his waist as though someone had squeezed him too tightly, causing everything to overflow. But the young one was trim and eager, with a neatly groomed appearance that spoke of his importance.
I listened to them. The old one was teaching the other. He was explaining how to “nail the crook every time.”
“It’s all in your opening, son. That’s where your whole case is won or lost. The jury makes up its mind after the first five minutes, so you got five minutes to sell yourself. If you can convince the jury to like you, they’ll do what you ask. To hell with the evidence. To hell with all that nonsense about reasonable doubt. It’s about us, son. It’s about the suits that strut before ’em.”
They were lawyers. The ones trying to take Trout’s freedom. They were my enemy. And yet they hadn’t seen me sitting there, and they didn’t even know my name.
“And you know how to get the jury to like you, son? You be like them. Jurors are common folk. The high school dropout. The angry neighbor. The farmer that has his hidden field of marijuana. They want to be looked in the eyes and asked for help. Not preached at.”
“And I suppose telling them how the law was created to protect them from people like the defendant doesn’t hurt either, does it?” the young one asked.
“Ah hell. The jury is the law. Those twelve people are the power. The moment you forget that is the moment you lose your case.”
“Well, at least there’s no jury to worry about for this next case, since the fella pled guilty earlier. Here he comes now, let’s get this boy sentenced and shipped on over the mountain where he belongs,” the young one said.
It should have been a perfect moment. My body should have sensed his presence, and my heart should have sought out the beat of his. The walls should have taken on a new life, pulsing with the greatness of holding him. I should have smelled his skin, the way I had always been able to. Our eyes should have met. Mine, the color of his earth. And his, the garden of my desire, the river of my drowning.
But that very first moment blinked by so quickly I could only remember it later as I laid in bed. And in that moment, before my mind could whisper to my heart, It is your love, I didn’t know him. And it wasn’t because he was completely changed. Hair, lips, eyes, skin, everything that makes a body, it was all the same. And yet somehow so different. With cool steel circling his wrists. And the easy way, the calm peace that always hung upon him, replaced by a face that looked older and angrier. That looked less wise somehow. And for that brief moment, for that second that I did not know him, I looked at him, and I saw a man that belonged there.
Another man entered the room and walked over to Trout. He placed his hand on Trout’s shoulder, and I instantly liked him. They spoke briefly, and I guessed that he was Trout’s lawyer. He looked younger than Trout, in a suit that was too big. Like he had lost too much weight, too quickly, and hadn’t had time to buy new clothes. He left Trout and walked over to the table on the right. The prosecutors stood up and they all shook hands and began joking about the new golf course built over in the foothills. I was filled with bitterness. How could he do that? How could any man touch Trout and then touch his enemy too? How could he be on Trout’s side and joke about golf with those that wanted to hurt him?
“Oyez, oyez, oyez,” the bailiff called out. The prosecutors rose to their feet. Trout’s lawyer turned from where he was already standing to face the bench. Sensing the air of importance that floated in the room as the bailiff called those words, I rose to my feet too. I looked at Trout. There were three lawyers on one side of the room. And he was alone on the other.
“The Honorable Judge Moser presiding,” the bailiff continued. “All people having business before this court draw nigh and you shall be heard. God save the state and this honorable court. Court is now in session.” With those words, a new man walked in. Draped in black and looking like a judge. With thick white hair sharply contrasting the blackness of his robe. He had heavy eyebrows that knitted together even when his face bore no expression, giving him a look of fierceness.
“You may be seated,” the judge said lowly without looking up as he shuffled through loose papers scattered about his bench. He put a pair of reading glasses on that his eyebrows defiantly peeked over, and looked up at the room. After I had been sitting there all morning, behind the lawyers, the bailiff, and Trout, the judge was the first person to notice me. In the moment our eyes greeted one another, I searched for kindness. And I willed him to have mercy. Mercy for Mercy’s love.
“Morning, gentlemen,” the judge said, telling me he was a good person. He looked at Trout, not just the lawyers, but Trout too, and called him a gentleman.
“In the matter of State versus Price, the defendant earlier entered a formal plea of guilty to felony larceny, is that correct?”
Trout’s lawyer rose to his feet, “Yes, Your Honor.”
“Counsel, are you ready to present arguments with regard to his sentencing?” the judge ask
ed, looking toward the prosecutors.
The young one rose, “The State is ready, your honor.”
“Very well then,” the judge said, looking at his papers again.
“May it please the court,” the prosecutor said, “the State will be brief, Your Honor. We don’t have any witnesses to call. We just want to emphasize to Your Honor that this man, this migrant drifter, entered the private property of one of our most respected community members.” He began flipping the pages of his legal pad.
“Let’s see, uh, Wallace Heron, who lives up on the mountain,” he continued. “The defendant entered his property at night, while his wife and orphaned granddaughter slept within. He then stole four hunting dogs of great value. And not just ordinary mutts, your honor. These were purebreds, purchased from a line of champion hunters. The defendant has admitted to all of this. But he shows no remorse. He won’t even tell Mr. Heron what he did with the dogs. He offers nothing to mitigate the sentence for his crime. Therefore, the State requests, Your Honor, that these facts all be weighed together, to impose the maximum sentence for felony larceny. Thank you.”
He took his seat and the judge continued to shuffle papers around as I tried to absorb all that I had heard. I had carried four dogs into the mountain to help Mamma Rutha, to keep them from killing her creatures, and suddenly it was larceny. I didn’t even know what that meant. Larceny. It sounded complicated, and bad.
“Thank you, counsel,” the judge said lowly. “Counsel for the defense, are you ready?”
“Yes, Your Honor,” Trout’s lawyer said as he rose to his feet.
“May it please the court,” he began. “The defense also will not call any witnesses, and thus will be brief, Your Honor. But we want to point out that this crime was committed without any aggravation. No one was hurt, no one even knew until the next morning. My client was not armed and the police did not find a weapon among his belongings. He may be a drifter, but perhaps he is just young and has lost his way. We ask for leniency, Your Honor, for this sin of his youth. Thank you.”
The Killing Tree Page 20