Treeborne

by Caleb Johnson

  He sat down on the couch. When he’d heard they’d arrested Ricky Birdsong he’d thought about going down at the jail and springing the boy loose. But say he did, then what? Take off? Where to? The whole South would be after a nigger and a retard on the run. Don’t give them reason, he heard his momma momma saying. Mr. Prince had chosen Lee Malone to own and operate The Peach Pit based on probability. A long shot maybe, but a man like Mr. Prince did not get rich by making bad bets. When Lee was younger he liked to think that Mr. Prince saw a singular greatness beaming from within him. This wasn’t right, he realized, the older he became. Mr. Prince had seen a black boy given opportunity by something common as death, by white folks who raised him strict in religion. He hadn’t chosen someone in Freedom Hills to take over The Peach Pit. He’d chosen someone already come out from the Hills. Foot. Even a rich man, Lee Malone now thought, could wind up wrong.

  As he sat there on Ricky Birdsong’s couch Lee replayed the previous day’s events in his mind. It was such heavy rain and everybody was bitter about wandering around in a storm, doubtful that Tammy would ever be found—alive or dead. Big Connie Ward was leading the search party. He spotted the smoke rising up from the ground. The men dug out dead leaves, brush and fallen branches, a deer carcass time-stripped and furred with moss and tender shoots of grass from the entrance to the cave. The hounds went wild when they got Tammy’s scent. The lightning strike had run down right into the cave where Tammy was being kept. Lightning could do mysterious things. Lee knew folks who’d been struck and not a mark left on them, others whose backs looked like a privet branch. They could hear Tammy down there. Wooten had to be held from flinging hisself into the hole. Deputy Polk offered to go down first. Instead Big Connie Ward rigged a rope around Orville Knight’s skinny waist and lowered him. Orville hollered when he laid eyes on Tammy, hollered again when she flew into him. Wooten knocked a few men upside the head with his bad hand trying to get to her. They cussed, wished he’d go on headfirst and break his fool neck. How many days had they spent traipsing after his wife? Now they’d found her. Tammy might of been Maybelle’s daughter, but she’d deafened Lee Malone. Tried to blow his head off. She hated him. Lee wasn’t going to do the song and dance, act a noble nigger. Ren didn’t care, Luther neither, if Lee and Maybelle were together after Hugh died. It was all Tammy. Maybelle had abided her daughter’s hatred as a mother would. Lee couldn’t blame Maybelle, but he didn’t have to like it—especially not now. But, foot, he’d been out there hunting for Tammy like the rest of them, even when enough days passed that he and others felt like they’d be better off just hunting for Sister.

  When they raised Tammy up from that cave she didn’t know her husband standing in front of her. Maybe wasn’t, some of the men thought, so happy to see him. She was bone-thin. She screeched when Wooten held her close and cried into her tangled mess of hair. She was trying to say something: “Ur, gur, bur, bir, birrr, bird, bird, bird…”

  That’s all it took.

  “We ought to lop off his pecker and feed it to the damn dogs,” Big Connie Ward said.

  All the men agreed. They were making plans to hunt down Ricky Birdsong that moment and do just what Big Connie Ward had suggested—or worse, if they could imagine it in the meantime—when Lee Malone spoke.

  “Hold on,” he said, “let the—”

  “Be just like a nigger to be involved with one of the most godawful crimes against a innocent woman Elberta County’s ever seen!” Big Connie bellered.

  “Con,” Ren said. He was clearly upset that Janie hadn’t been found with Tammy. He cleared his throat. “Wait just a minute and—”

  It was too late for talk though. And Big Connie Ward was right, Lee Malone now thought, sitting on Ricky Birdsong’s couch. If the boy did this, Lee was somehow involved. All of them were, whether they’d admit to it or not.

  When he felt hisself falling asleep Lee got up and drove home. Buckshot ran inside the house first. Lee heard the dog whimper and fumbled for the lightswitch. Buckshot hobbled out of the kitchen, sat down and licked his bloody paws. Lee followed the bloodtracks to a scattering of broken windowglass and a rock this big in the sink. He bandaged Buckshot’s paws then fed him a bowl of milk and white bread. The dog tore the bandages loose while Lee swept up the broken glass then wiped the floor with water and bleach.

  They sat together on the backporch—man and dog—and listened to a recording Lee’d made thirty-some years ago. He’d listened more times than he cared admitting to since Ren dropped it off. Lee’d told Ren there was no rush in cleaning out Maybelle’s things from the cottage. He’d rent to no one else. The boy wouldn’t listen though. Seemed to embarrass him, going through his momma’s belongings, finding this recording and no telling what else. Time, Lee would of hoped Ren didn’t see the love letters, the little ditties he wrote for Maybelle Treeborne. But Lee Malone was long past such foolish pursuits as saving face.

  He scratched his dog’s neckfolds and tried remembering the last time they’d been together there. The Seven would have been a safer place. Meeting in town was asking for trouble. Perhaps that was part of the fun. Some days Lee and Maybelle lay in bed till lunch, touching and bucking the way he’d imagined when they first met and denied the great truth between them. The murk and the memories were smeared on Lee’s mind like grease. His newly deaf ear was ringing. He adjusted the metal box in his pocket. Doc Barfield said this would eventually stop. He’d get used to the change. Foot. The man he’d become, Lee Malone thought, would be unrecognizable to the boy cut into the black disc he now removed from the record player and slipped into a paper sleeve.

  Lee could perfectly remember the room where he’d recorded: cement floor, strips of carpet nailed up on brick walls that once echoed factory sounds, a single microphone in front of a folding chair facing the wall. He could yet remember the smokestacks other side a tall chain-link fence across the frozen street where a green and white taxi left him standing ankle-deep in snow, holding Rosette and nothing else. Never seen so much snow in his life. Wisconsin colder than a well-digger’s asshole. The snot in his nose turned rock-hard the moment he stepped out of that taxi. Place looked just like the man he’d met in Florida told him it’d look. Lee hadn’t believed the stranger. He always needed to see things for hisself. When he sat down on the folding chair Lee figured to play the same music that got him noticed on the circuit. Same music his daddy the piano man banged out at their house in Freedom Hills. There were old-timers still on the circuit who claimed they remembered Ray Malone. Lee was able to channel their memories through his own, out of his throat, his fingers, into something beyond time. On the circuit he forsook the music he’d learned from Momma Pat and Mr. Robin and the other True Believers. Too harsh, no rhythm. He was black, goddamn it, and he’d play the music of his people because he was fucking good at it, which was how come a stranger bought him a train ticket to Wisconsin so he could record. But when he opened his mouth to sing into that lonesome microphone, when the white man with black cups over his ears said, “Rolling,” what came out of Lee Malone’s mouth was some mashed-up version of his daddy, yes, but also the hillbilly spiritual singer that Momma Pat and Mr. Robin raised him up to be. He belonged not wholly to one tradition, or to one people; he was his own damn man, motherfucker, and neither did he represent everybody, or just a single part—he was many parts, all those pieces unknown and unheard from each other till that moment, everything all at once, and he owed it to hisself, to the music with a capital M, to sound thataway.

  They didn’t ask him to record a second song. Gave him the disc that afternoon. On one side his newly recorded song, on the other some forgotten singer from before the first great war. They’d written on a sticker: BLUE HANDS MALONE. By then Lee had long stopped noticing the way the dye at the textile mill colored his skin. That day in Wisconsin he would of scrubbed in a bucket of lye had one been handy though. He hated hisself for this, for letting a bunch of white men make him notice the stain. For letting a name they’d put on hi
m bother him so deeply. On his way back out onto the frozen street Lee passed a man holding a guitar made out of a bright-red-and-gold cigar box and what looked like a mop handle. The man who’d sat at the recording console shook this other guitar player’s hand and repeated something he’d said to Lee Malone upon their meeting. The guitar player smiled, bashfully bowed his head, then headed back to make, as the white man called it, magic.

  On the train back south Lee imagined his voice sizzling out from radio antennas anchored all over the country. Magic. He couldn’t help it. He pictured the radio tower atop the Prince Building in downtown Elberta. Must of been a hundred feet tall with a red blinking light on top. He saw this antenna and others stretching high high high up into the sky, his voice winding out from them, tailing off like a cloud caught on the rockiest mountain peak.

  The snow began melting as the train clanked south, fields emerging full-green, rivers and creeks turning lazy brown-gold once again. Magic. Lee Malone wasn’t a complete fool. A black man becoming famous for playing guitar was likely as a blizzard hitting Elberta in August. He didn’t care how many records folks were buying in New York and Chicago. But when Maybelle Treeborne had told him he could do it, he should do it, forget the fact she was saying this so he would leave town, to keep them away from each other, when Maybelle told Lee to cash in that train ticket and go make a recording, then he’d believed in hisself some powerful way he never had believed before in his life.

  The power of women—magic.

  The train rolled on.

  He sat upright and watched the country pass from the window of a crowded car, feeling he was returning to his own inevitable doom. Proof recorded on the black disc hidden underneath Rosette where she lay in her velvet-lined case. All the songs he knew, all the songs he’d written, and this the one he’d chosen to record. Love was confusion. Love was magic. Here Lee Malone was headed right back to its source. Lie and say it’s not for her, he thought to hisself. Lie lie lie, you fool, but it won’t make the difference you hope.

  When the train stopped at a depot somewhere in Tennessee, Lee got off to wet his face under a faucet. The platform was crowded with folks in suits and colored dresses. He imagined disappearing among them. Could make Memphis and play guitar on Beale Street. Find an island in the Mississippi and build a log house, sit by a fire each night and grow old and fat, let his toenails lengthen till they curled underneath his feet.

  The train began pulling off.

  Lee had to run and jump to catch on.

  Now that she was home Tammy Treeborne Ragsdale felt an urgency to run and jump to catch on to something too. At present she snuck past her sister-in-law, who was sprawled out asleep in a recliner chair. Mouth open, arm folded up underneath her big body—Tammy couldn’t believe the weight Nita had put on these last six-seven months. Did nobody else see? The house was hot and dark, and Tammy was glad to step outside. Geronimo picked up her thin shadow, the cat yawning and flicking its fluffy tail. Tammy wore nothing but a gray T-shirt and a new pair of bloomers. Goldenrod and ironweed itched her bare legs as she headed into the pasture. She paused and looked back to see if Nita had woken up, noticed her missing from the bed where, just a few months ago, they’d laid out Maybelle’s body.

  Tammy had not been home a day yet and already she was fed up with the way folks treated her. Like something that might shatter—the sugar eggs her and her brothers were gifted when money was good, or the ceramic figurines Wooten gave her on holidays and birthdays for some reason. Like handling one of them, she thought. Even Doc Barfield—and wasn’t it in his doctor’s code not to—acted as if he’d never touched a warm body in his life. Kept rubbing his hands together, way you do sitting by a nice fire, and they were still cold as ice down there between her legs. Tammy wanted to holler, Go on feel me! I ain’t gonna break! If anything, she thought, stepping into the clearing where they were building a house, this whole ordeal had forged her hard as Birmingham steel.

  She walked out onto the concrete slab. Wooten, or someone, had raised one wall. She’d hoped things would be further along. This the rub between them—her always expecting more than him capable of delivering. Was it her fault? She did not love him anymore. Yet it was Wooten on her mind down yonder, in darkness so pitch it made her whole body hurt. Made her feel like something forever on the tip of her tongue that could not be said.

  Tammy touched a nail that wasn’t flush with a two-by-four. Off in the distance Geronimo prowled Hugh’s assemblies for snakes. She’d told Wooten when he asked to just move all that junk, she didn’t care. And one day he had. She hadn’t realized he’d move it thataway, bulldoze it like garbage. There was no use crying though, no use regretting. After all, her daddy’d toted it out here and left it. Tammy never knew why, never asked.

  She found a hammer and spun the instrument in her hand. It felt light. She raised and swung. The nail jumped. She swung again, the nailhead already flush, and yet again. Again again again, pounding a dimple into the stud. Sawdust sprinkled onto her freshly washed hair. She found another unflush nail and beat it down till the wood cracked. This was Wooten’s problem—not a lick of attention to detail. Exactly how come he’d allowed hisself to be snatched into a band saw and half-ruined. She felt bad for thinking this, but the hammering felt so good it allowed her to ignore the guilt. Felt nearly as good as pulling a pistol on Lee Malone during the Peach Days parade. Everybody there had witnessed it. She’d fired three times. So how come she was free? How come she’d stood so close to him yet missed? Tammy didn’t want to think too much about it. She just knew it’d felt good. Nita’d told her some folks suspected Lee had been involved with the kidnapping. This was wrong. But folks needed to feel like they were doing right. Tammy too. The gun, the house, this. There were no more unflush nails so she simply whacked the wood wherever she saw fit.

  The racket woke up Nita, who tried to drape a quilt around Tammy and take away the hammer. “Come on,” she said. “Woot’ll be here before long. You don’t want him seeing you thisaway do you?”

  “Nita I ain’t gonna break.”

  “You been through a lot honey.”

  “Everybody has.”

  “Come on back up at the house with me.”

  Tammy found a bottle of whiskey in the bedroom closet and set it on the kitchen table next to plans for their new house. Nita grabbed two coffee cups and Tammy filled each one to the brim so the liquor spilled when they raised the cups to drink.

  “Daddy still kept it hid even after we left.”

  “I sure do miss him,” Nita said.

  “He couldn’t remember where he put the stuff once he got bad sick. I’d have to sneak a bottle somewhere he could find it hisself. Proud as the day run long.”

  “He was a good man.”

  They drank. Geronimo came scratching at the door. Tammy let the cat inside. He purred and slapped at her toes.

  “I couldn’t quit wondering what Momma’d do.”

  Nita smiled, unsure what to say.

  “Drove me plumb crazy,” Tammy went on. She took a deep long drink. “Down there just wondering how she, of all people, would act in my situation.”

  “We’re all our mommas.”

  “I hope you don’t believe that.”

  Nita laughed. She hunted a snack in the kitchen. The cabinets were empty, but she found in the fridge a slice of German chocolate cake left over from Maybelle’s funeral. She unwrapped it and sniffed then took a spoon out of a drawer.

  “You ever been in that kind of dark Nita?”

  “What was it like?” she asked, sitting back down. “Or you ain’t got to tell.”

  “They had on masks,” Tammy said. “All of them except Ricky.”

  “Reckon what for?”

  Tammy shook her head. “It was a skeleton and a devil and a gorilla.” The women drank in silence till the coffee cups were empty, then Tammy refilled them. She watched Nita lick stale chocolate frosting off the spoon and the plate. Made her feel nauseated. She asked, “How you and
Ren doing?”

  “He’s still moved out of the house.”

  “Treebornes are a mule-headed bunch.”

  They were silent again. Geronimo jumped up onto the table and plopped down between the two women. The cat raised his hind leg like a cheerleader and began licking his tiny pink butthole.

  “I already kindly feel like it didn’t even happen,” Tammy said.

  Nita grabbed her sister-in-law’s bruised hand. She opened her mouth like words were going to come out. None did.

  “You got fat Nita.”

  “I know,” she said. “I know I have.”

  “You got to take more care of yourself.”

  “I know it Tammy.”

  “Start tomorrow. Or now. I reckon it’s already today, ain’t it?”

  They finished the whiskey then crawled in Maybelle’s old bed. The mattress springs fussed. Nita snuggled up against Tammy’s bony back. Geronimo joined them there, loudly purring and washing between his legs.

  Tammy resented Wooten for being absent tonight. Resented herself too for wanting him there. If Wooten and Ren weren’t in jail, she thought, they were laid up somewhere drunk. Nita being so big did feel good though. Wooten’s size had always been one thing Tammy liked—the way he filled up a space. It was certain. Truth, Tammy never would of had the guts to go to Hollywood, California. She’d heard that’s what folks thought she’d done when she first went missing though. Tickled her to death in a way. Maybe one day a Treeborne would do something so adventurous, she thought. Never one of hers though. It was clear she and Wooten never would have a child. But there was Sister. Maybe she—

  Tammy stopped, bolted upright and shook her sister-in-law awake. “Nita,” she said, “Nita, where on earth is Sister at?”

  Stories We Tell

  TODAY