Treeborne

by Caleb Johnson

  Janie led them down at Dismal Creek then up a gurgling branch to a spring. Tammy sat down on an overturned boat while the girl eased the dirt boy into the water.

  “You’ll ruin it.”

  The dirt boy sank then bobbed back up and floated in a manner that, in the dark, resembled swimming. The moon unfurled a tongue of yolky light. The dirt boy passed through to the far side of the spring, where Janie waited to pull him out.

  “Your grandmomma used to tell us this was the Fountain of Youth,” Tammy said. “That De Soto discovered it.”

  “That ain’t true.”

  “Is that right?”

  “Fountain of Youth’s down in Florida,” Janie told her aunt. “And De Soto wasn’t hunting nothing but gold up here.”

  Tammy wasn’t used to inspiration seeding itself in her. They were halfway up the hill before she realized it had happened. The movie she needed to show opening night at the Elberta Deluxe Drive-In Theater would be about Hernando de Soto! There wasn’t a movie about the conquistador though, least as far as she knew. And now she didn’t even have any land to open a drive-in on and show such a movie if it did exist. Well, she thought, seed sprouting into leafy glory, I’ll just make the movie my own damn self.

  The clearing was still in deep mud on the backside of the house. Tammy offered to tote Crusoe, but Janie would not let her. Stubborn, just like her grandmomma. They trudged on, splattering red dots up the backs of their legs with each step. Wooten was in his workshop, a radio blaring out into the night. All sudden Tammy stopped. Inspiration wasn’t through with her yet. She looked all around the wide flat clearing. If she could not buy the old Rampatorium then she’d build her drive-in theater right here.

  * * *

  Tammy taught herself how to direct from a book she found at the Elberta County Public Library. For some reason Mrs. Elliott—the sole librarian since Nita left town—wouldn’t allow her to check out this book. So Tammy stole it.

  Janie would sometimes flip through its pages. There were camera diagrams, lighting charts, and, on the first page, a list of tips for aspiring moviemakers:

  -Creating comes from memory

  -Know your frame

  -There is no process

  -Failure does not matter

  -One idea does not make a movie

  -Dream

  -Story, story, story

  Tammy would crow these sayings while filming. She’d decided not to appear on camera herself. Figured she’d be able to use her family for every part. But, after the initial few days of filming, it became clear she’d need other actors. She asked Pedro Hannah to say something about it on the radio. Day after he did, thirty-something folks showed up on The Seven. They became both cast and crew. Small sets were built in the woods, the pasture, the clearing, which was also being excavated to make way for the drive-in screen and parking rows. Everyone dressed how they imagined the Spanish and Elberta Indians would of dressed, and they spoke lines in heavy accents, also imagined, though Tammy had no way to record sound. The first couple weeks of shooting focused on the Elberta Indians. Folks who had nothing to do with the movie showed up with sandwiches and cold beer, and tried to puzzle out what the actors were doing and how come. One day somebody from the Times-Journal took pictures, which ran on the second-to-last page, above the classifieds.

  Wooten had not lost his mind over the drive-in theater plan. But Tammy hadn’t yet told him she wanted a divorce. Winter remained mild. If this weather held she could keep filming into December. Wooten and Ren had framed a screen and began planting speakerposts into the ground. Tammy swore that she’d tell Wooten about the divorce soon as they finished building her concession stand. The projection room would go on top. Wooten would have to finish that too. Tammy still aimed to learn how to run the projector herself. She wouldn’t need him. She’d finally got a lead on one to buy in a town near the Mississippi border.

  One day she was watching Wooten and Ren lay the concession stand’s foundation when both men stood up straight and puzzled over something on the ground. Tammy got up from her rocker and went to see what they’d messed up this time.

  When she got there, Ren was holding a bone. Too big for a deer, not quite that of a cow. “What’s it from?” she asked.

  “I ain’t got the slightest,” he said.

  Wooten kicked at the dirt where they’d been working. “Look here,” he said. “Another one.”

  Janie’d joined them too. The girl got down and began digging with her hands. Before long she’d uncovered the smooth curved portion of what looked like a human skull.

  Till Death Do They Part

  1930

  Maybelle gave birth in the summer. They named the child Renton, called him Ren for short. To her surpise, Sampley covered for Maybelle at the post office till she could return. Meantime money dwindled. The Authority was still taking on men to help clean up the damage done by the storm till construction resumed. Hugh refused to wait in line for a job. He’d planted those bones to stop this so-called progress, but nature, after all, had steered Elberta back on its intended course. He stayed gone for nights at a time, searching out objects for his history. He had to put more ceiling beams up to bear its weight. He’d been stopped by the law after crawling through Woodrow’s barbecue pits, picking out just the right charcoal pieces. Covered in soot, toting still-warm coals in the basket of his shirttail. Maybelle worried they might not let him go next time, might haul him off to the asylum in Poarch County. I need you here with me sometimes, she told him, for what little good it did. Not off chasing whatever it is in your head.

  The garden they’d planted bloomed lush and wild. Okra this tall, three kinds of purple tomatoes dangling on vines, white corn, bulbous yellow squash, pickling cukes, watermelon and cantaloupe and so on. Once Maybele recovered from giving birth, the crops were again hers to tend. She laid Ren on a quilt in some shade while she hoed and picked. Doted on her fat little baby boy, his arms like the sausages hanging in Beachy’s butcher shop. She would pinch those arms till they turned pink and he cried, then she’d laugh and kiss him till he stopped.

  Sometimes Lee Malone came by with fresh peaches. Maybelle sliced them and they ate. Usually Hugh could not be bothered to join. Summer rainshowers were replaced by fall and its long-shadowed light. Maybelle fixed cobblers with the peaches Lee brought her then. They talked less about Hugh and the possibility of Loudermilk’s return, and more about themselves. She told of her childhood in Bankhead, leaving on a whim to become an actress, failing, being sent to Elberta by the postal service. He told her about his momma momma dying, the white folks that raised him, meeting Hugh for the first time, about Caz, about traveling the circuit and working at the textile mill, and now working for Mr. Prince. One day Lee showed up with blood on his shirt. Told her it was nothing and reached into the crib for Ren. She saw the pain on his face though as he lifted the child. She kept asking what’d happened till Lee raised his shirt and pulled back a bandage. The knife wound looked like a small mouth. The skin around it was discolored. Maybelle sat him down and stitched the wound with fishing line. Lee laughed and joked while she worked, and Maybelle tried not to blush when she held his hip to crank the sutures.

  In many ways these were her best days. They’d take aimless walks across The Seven, Lee toting Ren and sometimes singing to the child. His voice killed Maybelle each time she heard it—same as it had the first. She drank up the place like a sot does wine, yet felt homesick each day, which she could not reckon with nor explain. A rhythm never found again.

  These days passed, like all days do, and Maybelle returned to work. Sampley acted miffed about her being around again. This September, six months after the storm. A funny thing started happening. Alyson Tillis came in with one of Hugh’s assemblies. Said it’d appeared out behind her barn. That word—appeared—troubled Maybelle. It implied a lack of control. She thanked Alyson and put the assemblie in the sorting room. Odd, she thought, how the woman recognized what she’d found. Maybelle didn’t mention t
he incident to Hugh, thinking it sheer coincidence. But, by the day, more folks brought in assemblies that’d been blown across the valley during the storm. Each encounter was matter-of-fact. Here, they seemed to say, this belongs to you.

  She let the assemblies pile up till Sampley began fussing. She could not carry them to The Seven by herself. Asking Hugh, she felt, was not possible.

  One afternoon she walked over at The Peach Pit and waited for Lee Malone to come down the orchard. She wanted to show him something. He met her back at the post office and she snuck him into the sorting room. It wasn’t much bigger than a mop closet and smelled strongly of paper and ink. They had to whisper. Every so often someone would unlock a P.O. box and take out a bundle of mail from the other side of the wall.

  “They done all the work for him,” Lee said.

  “Reckon we should tell?”

  “No, not yet.”

  Lee offered to haul the assemblies onto The Seven. But Maybelle got worried. What would Hugh think if he found out she’d gone to Lee? She told Lee no and, rather than sneaking Hugh’s wagon, asked Dee if she could borrow theirs. Tucker refused, but Dee defied him—and paid with her jaw. The women did the work themselves, adding to the assemblies that still sat atop the mass grave.

  Maybelle did not see Lee Malone for some time after this. She feared she’d offended him. Sometimes she would dream alternate versions of her and Lee in that sorting room. These dreams hung over her head for an entire day, sometimes longer. She worried Hugh could read her thoughts. She still hadn’t told him the truth about the night he sent her to Freedom Hills to ask Lee to come help cut the tree off the house—and she never would.

  What stuck out in her memory of that night was how empty The Hills were when she got there. The only person she could find was a Chinese man who ran a general store. He was lighting blue and red and yellow paper lanterns strung up on a dogwood tree. She asked the man if he knew Lee Malone and he answered in, she guessed, Chinese. Gestured with his hands. After a while the man quit and walked away. Maybelle realized he meant for her to follow. He went a stretch down the lane and pointed at the woods. At first she saw nothing but trees. The man pointed again and ushered her on. She had to cross a ditch before she could make out the barge on the river. She nearly tripped over some kids playing on the bank, who stopped and stared as she walked onboard across a wobbly plank.

  What Maybelle saw on the barge reminded her of the tent services presided over by her father in Bankhead and towns like it to the south and west. She pushed through a crowd dancing to music like nothing she’d ever heard. Her father knew all the best guitar players, he said, and enlisted them to play folks down at the altar where he would save their souls. Music always had been her favorite part of church. After the tent cleared out her father and the other men would bust out bottles of booze, and play and sing sometimes till dawn. Jim Chambliss wasn’t very good. Even Maybelle the girl could tell, watching from the darkness where the women cleaned dishes and nursed babies to sleep. He did not drink. Said he was drunk enough on God. This music on the barge sounded near to her father’s church music, but different. She couldn’t decide exactly how. She pushed toward the source, thinking only to find out.

  Then she saw him. Though they’d never met she recognized Lee Malone from things Hugh had told her. Arms blue from the elbows down, it looked like his hands were threaded to the guitar by invisible wire. He lifted a boot then stomped the makeshift stage. Time itself became meaningless. The barge bobbed with the crowd and with the river’s movements. Maybelle understood then why everybody was here. Words less important than how they sounded. She watched two men pulling giant catfish out of the river. They sliced open the fish’s bellies and dropped steaming handfuls of guts over the side. They dusted the fish whole in cornmeal then plopped them in a big pot of bubbling grease, pulling the fish out after just a few minutes and tearing off crusty chunks of flesh that they folded inside bread and passed to waiting hands. Maybelle took one herself. Somebody pulled her to dance. Hot grease burnt her tongue and her lips as she ate and spun. Her partner smelled like mint. Another somebody poured liquor into her mouth. She spat and spilled on her dress. Folks laughed, folks cried. Maybelle looked up at the sky and was reminded how life and death stood but a hair’s width from each other, and oftentimes bumped. Could again any moment, the music called to everyone on the barge. She tried to keep her eyes on Lee, but her vision began to blur.

  She came to sprawled among cattails. The kids who’d witnessed her arrival now touching her hair. When she sat up they screamed and ran away. She vomited on herself then crawled to the river and stuck her head in the water. She came up gasping, and there he was, Lee Malone, walking off the barge with that guitar in hand.

  “Hugh sent me,” she said.

  Lee stopped. “I wondered if the fool hadn’t died.”

  “He needs your help.”

  “I bet he does,” Lee said. “And who are you? Some of his kin?”

  “I’m his wife,” she said.

  This memory sustained Maybelle throughout the fall. Ren was a fussy baby and the history consumed Hugh’s waking hours, so she dealt with the child herself. She felt lonesome in a way singular to marriage and motherhood.

  Then one day Lee stopped by the post office again and told her he’d heard from a man named Dyar that a yankee had showed up in Poarch County. He wondered was this their man Loudermilk. If so, there was scant time to gather up assemblies before he arrived in town. Without hesitating, Maybelle offered to help.

  They met in the clearing after she put Ren to sleep. Hugh in his studio with the enormous assemblie hanging over him. Maybelle knew so little about art, even after spending time witnessing her husband make his. She tried to go by her gut-feeling. Ones that struck her like a fist. As they worked, Lee Malone sang, his voice in harmony with crickets and the odd bird of the woods calling out from the darkness. This went on for nights. They stored the assemblies they picked in the springhouse. Sometimes Lee would take off his shirt and jump in the water before going home. Maybelle felt ashamed watching him swim and wished she knew how so she could join him. Ashamed each time a feeling she both fought and welcomed came crawling back there in the dark as they rifled through all her husband had created.

  She and Lee had been at it for several nights with no new word about the yankee sighting. Maybelle often asked herself why she was out there. Not for Hugh, she knew. He never would care what happened to his art. A few days before she’d asked what he would do if Loudermilk showed up again. The storm, she thought, might of changed his mind. Hugh told her it wouldn’t matter, he would ask the yankee to leave then keep doing what he’d always done. No, Maybelle was not doing this for Hugh Treeborne. This was for her. Might as well admit. She stopped what she was doing and confessed her feelings to Lee Malone, as if it’d make a difference. She was married—just one of many reasons why they could not be together.

  Lee sat down on a crate made to look like a bird’s cage, whatever had been the bird missing from its perch. He did not let on whether he was surprised by Maybelle saying she had feelings for him. He was not; he felt thataway too. But he did not say this. He measured his response to her not against the moment they were in, but through an understanding of time. Now was not right; later maybe.

  “I was thinking to go up at Wisconsin,” he said.

  “To live?”

  “No, hell no. There once was this man I met told me I could come up yonder and record my music. Been thinking to take him up on it.”

  “Well you ought to then,” she said, turning her back to him. “Who knows what could happen if you were to wait.”

  She was glad Lee was leaving town, Maybelle told herself as she lay down alone that night. You’re married, you fool. Pledged to love till death do you part. She thought back to the days when her body knew she was with child but her mind had not accepted it. Woke up sick and hurried away from the house so Hugh would not hear. How come? Now this, another secret. Maybelle was learnin
g that marriage, like everything else, was full of them.

  * * *

  As winter blew into the valley Maybelle let bitterness and anger foul her innards. Even the baby put her on edge, though he could not help his coughing fits. One day she lashed out at Hugh while he lay underneath the assemblie, accusing him of being no better than a bump on a log, among other more vulgar insinuations.

  “Lee’s right about you,” she said. She regretted speaking his name, as if those three letters might reveal how she felt.

  If Hugh noticed the redness on his wife’s face he did not mention it. He said he had something to show her and he crawled out from under the massive assemblie. He raised it to the rafters, hand over hand, and secured it, tugging the corners to be sure the assemblie would not fall. From a shelf Hugh took down a metal box and opened the lid. The headmarker etchings inside. They were beautiful, Maybelle thought, unfolding each one. Names and birth and death dates adorned with drawings and, in some cases, poetry or scripture. But these weren’t what Hugh wanted to show her. He handed her a page torn from a newspaper:

  A new gallery showing by renowned Philadelphia artist Seth A. Loudermilk, who has traveled the world studying naïve art and interviewing those who create it. Loudermilk’s newest work was inspired by a series of dreams he had while camping next to a river in darkest Alabama. He calls these pieces “assemblies” and says—

  “That snake took your art and—”

  “And I let him,” Hugh said.

  “We ought to write a letter.” Maybelle felt tears coming. “We’ll write this paper and tell them that yankee lied!”

  “Won’t do a lick of good,” Hugh said.

  He was right, though she tried to convince him otherwise. Why had he told her the truth if he refused to do anything about it? How much did this feeling have to do with her own restlessness? She considered using the child as motivation. But she feared what might happen if this failed. What burden she might place on Ren’s head by doing so. Life would be difficult enough, it seemed, without that guilt for both of them to bear.