When Hugh was through eating he propped Crusoe up on his lap. Looked like the dirt boy had been walking around on his own. Missing a toe, and the bottoms of his feet were cracked. He toted Crusoe out at the studio and searched the shelves for the right clay, yawning as he ran fingers across buckets and jars. When was the last time he’d set foot here? Days he didn’t make art carried little meaning and were often hard to recall. Lived too many artless days period, he thought, since Caz died eleven years ago.
For some of those years, once the cannery closed, Hugh’d picked peaches and done other piecemeal work, like in the paddy fields of Livingstown, during summer. In winter he spent many idle nights at Lee Malone’s place for the company and the warmth. Lee hisself now worked as a dipper at a mill out in the county. Dangerous—the trip there for Lee and the work he did. He came home with arms stained blue up past the elbows. It was good reliable work though and the foreman let Lee cut firewood off company land. Let him, but wouldn’t of said so had Lee been caught. Lee gave what he couldn’t burn to Woodrow, who used it to smoke whole hogs that’d been splayed open down the gut and wrapped in chickenwire so the meat held together as they slow-cooked. Hugh Treeborne and Lee Malone met in the church where Lee the boy slapped guitar and sang. Hugh wasn’t holy; his daddy had wandered in during service and, crazed, started prying up the floorboards. Had a splintered stack four-five feet tall time Hugh caught up to him. The True Believers were speaking in tongues and laying hands on Caz, which did not a lick of good in the long run. Hugh never would forget the way Lee sounded that day—raw as the floorboards his daddy had pried loose searching for gold that did not exist.
Some winter nights Lee would sit up late late, and play and sing songs from his boyhood, others he’d picked up traveling the chitlin’ circuit in Florida and South Alabama and Georgia, while Hugh contentedly listened. Lee’d seen and played with the best guitar players of that time and place. Men named Papa, Blind-this-or-that, Sonny, Skip. Some with no name at all. Time, he figured to play the circuit till he could make a recording. Blacks up north with money would spend it on a decent recording, he’d heard.
Then one off night in Mobile Lee saw a hillbilly star pack out the civic arena. The big room smelled of cow shit from a rodeo held the night before. Lee and the rest of the black folks in attendance sat high up near the rafters, under watch of several fat policemen. The hillbilly star was gaunt. Looked like a string bean down there onstage. Lee knew his songs from the white folks who’d raised him. He began singing along under his breath, out of fear that the policemen would deem him a disturbance. Before long his neighbors in the balcony were cutting him looks. At first he did not care. He loved the songs and was taking what he could learn from the hillbilly star’s pitch to use in some of his own music. This is what he did; sponged. Then somebody kneed Lee in back of the head. He turned around, thinking it might of been an accident, and was confronted with rows upon rows of indignant faces. He did not wait for the show to end before leaving his seat and exiting out the side of the arena into the humid night.
He needed to get drunk to tell this story to Hugh for the first time. Between that night in Mobile and the night he told of it, he’d been asked to make a recording. Given a train ticket to go do so in Wisconsin. But Lee Malone had not gone yet. Instead he’d given up playing the circuit and taken the job at the mill. And for what? Hugh wasn’t sure, and he didn’t fully understand what’d happened in the civic arena that night.
When day began breaking Hugh got up and stumbled to the back porch. Waking up early felt like getting away with something. He pissed a gallon while listening to a mockingbird test its voice. Crusoe was waiting in the old chicken coop Hugh used as his studio. The dirt boy had laid out his tools and uncovered an assemblie set on tin they’d found at an abandoned houseplace near Livingstown. The assemblie had to do with De Soto’s boyhood home. Horses. Wouldn’t Spain have some kind of a desert? Hugh found his materials strewn all over the Elberta Valley. Felt like the land was offering up things, urging him to make art. Not even make, but frame, assemble. That’s how he’d come up with the word for the things he made. Crusoe came along on these walks and worked kindly like a magnet sometimes. The Elberta River too carried objects up onto its banks and into the woods when it flooded in early spring. The wind blew things down, rearranged what was already there. Pounding rain could unbury something lost. Most folks never noticed. You had to look. So much was thrown out, even during these tough times. Hugh gathered and assembled these objects to resemble the images filling his head, and when he was finished, he toted his assemblies off in the woods and left them there.
It was this last part that drove Lee Malone up the wall. Scared, he’d say, trying to taunt Hugh so he’d quit leaving his work to ruin. Hiding it like cat shit. Lee wanted him to share his art with the world. What world? Pot calling the kettle black, Hugh’d say. Then Lee’d turn the argument toward skin color, so he wouldn’t have to answer for why he’d quit the chitlin’ circuit and still hadn’t gone to make that recording. This argument went on till, often, Hugh’d let slip the word nigger, or something close enough to it, and the men came to blows.
Hugh lit a pine knot and burnt some of the paint already gobbed onto the assemblie. He covered his nose against the smoke. Crusoe stood on his toes and watched.
“Tell,” the dirt boy said.
Hugh waved him off, unwound a spring then began pounding it flat. Crusoe kept on begging. Stories were Hugh’s daddy’s thing; assemblieing his.
“Tell,” the dirt boy said. “Come on, tell.” He showed his animal teeth and pumped his hands like he was squeezing something.
Hugh finally gave in and told the story of Chief Coosa losing his soul to an owl, chasing the creature right off a bluff and breaking his body on the jagged rocks down below. While he told he mixed clay and began layering it onto the assemblie. Crusoe begged for a dab or two on his curved back. The dirt boy purred when Hugh obliged. Soon it was time to leave for work. Hugh toted Crusoe down at the spring and left him till evening.
Life went thisaway for weeks. Hugh stole from the day, working on assemblies while Crusoe watched. Didn’t drink much; didn’t see Lee at all. The work with The Authority allowed Hugh something near to peace. His long-sunk mind bobbed up. Crusoe noticed the signs in Hugh’s hands, which moved like a heron spearing toadfrogs from clear water. He finished the De Soto assemblie then three smaller ones that had to do with animals that’d disappeared from the valley since his boyhood. Panthers, bears. Native predators now gone. During these blissful weeks Hugh Treeborne often had a dream in which he uncovered a pit of bones in the channel the Authority men were digging to divert the river from the dam site. Digging was in his blood. Jarred awake, he’d return to the studio and assemblie till his eyes ached and his hands wouldn’t do right. This penance also pleasure. He never remembered going back inside, just woke next to Crusoe come morning, and a late owl hooting in a split oak out back.
* * *
He’d learned to read and write from pamphlets Caz would bring home from trips into town. The pamphlets would have titles like Our Caribbean Allies or How to Get Out from Under Debt. Rarely in life was reading and writing useful for Hugh Treeborne. In fact he hadn’t written more than his name in who knew when. So, the day he sat down to write something he could mail, it took effort to recall the shapes of letters and the order in which they went. He had no idea where the letter he was writing would wind up going once he turned it over to her. He wrote, If you some how git this I am sorree. He folded the paper twice then sealed it with wax. On the outside he wrote, To Frank Treeborne. When the wax’d dried he stuck the letter in his britchespocket then headed into town on his raggedy-ass mule named Byron.
Hugh stood next to the De Soto statue for several minutes before getting the guts to cross the street. A little bell chimed when he opened the door. To the right was a wall of brass boxes with ornate glass doors which folks rented out to receive mail. To the left was the service counter. The new po
stmaster stood behind it. She wore a blue wool dress with big gold buttons and had her hair styled up and pinned to her temples.
“How can I help you?”
Hugh set his letter on the counter. “I want to send this.”
She picked up the letter and looked at it. “You don’t have an address?”
“Right there,” Hugh said, pointing to his dead uncle’s name.
The postmaster kindly frowned. “This isn’t the address,” she said. “Do you know where Mr. Treeborne lives?”
“No,” Hugh said.
“You don’t know where he lives, but you’re trying to send him a letter?”
He didn’t know what to say. He’d assumed she’d just stick on a stamp and that’d be it. The letter was nothing but an excuse to talk to her anyhow. His uncle Frank had been dead longer than his daddy. “Well, thank you,” he muttered, then turned to leave.
“Now hold on,” the postmaster called out.
But it was too late. Hugh had rushed out the door.
Embarrassed as he felt, Hugh didn’t let this foolish attempt at courtship curtail the routine he’d established since starting with The Authority. Each morning he took a couple hours from the day by working on his assemblies. One such morning, hands crusted with blood from the gill plate off a carp he’d pulled out the fishpond, he heard a vehicle coming down a nearby path. He set down his tools but for a scraper and watched as a tar-black car came speeding down the hill. A thing so rare in this valley it might of been an airplane. Most folks in Elberta couldn’t afford to keep up a vehicle, let alone put gas in one. Not anybody who’d come down at The Seven anyhow.
A stranger climbed out of the driver’s seat. Hugh let him get all the way up onto the porch before sneaking up from behind and pressing the scraper to his neck. “I ain’t selling,” he said, “so you can go on.”
“I was passing by and noticed—”
“I ain’t selling my land,” Hugh said, pressing down harder. The scraper was so dull he’d need to saw if he meant to break skin. “I work for The Authority now too.”
“I believe you have me confused.” The stranger spoke in a clipped accent. If he’d of said Mississippi he’d of pronounced every last letter. Hugh let go and backed up. The stranger’s dark hair had been poorly slicked down against his squat skull. He was, in fact, plain slouchy-looking all over, and when he opened his mouth to speak again he revealed unseemly red gums. “Do you intend on using that?”
Hugh lowered the scraper. “I seen them notices y’all left.”
The stranger laughed a laugh too big and healthy-sounding for his appearance. He fixed his tie, which had a little yellow bird painted on it. His shirt collar was smashed and sweat-browned. He raised his eyebrows then walked back to the vehicle and took a fruit jar out from underneath the front seat. He sloshed around the pissy-looking liquid inside then drank from the jar and held it out toward Hugh.
“I can do without.”
The stranger drank. “Like I was saying before you held a knife to my throat, I was—”
“This ain’t no knife.”
“Does it happen to be for sale?”
Hugh looked at the scraper in his hand. “Does what?”
“Listen,” the stranger went on, “I purchase art. I’d like to purchase that odd little piece by the road if it’s in fair enough condition. I assume it’s yours?”
Hugh had forgotten about this assemblie—as he did all of them over time. It’d been growed-up in a honeysuckle vine since one drunk night Lee Malone decided to take it home rather than let Hugh tote it off into the woods and leave it. Lee got no farther than the path before deciding the assemblie too big and left it there.
“Mister, look—”
“How much?” It was a question impossible to answer, making a fool of Hugh in the most terrible way. “Here,” the stranger said, “let me show you something.”
He retrieved from the vehicle a stack of pictures wrapped in tissue paper and bound with twine. On back of each one a year had been scrawled: ’27, ’18, ’23, so on. Some of the art in these pictures looked kin to Hugh’s own. Up to now, whenever he saw art mentioned in the paper or a stray pamphlet, it’d been made long ago by a person now dead, and usually in some far-off land. Art itself being, he thought, a dead practice. But here was something made only a few years ago by people, according to the hard-to-read scrawl, from Memphis, Mobile, New Orleans and on over to Tallahassee. This angered and thrilled him. The stranger took some flyers out of a briefcase, making sure Hugh saw the prices printed on them in red.
“I believe you get what you pay for,” he said. “And I pay only for the best.”
“That right?”
“It sure is, Mister…”
“Treeborne,” Hugh said. “Jesse Absalom Treeborne. But folks call me Hugh.”
“Christ!” the stranger shouted, taking another swig from the jar. He gasped as he swallowed the firewater and fanned hisself with the flyers clutched in his hand. “People will love this. Name’s Loudermilk. Let me ask you a question Hugh. How long have you been one?”
“Been one what?”
“An artist,” Loudermilk said.
Hugh felt ignorant considering an answer. “I always been thisaway,” he said.
“Perfect!” Loudermilk shuffled through the pictures as if he’d forgotten why he was there. “That’s just perfect. People are going to love this!”
Loudermilk wanted to see more assemblies. As they walked The Seven, Hugh had a hard time getting a word in—and him born into a family of talkers. Loudermilk said he’d just come from the Gulf, but was originally from up north. He wanted to hear all about Hugh Treeborne, he said. But Hugh could not tell about growing up on these seven hundred wooded acres of old-growth cool and dim as a cave, of how some afternoons a flock of passenger pigeons blacked out the sky for seven Mississippi seconds, how bright yellow mushrooms like to walk on as steps grew up the trunks of those trees, or how Indians once lived here, and not the worn-out kind, but those whose descendants fought De Soto when the Spanish traipsed through hunting for gold not there, and how, centuries later, Hugh the boy picked up discarded birdpoints and broken pottery in the field his daddy plowed for a garden and a cotton patch, and how he picked up bird bones and tore those mushrooms loose from the trees and assemblied these objects, and others, according to what the land offered and what he saw in his head. Nor could he tell how the sweet smell of syrup and sugar and mashed fresh fruit used to drift down from Prince’s Peach Cannery so you could breathe cotton candy if you had a good strong set of lungs, how him and Lee Malone used to catch bats underneath the Hernando de Soto Bridge and tie string to the poor creatures’ feet, then let them swoop and soar after bugs while taking turns holding on to the shaking end, let alone did Hugh get to tell anything about his daddy’s sickness and the years after Caz died, about making Crusoe—now that would be a story, but Hugh couldn’t tell it yet—or how he was beginning to feel like he’d betrayed all the things he loved by joining The Authority, which was changing the valley in a way no one could yet grasp, because Loudermilk cut him off every chance he had, just like a damn yankee would.
Hugh remained wary. He slept with a rifle the first night Loudermilk camped on The Seven. He had a hard time believing anybody would pay for something he’d made. Doubted anybody cared what he did on these seven hundred acres—or if he even lived. A way of thinking rooted in his family’s past.
But as the week wore on and Loudermilk pulled more assemblies from the woods, his enthusiasm birthed in Hugh some fragile belief that maybe this wasn’t a con. Maybe he was telling the truth and folks up north would pay good money for his assemblies. He wanted to believe. He also reasoned that if there was money to be made from his art then Loudermilk would return for more. If not, Hugh figured, he’d be no worse for a few less assemblies sinking into the ground from which they’d come. The gamble seemed worth it.
Hugh waited for Loudermilk to make his pitch. He had lined up several assemblies he
thought were interesting, he called it, alongside the studio. “It’s not often I come across something like this,” Loudermilk said, stepping back to take them all in at once. “There’s enough here to put on an entire exhibition of Hugh Treeborne.”
Hugh let his silence speak. He noticed Crusoe in the shadows of an azalea bush and toted the dirt boy to a bucket of filmy water and began wetting him down. As he worked, Crusoe’s coloring bled onto his hands and ran down his arms onto his shirtsleeves. Reshaping the dirt boy sounded like kneading too-wet biscuit dough.
“Let me talk to my people,” Loudermilk said. “I can return in a month—maybe less. Of course I’ll need proof. My camera, it’s busted and—”
“Go ahead, take them.”
Loudermilk seemed surprised. He wrote out a contract on butcher’s paper Hugh found wadded up in his shirtpocket. “Keep collecting,” he said after he’d filled the backseat. They both signed the contract, then Hugh watched the vehicle depart, wondering despite hisself if he would ever see the yankee, or the art he’d given over, in this valley again.
Stories We Tell
TODAY
“You still taping?”
The young man said he was.
Outside the sun blazed late noonday heat, so it seemed like the world was made of old-timey glass. Same as the kind stuck in the windowframes of this three-room house on the side of a hill. Inside the house smelled like the occasionally smoked cigarette, like body odor, spent coffee grounds, scented pinecones and baby powder. Janie Treeborne was trying to remember who exactly came up with the name Hugh Treeborne’s Seven Hundred Acre Junk Garden. Maybe it was one of the dozens of art collectors who visited The Seven in those early days of rediscovery, she said. Could of been, on second thought, some magazine writer. She was sifting through a cardboard box filled with articles upon articles about her granddaddy Hugh and the art he made and the seven hundred acres he littered with it.
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