Treeborne

by Caleb Johnson

  Top of a hill the dirt boy sat on a log and wandered fingers to his eyes. He picked till a toadstool cap came loose from one eye then the other. Now he could make out a town snuggled inside a riverbend, which hooked off into a great-big forest that stretched toward the yet-gloomy horizon. Memory came easier with sight. He knew the town’s name, the river that’d lent it, and he recognized its flooded square: a statue of a Spanish conquistador, a cafe and several shops, beyond them, painted houses with fenced-in yards and fruit trees, a peach orchard, mansions up on the riverbank among towering oaks yet reaching limbs across a soupy red road. Elberta, De Soto, The Fencepost, people, human folks. This rush of knowing jolted the dirt boy so much he lost his balance and nearly fell.

  He sprawled out on a flat rock. Buzzards appeared circling overhead, thinking the dirt boy something dead. The big bald birds rode an updraft like screws being loosened from a hard board. An inky flock gathered above the hill and shat and shed greasy feathers long as the dirt boy’s legs. He collected a few feathers and stuck them in his knotty head and squawked. Two buzzards landed and unrolled tongues from their beaks. The dirt boy could of disappeared wrapped up in their wings. They waddled toward him. He ran. The buzzards did not hunt him but lifted back up into the sky, coasting toward something easier to collect.

  He crossed hill upon hill, daylight giving way to dark. He came upon uprooted trees, climbed over their great-big trunks and picked his way through their twisted tops. He saw at eye-level bird nests and beehives. No eggs, no honey. Holes where the trees had stood now filled with rainwater. In them floated playing cards, a sack, more peaches, a dead cat, what looked like an arm, household objects, a calf with its skin ripped clean off, red socks, a coffee cup. Some treeroots reached taller than the roof of a house would and held stones big enough to crush a wagon. He stopped at a rain-filled cavity electrified with minnows. The fish surged together, maybe trying to tell him something, but what he did not know.

  He took a flooded path around a sanded-down bluff toward a row of cigar-shaped houses the color of cooked liver. A pack of wild dogs wandered out of a field where black-eyed Susans sprouted like yellow plates. All down the path folks sat on porches and in yards. They whistled and prayed as the dirt boy passed. Some chucked handfuls of dried beans at him, or came down and tried knotting ribbons on his arms and legs.

  It was dark time he reached the end of the path. There stood a house with the door cracked open. The dirt boy saw the woman from his broken memory inside this house, sucking on a honeycomb as if it was a hammered thumb. He saw too a man with blue arms not far off from his own color. When the dirt boy entered the room the woman sensed his presence and picked him up.

  “Where’d you find this at?”

  The blue-armed man came over and petted the dirt boy on the head. He pulled out the feathers and put them on a shelf. “Out in the woods,” he said. “You can carry it back to him.”

  The woman held the dirt boy on her lap. “You really ain’t coming? I know y’all argued, but he got flung off and kindly beat up.” She did not mention the injuries she’d suffered. “He can’t cut this tree off the house by hisself. And he won’t let me try.”

  “But he’ll send you over here in this condition,” the blue-armed man said.

  The woman instinctively touched her stomach.

  The blue-armed man picked up a guitar. He plucked a string that rattled and buzzed. He plucked another and another, driving out a rhythm, and sang, State lines ain’t good for much, except for keeping you and me out of touch. He sang till he ran out of words then he just hummed and plucked a simple melody, which shifted like the floodwaters outside the door. The final note, when played, took much longer to fade out than it should of.

  “Well,” he said, propping the instrument against a wall, “I reckon we ought to head on if we’re going to.”

  He told the woman to go ahead. Wasn’t safe for them together. He knew a boat, faster than walking around the flood. She listened close to his directions then picked up the dirt boy and headed thataway.

  This was not the place the dirt boy hunted. He waited till they were well out from dry land before diving off the boat. Looking up, he saw the woman’s face beyond the rippling surface as he sank and sank all way to the silty bottom, where a catfish big enough to swallow him stirred up from the mud and leaves. Rusted hooks dangled from the fish’s thick scarred lips and its wide pale face and its bloodred gills. The fish acknowledged the dirt boy with a timeless stare then brushed past, long whiskers wrapping around him like a blessing, and was gone.

  He swam to the bank and walked on. It was daylight time the dirt boy came to a familiar spring in familiar woods. All sudden he remembered this water and his strange birth from its bank. Startling awake to the man from his memory’s big tan face. The way the horror of existence rolled and rolled and rolled as he held the man’s hand that day, walking together across a shaggy pasture, past a barn standing with no walls, down to a fishpond beyond it, to a tangle of honeysuckle big as a parked vehicle. There were blackbirds among this vine. Slick-feathered, red-winged creatures fluttering like wind-whipped cloth.

  The man tossed seed onto the ground, and a few birds lit down and pecked it. He strewed more and more, coaxing the birds closer. The dirt boy could see his own reflection in one’s unblinking eye. A dark dark boy with eyes blue and deep, and hair—the dirt boy had hair, he realized, touching it then—soft and black, growing in sweeping cowlicks all over a head that seemed too big for his body.

  The man shot out his hand and grabbed this blackbird. It cried out dik-dik-dik and ruffled up the feathers around its neck. He told the dirt boy to stand still as he pressed the struggling bird up against his throat.

  Water began pooling up in the dirt boy’s mouth. He could feel the bird’s itty-bitty heart. It quit crying out and an itch started in his throat. Water leeched out of his cheeks. The itch became painful as it fell down into the dirt boy’s chest, spread throughout his jaws and threatened to pry apart his head.

  Then the man opened his fist and the blackbird burst out like a wad of shot. It landed back among the vine. The other birds moved away. The pain vanished as the dirt boy wrenched open his mouth and struck his tongue to life.

  “Who am I?”

  The man did not answer. He motioned at the blackbirds and said, “Shoo.” They took to the sky in a murmuration, folding and spinning into themselves, as if he’d somehow stitched them together. Before long they’d left sight of the clearing, except for the lonesome one, which remained, working its beak up and down like a pump handle, stretching so hard the dirt boy wondered if its bones would tear through feather and flesh.

  Back at the spring the dirt boy pushed aside fallen branches. He caught sight of his ruined reflection and splashed it gone. The image returned. Eternity squeezed itself into what remained of his busted head. He felt his consciousness expanding like the elaborate fungal threads buried in the loamy forest floor. The man who made him believed everything was created from all the same parts, not a thing in this world in and of itself. The dirt boy splashed gone the clods dangling from his knotted vine and wound wire innards. Though the image returned to the water’s surface, he was, he knew now, something more than what could be seen.

  * * *

  The storm had slung Hugh sixty-some feet by Maybelle’s count. When she found him his clothes were missing, as was one boot. With some effort he was able to cling to the mule, who was unharmed and unimpressed by the storm. Maybelle led them to the house. An oak tree had fallen through the roof. She tied a tarp between it and the wall, and this is where the Treebornes waited out the days of intense rain that followed.

  Both Maybelle and the unborn child, as far as she could tell, were fine. Her cuts would heal before long. Meantime, she cooked root vegetable stocks. She scrambled quail eggs with hog brains, fed Hugh fresh honeycomb mixed with candied nuts, a raw egg dropped in buttermilk. She cleared limbs off the springhouse and emptied its reserves—blackberries, smoky jars
of persimmons, pickled beans and onions and green tomatoes, peach butter and molasses. She cooked for herself as much for him, her appetite like a motor that leaks oil. She wanted dessert. Pound cake with chopped pecans, and top milk poured over it. These cravings seemed as much a living part of her as the child she carried in her stomach.

  Once the rain stopped she went into town to check on the post office. A window had been broken, but otherwise the building looked fine. Though the mail would not run for weeks, folks were waiting outside the door. They had stories to tell. A relative asleep in bed with clean bloomers tucked under her pillow was lifted across the road and not a hair on her head harmed—the bloomers where she placed them before going to sleep. A hickory behind Elberta Second Baptist fell and formed the shape of a cross. A whole deck of cards stuck in the side of a barn as if thrown there by a magician. Goliath, the crane, had toppled onto the dam. Dee and Tucker Sargent found their fighting roosters huddled in a culvert, pecking each other’s eyes out.

  When she got home that evening she found Hugh standing on his own weight. Bruises on his body the color of rotting bananas. “You lost your mind,” she said. “Here, sit back down.”

  He ignored her and pushed through the fallen tree’s branches to the trunk. He thumped it like you might a cantaloupe to check its ripeness and said, “I need you to go get Lee Malone for me.”

  After she left, Hugh sat on the porch and fretted over sending Maybelle across the valley alone. No other choice to his mind though. His experience in the storm had given inspiration for a new assemblie. He needed a frame, and the oak tree seemed divined.

  After what Loudermilk had done, Hugh thought he’d never make another assemblie. It wasn’t just the gamble he’d lost, the money that never was, but how the yankee, by taking credit, had become him. Hugh’d let this happen. Not again.

  Maybelle and Lee showed up later that night. Hugh kissed her and asked was she alright. Even touched her round belly, which was as near as he’d come to outwardly acknowledging the child. It was plain to anybody who looked that she was in the family way. He hugged Lee’s neck too. The men laughed to keep from crying, everything bad between them now gone.

  Come dawn Lee began cutting the tree off the house while Hugh supervised from an overturned pail. Took half the day. Lee loaded as much wood as he could fit into Hugh’s wagon. Woodrow would be glad for the fuel to smoke his hogs. The rest of the tree’s trunk he piled next to Hugh’s studio. “Hope you ain’t expecting me to strip and plane it for you too,” he said.

  Hugh told him he would handle that and did.

  As his body healed, Hugh worked the oak tree down and used the timber to build a large frame. He constructed a pulley system in the studio so he could raise and lower this new assemblie. He cut mesh wire and attached it all over, then began shaping this wire by hand and with the taps of a tiny wooden mallet. He had in mind to create an entire history. Onto the wire he slathered clay. When it dried he added another layer, then another. Each movement of his hands, minute though they were, called to mind the shifting of the earth. Maybelle could do nothing but watch—afraid if she spoke it would break the spell.

  * * *

  No one asked Lee Malone to track down and bury the corpses on The Seven. One evening he just showed up with a shovel and began work. At dark Maybelle carried him a cheese sandwich. He thanked her then ate it on the walk home.

  As far as Maybelle could tell, Hugh had not noticed Lee’s presence or the work he’d done for them. He rarely left the studio. She’d heard The Authority was beginning to rehire men, but Hugh’d shown no interest in going back. She could not coax him inside the house no matter how late the night wore. She worried the child would come while she was alone and Hugh would not be able to hear her across the yard. Meantime the new assemblie grew and it grew. He’d flipped the frame so he could lie on his back and work on it from below. Maybelle worried the pulley might give and the assemblie crush him.

  One night she found Hugh plucking the feathers of broke-necked birds, which in the days following the storm were as common as pokeweed. She was restless from the continuing spring humidity and heat, and from carrying a living thing inside her.

  After a long silence she tried convincing Hugh to come inside the house. She wanted to make love with the cooling machine blowing on them. She yearned for Hugh to put down his art and be with her, his wife.

  But he would not.

  After she left, Hugh continued plucking dead songbirds. Tiny bodies cold and rigid in his hand. He realized Maybelle wanted him. But this history of Elberta meant more than either of their desires. He took a knife and gutted the birds in turn then pinned up their hollow carcasses on the wall. He would use feathers to represent the waters running all throughout this land. Inside the house he heard Maybelle trying to start the cooling machine. She hollered out of frustration and kicked the thing so it rang out.

  When he was through Hugh walked down at the spring to rinse. Being alone on The Seven rarely unnerved him, but this night he felt the immensity of these woods and their blue-black darkness. He remembered how his daddy would disappear into them as if entering another universe. Having reached the moon-sheened water, Hugh saw why he felt the way he did. There was the dirt boy. Hugh asked him where he’d been at but the dirt boy did not reply. Hugh scooped a handful of clay then stopped hisself. He would fix up Crusoe tomorrow, he decided. Tonight he needed rest.

  Maybelle was faking sleep when he got down next to her. “Look what I found,” he whispered, setting Crusoe on the floor. “Thought he’d been lost for good.”

  Maybelle rolled over to see, her roundly shape visible underneath the quilt. “I wonder would we be better off if he had.”

  Bring Her Back to Elberta

  1958

  Janie cut her hair with scissors stolen from The Bird’s Nest. The blades were dull and pulled so much she cried. She cut her hair all way down to the scalp while Crusoe sat watching locks pile up around her scabbed feet. She’d put the dirt boy back together in a crude way. Seams showed, his head dented like overhandled fruit. She buried the hair to hide her scent. Someone would be coming, now that they’d recognized her at the restaurant.

  She had enough food to last four-five days. They could be out of the county by then. Which was the next one over—Poarch? What lay between Bankhead and the Gulf was uncertain. Janie opened the trunk. The catfish slashed tea-colored water. She touched the fish’s underside, something hard beneath the skin. Maybe babies, she thought. The fish turned a shoveled head into Janie’s hand, like a dog, and gazed up with eyes fogged gray. Janie imagined honey-colored eggs squirted out of the fish’s underside. Whenever her daddy caught a pregnant fish he spooned out these eggs and spread them on a saltine cracker. Janie wouldn’t eat this catfish’s eggs though. No, she’d hatch them—and those fish would lay eggs, which would hatch and grow in the safe harbor Janie aimed to build them. Somewhere. Generation upon generation upon untouched generation, swimming in one wet world.

  “Can’t carry it forever,” Crusoe said. He’d climbed up onto the bumper of the vehicle and was peering down into the trunk.

  Janie cried off and on the rest of that afternoon, knowing the dirt boy was right. She ate a butter biscuit and a bruised peach—ate it skin and all. She pinched the legs off several crickets and dropped them into the trunk. The crickets sank to the rusted bottom. The catfish would not feed. Animals always know what’s coming, Janie thought.

  Before they left, Crusoe built a fire with green branches to draw the searchers thataway. Janie helped pile on more and more branches till the pyre rose twice as tall as herself. They burnt the last of the coal chunks too—firesmoke turning black from white.

  It was good-dark time they crossed the road outside Bankhead and came down through a pinebrake to Big Connie Ward’s used-car lot. Bats swooped in and out of foggy yellow light shining down on the vehicles. A line of pickups barreled past, miners headed for the owl shift. Janie tapped Crusoe when the road was clear. They jumped t
he railing then hustled behind the building. She listened at the garage door while he caught up.

  All the keys hung in an unlocked cabinet next to the secretary’s desk, which, Janie noticed, was emptied and cleaned off. The keys were tagged with a plastic peach, written on it the make and model. Janie looked out the window and found a pickup truck like the one her daddy drove. She grabbed the key. Rain began falling as she helped Crusoe up onto the bench seat. She had to sit on the edge to see overtop the dashboard. This a surprise. She needed to remind herself she’d only been gone a month. Felt like years.

  The chain strung across the entrance snapped off the posts when Janie drove into it and got caught underneath the truck. It sparked a ways down the road then spun off into the ditch. She was still bad with a clutch. When she shifted, the truck heaved, stalled, and Crusoe fell into the floorboard. Raindrops streaked the windshield like lead. Janie felt for the wiper switch and tried to restart the engine. First, second, third, fourth, she heard her daddy saying, like a song, as she wiggled the shifter to try again. Crusoe climbed back up and stood with his hands against the dashboard. The radio switched on. Janie couldn’t make sense of what Pedro Hannah was saying.… ninety-nine cent for two or pick one … Now they were rolling. Janie heard her daddy say Alright whenever it came time to shift. They picked up speed and she shifted to third then cranked down the window and hollered. She felt a lightness she had not felt in months. They were headed south. No telling how fast. Too fast to see the owl swoop down from out of darkness till it’d caved in the windshield.