Treeborne

by Caleb Johnson

  One day Caz dug too near the house and the foundation collapsed. The floor split, and the woodstove dropped and cracked on one side. To have the house raised and reset, Hugh traded the wagon his uncle Frank the cripple had once used to hunt foxes. Caz never knew this cost. Likely by then he no longer remembered he’d once had a brother named Frank, who lived the final fifteen years of his life useless from the waist down because a forgotten bullet worked its way up his spine and rendered him so.

  After his memory, Caz’s words went. That winter it snowed in Elberta for the first time in thirty-three years. Caz continued his hunt for De Soto’s gold. Hugh worried he’d one day find his daddy froze to death. He imagined pouring boiling water on Caz’s purple body so it’d come loose from the stubborn ground. For days and days the snow lay up in trees, shimmering like spilled sugar, then a rain fell and formed a layer of crunchy blue ice. The fishpond froze solid. Caz looked less a man and more like something that would scurry from underneath a bluff into daylight, only to retreat before it could be definitively seen.

  That spring Caz went missing. After searching for days Hugh found him at what Caz said Granny always told him was an Elberta Indian mound. Caz’d dug out a good chunk of the mound time Hugh got there. A shovel lay near where he was yanking on a yellow root. Hugh tried getting his daddy to rest in some shade. Caz pushed his son away and began forcing stones into his own mouth. He gagged, choked. The skin around his lips tore. He spat out one stone and furiously rubbed it, then forced another past his bleeding gums.

  After this Hugh chained his daddy to the busted kitchen floorboards. Caz pried loose the nails and escaped. Hugh brought him back and chained him to an oak tree. For months he fed Caz corn mush and raw eggs, gave him buckets of water to drink and rinse hisself if he saw fit. Caz did neither. Hugh once tried praying. Good Lord in Heaven, he began. It was no use. He didn’t believe. Yet the old man sat underneath the oak tree and spoke in many different tongues. Howled and spat if his son came near. Caz was missing half his teeth. Gums so infected he could not fully close his mouth. One day Hugh came outside and found the chain broken, Caz gone. He searched all over The Seven. He knew what he would find, but did not know when or where. Then one afternoon he came upon bits of teeth down by Dismal Creek. A little farther downstream he saw several bloody stones. In a slow pool floated his daddy’s naked white body. When Hugh dragged Caz out, he could feel more stones underneath the skin at his stomach.

  Four nights in a row Hugh Treeborne and Lee Malone dug till dawn and came away from the cemetery with eleven more corpses. They’d discovered a group of unmarked graves as well. The soil seemed damper—the Elberta River inching nearer. Hugh worried he hadn’t buried Velston and the birthmarked man deep enough. He could of chucked a stick over the stone wall to where the logging crew had reached.

  “Ain’t making it,” he said.

  “Hell we ain’t,” said Lee.

  Hugh squatted down, gripping the shovel for balance. “It’s my fault.”

  Lee wiped his forehead. “Ain’t your fault somebody decided to plant these graves right here buddyroll. You just took on the burden, Lord knows how come.”

  “Won’t never move them all in time.”

  “Give up then,” Lee said. “Just like with that damn yankee wanting them whatever-you-call-thems. And what you done since? Where you at artist? Out here in the dark of night digging up a bunch of dead bodies, like a goddamn fool.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “Nuh uh,” Lee said, dropping the shovel and raising his hands. “Fuck you buddyroll. Fuck all this.” He started walking off.

  Hugh hollered, “Go on big-talker. Just go on then!”

  Lee held up a middle finger as he disappeared into the woods.

  After Hugh had returned to The Seven and buried the corpses in the clearing he sat with Crusoe in the old chicken coop he called his studio. Caz always kept chickens. Named them after folks in the Bible. It was Hugh the boy’s job to feed the chickens dried corn kernels and whatever bugs and worms Caz pulled off plants in the garden. Hugh hated those chickens, always pecking his toes or else flogging his head. Shit all over—and stunk too. Sometimes Caz would wring one’s neck. He got a kick out of saying something like, Son, let’s fry up old Jeremiah tonight. After Hugh found his daddy’s body floating in Dismal Creek and had buried it in the cemetery at Elberta Second Baptist, he went home and wrung the neck of every last chicken in the damn coop. Plucked them bald, lopped off their heads and yellow feet, gutted them then carried the warm carcasses to Lee, who set up a deep iron vat out behind his house and filled it with oil. Lee broke down the chickens, soaked the parts in buttermilk while a fire heated the oil, then he dredged the parts in flour and dropped them in the vat. The oil overflowed and a party broke out. Lee played on his guitar Rosette whatever songs folks wanted to hear. Hugh woke up the next morning—head feeling whacked by a board—with a skinny black woman against his side. He didn’t know her name. This was how an old chicken coop became his studio. This was the kind of story, he thought, Loudermilk wanted to hear.

  Weeks later, summer extinguished, the diggers were still hounding Hugh about the article in the paper. One man named Rabbit said he thought Hugh would of done got rich and took off to New York City by now. It was Philadelphia where Loudermilk came from, but same difference—million miles from Elberta, Alabama. Underneath the men’s teasing was an honest wish for Hugh to make good though. He no longer believed it possible—if he ever truly had. But this he kept secret from the men. Why poison the wells of others? He’d been the one who threw open the henhouse door and waved the fox inside.

  When the men weren’t teasing Hugh and each other they speculated about what might of happened to Velston and the birthmarked man. Drowning seemed most likely. That didn’t make for good bullshitting though. Some claimed Velston’d simply become the statue of De Soto once again. Hugh kept his mouth shut on this matter too.

  * * *

  Working without Lee, he’d fallen behind reburying the corpses and instead dragged them underneath the house. He placed them far in back in case a dog caught scent. Despite their age and state of decomposition the corpses gave off an odor. He dragged the cooling machine under there and ran it, hoping to blow out the stench. He needed time. Maybelle could tell something wasn’t right. As milder weather painted the trees, which began dropping their leaves, she asked more often why he’d stopped gathering assemblies and, recently, how come he didn’t invite her to sleep inside the house.

  After work one evening he fished around in boxes till he came across a pamphlet called Wild Alabama. Used to, they’d hand them out free in town. It’d been umpteen years since he’d seen the face on front of this water-damaged copy: oiled mustache and bird-beak nose, hollowed-out cheekbones and flat eyes. Hiram Transtern was a short man and prone to chewing dogwood twigs as an affectation he believed endeared him to Elbertans. Looked more poet than explorer—serious and sad. Transtern had led expeditions into the Egyptian desert, Pacific islands where men ate each other and worshipped monkey heads, then one day he walked right into the Elberta County Courthouse and asked for a set of maps nobody knew existed. Word of his arrival soon spread. Oodles of folks claimed they saw Transtern cross the river and begin his journey. Longer ago the story, the more folks who were there for it. Some even claimed Transtern let them see the forgotten maps that showed exactly where Chief Coosa had been buried with all his treasure. Whoever, if anybody, did watch Hiram Transtern float across the Elberta River then walk into that great stretch of wilderness later to be named after a senator who held dear his peaches, those folks were the last to ever see the man—living or dead.

  Then, twenty-some years later, his son Hiram Transtern Jr. came to Elberta with a hot-air balloon. This time the town got it right and held an official ceremony to see off the famous explorer. Hugh remembered bits and pieces of the day: the balloon’s bright orange cloth, the burner’s blue flame, a four-piece veterans’ band playing loud and out of tune, fried d
ough sprinkled with sugar. Transtern Jr. waved and waved till he’d floated beyond the tree-lined horizon. Then the band quit. Everybody milled around, not knowing quite what to do.

  Unlike his daddy, Transtern Jr. did return—though with nothing to show for his weeks spent in the wilderness but for a few mild injuries and a wooly beard, and minus one beautiful hot-air balloon. But he’d returned, and Elberta, Alabama, embraced the Transterns’ failure more than it ever would of dared to their success.

  When Maybelle arrived at The Seven later that night, the Transterns and that balloon were still on Hugh’s mind. He showed her the pamphlet.

  “And nobody ever found it?” she asked.

  “No,” he said. He could sometimes forget Maybelle wasn’t from Elberta. She seemed to fit so well. “But any time they uncovered a artifact or a grave the whole town would just seize up,” he said. “I mean, for weeks. Sometimes it’d be months.”

  The words that’d come from his mouth stunned him. Hugh knew what he had to do. But Maybelle was staying tonight. He’d asked her to stay. He wanted to do the things they did when they lay down together, more often before he fell behind with the corpses. A night spent with Maybelle would be a sacrifice though, one less night he had to finish what he’d started before the river swept into the cemetery and he no longer could.

  He let the cooling machine run for a while before taking her hand and leading her inside the house. It was loud. Of course she asked what on earth the noise was. He told her he had a surprise, then pulled the mattress near where cool air seeped up between floorboard cracks. Better to confront it, he thought. They got down on the mattress and kissed. Stinks, she said, her skin turning to gooseflesh as Hugh undressed her. He told her an animal must of got up under the house and died. The smell wasn’t bad as he’d feared and it did feel good for such cool air to blow on their naked bodies—even in the fall.

  After they made love Hugh waited till he thought she was asleep then snuck outside. He crawled under the house, cobwebs catching on his face. The brittle bones made awful cracks he feared she would hear even over the sound of the machine. He chose hands and ribs because they snapped easier. The ancient perfume made him slightly drunk. He laughed, then stopped hisself and listened for her stirring above.

  He carried the bones to the studio and put them in a tote sack. Grabbed a shovel. He whispered for Byron the mule, who’d wandered out of his stall. Hugh thought he heard the creature around back of the house. Retching. Sometimes Byron would munch milkweed and foxglove, other plants and roots, that made him sick.

  Instead of finding the mule Hugh came upon Maybelle there in the dark. He smelled something sour. She gasped when she saw him and asked what was he doing prowling around thisaway. He told her he couldn’t sleep.

  “What’s that sack?”

  “Junk,” he said, using the word she sometimes used for things he gathered. But he’d stalled answering. Maybelle said she didn’t believe him and took the sack. “Wait,” he said. “Don’t.” Too late; she’d emptied the bones.

  “Oh my Lord! Are these, are they human?”

  Hugh could no longer lie. He told her all of it, from the beginning. He could see Maybelle trying to hide her horror; her face like a watermelon dropped on brick. She kept asking who they were, who were they.

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  “What do you mean don’t know?”

  “I mean I don’t know who they are May.”

  She looked down at her bare feet. “You ain’t some kind of pervert are you?”

  “Jesus, no,” he said.

  “Well what are you doing with a bunch of bones Hugh?”

  “Listen,” he began, “I under—”

  “Just tell the truth, damn you!”

  Hugh knew what he said next would bind or break them, same as he knew walking into a river would get a man sopping wet. When he’d finished explaining his reasoning and the plan he now had, he could not tell which outcome had occurred. Maybelle seemed rightly disturbed by all this. But she did not leave. She got dressed and climbed onto the wagonseat next to him. Her reckoning wasn’t complete, but it began as they set out across town on the wagon, the sack of bones and a shovel stowed in back.

  They waited in the brush for the night guards with their torches and blades to settle in with a late meal and a deck of playing cards. As he dug, Hugh disturbed the ground as little as possible. It had to look authentic, he said. With Maybelle’s help, he arranged the bones in the bottom of a hole no more than a few feet deep. He sprinkled in some arrowheads and broken pottery from his collection, then filled the false grave and smoothed over the dirt. Maybelle swept away their footprints with a green pine branch.

  On the way back she said she wasn’t feeling well and asked if he’d drop her off at the apartment she still rented in town. Hugh feared this would be the last he saw of her. Worry sank into his gut as he returned home to change into his Authority uniform, then doubled back to the worksite. Tormented him till he squatted in the woods with a sick stomach as blue light broke overtop the receding treeline and spilled onto the muddy riverbank like a burst yolk. He wiped with leaves then pulled up his britches and watched the first workers arrive. Mist swept low as men slid down into the channel and began cutting into the earth. Hugh took his place among them. It wasn’t a couple hours into the shift till a digger hollered, “It’s a goddamn skeleton!”

  The new foreman—a man named Alan—told them to take a break. They ate lunch early, balled up the greasy butcher’s paper from their sandwiches and chucked it at each other. Alan was waiting on a radio callback from headquarters. Another lunch hour passed. Still getting paid—least they hoped this was truth.

  They started a game of tackle on the riverbank. Some men stripped naked and swam, the river cold and calm. Hugh Treeborne had climbed up the rise where folks sometimes picnicked and watched the scene from above. What luck, the men all agreed, daylight inching toward dusk. An Indian grave right here. What goddamn luck, they all said, over and over, getting paid to just fool around.

  This is How She Survived

  1958

  For a while Janie was able to track the days. Eight since she left Elberta, six since she left Lyle and Goodnight, five since her run-in with Big Connie Ward. Then one morning she woke up and had lost count. She wasted a whole day trying to remember. Crusoe no help. The dirt boy seemed to be withdrawing into hisself, like a piece of paper folded till it could not be folded anymore. Janie nearly wanted to beat him to pieces against a tree trunk. She spent two more days like this before she understood that she had no choice but to start counting from when she could last remember. “Three,” she said. “Three three three,” she repeated to herself as they walked deeper into The N. W. Barfield National Forest.

  She cussed herself for leaving behind her bag. No clothes, no food, no map. She tried to draw one in her head. Maybe on The Seven she could of; not here. She ate what she could find: handfuls of blackberries, unripe muscadines that popped out of their hard skin like snotty pimples. She plucked honeysuckle flowers, removed the innards and sucked sweet sticky drops of nectar while annoyed bees bounced off Crusoe’s face. Gradually, a crusty yellow disc grew over her blind eye. She scratched off the crust and rinsed in the river. Each morning it came back. Her eye itself throbbed day and night. After one long day of walking that involved crossing many streams and creeks, her boots rubbed dime-size blisters on her heels and pinky toes. She stripped barefooted and let Crusoe smear hisself onto the sores. She tore her dress and wrapped pieces around her feet. They camped in Authority ruins, an abandoned pilot house, clearings doused in canted light. Crusoe built fires, and they watched bugs drift down toward the flames till they got too close and burnt up. Morning came and they walked again, crossing abandoned strip pits grown over with pine trees and tall grass, clear-cuts dusted with a fine layer of gray ash and sparkling coalgrit, leaving behind all signs of man, walking wide creekbeds that looked like busted-up roads, returning to the Elberta River and follo
wing as it wound through The N. W. Barfield National Forest.

  In spite of the pain it was hard not to notice the wonder and beauty of being among such wilderness. Her grandmomma had driven this notion into Janie so hard and true it never would come out. Stretches of the forest were how the girl imagined the innards of churches and castles she’d read about in books from the library where her momma worked. Quiet, enormous. Moss ran across the ground like carpet. The animals here were not easily spooked. Herds of deer with wet black noses, a gray fox toting a robin in its sharp pointy teeth, owls roosting in knotholes and split stumps, groundbirds searching for seed and materials with which to craft nests. Janie and Crusoe could get right up on them. Hours, maybe, passing while they just watched. The pace slowed so much you’d be hard-pressed to call what Janie was doing running off.