Treeborne

by Caleb Johnson

  * * *

  Janie could hear Sheriff Aaron Guthrie, her daddy and Lee Malone in the kitchen, drinking fresh coffee and waiting on Millard Andrews to show up with his hearse. Squirrel hunting. Say you went and called Ren after you found her? Up at Varny’s? Uh-huh. Your rifle too? How many bullets left? Well count them motherfuckers then. I wish y’all would of just let her be. I wasn’t leaving my momma off in the woods Aaron. Bugs’d already got at her. I know it, but be a whole lot easier had y’all just let her be.

  Janie put on her boots and went outside. Buckshot had chased Geronimo up a stunted peach tree. The dog circled and the cat slicked back its ears, that one eye narrowed to but a bright blue slit. Janie plucked a peach from the tree. Hard as a hickory nut and too sour to eat. She chucked it off in the weeds and let the animals alone. She needed to find Crusoe.

  Halfway across the pasture she heard a vehicle coming down the driveway. The pickup she recognized right off the bat, and she could make out through its bug-splattered windshield a bright-colored Hawaiian shirt—her uncle Luther. Seated next to him, her aunt Tammy. The pickup slid to a stop and the siblings hustled inside the house.

  Janie followed the old path of the storm toward her granddaddy’s junk garden. Her grandmomma had given this clearing that name. Lovingly, the girl reckoned. Anyhow it was apt. Looked like the junk grew up from the ground. But truth, the ground was eating it. Janie and her grandmomma had walked this path umpteen-thousand times. Summer, Maybelle toted a garden hoe for killing snakes. She despised these creatures, which seemed to relish making the junk garden their home, nesting all up in and underneath the assemblies Hugh’d toted out there and left. Janie and her grandmomma walked together all over The Seven. Scanned the treetops for stuck assemblies, poked at the groundcover for buried ones, turning up leaves that showed spiderwebs like cotton bolls, and earthworms squirming in dirt black as coffee brewed at night. They toted whatever they found out at the junk garden and laid it there among the rest. Some days they found not a piece. That was alright. Maybelle just told Elberta stories then. Some of the stories she’d learned from Hugh—the rest she made up.

  When it was warm weather their walks ended down at the spring. Day her grandmomma died, Janie stripped off her boots and waded in. She hollered for Crusoe. The spring his main haunt, the place Hugh had taken him from by the bucketload. She checked the old springhouse. Empty, Crusoe wasn’t there. A few comb-headed jays and redbirds looking like they wore makeup were streaking colors among the hickories and oaks as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened that day. To them, Janie thought, it ain’t. There wasn’t a breeze, but Janie noticed treebranches bobbing as if there was. The hair on her arms stood up at the thought that her grandmomma’s ghost might of blown past—might blow here forever.

  She tucked her dress into her bloomers and waded out till water came up past her scabby knees. Squirrels barked and chucked acorns her way. Janie cussed them and waded farther out. The spring was kindly shaped like a lima bean and bubbled from underneath a warty limestone ledge. Sometimes she would stick her arm into the spring’s dark mouth and scoop out handfuls of sand and sticks and leaves to increase its natural flow. It drained down a holler into Dismal Creek, which ran into the Elberta River, which ran on and on, out of the county if you followed it far enough. Janie often imagined doing so. She stepped out of the spring then sat down where coon and deer and birds had tracked the mud. Hollered for Crusoe again and watched water droplets sliding down her legs through newly come blond hair.

  When he, a creature of her granddaddy’s creation, showed up, Crusoe was dragging a crumpled sheet of tin that’d been shot through with pinky-size holes. Janie picked up one end and they toted it over at a flat-bottom boat her uncle Luther and daddy had abandoned as boys. Their second boat. The first a baby’s coffin the boys mistakenly purchased from Gus’s Buy-All. Chicken-legged Luther and dark-headed Ren aimed to sail clear to the Gulf of Mexico yet got not even out of hollering distance from the pasture before giving up. Elbertans a people of great ambition sometimes lacking see-through, but Lord at the glory that comes from a spark.

  Janie and Crusoe flipped over the boat. Underneath its spidery bottom was more of her granddaddy’s art: angels spiraling down from out of a stormcloud painted on wavy windowglass, a crusty black man playing guitar with his big long blue-roped toes. They flattened out the sheet of tin and on it was painted an alligator garfish. Inside the fish’s belly you could see all the things it’d swallowed across time, including a house where a family stood waving from a cluttered porch. Crusoe slid this piece in next to the rest of the art he’d toted there.

  “I was hunting you,” Janie said.

  Crusoe shucked his cutoffs and waded in. The water turned oily on top and flowed away in a rainbow slick from the dirt boy’s distended belly. When he bent forward rusted metal innards poked out of his blue-black skin. He splashed hisself a few times and sappy droplets rolled down his little body like mercury from a busted tube. He sank down underneath the surface. A mushroom cloud rose all around him then tailed off like wet smoke.

  He climbed out and sat down next to Janie. Crusoe stunk in that agreeable way old things stink. He smiled borrowed teeth then cupped his softened face and mashed down hard, shaping his head back the way it ought to of looked—or closer to it. Way Crusoe truly ought to look lost forever the day Hugh Treeborne died on the screened porch while the dirt boy, his masterpiece, sat there on his lap.

  “Help,” Crusoe said.

  “Help what?”

  “Tote.”

  Before Janie could ask tote what she heard hollering up toward the house. She could make out her aunt Tammy’s voice above the rest. No true surprise. When she heard Lee Malone though she knew to take off and see what was going on.

  She found them in the front yard. Her daddy and the sheriff on the ground while the others—Tammy, Lee and Luther—watched. Ren had an arm locked around the sheriff’s throat, squeezing. It wasn’t out of place in Elberta to see grown men fight, but this fight, Janie immediately understood, was different. The tighter Ren squeezed the more the sheriff’s eyes bulged. Before long they favored two peeled eggs. His leg kicked and kicked like Janie’d seen rabbits’ do when they’d been shot. Ren might of choked the sheriff to death had Tammy not pulled a pistol out of her purse.

  “Quit it now,” she said, bright red nails clicking against the underside of the barrel as she struggled to get a grip. “Quit this bullshit right this minute!”

  Ren let go and got on his knees. The sheriff sat up too and rubbed his throat. Ren held out his hand toward her and said, “Tammy—”

  “You want to take up for this, this…”

  “That ain’t what this is about Tam,” Ren said.

  “Ain’t what this is about? Then you tell me what it’s about Ren Treeborne. Tell me, because it looks to me just like what this is about.”

  “Tammy,” he said.

  She stepped toward him.

  “Put that thing up,” Lee Malone said.

  She wheeled around and shook the pistol way you do something sticky from your hand. “Don’t you say a word,” she said. “Don’t you say one single goddamn word to me. I’d just as soon shoot you as ever lay eyes on your sorry face again.”

  “Tammy,” the sheriff said. He had his gun drawn now and partway raised. “Let’s put that thing up now before somebody gets hurt.”

  She ignored him. She was staring at Lee Malone in a way which Janie had never seen anybody stare at another person.

  The sheriff said her name again.

  Luther giggled at something mysterious to everybody else.

  Tammy ignored all of it, focused on the bloodspot she saw pulsing out of a dime-size hole in Lee Malone’s chest. Ren stepped between them and this image was no more. Tammy shook the pistol and wailed as if something deep inside her had torn loose. The need to piss just overcame Janie right then. She pinched together, but it didn’t matter. Warm yellow ran down her legs and collected in the bo
ttom of her boots.

  “You ought to live with all you done,” Tammy said to Lee. She dropped the pistol and the sheriff hurried to pick it up.

  Tammy grabbed Geronimo from where he lay in a clump of monkey grass. The cat meowed. Tammy banged through the screendoor. All the windows stood open, so she could be heard going back to the bedroom where her momma’s body lay in waiting. A door slammed shut then it was quiet, like the whole scene had been dreamed up.

  Janie snuck off before anybody saw her. She set Crusoe down and peeled off her wet bloomers. The dirt boy staggered toward the woods. Janie slid aside a piece of plywood covering a gap in the house’s foundation, balled up her bloomers and chucked them far up underneath the house, where they’re liable to remain this day yet.

  The Artist at Work

  1929

  Beyond town the lane became little more than a mossy path littered with slick patches of black fallen leaves. A man on horseback who Maybelle Chambliss didn’t recognize galloped past and tipped his brown hat. She hurried on as morning settled. Summertime flat-out oppressive in this valley. A few gaunt cows munched goldenrod and thistle in an otherwise untended field. At least there was no ash and soot this far out, she thought, passing the rock Dee Sargent had mentioned looked like a ship run aground. Getting close now. A redtail hawk pealed into the sky. Maybelle came to the last turn on the map Dee’d drawn for her. She climbed underneath a fence, hid in a honeysuckle clump and waited.

  Before long Hugh Treeborne came walking up the path from his property. Shirt and britches stained red and stiff with mud and clay. The Authority’s A was stitched high on the right sleeve. He was taller than Maybelle remembered him being the day he came into the post office trying to mail a letter without an address. Uglier too, she thought, fighting back a laugh. He walked right by the honeysuckle, then turned down the lane toward town.

  She was bursting to tell what she’d done time Dee showed up again needing to mail four fighting roosters to Sapmore, Louisiana. Since becoming Elberta’s postmaster one year ago, Maybelle had sent the Sargents’ fighting roosters faraway as Mexico. While Dee handled the shipping, her husband, Tucker, waited at a coffee stand where mule traders and drunks lingered and ate boiled green peanuts, so a great fart-cloud hung around well into the afternoon. Maybelle loved seeing who mailed what where. She’d make up stories about how come they might be doing so. She loved walking the delivery routes whenever Sampley, the lone letter carrier, got drunk at Hernando’s Hideaway. Maybelle just loved talking to folks—well the ones who’d talk back to her. She could of filled a book with the stories they told. Taking on the past of this place sure as shit beat turning over the nagging parts of her own.

  She toted the caged roosters out back and set them in some shade till the postal truck came and carried off all the mail that wasn’t local. Kids would chase the truck, falling back and picking up at unspoken locations, like a relay team, to the town limits. She popped a rubber band around her wrist so she’d remember to water the roosters till then. It was a smoky day. The roosters scratched for bugs among the ash blown in their cages.

  Dee rolled two cigarettes and handed one to Maybelle. “I remember us little girls thinking his daddy was handsome, bless his heart,” she said, grinning what teeth remained in her small head. “Treebornes always have been strange.”

  “How come you to say that?”

  Dee shrugged, inhaled, then blew smoke right in Maybelle’s face. Maybelle slapped her on the arm, and Dee giggled and coughed.

  “Well’d you just gawk or what?”

  “I hid in a bush!” Maybelle said, going into a giggling-coughing fit of her own.

  “Lord, you two’d about deserve each other,” Dee said. She puffed five quick times then ground out the cigarette against the wall. “Well, I got to get Tuck.”

  “Love you,” Maybelle said.

  “Love you back.”

  Dee Sargent was the closest thing to a friend Maybelle had in Elberta, Alabama. Thirty years old, never married, Maybelle heard folks talk from day one in town and felt the looks shot in her direction like arrows. It would of bothered the younger Maybelle, a girl whupped by her upbringing till nearly all she cared about was what folks thought of her. Preacher’s daughter, his sole precious blessing. Dee Sargent was all the time on Maybelle about finding a man. Maybelle wasn’t opposed to men, though, time, the idea made her squirmy—same as anybody with good sense. This too she blamed on her folks, who’d hammered beliefs into their child as if she was a piece of lumber meant for a million nails. She used to keep a pencil drawing of them that had been done during revival at the church where her father preached to the coal miners who went down into tunnels burrowed beneath Bankhead. I send God with them, Jim Chambliss said, and what else is there? Maybelle had been with men—two in all. Hurt less than she’d expected, not nearly as fun as she’d hoped.

  Later that night, in the little apartment she rented above Beachy’s Butcher Shop, Maybelle fixed baby turnips in chicken fat. Sweated out the greens and ate them too with hot pickled peppers, half a raw onion and a piece of cornbread. The onion stung her tongue and made her eyes water in a pleasurable way. She washed down the meal with a jar of buttermilk then sat on the windowsill, watching distant burnpiles thrust flame into the darkening sky. Beside her were four uprooted buttercup bulbs wrapped in damp newspaper. She’d dug them from a little graveyard she passed one day when she got turned around walking Sampley’s route. Maybelle aimed to find a new place to live soon, somewhere with a yard, and plant these bulbs. Perennials, they’d return each spring. She could pick the flowers then, remembering them as bulbs and this time in her life. She liked marking memory thataway. But nobody would rent a houseplace to a single woman. Not even with so many now abandoned. The apartment was fine if you didn’t mind the sounds and smells of the butcher shop, the river of blood running down the back alley every evening when Beachy rinsed his knives and saws and thick cutting boards. Dozens of stray cats gathered at twilight to lick up bits of flesh and fat spinning down this red river. Beachy cussed the foul creatures and the eternal racket coming from where The Authority was building that hydropower dam. The racket was omnipresent, The Authority’s progress inescapable. Maybelle knew exactly what her father would say about it—world’s headed straight for hell in a handbasket.

  * * *

  The shift had just begun when a piece of the spillway’s support wall broke loose and nearly killed two men digging in the channel down below. Hugh Treeborne helped drag them out. Velston, the foreman, a wild-man from the far northern reaches of Alabama, toed the men till they came to. They’d lost their shovels, so would use buckets the rest of the day. Hugh was a strong swimmer, but he respected the river. He thought it foolheaded to move it. To plug it seemed impossible. His daddy used to say a big fat woman lived in the Elberta and made its waters sing so. Hugh doubted this, but never the river’s power.

  During lunch everybody swallowed sugar pills this big around, pills The Authority told their men would protect against mosquito bites. Hugh swallowed, but he had little faith in anything The Authority said. He was using It, and It using him. Taking part in such work felt like a negotiation with hisself that Hugh was not yet ready to enter into.

  He watched Velston sitting in the shade with a roasted chicken on his lap. The foreman handed the birthmarked man a drumstick, way one might a dog, and the birthmarked man gnawed off the meat then snapped in two the bone and sucked what marrow could be found there. Some of the workers thought Velston wasn’t a wild-man from the far north of the state at all, but instead De Soto hisself, come down off his pedestal in town and made flesh. Just look, spitting image of Him. Balding head, hair long on the sides and in the back, and dark eyes. They speculated on the subject while eating sardine sandwiches, washing the food down with handfuls of the river. Hush, they said when Velston got up to throw the chicken caracass into the river, he’s coming thisaway.

  After lunch they stacked sandbags to staunch the river where it swoll
near a buried sandstone knob. Some of the builders hollered from the scaffolding at the diggers toiling on the ground. In reply Hugh led his crew in baring their backsides, bending over and spreading wide their hairy asscheeks, which they wiggled back and forth. Down in the channel again, they dug deeper into a hard layer of clay and bailed buckets of bloodred water up where Velston and the birthmarked men paced. The sun beat down without repentance while Hugh tried not to wonder about Loudermilk, who’d left a couple weeks ago. Hugh wasn’t sure how long it took to drive up north and back. He tried not to think about it, but his mind raced that direction like a spooked rabbit toward its hunter. Before Hugh realized it, the birthmarked man had raised his pistol and fired, signaling the day was done.

  Rather than leave directly Hugh sat on the riverbank. As he did daily, the birthmarked man waded ankle-deep and shot at fish. Hugh watched a few stragglers hustling down the wobbly ladders. Most of the builders came from up north too, where they’d raised skyscrapers and laid track and built oceangoing ships. Steelworkers, they looked down upon Elberta and its structures of wood and tin and hand-cut stone. There’d been trouble, especially at places like Hernando’s Hideaway. Killings and cons. Hugh wanted to believe this Loudermilk fellow was different. But hope, he knew, was a dangerous thing. The birthmarked man fired two more times, interrupting Hugh’s thoughts. Hugh looked at the turbines where they waited sealed in crates big as cabins, the riverbank washing out from underneath them. The Authority had hired men from Freedom Hills to guard this machinery, as if anybody had the means to run off with something so enormous. The paper said the Hernando de Soto Dam would be completed in four years. The second hydropower dam built by The Authority in what was now being called the Alabama Watershed. Folks had started picnicking some days on a grassy rise to watch the slow build of progress. History made before their eyes. Everybody wanted a piece. Why not Hugh Treeborne too? The pistol clicked in the birthmarked man’s hand. A shot-dead garfish floated near the bank, half-open mouth showing hundreds of little sharp teeth. The birthmarked man stuck the pistol in his britches then walked into a stretch of woods.