Treeborne

by Caleb Johnson

  “Me and Aunt Tammy was more alike than I cared admitting for a long long time,” Janie Treeborne said. She drummed her slippers on the floor and assessed the young man. “Now you don’t understand something like that in one swooft moment. It’s the piling on of moment after moment strung out across all damn-blasted time that leads to what you call true understanding, which don’t always amount to how you wished it’d be.

  “See, I wanted to be my grandmomma,” she went on, “because MawMaw May didn’t live long enough for me to outgrow her. Aunt Tammy did, and she died right yonder in that bedroom. Times I still hear her back there fooling around with that movie camera. She ruined a good many reels before I got the mind to carry them over at The Seven for preserving. Something’d happened by then, understand. Me and Aunt Tammy become closer than kin. Me and her, we wound up each other’s best friend.”

  Janie ambled into the kitchen where the microphone couldn’t pick up her mutterings. She returned to the living room with two ripe Elberta peaches balanced on a small plate. She pulled a knife out of the pocket of her gown then sliced the peaches in half, exposing wrinkled brown pits set inside bloody hearts.

  “Foot if I’ll know the difference where I wind up,” she said, wiping the knife on her gown. “MawMaw May’s folks, the Chamblisses, they’re all buried down Bankhead area. I ain’t been to Decoration in years though. Your daddy used to go with me. Treebornes are scattered out. Time, I got interested in tracking us all down. Putting us on maps. That’s all them boxes you see right yonder there. Go through them before you leave, if you want to.

  “Daddy used to give me a map every birthday and Christmas—sometimes just because. Aunt Tammy and me, we hunted maps at flea markets all over this area. I collected maps my whole life and see where I am—never gone a goddamn place! Filled up a whole room with maps till Aunt Tammy needed to move in. This old schoolteacher of mine—Miss Miller was her name—she once give me a passel of maps her sister found when the county swapped courthouses. Most of them just fell apart soon as we took them out the cardboard tubes. Hugo, I remember, he was still a puppy back then. Just big enough to fit a pullet egg in his mouth. Cutest dog you ever have seen. They call his color salt-and-pepper, and he had this smudge of white on his head like spilled coffee creamer. Dog would trot right onto them maps and make hisself a bed if you didn’t watch out! I hung the oldest ones up at the fruit stand. Beautiful beautiful hand-drawn things, I mean, signed by a S. N. J. We never did figure out who that artist was. Them maps though, I made sure to keep.”

  Janie popped out the first peach pit with her thumb. It spun across the dirty linoleum and the young man went to pick it up.

  “Leave it,” she said, biting into the fruit’s flesh. She popped out the other pit and it spun across the floor too. She passed the plate to the young man. “I reckon I just enjoy wanting and loss. If you don’t too it’s because you ain’t felt them true enough. What do they call that? A addiction don’t they? Now I might go on and tell you them walks in the woods are my clearest memories of MawMaw May. I might tell you anything! Truth, they ain’t. It’s the losing her. Wanting her back. Same with my folks. Same with Elberta. Same with my poor Hugo beast. Now I loved that dog, buddy. He’d take my pullet eggs if I didn’t watch out! I’d find them busted or buried here and there in the yard. Only dog I ever did let sleep in bed with me. He was a great-big leggy creature and used to chase flies whenever they got inside the house. He got old. That’s all. He got old and he died.

  “But going back to memories—

  “I been sitting here on mine how many years? Waiting, I reckon, same way folks wait over the sick. Waiting for somebody to slip on in and take them away. Well guess what? I been waiting for somebody that’s done here. No, it ain’t you. I been waiting on myself and didn’t know it. You see, it ain’t memory that ever goes, but us being able to peel it back.”

  His Masterpiece

  1929–1930

  Hugh opened the cooling machine and reached inside to check some part. The machine shuddered and exhaled cold chemical air.

  “I still kindly smell them,” Maybelle said. The weather had turned cold. Too cold to run this machine, she thought. She felt nauseated too—as she often did lately.

  “Just your mind,” Hugh told her. He banged on something with a wrench. “Hold on a minute. Damn thing still ain’t doing right.”

  He fooled with the machine’s innards a while longer. Just when he was ready to quit, the engine backfired and, a moment later, snow blasted out of the chute. There, he said, as flakes swirled throughout the house. The snow melted when it touched their hair, their clothes, their skin. Dampened the floorboards and the papered walls and the mattress. Maybelle stuck out her tongue to catch some, and Hugh took ahold her hand and slipped a gold ring onto her finger. The ring was tight but it fit. He leaned in and kissed her, and they collapsed and made love twice. After, they toted a jug of muscadine wine to the backporch.

  “I ever tell you you’re uglier in person than in the paper,” she said.

  He kissed her temple. She loved that joke. “Never claimed to be a looker.”

  “Or a artist.”

  “Some things claim you.”

  She played with the cowlicks on back of his head. “When you reckon that yankee’s coming back?”

  It’d been four-five months since Loudermilk left with a backseat full of assemblies. Hugh said he didn’t reckon the yankee would return.

  “But what if he does?” Maybelle went on. “Now that you’re done with that other mess maybe you can start back gathe—”

  Hugh interrupted. “What if he does May.”

  Planting the bones at the worksite bought enough time to finish exhuming the cemetery and decide what to do with Velston and the birthmarked man. Still mad at Lee, Hugh’d consulted Maybelle about what to do. She told him she wasn’t having anything to do with the decision. Which wasn’t quite truth. They were together. She was with child, though she still had not revealed this to him. She was putting on weight; he’d figure it out soon. Her presence on The Seven maybe not an affirmation of the thing Hugh Treeborne had done, but a kind of forgiveness for the inextricable nature that’d driven him to it. In the end Hugh left the Authority men in their borrowed graves and let the water cover them.

  After the first of the month, time payday came, Hugh and Maybelle hitched the mule to the wagon and rode into town. She wore one of his heavy coats during the long cold trip. They waited at a counter behind which stood a judge named Aderholt. The judge said a few words, asked a couple questions. Hugh and Maybelle said yes they did. The judge stamped a certificate and the couple kissed. They bought roast beef sandwiches and carried them down at the river. Hugh wished he could tell Lee he was married. He’d passed by The Hills a few times since the night Lee walked out on him. Never was home. Fool could hold a grudge too, Hugh thought as they ate.

  Later, as they loaded Maybelle’s belongings into the wagon, Beachy the butcher came out to say goodbye. He gave them a country ham. That night Maybelle sliced into it, the interior sparkling ruby red and marbled white with delicious fat. The ham smelled nutty and sweet. She could eat no more than a slice before feeling sick.

  Though Hugh’d moved the corpses out from underneath the house, he hadn’t reburied all of them yet. He delayed too long and the ground froze. He’d have to wait for spring. Meanwhile, he had no excuse for not gathering assemblies. At least none Maybelle allowed him. He loved her, so he did not tell what he’d learned Loudermilk had done. He braved the biting cold, and hauled assemblies out of The Seven’s many crooks and hollers. Pieces he hadn’t seen since his daddy was alive. He stacked them in the clearing behind the pasture where he’d put the now frozen corpses. An unintended monument.

  That winter Hugh considered quitting The Authority. His mind changed one chill night when he pushed into Maybelle from behind, wrapped his arms around her, and felt something move inside her stomach. He didn’t remark upon it as they made love or afterward, lying there
finger-threaded and bare. The sense of pride and fear he felt rendered his tongue useless. Then, come morning, it seemed too late to mention. The knowledge too obvious to speak. He did not blame her for keeping this from him. After all, he was keeping a secret of his own. He began doing things to signal that he knew about the child and accepted their future though. Framed a crib, cleared extra land to garden that year, carved small horses and owls for the child to play with. From a cedar chest he took the last surviving quilt his momma’d made before she ran off with the riflemaker and he placed it with the wash for Maybelle to find.

  The counter at the post office hid her growing belly all winter. Not from Dee Sargent though. Early on she’d placed a hand on Maybelle and asked how long. Dee herself was childless and thought it for the better considering Tucker’s propensity for going on historic drunks. Maybelle’s secret was safe with Dee, but she did not linger in town those days for fear of someone else noticing her condition. She’d have to tell her superiors at the post office sooner or later. They’d bring in another postmaster. Likely a man. She wouldn’t get her job back after the child came. The Seven’s isolation, which’d fascinated Maybelle at first, would become her. She had to tell, but not yet.

  * * *

  By March the weather had warmed to the point where folks in town debated how many cool nights the peach orchards were getting, which would determine the length of this year’s harvest. For days unbearable humidity blanketed the valley. Like being slapped in the face with a wet sponge. It would of been miserable enough had Maybelle not been pregnant and forced to walk the miles between work and home.

  One day it got so she could no longer tolerate the weather in town. She closed the post office early and left. The wool dress she wore kept slipping up her hips as she walked. Her body no longer felt like it belonged to her, the baby had taken on such size within her. Tall oaks shivered along the path leading to The Seven. The postal service had given her only two dresses. An ordeal apparently. Both now fit snug. She sweated, thinking she would of gladly worn button-up shirts and loose britches like men—or, on a day like this, nothing at all.

  Hugh was nowhere to be found when she got home. It was Saturday, she remembered, his day off. She felt too exhausted to search for him. She hollered his name a few times then sat on the porch and watched lightning flash in the bellies of black clouds bulging over the treeline. The sky beyond them sickly green. The world gone quiet; air soupier than it’d been all spring. Hot hard raindrops began pecking at the ground. Maybelle stepped down into the yard and called for Hugh again. Only the blood that beat in her ears replied.

  She busied herself fixing supper, using the last of some vegetables they’d put up before winter killed the crops. She was looking forward to gardening this summer. She’d sketched on an envelope where she wanted things planted. Fixing supper always reminded Maybelle of her mother, who was not a good cook at all. She tried not to think about Alice when possible. On the verge of becoming a mother herself, Maybelle could imagine how it felt not knowing where your daughter was or if she was even alive. Sometimes she told herself she’d travel down at Bankhead after the child was born. A lie she believed no more than up was down.

  Near dark she caught sight of Byron crossing the pasture. The mule cocked its ears as she approached. The rain had stopped and some great unseen pressure filled its void. She asked the mule where was Hugh. Byron clacked his teeth then continued into the woods.

  She took hold of the mule’s tail, walking to the side so she could not be kicked. Bursts of lightning showed a worn path before her. The clearing was the last place she expected Hugh to be, despite the ground thawing. But a flash of lightning revealed him wielding a shovel, surrounded by assemblies and corpses. Maybelle waited for another charge. When it came she saw the dirt boy Crusoe upright and staggering on his own two legs. No, she thought. She felt the child pressing against her bladder. She begged it to quit. The next round of lightning strobed for such duration it might of signaled the universe’s last act. The mule hawed and Hugh spotted them. A peculiar look came over him and he began wildly gesturing at her, then he scooped Crusoe and ran thataway.

  He grabbed her. She’d never seen him so frantic. He was saying something, but she couldn’t hear what. She tried to tell him that she thought she’d lost him. Her words also consumed by a yet unseen clamor. Something that sounded like kadunk. She spoke again and her words were lost. Hugh’s mouth was moving, but she could not hear him. Kadunk kadunk kadunk. To their left a tree jumped into the sky. Kadunkkadunkkadunkkadunk. Another tree, then another and another, hundred-year hardwoods, all around, lifted up out of the ground. Hugh dragged her away. She smelled on him dirt and sweat and death, and the air hummed. Above them swirled the brownest thing ever imagined, swaying, brown tentacles grabbing all they could. A cow flew past. Lumber, kartsy rock. They were in the woods, which were no longer woods, running toward the fishpond. She couldn’t hear anything but kadunkkadunkkadunkkadunk. Treetops snapped and rolled past like paperballs. An assemblie nearly took their heads. Kadunkkadunkkadunkkadunk. Something wet trickled down the side of her face and neck. Hugh had picked up a sheet of tin, and they were still running. Stumbling. He fell in a depression and pulled her down.

  He held the tin overtop them as it rattled and bent. He mouthed something. She hollered back. The tin slowly curled, slicing into his palms. She could see everything that should of been rooted now airborne. Trees, pieces of houses, the things he made, art, water, dirt, bodies, floating among a terrible terrible brown cloud.

  The tin wrenched loose.

  Hugh rolled on top of her and dug his fingers in the ground. She felt the child kick and only then did she remember that she was carrying it. The selfishness of survival caused her to sob. She tried to remind Hugh about the child. He was hurting her. It was too loud. He was saying, Shut your eyes and it’ll be gone before you know it. Just shut your eyes May. But she would not. She saw Crusoe take flight. A shovel fell from the brown mass and jabbed upright not two inches from her. The handle wobbled. She could not look away. A sandstone slab bigger than a tractor flipped across the pasture. She could not look away.

  She didn’t feel Hugh being lifted. It happened all at once—like a bad burn. Something whipped her throat. Her dress was torn from her body. Hugh was no longer there, she realized, seeing shards of glass stuck in her belly.

  Then everything ended. Her ears were whistling. The shards of glass moved up and down, up and down, updownup, with each pained breath. Just like Hugh’d said, it was over, it was gone—and him too.

  * * *

  It rained twelve days straight after the storm sheared the valley, water gushing down hillsides laid bare and pooling up in low-lying spots. The Elberta River topped its banks, covered the docks, seeped into town. Homes slipped off foundations and floated into woods. Piss ants abandoned wet earth, climbing any tree they could find and stripping bare the leafy tops. Owls, birds of all kinds, snakes both poisonous and not, rabbits, forgot their differences and hid together underneath any dry bluff they could find. Some dared under the hoods of vehicles, inside attics crowded with forgotten things, and waited there while catfish floated through yards like unloosed ships. The people of Elberta, Alabama, thought the rain would never quit. But on the thirteenth day it did and floodwaters slowly began their retreat, carrying off debris and wreckage, creating mountains of mud. What cotton grew rotted and other crops washed away along with the rich black topsoil, leaving patches of clay resembling open wounds.

  The dirt boy couldn’t see a thing. He climbed out of a hole and ripped off what was left of his clothes. Roots ran clear through his body and anchored him to the ground. He yanked loose then angled his head and fished moss out from his earholes. He took a step, feet heavy as cinder blocks. He cracked what stubby toes weren’t missing, then walked without aim, knowing no more than a stone, while a reluctant sun split blue-black clouds piled up overhead like burial mounds.

  The sun would not move, even as the bunched-up c
louds evaporated and gave space. Memories yet escaped the dirt boy. He felt as if he was walking in a time misplaced as he waded floodwaters topped with rusty orange needles that slopped against his waist. He stumbled and the current pulled him under. Drifted till he caught hold of a tree and dragged hisself to shallower water. On he walked, loosening up as he did. Now if he could just remember. Flying, lifted, flung. A vague notion he’d been named—but by who and for what?

  He held out his arms for feelers and tried making sounds with what was left of his jaw. Wild animals called out in reply as he followed a rain-fattened creek that jumped belowground then seeped back up as if the earth wept. He couldn’t remember the names of these animals. He ran from what he did not know, descending into a close-walled holler where water rose past his chest. He gripped the slick rock walls with nubby hands. His foot slipped and he was again at the water’s terrible mercy, drifting no telling how far before he stopped.

  He crawled up onto a ledge and back into a crevice and lay there for a time among some bones. A steady knocking came from deeper within the rock, taunting him. He couldn’t remember anything except flying. How long was he gone and how far had he flown? Without memory he was only dirt—eroded bits and pieces of hills that once were mountains rising from a vast ocean. A wanderer. But wanderers come from someplace, so the dirt boy must of too. Though, till he figured out where, he was but a searcher; lost.

  He came out of the holler into a hardwood grove. The sun warmed the trees, so branches creaked and popped like a ship at sea. He gazed upward. This did not fix his eyes. He walked on, pictures and words coming to him broken and half-formed. He tried them on the stub that was his tongue. They sounded painful as it felt to form them. He crossed a creek where see-through fish darted here and there in chalky blue water. On the other bank the woods were in sweet-smelling bloom, he noticed. Also something sharp and metallic, something favoring rot. With his next breath of this odor came a rush of names: yellow honeysuckle, blue flags, wisteria vine, tin, camellia blooms, bodies, Indian braids and purple hollyhock, wild laurel, Death. And another memory: before being lifted, before flying, a man on his back holding a piece of tin. A woman there too. The tin whistled, slowly peeling. They were hiding from something. Up high, the dirt boy had spotted the tin turning flips. But not the man, not the woman, then the world had sucked into itself and all became black.