Treeborne

by Caleb Johnson

  “Then you’ll have to call billing,” she said.

  “Wait, don’t I know you? Went to school with Celia and them?”

  “Class of forty-six,” Tammy said. “You was two years below us.”

  “Hey, you hungry?”

  “No,” she said. “But I could stand to watch a movie after work.”

  It was nearly a year after their wedding when, one day, Wooten was sending warm chicken carcasses through a band saw and the blade warped and sliced off most of the fingers on his right hand. Ruined enough nerves and tendons too, so even after the wounds healed he couldn’t do much with it. He never did feel sorry for hisself though. Certainly helped when a settlement from the band saw manufacturer started coming in the mail. Everybody called this Wooten’s Check. Day the first installment arrived he toted it right down at The Fencepost Cafe and let folks pass the check around. They oohed and ahhed, and asked him what on earth he aimed to do with his newfound wealth.

  First he bought Tammy a proper wedding ring. The original had been a knockoff from Gene’s Pawn & Gun. Then he bought hisself a fishing boat, which he promptly sank one night when he ran into a sunken treetop poking up from underneath the surface of De Soto Lake. Ray Posey, who was along for the ride, like to drowned. He also bought a nice radio that could pick up baseball games. One day Tammy asked why he didn’t just go watch the sport played in person. “Thataway you could see it,” she said. The idea seemed so outrageous that he didn’t even know what to say back. So he said nothing, which always drove Tammy crazy—and not in the good way.

  He bought Tammy an aboveground swimming pool and paid someone to build a deck around it. She was still off from work, taking care of him while his hand healed. She spent all her free time on that deck, worshipping the sun. When time came for her to return to the water department, Wooten begged her not to go. But she loved her job. The only woman who kept a desk in the county building and wasn’t a secretary or a typist. Pitiful as that pickup truck looked too, it gave Tammy Treeborne Ragsdale some freedom and a notion of possibility in a life that all sudden seemed set—and her not yet thirty years old.

  After half an hour the line of mourners yet stretched beyond the pole barn. Lee Malone was still singing, pennies inside his guitar shifting every upstrum. Janie bent over to check on Crusoe. Her momma’d warned her about taking the dirt boy out from underneath the chair before the crowd cleared. She thought about doing it anyhow. She was imagining the shocked looks she’d cause when she felt a vibration in the air and looked up. It appeared as if the trees surrounding the pasture had come to life, leaves removing themselves from branches and taking flight. Nobody had time to take cover. The grasshoppers were on them. Tangled up in hair, down inside socks and shoes, mashed between tits, down earholes and up shirtsleeves. Everybody started flogging anybody within reach and the tent came down. Janie grabbed Crusoe and crawled out. Some folks were trying to fold back the canvas, which only confused those trapped underneath. She saw Buckshot snatching grasshoppers midflight. Janie ran for shelter, whupping the big yellow bugs where they clung to her dress and her skin and her hair. She tripped over the fresh dirt covering her grandmomma’s body. Getting up, she nearly bumped right into Lee Malone, who just stood there strumming, covered head-to-toe in bugs as if he was made of honey.

  After the swarm passed Janie found her parents together beneath a poplar tree. Her daddy was scratching where the grasshoppers had crawled on him and her momma sat in his lap. Ren motioned for Janie to sit too. “I love my girls,” he said, and smooched her forehead. He patted Crusoe twice. Nita leaned over and smooched Ren on the mouth. Janie turned from this. She saw her aunt Tammy plucking grasshoppers out of her uncle Wooten’s beard and pinching them in two with her long painted nails. And right there was Jon D. Crews, watching waxwings and swallows and chickadees tear apart left-behind bugs. Janie, Crusoe in her arms, dodged the birds as she ran thataway. Lyle and Van Crews there too, Van talking to Luther Treeborne and Ricky Birdsong about the Conquistadors.

  “They don’t stand no better chance than a slug in a salt mine,” Van was saying. “Shit, it don’t take much brain to hand the damn ball to that Snell boy.”

  “Hey Sister,” Luther said. He’d untucked his Hawaiian shirt to give his gut some breathing room. The fabric stuck to his skin.

  “What’s that you got?” Van said. “Looks like a nigger dummy I used to have. You boys remember? Scared these two plumb to death, I mean.”

  “When’s this one here going out for football?” Luther asked, nodding toward Jon D.

  The men waited for the boy to answer.

  “Want to go play?” Janie said.

  “Can I?” Jon D. asked.

  “Go on,” Van said. “Me and Luth need to get us something to eat before it’s all gone. You hungry Ricky?”

  “I got to go mow Miss Strickland before it rains,” Ricky said.

  “Well son, that’s the Good Lord’s business if it does,” Van said. He slapped Luther on the shoulder and told Lyle to wait for him in the truck.

  Janie wanted to show Jon D. what her uncle Wooten had done to the woods, but the boy wasn’t interested. Instead he took off his shoes and headed toward Dismal Creek.

  Janie set Crusoe in the cradle of some hemlock roots then she and Jon D. hunted salamanders in slow green pools bottomed with flat black rocks. They handled the grinning creatures careful as crystal then let them go wiggling off again. Buckshot had followed them down to the creek. The dog chomped at bubbles floating on the surface of the water. Before long Jon D. got bored. He climbed a boulder then swung from a dangling vine. Buckshot barked and leaped at the boy’s bare feet. Janie tried the vine next. Jon D. caught her on the backswing. She pulled down an elephant ear and folded it into a cup—way MawMaw May’d shown her. This made her want to cry. But she wouldn’t. Not now. She fought the urge as she and Jon D. shared creekwater out of the rubbery green leaf.

  “Reckon what happens once you die?”

  “Heaven,” Jon D. said. “Or hell one.”

  “MawMaw May never did go to church.”

  “Neither do we,” Jon D. said.

  “I seen her body out in the woods.”

  “Lie.”

  “Did too,” Janie said. “Swear.”

  “Show me where at.”

  She led him to the holler but couldn’t find the exact spot. Whispered to Crusoe for help. It did no good. Jon D. tried getting Buckshot on the scent. Maybe there was blood on the leaves, he said. But the fool dog kept getting distracted by squirrels. There were so many. Buckshot would take off running with his head held up till he crashed into a tree or a rock.

  They gave up hunting for the spot where Maybelle’s body was found and climbed up the holler toward the junk garden. Jon D. loved fooling around there nearly as much as Janie herself did. He was always asking about Hugh, but kindly shy over it. Not all the grasshoppers had flown off. Still the clearing seemed quieter, less alive.

  Jon D. dug through some assemblies till he found one that showed bassfish with the legs of men walking up from out of a river and into a church. “How come you reckon Granddaddy Hugh didn’t sell this stuff?”

  “I don’t know,” Janie said.

  “Van says he could of sold all of it at one point in time.”

  “He did some I think.”

  “Reckon what happened to the money then?”

  “I don’t know,” Janie said.

  “Van says one of these is what killed her.”

  “That ain’t true.”

  “Told me and Lyle that it smushed her plumb to death.”

  “Shut up,” Janie said. “Your daddy don’t know anything he’s talking about.”

  Jon D. shrugged and went back to lifting aside assemblies.

  They poked around the junk garden while the sky turned into a mashed peach, the sun a bloody pit falling down down down. Buckshot bedded on some clover and fitfully napped. Janie could hear vehicles pulling up the long gravel driveway toward the road as t
he last mourners departed The Seven.

  “What if he buried it?” Jon D. said. “Like De Soto did.”

  Janie wasn’t in the mood. She didn’t even care about showing Jon D. what her uncle Wooten’d done anymore. “Let’s go get something to eat,” she said.

  They had to pass through the new clear-cut to get to the house though. “Timber’s good money,” Jon D. told her, repeating something he’d once heard his daddy say. Janie ignored this comment and walked on ahead of him. At the house she and Jon D. fixed a plate of cold fried chicken and six deviled eggs. They toted the food outside and climbed up on top of Hugh’s studio. Buckshot sat below and barked for scraps.

  “If I couldn’t eat but one thing ever again it’d be fried chicken,” Jon D. said, wrapping crispy skin around half a deviled egg and popping it into his mouth.

  Later, Wooten and Lyle walked past. Wooten had the chain saw in his good hand. When they got to the clear-cut he showed Lyle how to prime it, yank the cord so the motor rattled as if it was held together by coat hangers, then caught life. Janie and Jon D. watched Lyle lay into a tree. The top swayed. He pulled out the saw then kicked. The tree creaked, tilted, came back upright. Wooten said something and pointed.

  “I wish it’d fall on them both,” Janie said.

  “Don’t you wish something like that,” Jon D. said.

  She couldn’t help it, she did—and worse. Wooten took the chain saw from Lyle and made another cut. They both kicked this time, and the tree came falling down. If somebody saw inside her head, Janie thought, they’d lock her up till the end of time.

  Signs to Show the Way

  1958

  They came in broad daylight. Emboldened or ignorant, desperate, it did not matter which. Her momma was at the library. Janie let them in when they knocked. She’d been in her bedroom, lost in a map of the Elberta River Valley. A topographic map colored shades of green and brown and blue, with black lines like fingerprints spreading out from the valley’s higher places to its bottomlands. The inevitability she’d felt when her grandmomma died, when her aunt and uncle began logging timber and building a new house on The Seven, had not lessened with this awful thing they’d done. If anything it now seemed heavier.

  Lyle Crews didn’t appear surprised that Janie had no money. He gave her five minutes to pack her things. She already had a list:

  clean clothes

  extra bloomers (two pair)

  maw m vegetables (beans peas cream corn)

  quilt x1

  map of elberta county

  peaches

  one of daddys knifes

  In back of the pickup were the rattlesnakes Lyle and Goodnight had caught. Janie put her bag next to the humming crates then climbed into the cab. She sat in the middle, straddling the shifter, with Crusoe on her lap. The rattlers droned louder as Lyle sped down the road. She didn’t ask where they were going. They passed through town, crossing the Elberta River, and took 22 headed south.

  Lyle turned left at a sign that said WELCOME TO THE N. W. BARFIELD NATIONAL FOREST—LAND OF MANY USES! Houses were fewer out here and just as likely abandoned. Janie knew some of the national forest roads from riding around with her daddy. Soon she was confused though. The choked woods and kudzu fields all the same. There were no signs. Lyle turned and turned and turned, as if trying to get lost. They ate the peaches Janie’d brought and placed the pits on the sun-spackled dashboard. She imagined burying these pits wherever they eventually stopped, a part of Elberta growing in some strange new place.

  Eventually Lyle pulled into a horseshoe-shaped parking area and backed the pickup into the edge of the woods. Janie looked at a mildew-covered map tacked to a bulletin board showing nearby trails. They followed one out to some old Authority ruins and set up camp among what remained of a stone foundation resembling filed-down teeth. Janie wondered had her granddaddy set foot in this place. She knew he’d helped build the De Soto Dam but didn’t know what else he’d done for The Authority. She could ask Crusoe, but knew the dirt boy wouldn’t answer in the company of others.

  She sat down and shucked off her boots. It was blamed-hot, but Lyle was building a fire. He blew to help the flame catch then added more wood to the teepee. Janie moved back from the fire. Goodnight sat next to her. She’d stripped down to her bloomers and brassiere. When Janie glanced at the older girl’s body a little nut of jealousy inside her cracked open.

  “Let’s eat,” Lyle said. He grabbed Janie’s bag and fished out a jar of green beans, then uncapped it and set it in the edge of the fire.

  Maybelle kept a full pantry all winter into spring. After Hugh died Lee Malone bolted more shelves onto the wall to hold her canned harvest. Janie remembered her grandmomma lifting her up to pick jars of vegetables off those pantry shelves. Inside the jars the vegetables resembled something dead. Maybelle loved eating and was herself a wonderful cook. She taught Janie how to bring whatever was in a jar back to life. You couldn’t treat a vegetable just any old way and expect it to taste good. On the stovetop, in the oven, more salt, fresh herbs, how much butter, what heat and for how long, hog jowl or bacon to season and taste. MawMaw May knew all the secrets, Janie thought.

  Pearl onions spun upward as the jar warmed. Janie pulled it out of the fire when bubbles started running up the inside of the glass. She wedged the jar into the loamy ground between the three of them. They used her daddy’s pocketknife to spear the beans and onions. The beans held their crunch and sweetness as if they’d just been picked off the vine. When they were finished, Lyle chucked the jar into the bushes. Janie thought she’d retrieve it later. Goodnight cleared the ground of twigs and rocks then spread out a ratty quilt. She and Lyle were soon asleep, leaving Janie and Crusoe to watch the fire, and daylight, burn out.

  The couple woke at dusk. Janie hadn’t slept. Lyle stripped to his drawers and stepped off into a flooded sinkhole. Black water swoll up onto the bank as his head dipped below the surface. Goodnight rolled down her bloomers and pissed on the ashes and white-hot coals. Smoke curled up between her sprawled legs. Back at the truck, Lyle checked for signs that anybody had been snooping. The ground appeared clear. Whoever came this deep into The N. W. Barfield National Forest, Janie thought, meant to keep to hisself.

  They got in the cab, and Goodnight turned on the radio. Pedro Hannah was talking about Tammy being missing. Nothing new to report, but he was confident that Elberta’s hardworking law-enforcement officials and volunteers would find Tammy safe soon.

  Janie herself hoped to never be found. As Lyle headed south again, dark descending onto the forest, the girl figured they were headed first to meet whoever wanted to buy the rattlesnakes. They could be in Bankhead by morning if Lyle drove straight. But still he wasn’t, Janie noticed. They stopped again when the sun returned and camped near a noisy stream. This became their routine—drive all night, sleep all day. Each time they were ready to get back on the road, Lyle fed the rattlesnakes from a container of white mice, some of which had died in the heat. Seemed like he was trying to get up the nerve to do something that Janie figured had to do with her. She’d forgotten the drops Doc Barfield prescribed for her injury. Mucus gathered in the corner of the eye if she went too long without lifting the patch and rubbing. There wasn’t much pain though.

  By the third day, after camping next to a waterfall that moved like a horse’s tail, the truck was running low on gas. Janie watched the orange needle drop and drop, wondering if she should say something before they ran out. Rounding a blind curve, they saw a service station. A sign said GAS/ICE/MINNOWS & CRICKETS. Lyle pulled in and sat there with the engine running, tapping his thumb against the steering wheel.

  “What’s the matter baby?” Goodnight asked. “Is this it? Is he here?”

  Lyle let out a long breath through his nose. “Y’all get gas,” he said, then opened the door and headed around the corner of the cinder-block building, where the bathrooms were located.

  Goodnight grabbed a length of garden hose from behind the seat. From the be
d she took a canister and a funnel. She chose a vehicle that couldn’t be seen from inside the service station then stuck the hose in the tank and began sucking. Janie kept lookout. The gas came in gurgling spurts, splashing Goodnight. The canister was nearly full when a family pulled up next to them. Goodnight looked up from siphoning, smiled, then went back to work with lewd determination, causing the driver to back out.

  After they’d poured the gas into the truck, Goodnight and Janie got in the cab and waited for Lyle. Goodnight rolled down the passenger window and dangled her foot. She eyed what looked like a few coal miners going into the service station. They eyed her back, and she bounced her bare foot at them.

  “Where we going to?” Janie asked.

  “We’re going to Florida,” Goodnight said.

  “Ain’t you worried they’ll come after you?”

  “Ain’t you, Little Miss Questions?”

  Those first days after the kidnapping it would of been a relief to get caught. Janie had prayed to God for it. Fool. Held a little Bible given to her one day at school, clenched shut her eyes and muttered toward the ceiling. Would of been the same kind of relief she now felt being taken by Lyle and Goodnight. Blame could be laid elsewhere so long as whatever happened was, in the girl’s mind anyhow, outside her control. This was the story Janie Treeborne told herself. She’d begun to see herself as an actor, a character, and in this portrayal of herself she liked the notion of running off to Florida with two older kids.

  “I been to Florida before,” she said.

  One day her grandmomma’d woken her up and told her to get dressed. The car was already packed. They drove to the county line then pulled off at Chief Coosa’s Overlook. A familiar pickup truck was parked at the pullover.