by Brad Barkley
Later she lifts the lace curtains again and finds the trees in the evening light, swaying with the wind. The five biggest are black up their trunks in shapes like fingernails. She thinks of the couple who was married inside the trees and wonders how they get along now, how their kids turned out. And she thinks of Madam Velda, who stood in the trees wearing her blond wig, her eyes closed, the police with her because she had promised the trees would tell her where a missing boy was buried, and how later the police had found him in a swamp grave clutching a basketball, his legs gone. Of scientists from the state school on the nightly news, explaining the voices in the trees as “audiological illusion,” a phrase she held onto and used for herself, not knowing its meaning. Of Garrett dying before the trees found their voice, before the kudzu and honeysuckle wove a room to occupy the side yard. She thinks of his hands yellow with the crabapples crushed in his fists.
For weeks Garrett had watched the blossoms and then the fruit, thinking something had discolored and stunted them, some disease or blight. He’d already built the press for apple cider and apple butter, bolted it together from her dining room table and the parts off old lawn mowers and bicycles. He bought the peacocks and let them roost in the trees—to eat the bark beetles, he told her, when she knew he really bought them for her. When they cried at night he came to bed and slept, as if their sounds of helplessness gave him peace. He bought farmer clothes from Sears & Roebuck and a kit with which to make apple wine, and he gave up looking for the pistol she’d hidden, the way a child will suddenly give up needing a stuffed bear.
Etta walks out at night into the deeper dark of the trees, the air ripe with humidity and the sound of frogs. When the frogs move under her feet she imagines the crabapples alive, hopping around the yard, struggling to return to the tree, to their blossoms, to fold themselves into their becoming and work back out again as the McIntoshes they were meant to be—juice-filled, shiny-red, weighing down the branches and Garrett there in his Sears & Roebuck clothes to harvest them.
A wind starts with the smell of storm in it and quiets the frogs. The trees say he is, he isn’t, arguing some point among themselves. Then come the voices and no sense in them, like ten radios playing in ten different rooms. There’s more, she hears, pushing down in herself the urge to ask anything of them, like the Atlanta Catholics asking guidance, asking grace. She shouted through her screen door at the ones that came: “Those’re trees you’re talking to. No account crabapple trees, trash trees.” She became a local character, filler on the wire services, wanting nothing but for everyone to leave her yard. Her picture ran in the back of Life magazine; “Miz Cayce,” as they called her, smirking at the crabapples through her shiny glasses, quoted as saying “I don’t see what all the fuss is about,” words she never said, words that only sounded like what someone who looked like her in the grainy picture, someone named Miz Cayce, would say. The neighbors dropped off extra copies for her to keep, which she burned in the fireplace, praying with the gassy green flames curling the shiny pages that she was not really how she saw herself—as the punchline to the joke that had put the gun in Garrett’s mouth.
If the trees would only tell her something she could understand. She listens, not singing her song, the one that comes without her thinking it when she steps outside. She touches the trees, the smooth bark. She is listening now, her song put aside, hoping to hear the name of the man who sold to Garrett for a dollar and a half each the trash trees he must have dug up out of some roadside ditch. Garrett stands in the narrow shade of the man’s truck while she is home trying again to hide his pistol. Garrett has stopped to buy apples, a sack to eat and a sack to cook, and is eating one he has paid for, the juice drawing the chill of the October breeze to his chin. The man rests his foot on the truck gate, tips his hat (he is wearing one, she knows this, wrapping her arms around the tree, the bark pulling holes in the silk of her housecoat). Ain’t hard to grow ‘em, he says. If the trees know anything, they know his name. Garrett nods and bites while she buries the gun in a shoebox of old letters under the bed and the man figures a price on trees that in six years will bear fruit even the birds won’t eat. Garrett sees plans form, feels his mind reverse and begin to look forward to the time of apple pies and fresh cider and apple butter put up in Mason jars, and he takes out his money clip while she places a pair of shoes on top of the box of letters containing the gun on the floor beneath the bed. He loads the spindly saplings wrapped in burlap into the trunk of his Chrysler, already not needing the gun so much or the nights in the dark kitchen of the house. The gun’s hid for good this time, she thinks, away from his not needing it for six years until the day came and he found it as if he’d known it was there all along.
She rubs the burnt part of the tree, feels the black rubbing off on her hand. The trees align their voices to ask, Where?—not so much a whisper this time as a moan, the wind stronger now. Always it’s nonsense she hears, always these questions not tied to anything, like the ones asked by the reporters who came for those months when the trees first started up, when the boys in the neighborhood playing hide-and-seek first heard them and ran home to tell their mamas and daddies. For that whole first year she couldn’t hear them, really didn’t know what all the fuss was about, and just wanted everyone to leave her to Garrett’s memory. Now the wind comes heavier and then the rain sounding in thumps on the roof of leaves and branches. She says “audi-ological illusion” out loud, the words empty, just something she says back to the trees. The thumps sound louder and mushy, a hailstorm outside, the ground inside the trees still dry. Etta, the trees whisper, then Garrett, twining their names like kudzu vines. She is scared, hearing the names, hearing them as clearly as words whispered over her shoulder when she sits in the church pew. She tries to find the words of her song but has mislaid them, the way she mislays potholders and letter openers. She notices she is cold and draws the housecoat tighter around her, the belt another thing long since lost. The balls of ice punch through the branches above her and make a short hop at her feet, as big as the crabapples, faintly blue in the dark. The rain finds its way in behind the hail and wets her, and she stands up next to the trunk of the tree to let it shield her. She remembers the peacocks shrilling in the lowest branches of the trees, their tails sweeping patterns in the dust at the base of the trunks. Soon, the trees say, and Etta finds her song and fills up her ears with it, lets her housecoat drag in the mush of rotted crabapples around her feet.
By morning she has dried off, sleeping on the porch. Waking, she laughs at herself: an old woman without enough sense to put herself to bed, without enough to come in out of the rain. After a while the boy comes along the narrow blacktop, smoking a cigarette, wearing his headphones and bandanna, pushing the cart loaded with a lawn mower and a red gas can sitting on top, his shoestrings tangled around his feet.
“Garrett, you tie up those strings right off before you crack your head,” Etta shouts, startled at the sound of her voice, how like someone else she sounds. The boy slows and looks at her, still walking. She thinks of Garrett Junior all grown in the city with its sirens over the phone, and this one just a boy yet, not war age even. Sleeping in wet clothes in the out-of-doors, not eating the food the county woman brings. She is cutting right through her good sense. When she waves, the boy pushes the cart into her drive. He is all in black, his T-shirt and dungarees, a hat turned around the wrong way on his head. Boys not knowing how to wear clothes proper! Garrett Junior is wearing his old wool suit, pulling at the starched collar while the preacher says his words over Garrett. The police are at the house, still trying to find fragments of bullet, shaking their heads over the peacocks in the absence of their cries while Etta cries at the graveside not feeling it, looking the way she is expected to look, as she will do for the Life photographer at a time still twelve years off from this graveside, a time of not-apples, she thinks, watching the boy crush out his cigarette away from the gas can, a time of not-cider, of not-Garrett. Garrett Junior turning away finally when the firs
t shovelfuls fall on the copper and the old Negro men are talking baseball scores while they work, after he has seen her pay the preacher five dollars, and already in his mind are the seeds of his leaving—not to college or vo-tech as she and Garrett had always hoped, but away in the night seven years later in his daddy’s car, its tires gone soft from parking so long. She never blamed him for leaving behind any of it, but he must have always thought she did. And now this boy the age he must have been then, that night he left or the day at the graveside tugging his collar in the suit that needed the sleeves let out a little. But everything runs together and she can’t remember.
“You need work done, lady?” he asks. “Your grass needs mowing bad,” he says, then looks away. Etta looks down at herself and pulls closed her housecoat.
“If you got a saw I’ll pay you to cut down these trees.” She can’t remember if this has occurred to her before, to cut them down. Police took the hatchet and never brought it back to her. She wonders if this boy can hear the trees, what they might say to him.
“These trees?” he says, as if in answer to her thoughts. He straightens his ball cap, red lightning bolts machine stitched on the front. “When I was a little kid we called those Spooky Woods. Everybody thought you was a witch or something.”
“Well, they don’t mean a thing to me. Trash trees.” She lifts her chin and reaches for the missing belt on her housecoat. She closes her eyes to see herself all the ways others see her: Miz Cayce, the witch, the old crazy lady.
“There’s a bunch of ‘em anyhow,” he says, scratching his head under his hat.
“Two dollars apiece,” she says, trying to remember if there is any money in the house. She thinks of the blueglass tobacco jar in the kitchen where Garrett stored away his dollars for six years, saving to buy more land for more trees, and how for six years Garrett Junior stole out of the jar, she the only one knowing it and never telling, never letting on, like it was some secret conversation between them. After the gun in Garrett’s mouth she put the money in still, and still he took it for the seven years until he left, but during that time it never meant anything, a secret kept from no one.
The boy rummages the cart to find a chain saw and starts it up. She watches him bend and guide the saw (slowly, as if he is leading a dance partner) into the base of the first tree in the staggered row. The saw deepens its noise, spitting out white chips and blue, lingering smoke, the chips covering the boy’s shoulders and the hair that sticks out from beneath his cap. When he is almost through the first trunk the saw screeches, kicks back at the boy, and dies. The silence that follows whistles in Etta’s ears.
“Hit a damn knot or something,” the boy shouts. He shrugs, and the sawdust falls from him. She remembers now, like water unwaving itself. Garrett coming through the door with the tiny crabapples crushed in his fists, his mouth gaping as if his words have fallen out of it. She knows the smell of crabapples—a sticky-sweet molting—from her girlhood, as she knows it now mixed in the smell of chain oil, as she has known it always, as if by chance alone it is the odor of her living. Garrett says nothing, but rubs at his face as if to wipe away tears that won’t come, smearing the jam of the crushed apples in his red beard. She has to remember back to think of the gun still hidden under the dusty shoes in the box of letters on the floor under her bed. Her first thought is Where are the McIntoshes? but then she understands that they are not anywhere, that what Garrett had bought from the man on the same day she hid the gun was the absence of McIntoshes. He walks out through the back of the house, flies swarming at the crabapple mess on his face. She hears bellowing from Garrett, then hears the hatchet he bought to prune back the branches of his apple trees in winter as it hacks chunks from the mahogany of her dining room table, the apple press that he’d made from it. He walks back in, his hand bloodied with the gash from the hatchet. Without speaking he is out the front door and into the orchard. She makes the front window just in time to see him grab the first peacock he comes to and drag it by its tail from the low branches of the apple tree, put his boot on its neck and hack the bird in half. He tosses the tail into the yard while the bird twitches under the tree. He takes them one by one, in the calm of work, as if he is pruning branches. They screech and flap, then are caught by the blade, their noise hacked off just as sudden, their iridescent tails tossed away like sheaves of winter wheat.
Ten of them dead in the thin shade of the young trees, then Garrett stops and turns to look at her looking at him through the window, where it seems she has stood for six years, waiting for this to happen. He is dressed in blood, the bits of feathers shimmering green like sequins along his arms. She is glad to God then for Garrett Junior not home, for the school she knows he has skipped with the money he has stolen from the tobacco jar to play pool or watch movies in town, and she knowing for these six years and not telling. She thinks of telling Garrett now, reminding him of what he’d given up or lost in Japan, that his place is at the head of a family and not at the head of an orchard, that there is discipline to hand out. That boy, he’d say if she told, and smile admiring the trouble a son will find. When Garrett starts toward the house he is running, the hatchet loose in his hand. She steps onto the porch wearing the housecoat he had bought her when he was happiest about his apples, silk and blue-green, Garrett telling her in nighttime whispers it was the kind of present he should have brought her from Japan—the kind the other men brought to their wives and girlfriends—if only he could have found his way out of his sadness to do it. She opens her arms to him and then sees the hatchet and the emptiness in his face, and in that moment all her muted love for him is bubbled out by fear, and she turns so that the belt of the housecoat catches on a nail on the porch rail post and tears loose, slipping its loops. She runs in through the house and hides herself behind the wingback chair in the den. She hears Garrett crawl under their bed, hears him find the box, and in the silence that follows she knows that he is tossing her letters one-by-one across the quilt on the bed, their sound almost silence, like the sound of snow hitting the windowpanes, and she knows then that he is gone already and that this tossing of the letters, not tearing them, not throwing, is the last gentle thing he will do. In the noise of the singing of the trees what has not been kept, not sung nor said, is the sound of the pistol shot, its edges softened by palate and cheek and closed lips—a noise long since let go, scattered and blown away like papers caught up in a windstorm.
The doorbell rings and Etta thinks of Garrett home from war, no telegram or letters to warn her, ringing the bell of his own house as if her not answering it would send him away. Silly Garrett, she says when he walks in with his duffel bag and sunken eyes, Garrett Junior climbing his legs while Garrett’s arms remain stiff at his sides. She opens the door and the tinny voice that comes from her says again Silly Garrett, while the boy in the red lightning hat, his face powdered with wood, wipes the sweat from his neck with the back of his hand.
“They’re cut,” he says, “but they’re not down.” He blows his nose into his fingers, and his fingers pull away bloody. “Saw kept kicking on me,” he says.
Behind him she sees the crabapple trees tall against the sky, their leaves full of voices, the five blackened trunks.
“I’d like you to take down those trees,” she says. Every word in her mouth feels old, some made thing not of her throat. “Two dollars a tree,” she says.
“Ma’am, I cut the damn trees. Kudzu’s got ‘em all strung together and they won’t fall. Just leaning a little. I’ll need rope and my truck to pull ‘em down.”
She looks past him at the trees leaning in toward the middle, huddled together, the whites of the wedge cuts shining in their trunks like crescent moons, one after the other.
The boy turns his hat back around the wrong way. “I’ll get on it first thing tomorrow, but I’d like to get paid first.”
She goes for the money in the blue tobacco jar, Garrett saving it up, Garrett Junior spending it on candy and Cokes, pool halls and nights away. The jar is
not there on the hutch where it always sat in the kitchen. She comes back to the boy and the trickle of blood runs thin into his mouth. He swipes the blood across his face.
“You don’t have my money, do you ma’am?” he says. He shakes his head and snuffs, spits across the porch rail. In his sweat is the smell of the crabapples.
“That boy,” she says, and after a minute realizes she’s forgotten to shake her head and smile at all the trouble he’s caused.
The boy mutters to himself, wipes his head on his forearm, and reaches toward her. She opens her arms, thinking of Garrett reaching for her that first night after the trees were in the ground, the burlap and twine left piled on the roof of the Chrysler. Reaching for her after a year of nights in the kitchen, sitting on a stack of papers and watching the darkness drag the house into night. Reaching and slipping the robe from her shoulders, weighing her small breasts with the tips of his worn fingers, grazing her nipples with his thumbs.
The boy tugs the frayed edges of her housecoat to pull it closed. “Just keep yourself covered up, ma’am,” he says, “and we’ll call it even.”
She hears his boots on the gravel drive as her arms lift away from her like balloons set loose by a child. Garrett lifts her from the floor, her thigh scraping his belt buckle, the smell of outdoors in his hair. Her robe sticks to the sweat on his stomach as he lifts her away from him and onto their quilted bed.
“We’re apple farmers, Etta Cayce,” he whispers. “How the hell do you like that?” He smiles touching her; the hatchet he has bought to prune the branches that have not yet grown hangs in the workshop, the blade he has whetted and then coated with oil to keep away the rust until the time that he will need it. He kisses her along the length of her body, his Sears & Roebuck clothes soaking in the basin to take the stiff out of them, the sapling trees stretching their roots into new soil, the man in the hat riding off somewhere counting his money, the peafowl not yet hatched on the ranch where Garrett will buy them out of a magazine. The gun is hidden, this time for good, she thinks, beneath the bed where she opens herself to him and he moves on top of her. Above her where she lies, the trees lean in, the holes in the green letting in the failing light of evening. She hears sounds, music, shaken from the branches. Garrett moans, the sound of it like sap running out of the trees; she hears babies crying with new-cut teeth, Christmas music from school assemblies, the sirens where Garrett Junior lives, the Atlanta Catholics praying their rosaries, dogs caught in raccoon traps, wrestling broadcasts on the radio, peafowl in the trees at night, their tails whisking the dust. She hears her song, “Dream a Little Dream of Me,” stolen right away from her. I don’t see what all the fuss is about, she thinks to say. Her hands find the crabapples, one bite missing. Her housecoat lies twisted around her; she needs to find that belt, to close it up tight. She thinks of herself while the noise of the trees swirls around her, Miz Cayce, that old witch lost out there in the Spooky Woods. The trees sing to her now. Blood is falling, they sing, some old church song, but she won’t hear of it, not for a minute. She lifts a crabapple to her mouth for a bite, the bitterest fruit she knows.