Treeborne

by Caleb Johnson

  Janie could feel the anger and shame coming off Lyle like heat. She interrupted, said, “That don’t mean you’re—”

  “I know I ain’t.”

  “I know,” she said. “I know.” Then, after a minute: “Try looking at me when you sing.”

  He turned in the seat so he faced Janie then began singing, I was sinking deep in sin … She tried to tell him with her one good eye that he could keep his open. Far from the peaceful shore … He was singing a hymn, a song for God, but, the more he sang, the more it felt like he meant these words for her. Janie folded her legs underneath her rear end and leaned back against the passenger door, watching his eyelids twitch like moth wings. Don’t, she almost said out loud. She pulled the eye patch up onto her forehead. Lyle did not flinch. She felt something down between her legs. It was hard to sit still anymore. She hugged Crusoe on her lap, which only made the feeling stronger. Terribly wonderful. She thought she might shriek. The fear over doing so only made the feeling better. Lyle was singing louder, louder … Janie grabbed one of the peach pits off the dash and quickly stuck it inside her bloomers. She wiggled so the pit slid down to the right place, knowing Lyle’d seen. She rocked back and forth against its hardness till she didn’t know anything other than that she wanted Lyle Crews to quit, wanted to quit herself, and wanted to never quit anything all at the same time. She was so far gone she didn’t even notice Goodnight approach the truck with a big stick.

  The driver’s-side door swung open and there was a sickening whump when Goodnight hit Lyle in the head. He doubled over in the seat and she set her sight on Janie. “Go on!” Goodnight hollered. Janie fell out of the passenger door with Crusoe. Goodnight was beating the pickup with the stick now. Janie ran. She just ran. Didn’t even realize she’d left her bag behind till she made it back to Bankhead. Morning then. The eye patch had slipped off her head at some point too. She fished the peach pit out of her bloomers and threw it away.

  She snuck behind The Bird’s Nest and watched the cook smoking cigarettes. He was fat and had curly brown hair shaped like a toadstool on his head. Janie was hungry. Starved. She hid Crusoe in some brush then walked around front and went inside. She’d just stepped through the door when somebody said her full name.

  “Have a seat,” Big Connie Ward said. He wore a white collared shirt and a blue-and-brown-striped tie slung over his shoulder so it didn’t dip onto his plate. “Honey, get this young lady a plate of eggs and a hot biscuit,” he said to a waitress, a different one from the other day. “She looks a little peaked if you asked me.”

  Janie sat down and the waitress poured coffee. Big Connie slid over the sugar and cream. “What you doing all the way down here Sister?” he asked. “You ain’t running around with that Crews boy and his nigger gal are you?”

  “Nuh uh,” Janie said.

  “That’s good. I’d hate to know you put in with a couple truck thieves.”

  The waitress soon brought a plate of scrambled eggs and one steaming biscuit. Janie didn’t want to eat in front of Big Connie Ward, but she couldn’t help herself. She opened the biscuit and heaped on butter and peach jelly.

  “That eye’s looking alright.”

  Janie said nothing, which was what Big Connie wanted her to do.

  “Shame about your aunt,” he went on. “You know I was thinking, wouldn’t it be something if they was somebody—and now I’m just spitballing here, if you’ll bear with me for just a minute—but wouldn’t it be something else if somebody who knew what happened to your poor-old aunt Tammy could come forward and speak up?”

  Janie sipped her coffee. Too hot, it scalded her tongue. She wolfed down half the biscuit then wiped the other half across the greasy plate.

  “Somebody who could just put a end to all this mess,” Big Connie said, leaning onto the table with his elbows. “You know my boy Pud, don’t you? Hell, sure you do. I was talking to Pud just the other day about this very same thing. Seems like whoever come forward would be a hero, don’t it?” Big Connie waited to see if the girl would say anything. When she did not, he continued talking. “Every bit as stubborn as the rest of them ain’t you? You understand what’ll happen if she ain’t found before long don’t you?”

  “Yeah,” Janie said.

  “I don’t believe you truly do.” Big Connie splayed his hands out on the table, a gold class ring with an orange stone anchored in the center banded his first finger. Looked like he’d got his nails a manicure. “I don’t believe you do,” he said. “But I know this, you’re going to tell me where Lyle Crews and that gal are at right now. Start there. Then you can go home or not. That’s up to you to decide. But for now you’re sure enough going to tell.”

  He Was, You Know, Thataway

  1929

  The door to Hernando’s Hideaway stood wide open and Ruben waited behind the bar, among half-full glass bottles time-dulled and chipped. Hugh placed Crusoe on the pine slab and the bartender regarded the dirt boy with no more interest than he might the sunrise.

  “What’ll have you stranger?”

  “Anything,” Hugh said.

  The first drink went down rough. He ordered another. This one easier, the others following it too. Hugh knew he was good-drunk when all sudden he came awake prone against the floor. The Hideaway emptied. He hollered and got no answer except for his own voice. Sawdust covered the left side of his face. A tender lump the size of a quail’s egg on his head. Crusoe was sitting upright beside him. Ruben had nailed a note to the bar asking Hugh to latch the door when he left.

  Fog lifted off the river in sheets as he walked its bank, picking through resurrection fern and bleached driftwood gone hard as rock. Here and there broken bottleglass shined blue and green and brown-that-favored-black in the milky moonlight. Hugh fished out pieces worth keeping and tried to forget what he’d done. What he yet had to do.

  Instead he thought about his art. The only thing he truly remembered about his first assemblie was the deep-down urge to make it. He turned this memory over and over in his mind, same as the river-smoothed glass in his hand, as he cut toward a drooping wire fence. He hurried across a field full of purple thistle and goldenrod growing up to his waist and taller. Time had passed, summer ending, and still he could hear stone smashing bone, feel the force of impact in his hand. Haunted, he’d gradually quit gathering assemblies. Maybelle was asking what was the matter. What was the matter? He’d had to lay into Velston again after doing in the birthmarked man. The foreman’s leg kept twitching while Hugh reburied the corpses, then the two fresh bodies. About fitting. No, Hugh thought, fitting would of been dragging Velston and the birthmarked man into the river with stones tied around their waists. But they might not stay sunk. Might come back up. He still wasn’t sure whether he’d leave them in the cemetery or carry them over at The Seven with the rest he’d hauled there and buried in a clearing.

  He left the overgrown field, sticking to a pinebrake instead of risking trouble on the road. He sensed the stink of death upon hisself and worried Maybelle could too. Hugh felt their time together was marred by his great secret. If he could just finish this undertaking, he thought, then they could start fresh. Beyond the trees a spermy cloudtail passed across the moon’s bruised face. Wild dogs yelped in the not-so-distance. For a moment he got turned around and lost. He asked the dirt boy if he knew where they were and got no answer in return. Eventually he righted hisself and found the path to Freedom Hills.

  Partway down the path a long kingsnake slithered out from the groundcover and crossed his boots. Kingsnakes, Caz always said, were good signs—like an owl screeching twice. Once foretold death, three times a marriage, four trouble, five a journey, six the arrival of guests. But twice was a good sign. Hugh tried remembering how many times the owl in the split oak had screeched the morning Loudermilk showed up on The Seven. Once, twice. All Hugh could remember now was the screech the birthmarked man had let out as he brought the stone against his head.

  He found Lee Malone out back of his house, sitting w
ith the guitar he called Rosette propped on his lap and a jar of corn liquor on the ground between his bare feet.

  “Get a seat,” Lee said, “you son of a bitch.”

  He sat on a bucket, Crusoe on his knee. Lee slid over the jar and he took a swallow. They were silent. Both men comfortable with this condition. They preferred each other’s company to anybody’s, from the time they were boys who spent their days catching harmless snakes, swimming butt-naked in copper-colored creeks, racing the valley’s dirt paths till their toenails chipped and bled. Even drew blood one summer and mixed it. Hugh’d never thought twice about how befriending Lee might look to folks in town. Treebornes were apart. Folks in town paid little mind to them. Lee was his brother. Always said they’d do anything for each other. Now he was about to ask Lee to prove this long-ago promise still truth.

  “I need help,” he said.

  “And folks in hell need a cool drink of water don’t they?” Lee strummed a big open chord. “How’s that my problem buddyroll? I’ll tell you my problem. Them damn fools at Roger’s chucking coins. You believe that? Like them niggers got enough to be chucking in the first place. Acting like it’s the funniest damn thing they ever seen to chuck money at a man while he plays guitar for them.” Lee plucked a few sorry notes then said, “You know, folks liable to think you crazy toting that thing around.”

  Hugh ignored this appraisal. “Will you help me or not?”

  Lee took another drink. “Depends,” he said. “Saw your picture in the paper. Yankee what’s-his-name about to make you famous, huh.”

  “I never said that mess they wrote.” Truth, Hugh didn’t know about the newspaper story till Maybelle mentioned it the night they met. Days later a digger named Nawgahyde smacked him upside the head with a copy of the Times, and Hugh saw a likeness of hisself drawn above a couple-paragraphs credited to Seth A. Loudermilk. The diggers had been teasing him ever since. “Didn’t even know he was doing it.”

  “Well he did,” Lee said. Then, changing subject: “It’s a pretty little-old feller. Still don’t look right though, grown man toting a mud doll all over creation.”

  He kept on about Crusoe, a variation on the conversation repeated every time he saw the dirt boy. Sometimes Hugh wondered was Lee pulling his leg. After several minutes he wound back around to fussing about the folks at Roger’s Lounge—a floating bar on the Elberta River where Lee sometimes still performed.

  “How come you don’t just sing some other way if you don’t like them teasing you?”

  “We can only do how we’re made to buddyroll.”

  “Sounds like some horseshit to me.”

  “Nobody asked you if it did artist. Now what you needing from poor old me this time of the goddamn night?”

  Hugh straightened up and started telling. Lee set down Rosette. Her strings wommed and he hushed them with his calloused fingers. “Come again?” he said more than once. And Hugh did. Still, Lee wondered had he heard right. Killed two Authority men and was unearthing a cemetery before it flooded.

  “And ain’t nobody noticed them men missing yet?”

  “They did,” Hugh said, “but we ain’t skipped a lick of work for it. Even the bosses ain’t nothing but parts and pieces down yonder.”

  “And you still working for them?”

  “That ain’t the point.”

  “Seems like the point to me.”

  “You ain’t listening.”

  “Oh I am,” Lee said. “Heard you clear as a church bell on Sunday morning.”

  They walked to The Seven and hitched Byron to the wagon. Hugh put two shovels, a pick, and a roll of burlap in the bed while Lee climbed up on the seat with Crusoe. They set off with the moon yet high and the mule miffed at being called to work. Its coat the ragged gray of cold fire-ash, and had been from the time Hugh bought him.

  Other side of town they picked up an old logging road. The air in the woods hung close and still. Only owls stirred among blue-black treetops. None screeched. The road petered out and saplings thumped the wagon’s underside. Byron stopped frequently to munch weeds and briar, to blow airy farts. An owl swooped low and spooked the fool creature. Byron would go no farther till Hugh beat him on the flank with a balled fist.

  The brush threaded in and out of itself, making impassable stretches. They doubled back twice. They could hear the river up ahead, but could not see it running. Lee sang, Went and bought myself a new car, filled that sucker up with gas … and Byron brayed along like an ill-mannered drunk. Every little bit the mule would drop a pile of steaming shit and haw loudly as he continued onward through the dense woods. Brand-new engine in perfect condition, Lee sang, and a woman just about as fast—

  “Will both of you just shut the hell up,” Hugh said.

  Neither man nor mule would.

  When they came out of the woods into the cemetery clearing, Lee hopped down and kissed the ground like a sailor back home from sea. “Any these your kin?”

  “We ain’t all us whites kin.”

  Lee laughed. “Then how come you to care what happens to them?”

  “Here,” Hugh said, pitching Lee a shovel. “Dig.”

  They lit a few pine knots and stuck them in the soft ground. When they opened the plain pine coffins they found the corpses buried with keepsakes: a piece of hard candy, pins, pages torn from the Bible, playing cards, a dried lock of hair with ribbon yet tied around it. Come dawn Hugh and Lee had four corpses wrapped in burlap and loaded in the wagonbed. Hugh insisted they rebury the coffins with as much care as if nothing had been removed. Not for fear of being caught—no one would flinch at the sight of a looted cemetery where soon would be a-hundred-plus feet of water—but for the rightness of the gesture.

  The sky was beginning to blush pink and red like a lover’s neck. Soon, Hugh knew, the loggers would be tromping nearby. Starlings cut overtop the cemetery clearing.

  “What you aim to do with them two?” Lee asked, nodding toward where Hugh had buried Velston and the birthmarked man.

  “Worry about that last.”

  “Crazy as a goddamn duck,” Lee said, pitching a final load of dirt then tamping it down. “Let the lake take them buddyroll.”

  “If I’m crazy then reckon what it says you’re out here with me?”

  Before leaving Hugh pressed wax paper to the headmarkers and scratched back and forth with an oil pencil till names and dates appeared. He folded the paper and stuck it in his shirtpocket. They departed ahead of full light, reaching the path down into Freedom Hills time the first batch of tamales at Dyar’s was ready to be served.

  “Be by after dark,” Hugh said.

  “Dark tonight?”

  “Yeah dark tonight.”

  “Shit fire.”

  “You got somewhere else to be?”

  Lee waved as he walked off. He stopped just a little way down the steep path and hollered back, “Do what you supposed to now artist.”

  Back at The Seven Hugh unhitched Byron and let the mule roam while he buried the four corpses in a clearing out behind the pasture. In the kitchen he ate a stale chunk of cornbread then went down at the springhouse and drank buttermilk from a clay jug while he sat for a spell with Crusoe. Fuck Lee Malone, he thought, staring at a dozen assemblies he’d gathered since Loudermilk left. He had been doing what he was supposed to do—and more. Fuck, and this was supposed to feel good? It didn’t, he didn’t. Fuck Velston and the birthmarked man’s dead asses too, he thought. Ought to just let the lake take them. Hugh got up and checked the cooling machine he’d for some reason built. Sometimes it ran so cold it spat snow. Back at the house he locked the headmarker etchings in a box, along with a land deed, some old coins of no real value, and the stones his daddy had swallowed on the day he died.

  Caz’s dying was drawn out, but, looking back on that time, it began on a day when Hugh the boy woke to a cold and driving rain. The house felt empty in a way it hadn’t before. Hugh tried shaking this feeling as he fried eggs, heated biscuits, smeared on the biscuits an extra
gob of peach jelly, and ate alone. Rain pecked the roof as if trying to tell the boy something he already knew. It’d been years since Caz stayed out all night. A common occurrence for a time. Hugh could look back on those days and be grateful because if not for his daddy being the way he was then he wouldn’t of met Lee Malone. After he’d finished eating that morning Hugh fed the chickens, fixed a breakfast plate for Caz and set it on the woodstove, then left for Prince’s Cannery, where he worked so long at peeling peaches that moon-shaped scars would forever mark his fingers and thumbs.

  The rain yet drizzled that night, the plate on the stove where Hugh’d left it. He sat on the porch and fiddled with an assemblie. His daddy had let go of berating him over the things he made. Hugh was too distracted to work though. He built a fire and stoked it so warmth spread throughout the two-room house. His momma’s quilting rack hung from the ceiling, holding a piece she’d began before taking off with a traveling riflemaker from Wyoming. Hugh could not remember his momma, but he’d learned from Caz to despise her and the riflemaker, who wore a buffalo-fur coat. Caz burnt all the quilts she’d made. Father and son nearly froze to death that first winter without covers. Hugh didn’t remember this either, but he did too. Memory, he’d learned, could be inherited. He was staring up at the quilting rack, wading memory, when his daddy stumbled inside covered with bloodred mud.

  “I been out hunting gold,” Caz announced. “And, son, I have seen a big-old wall holding back a mountain of water and one day that mountain’s bound to crumble upon us.”

  “What you mean Daddy?”

  “The Lord said, ‘Behold, that which I built I’ll break down, and that which I planted will one day yank up by the roots, even all this land.’”

  The next day Caz began digging on The Seven. Before long you couldn’t walk anywhere without coming across a hole. Some were chest deep to a man, others divots.

  The idea to dig for gold was not new, but it had not taken hold of Caz in a number of years. Hugh believed the notion originated with Granny, Caz’s first wife, who died one winter while ice draped the valley end to end. Granny, an Elberta Indian, spoke of the valley’s unmarked graves from her people’s war with the Spanish. De Soto’s caravan had passed through on the way to what would become Arkansas, where his men chucked his lifeless body into the Mississippi River—the biggest unmarked grave in the country—and it hung up on sandbars, passed through petrified forests, and spun over silty gravelbeds where fish long as children floated unblinking, all the way out to the Gulf of Mexico. De Soto was liable to be circling the world yet. After Granny died Caz married Irina Wade, Hugh’s momma, a little woman with wet black eyes like a deer, who went into unexpected fits that some folks credited to God, or the Devil one. She hit Caz, he claimed, with a firepoker once, and his ear looked like cabbage till the day he died. Irina wasn’t but fifteen time they wed under a brush arbor, nineteen time she gave birth to a live son named Jesse Absalom, and twenty-one time she fled Elberta with the traveling riflemaker. Some years Caz coaxed a living from a cotton patch. He fed his son what he could kill and grow on these seven hundred acres, which came to him through a grant for something to do with Granny and her people, though Caz told it was due to his service in the war. Truth, nearest Casabianca Treeborne came to the fighting was squatting in a poke salad patch while a ragged bunch of homeward soldiers stumbled past.