Treeborne

by Caleb Johnson

  “Nobody expected there to be money in such a thing,” she went on. “Wasn’t ever much. Not even once it got wrote up all over the place. Beat all to me, seeing Aunt Tammy talking to folks from New York and California.”

  What began as a local oddity turned into a not-for profit with one year-round paid employee and a few volunteers. Soon it became too much for Tammy Treeborne Ragsdale to manage on her own. An executive director was hired, a board of directors assembled. Janie steered clear of the whole enterprise. A young woman yet, she had her orchard and her fruit stand. Summers busy back when Elberta was on the main route to the Gulf Coast. She’d direct folks out to The Seven to walk paths past her granddaddy’s art if she thought they seemed like the kind who’d be interested. Otherwise she kept apart.

  “Them days passed,” she said, “till all the place run off of was donations and pitiful government grants. I remember the first day it opened though. Jon D. and his boy Henry was there. Spitting image of his daddy, I mean. Henry is. Got some Lyle in him too. Jon D. likes you saying that. Handsome might of skipped Jon De Soto Crews, but not his boy. I got a picture somewhere. Boy, foot—I reckon Henry’s grown now. About your age. ECHS marching band played the day it opened and Aunt Tammy led the first tour group.”

  Janie couldn’t find the article she was looking for, but she did find a newspaper clipping she hadn’t seen in years:

  Maybelle Chambliss Treeborne, 58, of Elberta, died shortly after dawn on Saturday the twenty-fourth of May. She is survived by three children and one grandchild. Maybelle was preceded in death by her husband, Jesse Absalom “Hugh” Treeborne.

  Maybelle was born in Bankhead, Ala., a nearby coal town, where she graduated in a class of four students from the Bankhead School in 1916. A photograph from this time shows a smiling young girl with thick hair pulled back and styled into a type of pompadour then popular. Through fate, she often said, Maybelle wound up in Elberta, where she served many years as our local postmaster, including during and after The Storm of 1929, until retiring two years ago.

  Maybelle married Hugh Treeborne, who is remembered by family and friends for the unique art he made. Together, the couple raised three children—Renton, Tammy and Luther—on a large tract of land to the north and west of town. This untamed acreage stirred much jealousy in the hearts of local children—enough that some ventured onto it from time to time and imagined their own tiny kingdoms there. Trespassing is not an act this writer advocates, but, on the occasion of Mrs. Treeborne’s passing, will confess to having committed on the acreage at least once.

  Maybelle Chambliss Treeborne will be remembered for having been one of the first female postmasters in the state of Alabama. She seemed to know the entire history of our lovely river valley and of all who reside here. If she didn’t know something, Maybelle simply made it up—like any storyteller worth her salt—and our lives became all the more wondrous for it. Maybelle prized her family, especially her granddaughter, Janie “Sister” Treeborne, who is surely the spitting image of her grandmother, or this writer is not sitting here, looking out onto Water Avenue and the beautiful river which gives our town its name.

  Janie hung her grandmomma’s obituary on the fridge, securing it with a magnet shaped like Alabama.

  “The day it happened Daddy and me was fishing over at the dam,” she said. “Not a lick of college to his name. The Authority would still train you thataway back then. Anyhow, I remember poor Ricky Birdsong hollering, ‘Telephone! Telephone!’

  “We was fishing this finger of deepwater where summer before the lake’d dropped so low it turned up a rusted-out car with a dead body in the driver’s seat. Woman behind the wheel was from Arkansas, the paper said. Well we’d done caught us a good mess of bream, aiming for Momma to fry them up that night, when Ricky Birdsong hollered that that telephone was ringing for Daddy.

  “I watched the lines while he went to answer. Fishing was our thing, same as it’d been with him and his daddy. If you was to ask my first memory though, it wouldn’t be fishing. Be Granddaddy Hugh’s big ugly foot poking out from underneath a sheet the day they slid him in back of that hearse bound for Blessed Assurance Funeral Home. Nails this thick and second toe longer than the first. That’s it. See here though: mine too.”

  Janie kicked off a pink slipper and held up her wide flat foot, laughed as she wiggled five long toes at the young man.

  “Then I heard a door open and Daddy was just-a-hustling toward his truck. Never had seen him move so fast. It thrilled me to the bone. Cigarettes flew out the pocket of his shirt and hair blew back from his forehead. Seeing him run thataway made it easier imagining him playing for the Conquistadors, easier imagining who he was before I came along. Anyhow, I dropped my pole and took off too. The engine was running, passenger door slung open for me. You want to talk regret? Let’s talk how much I wish I’d kept Daddy’s pickup after he died. Shit, I can’t even remember how I spent the money I got from selling it.”

  Seven Hundred Acres

  1958

  As they drove away from the dam Janie imagined the valley a map in her head. She pinpointed their place on it and, by direction, figured they were headed to The Seven. It’d been a few days since she’d last seen her grandmomma. Her daddy drove fast and with the radio off. Empty bottles clinked on the floorboard. Janie liked riding in her daddy’s pickup truck better than nearly anything in the world. It was big and steered like she imagined a ship would. A spotted hawk’s feather hung from the rearview mirror, twirling at every bump in the road. She loved the stink of cigarette upon smoked cigarette and burnt motor oil wafting into the cab. She tried getting by without washing it out of her hair, especially since her daddy’d started sleeping at the dam so much. Her momma usually caught her and stood in the bathroom door while Janie got back in the tub. Wash good, Nita’d say. And Janie half would. Some Saturdays she and her daddy rode for hours on end with no true destination in mind. Stopped when they pleased, pissed in the edge of the woods, bought coke-colas and egg-salad sandwiches and salty potato chips from whichever country store they came upon, and listened to 1570AM-The Peach loud as they could stand it. The whole valley felt like theirs. These rides an appraisal. But today was different. Today the smells were making her nauseated. Something’s wrong, she thought, picking at the little round brown burns in the seat fabric.

  She was surprised when her daddy flew past the house and out into the bumpy pasture. He jarred to a stop next to the pole barn, left the engine running and jumped out, and disappeared into the woods behind Granddaddy Hugh’s gravesite before Janie could get out herself. She chased, ducking branches and briars. Two of her steps made up one of her daddy’s. She was breathing hard time she caught up with him at the edge of a holler.

  He grabbed at a sapling, then began sliding down the bluffline. Janie tried telling him she knew a better way. It was like he didn’t hear. She could make out a yellow splotch in the hollerbottom. The month of May, practically summer, the woods already an unnatural green. Dirt and leaves avalanched ahead of them. The yellow splotch moved. It was, Janie realized, Lee Malone. He was standing over something covered up with his tan hunting jacket.

  “Lord, I’m so sorry,” he said when they reached him. He hugged both their necks. He smelled like gun oil and squirrel and spearmint chewing gum—way he always did to Janie, even after he no longer hunted, which began this day. “I don’t know what on earth she could of been doing fooling with this big-old thing by herself.”

  It was like Ren didn’t hear Lee Malone, nor pay mind to the big-old thing he’d mentioned. The rusted metal box favored a generator. There was a round opening at one end. In all her wandering around The Seven Janie had never seen this thing, though she figured it had something to do with her granddaddy, like everything did.

  She watched her daddy pull back the hunting jacket covering Maybelle’s body. Ren held his momma to his chest, picking groundtrash out of her white hair. There was a deep blue cut on her leg and her lips were parted where you could se
e the coffee-stained backs of her teeth. A rubber band pinched her wrist—reminder of something, a leftover habit from her post office days. He held her hand and picked at dirt—or rust one—caked underneath her nails. She was barefoot—missing both shoes. Ren was crying now. He kept saying, “Momma, oh, my momma. Momma, Momma, Momma.”

  Lee put a hand on Ren’s back. When he found her he’d ran over at Varnado Price’s place to use the phone. His yellow collared shirt was soaked through and stuck to his chest. “Ren, I told her she ought not be out in these woods by herself anymore,” Lee said. “But Maybelle was going to do what she was going to do.”

  Buckshot came galloping up the holler. The dog sat on Janie’s boot and leaned hard into her leg. She scratched his neck down his side where the pellets that gave him his name were yet lodged up underneath the skin. He looked like a bird dog you’d see in a sporting magazine, but lacked any such talent. Buckshot licked Janie’s hand and grinned stupidly at her. When she stopped scratching, the dog trotted over and flopped down on a stringer of shot squirrels. He rolled and he rolled.

  Lee’s rifle lay there as well. Janie picked up the rifle and checked was it loaded. It was not. The weight of the thing in her hands felt comforting somehow. She sighted down the holler, where the underside of oak leaves flashed dull silver. She scanned a grove of laurel blooming wild-pink, spotting a piece of storm-blown tin among the tangled bush. She squeezed the trigger and made a firing sound in her head. Buckshot was sniffing the groundcover for something else worth rolling in. He snorted and shook his head. Thinking nobody looking, he picked up one of the shot squirrels and began slinking off.

  “Quit that,” Lee said.

  Janie nearly dropped the rifle. But Buckshot knew who Lee meant. He spat out the squirrel as if it had climbed into his mouth, then sat down and casually thumped his ear a few times with his hind foot.

  “Careful Sister,” Lee said.

  He’d taught her how to use this very rifle. Her daddy never was much for hunting. Had no problem with it, or with guns, or with his only daughter using them to kill wild game. Lee just knew more. He’d told her you held a gun tenderly, way you do a woman. Then, realizing his mistake, cleared his throat and said, Well. Lee’d learned to hunt from the white man and woman who raised him after his momma momma died. Janie had been obsessed with this time in Lee Malone’s life, but getting stories out of him could be like drawing water from a hidden leak in the roof. Nothing like her grandmomma. Like her grandmomma was, she thought. The first past tense. This is life now. Stories had gushed out of Maybelle Treeborne as if her mouth was a wellspring. Janie propped the rifle against a poplar tree then told Buckshot to come on. The dog tilted his head, cocked his ears then followed the girl.

  They walked alongside a mossy-banked stream broken up in turn by orange sandstone as big as a person’s skull. Her grandmomma’s shoes being missing irritated Janie to no end. This was something she could do. She aimed to find them or else. Maybelle always wore the same white canvas shoes when she went walking. When the shoes wore out she went down at Holly’s Fine Dress and bought another pair same as the last. Janie imagined herself wearing shoes like them when she became an old woman. She wanted to be just like her grandmomma—from her short and high haircut to being without a husband. Janie already felt old, wanted it to be so. She lay in bed at night and strained to age the way some kids strain to grow taller.

  She watched the groundcover and sandy mud for footprints. She wondered if her grandmomma had taken off her shoes to wade this stream. Maybe stuck them under a bush and forgot. Maybelle, Janie knew, loved water even though she couldn’t swim herself. Janie hollered if Buckshot wandered too far off. She didn’t want to be alone. The girl and the dog rested on the streambank for a little bit. Cedars curved upward through the hardwood canopy. Janie saw a salamander that looked like a coal escaped from a fire on bottom of the green streambed. She didn’t feel like catching the creature though. Not right now. She didn’t feel like anything at all. She got up, called Buckshot, and headed back the way they’d come.

  Her daddy and Lee Malone had picked up the body and were toting it out of the holler. Maybelle’s head hung to the side. Janie could see her grandmomma’s cotton bloomers sagging where she’d messed herself. These details didn’t register so much in the moment, but came to the girl in memory, time over, growing smoother as she aged and handled it through the years. She noticed Lee’s rifle and the stringer of shot squirrels had been left behind. She picked them up. The squirrels stiff as a board and bottleflies crawling through their fur. She ran, Buckshot beside her nibbling at a squirrel when he could. Lee usually cut off the tails and gave them to the dog to chew on, to hide somewhere he eventually forgot. Janie could see Lee and her daddy were struggling to carry her grandmomma’s body up the steep slope. Maybelle’s dress kept getting hung up on brush. Lee tripped on a treeroot, and they dropped her. Way the body landed and rolled, it looked to Janie like her grandmomma had come back to life.

  They sat down and rested. Buckshot walked past licking each man and Janie in turn. Nobody spoke. Janie watched a black piss ant crawl up her grandmomma’s freckled arm. She wanted to brush it away, but she was afraid to go near the body. She felt more ashamed of this than she ever had felt about anything in her young life, treating MawMaw May like a curse she might catch. The girl knew better. Death was all around. She’d killed animals herself. But this was different. This was a person. This was her grandmomma. This had been her grandmomma. This was no longer her grandmomma. She didn’t have a grandmomma anymore. What was was through and what would be had now commenced. A slow-blooming understanding that tormented the girl.

  As they continued around the bluffline and up the slope, Janie pretended to pick birds out of the treebranches with Lee Malone’s rifle. She kept lookout for Crusoe too. First chance, she thought, I’ll find him and tell him what’s happened. Without realizing she began making firing sounds out loud instead of inside her head. She worked the bolt, squeezed the trigger. Schklikt, klikt, poomb. Schklikt, klikt, poomb. Buckshot bounded up and sniffed Maybelle’s bare foot. Lee gently kicked the dog away. Janie fake-fired and fake-fired. Schklikt, klikt, poomb. Kept her from thinking. But her daddy, he didn’t understand it thataway.

  “I told you!” Ren bellered, dropping his momma and grabbing his daughter by the arm. He yanked off his belt in one motion then began whipping her.

  Janie dropped the rifle and highstepped to dodge her daddy’s belt. The stringer of shot squirrels flopped everwhichaway as she danced around him. He wrenched her arm and landed a few across her back. She screamed, her shrill voice rolling throughout the woods, and swatted at his swinging hand as he whipped her ass.

  Ren finally let go and quit. “Hush,” he said. “You ain’t killed.” He shakily looped his belt back around his waist then picked up his momma’s body again.

  The pickup truck was still running. They put Maybelle in back and Lee got in with her. Janie slid the rifle behind the seat then climbed up onto the passenger side. “Move over,” Ren said, motioning toward the steering wheel.

  She could barely toe the pedals. Ren told her he’d shift if she just mashed the clutch and steered. She’d never driven a vehicle by herself. It wasn’t but a couple hundred yards of open land between the barn and the house though, the only obstacle a towering pecan tree. She stalled a few times. A rainshower had blown up while they were in the woods. Elongated drops pinged the hood and streaked the windshield. Buckshot gave chase, barking, hopping sideways like a bronco. The pickup lurched, stalled again. Ren switched on the wipers and they beat time while Lee started to sing. Janie had never heard a voice prettier than his—and she’d heard many voices on the radio and on the console Lee kept on his screened backporch with the recordings he collected. His voice was deep by nature, but he could move it around where he desired. Janie wasn’t the first Treeborne woman to admire it. She’d noticed the way MawMaw May acted whenever Lee Malone took out his guitar and let his voice put flesh to bone.
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  Lee sang while they unloaded and toted Maybelle’s body into the house she had not lived in for years. He sang through the kitchen, the coffee fixed before her walk now gone cold, and down the hallway to the bathroom, where they set her in the tub then filled it with water. Geronimo jumped up and watched the running faucet till Lee ran the cat off. Ren left to use the phone at Varnado Price’s place. Lee kept singing. Janie didn’t know the names of these songs—if they even had names. Songs he’d sung no telling how many times, never imagining he would like this. But maybe that’s not giving Lee Malone due credit. Song, he knew, could not be called on only in good times, or else it’d be no more useful than a blown-out wall socket. So he sang as he rinsed his love’s lifeless body, her granddaughter watching from the hall.

  “Come on help,” he said. “You’re big enough to I reckon.”

  Janie got down on her knees and leaned over the tub. Lee handed her a washrag and she wet it then touched the ball of her grandmomma’s shoulder, where plum-colored freckles favored drops of paint. Suds raced down Maybelle’s arms and wrinkled tits. She felt like jelly to Janie, who still half-expected her grandmomma’s eyes to flash open when she touched the rag to her forehead. Of course they didn’t. Death would not give second thought. Maybelle Treeborne was gone, and nothing Janie could do would change that.

  When they’d finished Lee unstoppered the drain. Maybelle’s body slouched down as the water ran out. They dried her off, skin warm from the water, then Lee picked her up. He stumbled getting her in bed and fell on top of her. Some of Hugh’s arrowheads glued to a framed square of green velvet and wall-mounted shook as Lee pushed off the bed. The rainshower had passed. Outside the sun shined all over. Steam rose up from black fallen leaves and burnt off midair. Lee put Maybelle in a clean cotton dress, and Janie cracked the window to let out her grandmomma’s ghost and let in what breeze, if any, might come.