Treeborne

by Caleb Johnson

  Even after what was fixing to happen, Hugh Treeborne could not put a name to the thing that compelled him to follow the birthmarked man. He should of gone straight to The Seven and hunted more assemblies. But he did not. Another crew was cutting the woods that lay ahead of the diggers. Gone for the day, the slashed woods silent except for sticks snapping underneath Hugh’s heavy workboots. The Authority wasn’t supposed to fool with timber however-many feet below the lake’s designated shoreline. Let the water cover it all. But these trees, when cut and skinned, were free money.

  As Hugh followed the birthmarked man, he thought back to a day Caz’d caught him down at Dismal Creek shaping little mud horses and setting them on rocks to dry. Hugh couldn’t of been five or six at the time. Caz called it a curse and whipped the boy with a rope till his legs bled. This whipping and the ones that followed were not some key to understanding the man Hugh’d become. He didn’t know much, but he knew the past could not be organized in such a nice neat manner. The word curse terrified and shamed Hugh the boy though. He tried to stop making art and couldn’t, compelled then as now by forces unknown toward acts deemed unacceptable. Cursed. In secret he began sculpting other forms and figures from materials he could find or take from the world around him. These assemblies became bigger as he did, and harder to hide—like the uncontrollable bulge he sometimes got in his pants when he saw a girl in town. Over the years he’d stashed assemblies all across The Seven, which made tracking them down for Loudermilk a difficult task.

  Up ahead in the woods Hugh heard a shovel singing against dirt and rock. He continued toward this sound till he came to a cemetery quartered off by a low stone wall. Velston and the birthmarked man stood among the listing headmarkers. Hugh’d heard that The Authority would relocate every grave the lake might cover. Judging by its look this cemetery likely had no name remembered by anybody not resting in its patch of earth though. Hugh hunkered down before he could be spotted and he watched Velston climb into a dug-up grave. Before long the foreman struck a coffin then heaved out a corpse, which the birthmarked man checked for anything of value. There was nothing.

  “Pretty out here ain’t it?” the birthmarked man said, squatting on his heels.

  Velston ignored this ponderance. But the birthmarked man’s words had prodded Hugh Treeborne. He crawled nearer and could make out the dates on some markers, which belonged to folks born before Alabama was a state. Folks long forgotten and soon to be forever lost, he realized, picturing the river’s impending path. The names were weatherworn fragments, indecipherables. Alone they meant nothing, but as a collection they told the story of a people, a place, a history, a time, which suddenly bared down on Hugh Treeborne with irreconcilable weight. People’s memories, he believed, were worth preserving. Memory the only thing keeping us from being nobodies from nowhere.

  Deep panic stirred inside him. He had to do something. He grabbed the wall and a stone came loose in his hand. The stone about this big, double the size of a ripe peach. He gripped it tight as he watched the foreman move through the soft ground into another grave. Soon Velston struck wood again and dragged out another corpse. A woman, long red hair still connected to her tobacco-colored skull. She had not been buried with anything valuable either. Velston kicked the corpse and a hole opened up as if she was made from newspaper. The birthmarked man fingered this opening, then hurriedly unhitched his britches and fished hisself out. “Little dry,” he said, poking his dick in and out of the corpse. Velston watched for a moment then began digging up another grave. The birthmarked man laughed and kept on, pumping faster faster … Hugh Treeborne rose to his feet, realizing with terrible certainty what he was fixing to do.

  One blow in back of the head and down Velston fell. Hugh kicked the shovel out of arm’s reach. The birthmarked man looked up from his filthy business and grasped for his pistol. Too late. Hugh smashed the stone into his face. He swung again and again, till it looked like the birthmark had grown to cover all that was left hanging on the man’s skull.

  * * *

  Maybelle caught him from behind this time. Rather than walking he drove a wagon hitched to an ancient-looking mule. She followed at a distance, dodging mounds of mule shit. It was early morning. She wondered where he’d been all night. The wagon creaked under a heavy load. Something lumpy, maybe melons. Did this wagon trip have something to do with him being an artist? The story she’d seen in the newspaper the other day told how Hugh Treeborne’s art had been taken by a collector named Loudermilk all way to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

  She hid in the same honeysuckle clump and waited. Took him a long while to return in his Authority clothes this time. He appeared dazed, troubled. She let him get a good distance down the path toward town before crawling out of the vine. She looked both ways then headed down onto his property at something like a run.

  The house had been set up on smooth stones above a black dirt and moss-covered clearing. It had a stone chimney and a cluttered porch. Not just any clutter though; this was, Maybelle realized as she approached, his art. She’d never seen anything like it. Never seen art period, her father’s church not even ornamented with colored-glass windows. It was too much for the human eye to take in. She blinked and she blinked as if her vision might adjust. This, she thought, was what her father meant when he spoke about God-with-a-capital-G. It’d taken thirty years for Maybelle Chambliss to understand.

  Inside an old chicken coop behind the house she found more. She wondered what to call it. Not paintings, not sculptures. A mix. She had no word. The art was stacked on top of itself and propped against walls. Looked like this coop was where he fashioned it. She wondered where he found all the objects he used as she pilfered boxes and crates and jars and buckets and sacks filled with—to her, detached from order—meaningless junk.

  Something fell.

  She spun around, expecting to be caught by him, and saw a little burnt boy lying on the floor. No, just some strange doll. Crooked animal teeth smiled and hard cloudy eyes shined where they were set in a misshapen blue-black face. Maybelle noticed a tuft of pinestraw sticking out of the doll’s side and poked it back in. Did the thing move? Foot, she thought. No, it surely did not. The doll was heavy and it smelled old. Maybelle took big breaths of this pleasant odor as she toted the doll around the property, time getting away from her.

  When she arrived back in town, folks were waiting to be let inside the post office. She apologized for being late, dabbing sweat off the back of her neck where her thick blond hair fell. The customers said they’d worried something terrible had happened to her. One woman in particular seemed disappointed they’d been wrong. Where had she been this morning, and what on earth were those greasy stains all over her pretty dress?

  After work that evening Maybelle sat on the fire escape and ate a peach. Wasn’t her first Elberta peach, but this one better than any she’d eaten before. She could taste things in its flesh she could not name.

  The sky had slabbed over. Faraway heat lightning flashed, burning the scene in the alley below onto her eyes for a moment. Beachy and the stray cats, the butcher banging a long curved knife against the brick building. Rather than scare off the cats the sound served to call more. Yowled and paced and hissed. Maybelle waved to the butcher, who wiped his forehead bloody and waved back, then doused the cats with a pail of soapy pink water, sending them fleeing down the alley to lick themselves dry.

  She tried reading a book. Pages turned as if they were made of cement. Her father would of told her to pray about it. Pray May. Pray. Pray, foot. Prayer his answer to everything. Maybelle the girl used to pretend she heard God just to satisfy him. She put down the book. Tomorrow would be Saturday. She’d finish work by lunch—then what? From her window she could see the partly built dam by light of the moon and the ever-burning fires. The Authority paid men from Freedom Hills to patrol the area, toting riverstone-sharpened blades and tending coalfires. There’d been threats to dynamite the thing, she’d read in the paper. And the recent disappearance of that
foreman and his simple assistant. Awful. Sometimes Maybelle toted mail to an Authority address out near the dam, meeting along the way those bone-tired watchmen headed back to Freedom Hills, which had been founded after freed slaves tried leaving the valley and were turned back by armed riders. Even children killed, little heads jammed onto pointed limbs planted along the road like a fence. If Freedom Hills received mail it came through a system unknown to her. She’d written a letter to her supervisors about fixing this, but so far had heard nothing back.

  She opened a jug of muscadine wine. After a few sips her tongue felt doubled in size. She’d never been good at waiting. According to her father patience was a virtue. Drinking a sin. She finished the jug of sweet wine, then she went out walking—too damn stubborn to admit to herself where she was headed till she’d arrived there.

  The mule surprised her in the path. Good way to get yourself killed, she thought. Surely Hugh Treeborne owned a rifle. She wondered how getting shot felt. Time, she’d wanted to be an actress. Left Bankhead for Birmingham to audition for a role. Some actress you would of been, she thought, can’t even imagine getting shot. She clucked at the mule, which swished its tail and threw back its head. She patted the creature’s rump and it stepped aside so she could pass.

  The air settled into something beyond stillness. She knew this feeling, this calm, and she took it as a sign, though for what she wasn’t sure yet. Her folks had nailed the notion of signs into her so crooked and deep it could never be pried out. She’d tried to remove it ever since leaving Bankhead. Her father lived by signs, hisself an interpreter of them. Brother Jim saw signs everywhere, and preached to his congregation their joys and dangers, mysteries, the obviousness of some, how others could appear—just like that—or be teased out slowly over the course of a lifetime. Following signs required faith. You got to keep ever-diligent watch, he’d shout from the pulpit as he slammed a veiny fist, and be faithful-true! The coal miners and dirt farmers of Bankhead, Alabama, listened with pure-dee awe as Brother Jim preached on signs twice a week. They’d continue to do so till the day he missed a sign telling him that a woman’s boils were beyond his power of healing. The sores soon covered the preacher’s body and he died too.

  Maybelle could see a light burning inside the old chicken coop. All sudden there was the clanging of metal striking metal. She waited for it to quit. When she snuck closer she saw Hugh Treeborne hunched over a big metal box, faded red with white lettering that said BRGS-STR. He finished attaching a chute to an opening on the side, then he removed a panel and poured in a glug or two of gasoline. He yanked a cord and an engine rattled, but did not catch. He yanked again. This time the engine caught. He held his hand up to the chute, turning it back and forth, waiting, feeling for something unseen.

  “What is that thing?” Maybelle said.

  Hugh grabbed a wrench. “This is private property!”

  “Hold on,” she said. “My name’s Mayb—”

  “You need to go on. I know exactly who you are.”

  This thrilled her to the bone. He remembered her. She ducked inside the coop. “What’s that thing for?”

  After a moment Hugh put down the wrench. “Keep things cool,” he said.

  She held her hand near the chute and felt chill air blowing out. “It ain’t art?”

  “What you know about that?”

  “Just what I seen in the paper,” she said, grinning. “What’s it keeping cool?”

  Hugh turned off the engine and the box rattled then stilled. “I don’t care much for strangers and their questions.”

  “Well you best start getting to know me so I ain’t one then.”

  Hugh did not ask her to leave as he piddled around the coop, though he also gave no indication that he cared whether she did. Maybelle was surprised when he invited her onto the porch for coffee. It was late, but she drank anyhow. She could taste chicory mixed in to make the beans go further.

  “This’ll keep me up all night,” she said.

  “You want some more?”

  “I’m fine,” she told him.

  “Well, reckon I will.”

  While Hugh went to fix more coffee, she peeked inside. Maybelle hadn’t set foot in a country house since leaving Bankhead. She’d forgotten how primitive one could be when compared to the apartment she lived in now, or where she’d lived in Birmingham when she began working for the postal service, or even the steel-mill workers’ shotguns in the company towns surrounding the Magic City. The inside of Hugh’s house brought forth memories Maybelle would of just as soon denied. She noticed a quilting rack hanging from the ceiling in the front room and wondered if he had a woman after all. He was coming back. She returned to the porch.

  “Did you ever get that letter sent?”

  “Oh, no,” he said, sipping from his jar.

  He appeared embarrassed by her question, so she decided to change the subject. “How’d you find this yankee to buy your art?”

  “He didn’t buy it,” Hugh said. “And he found me.”

  She was confused by this answer. Hugh Treeborne wasn’t easy to talk to. After he’d finished his coffee he offered to take her back into town. She rubbed the mule’s ears while he loaded a shovel, a pick and some burlap in back of the wagon.

  “What’s that for?”

  “Something I got to do,” he said.

  He didn’t speak again all way into town. Maybelle thanked him for the ride then climbed down off the driver’s seat.

  “It was my uncle,” he said.

  “What was your uncle?”

  “I was mailing that letter to.”

  “Well how come you not just tell me that? We could of looked him up in the regist—”

  “My uncle, he passed away.”

  Maybelle was even more confused now. Folks came to the post office trying to mail all sorts of things, but never a letter to the dead.

  “I shouldn’t of said nothing.”

  “No,” she said. “It’s alright. All of us grieve—”

  Hugh chuckled, trying to hide a smile.

  “What on earth is it?” she asked.

  “My uncle’s been dead years,” he said, full-on laughing now. Tears streaked his face. “I wanted to talk to you and couldn’t think of nobody else’s name to put down.”

  Dee was right—Treebornes were strange. But Maybelle liked it. After this night she visited The Seven, what Hugh called his property, every day that summer after close. Sometimes he wasn’t there when she arrived. She’d track down the dirt doll, which Hugh called Crusoe, and walk the property herself. The Seven more gorgeous than any piece of land she’d ever traipsed. Walking it felt like stepping out of time and seeing what Earth might look like had man not come along with ideas and aspirations.

  That cooling machine had disappeared since the night they met. She didn’t ask where to, or where Hugh went with the mule-drawn wagon each dark of night, or what he was hauling onto The Seven. He didn’t care for questions, especially when he was working on an assemblie, he called his art. Not asking questions went against Maybelle Chambliss’s nature. She pieced together that he was gathering assemblies for when that yankee returned. It just about killed her to not ask how come he’d toted all of them off into the woods in the first place. The trade-off for not asking was she got to watch Hugh work. To her it was an impenetrable mystery how he could take cast-off junk and paint and burn and twist and sculpt and nail and shape it into such beautiful objects. Assemble it. Asking how would be a cruelty, she thought. Something plain as understanding could only ruin it.

  She tried describing this feeling to Dee next time she came by the post office to mail fighting roosters. Dee seemed less interested in what Hugh did with his art than what he did with Maybelle and didn’t delay asking whether they’d made love yet.

  “You witch!” Maybelle answered, puffing a cigarette. “Of course we ain’t.”

  Dee patted her arm. “Sure, sugar, course y’all ain’t.” She paused and grinned. “And I’m the Queen of Englan
d.”

  Maybelle was not a prude. She wanted these moments for herself. Hugh rolling up her dress, her legs wrapped around his waist, feeling overcome by panic and pleasure when he finished. They’d lie there after—in the house, in the yard, once in his studio with the dirt boy almost watching—and hold hands. Oftentimes Hugh would talk. He told of his daddy Casabianca, or Caz, and the tragedy of how he died. He told of creating Crusoe from clay dug up by the spring they’d made love beside on a moon-runny night. He told of his best friend Lee Malone, who, after weeks visiting The Seven, Maybelle still had not met. He told stories about Hernando de Soto and about Chief Coosa, the leader of the Elberta Indians. Remarkable stories that deserved to be heard by others, she thought, just like his assemblies deserved to be seen. One day she asked where in the world he came up with all this.

  “My head,” he said.

  “Did you ever write any of it down?”

  He told her no.

  “What do you reckon’ll happen when you’re dead then?”

  Hugh seemed to consider this question more closely than most. “It’ll go with me,” he answered.

  To Dirt She Returneth

  1958

  Ricky Birdsong dug a grave two days after Lee Malone found Maybelle Treeborne’s body in the woods. She would be buried in the pasture next to Hugh. You could still do things thataway back then. Tammy’d asked Ricky to dig the grave because she knew he would for free. She, both brothers and her niece stood underneath the pole barn watching Ricky use an excavator to scoop clods of grass and dirt into a big steel-toothed bucket and make a pile by the gravesite. Ricky waved as he dumped another load.