Treeborne

by Caleb Johnson

  Just before the new year Lee Malone showed up with a black disc in a yellow paper sleeve. Maybelle had no means by which to play the thing and felt like she was being made a fool with the gift and his unannounced return. Lee wouldn’t reveal how the song he’d recorded went, which angered her further. After supper, down by the pond, their breaths visible in the air, Maybelle asked him to sing it—feelings for him crawling back. You’ll hear it one day, he told her. This faith was heartbreaking in a way she could not name.

  Not long after his return Lee was promoted to orchard manager at The Peach Pit. He’d come to The Seven to share the good news. Folks in town didn’t seem to realize he’d been promoted yet. Lee worried what would occur when they figured it out. Said Mr. Prince didn’t understand what it was like for him to be in this position. Maybelle was only half-listening to Lee though, sitting near the woodstove and bouncing Ren on her lap.

  Lee changed the subject, asking whether there’d been word from the yankee yet. Maybelle told him about the newspaper article, what Loudermilk had done. An easy enough decision. In this moment she wanted to hurt them, Lee and Hugh both.

  “Well,” Lee said, “it wasn’t for us to do.”

  “You’re just scared,” she told him.

  She was right, Lee Malone was scared. He betrayed his friend every day he woke and his mind rushed right toward Maybelle. To betray Hugh in yet another way by—by what, by getting Loudermilk to confess? By getting Hugh some kind of credit? Foot, Hugh knew what Loudermilk had done. Sometimes knowing was enough. Lee understood how Maybelle interpreted his reaction as plain fear though. But he knew hisself and Hugh Treeborne knew that so long as they assemblied, so long as they sang, so long as they loved and so long as they lost, the pit of why they did so would remain hard and unchanged.

  He was reminded of an old drummer named T-Model who he’d known on the chitlin’ circuit. Sitting by the stove, he told Maybelle how T-Model kept a piece of paper taped onto his snare drum. On this paper he’d written a list:

  eat

  sleep

  look

  comb your head

  do nothing

  They sat in blooming silence. The baby Ren cooed and blubbered and clenched his fists. Maybelle patted him. After a while Hugh came down from the studio. Filthy from head to toe. The man worked as if at the end waited peace. It did not. Only more work to be done, Maybelle knew. She would forgive him this or not. But right now the baby was crying and her breasts ached and she just wanted her husband to touch her.

  Hugh placed a hand on her shoulder. “I love my family.”

  His touch left a stain. She couldn’t quit staring at it.

  “They love you too,” Lee said.

  * * *

  In the middle of the night, Maybelle woke to the sound of Ren coughing. She toted the baby outside so he wouldn’t wake up his father. The sky showed all it held. She pulled back her coat and rolled down her dress, but Ren couldn’t quit coughing long enough to latch on. She toted him down at the spring and splashed cold water onto his face and chest. Took the baby’s breath. She sat down on the leafy bank and gazed toward the years ahead. They appeared sloped. She saw herself flying downhill like a greased melon given a good hard kick. Trees cycled green to brown to fire yellow and red, to bare, again and again and again and again. Her skin did like a candle left in the sun. She heard a clicking, a clicking, clicking, then it stopped. She saw beyond these woods surrounding her the Elberta River running as time itself. Eternity, seemed like, would threaten to consume Maybelle Chambliss Treeborne every remaining minute of her life, like the unsatisfiable monster she knew it to be. She saw her marriage to Hugh, which already seemed far-gone, his early death to cancer, and she glimpsed what she and Lee Malone would settle for long after the kids were grown and Hugh’d been buried in the pasture up the hill from where at present she sat.

  She was almost back to the house when she caught sight of a shadow slinking past the studio. Someone toting an assemblie. She did not cry out nor give chase to this form. Somewhere down the lane, she knew, a big black vehicle was hidden in the brush. The way stretched on. Many more Elbertas to pilfer and plunder. Night long yet. The vehicle humming its futuristic hymn as it slid through darknesses unknown.

  The Hole in Lee Malone’s Guitar

  1958

  A song never hurt nobody, Lee Malone kept telling the sheriff. He could put in a word with the warden if he just would. Lee swore not to play anything that’d rile up the prisoners. Didn’t they deserve a little bit of pleasure, same as the rest of us? It took several trips visiting Ricky Birdsong in Poarch County before he convinced Aaron Guthrie of this. One day the sheriff arrived to pick him up and said, “Go get that guitar then.”

  Lee fed Buckshot all the raw bacon in the refrigerator, crying and kneading the dog’s skinfolds as he ate. He kissed the dog’s wet black snout then set him running free out back of the house—same as he did each time he left to visit Ricky Birdsong. The dog stopped at the edge of the property though. His person wasn’t coming; he’d go no farther. Lee hollered and waved his arms. Buckshot tucked tail and shivered. The sheriff was honking. Each time he left to visit Ricky, Lee had to break off a branch and whip the dog till he disappeared into the pasture. Doing so like to killed him. But Lee had to, in case he did not return, which was a possibility he had no choice but to accept.

  He thought about the dog all way to the Poarch County Correctional Facility. The joy he felt watching Buckshot run, things he’d learned from him. A dog the only creature capable of unconditional love. He couldn’t let the sheriff see him cry, but he couldn’t stop the memories: Buckshot toting a rotten deer leg through the woods, chasing a red rubber ball into De Soto Lake, over and over, asleep in bed and whimpering at dog dreams.

  “Everything alright?”

  “Yeah,” Lee said.

  The prison appeared at the end of the long straight gravel road. Looked like it’d been built to hold expensive paintings and marble statues. The soapy granite front faced a big enclosed yard surrounded by cement walls topped with gleaming sharp wire. Cornfields grew on three sides, the stalks dried yellow, this being late November. A guard holding a shotgun waved the sheriff through a sliding gate. He parked the vehicle near an administrative building then let Lee Malone out of the back.

  Lee kept his eyes trained low going down the hallway. No sudden movement, nothing open to interpretation. He held Rosette’s case with both hands. There were more gates and more doors studded with locks big as Bibles between the prison entrance and the room where Ricky Birdsong and another fifty-some white prisoners sat on folding chairs. There would be no black prisoners invited to this special performance. Somewhere down another hallway set the Yeller Mother. Fried brains quick as The Fencepost’s skillet did eggs. Lee knew he could wind up taking his seat on her yet. The sheriff was hanging Maybelle’s death over him. After six months, the investigation yet ongoing. He’d asked Lee about the peach pits found in Tammy and Wooten’s mailbox, and at Ricky Birdsong’s house. But the sheriff did not appear to believe Lee would be so stupid as to leave behind a clue like that. And these visits to see Ricky. One wrong move here all it took for someone like Lee Malone to never leave.

  The warden and a couple guards were waiting. The sheriff shook their hands while Lee set down the guitar case, unlatched it and touched Rosette.

  “Now who’s this nigger you brought?” the warden asked.

  “Lee Malone,” the sheriff said. “One of our most upstanding citizens. Grew up playing music in a True Believers church. Tends a orchard. Lee’s a real model to others of his race.”

  “What’s that stuck in his ear?” the warden asked.

  “Lee had a little, uh, accident back in summer. Ain’t that right Lee?”

  Lee looked up and tried to meekly smile. He began tuning the instrument, which he hadn’t played since the day they buried Maybelle Treeborne. Part of Lee thought he’d never play this guitar again, some kind of penitent tribute to her. But, he
thought, listening to each string stretch as he tuned, the boy needed it. Maybelle would understand.

  “Well I hope the thing’ll play with a big-old hole punched in it,” the warden said, pointing a grubby finger at Rosette.

  Lee strummed to show off the instrument’s sound.

  The guitar didn’t have a hole the day he found it. When he was younger Lee sometimes slept at a fishing shack on the river to escape the heat in Freedom Hills. One morning not long after the storm ravaged Elberta, Lee watched a pale face emerge in the swirling yellow water outside the shack. No telling how long bodies would keep turning up in the valley, especially now with the storm-flood receded. Only after Lee’d waded in and dragged this one out did he realize a guitar was gripped in the dead man’s hands. The instrument looked to be made of rosewood and a flat pick was wedged between the strings, which groaned and bled water when Lee pulled the pick loose. Turtles had been at the dead man’s face and curled ears. His skin looked like toilet paper that’d fallen into a commode. A tarnished ring dug into his stiff third finger. Lee felt inside the pocket sewn over where a heart had once beaten then propped the guitar against the porch. This time Lee needed help. Getting off The Seven, he thought, would be good for Hugh Treeborne.

  Time they got back with the wagon the dead man was stinking something awful. Piss ants and mulch beetles crawled across the body.

  “How long you reckon him in the water for?”

  “No telling,” Lee said. “Pretty young though.”

  “Well, I sure don’t know him from Adam.”

  Lee swatted a blue-black fly at the corner of the dead man’s mouth. The fly lit then landed right back where it’d been.

  “How come you not just let him float on past buddyroll?”

  “How come you ain’t just let them others sink?”

  Hugh sat down on the porchsteps and touched the dead man’s guitar.

  “He was holding on to it,” Lee said.

  “I’ll be shit.” Hugh picked up the instrument and strummed. “Play us something.”

  “Nah.”

  “Come on and play,” Hugh said, offering the guitar.

  Lee ran his thumb down the strings and began twisting the tuning pegs. He remembered his daddy showing him where his fingers went to chord the piano. His daddy could play all kinds of music, even what folks called hillbilly. White music. Played it like a bad joke. His daddy was high-yeller, Lee’s momma momma called it, and sorry as a yard dog. But he sure could sing. Oh, she’d say, he sure could sing. Before Lee’s daddy sang he’d always say, Now this here never has been written down by nobody. Older than your momma too. And Lee’s momma momma would guffaw and slap and smile. Lee never knew where beyond his daddy these songs came from. As he got older he realized their origin didn’t much matter so long as the songs rolled on toward the future—just like they’d been doing for ages on end.

  “Get on with it,” Hugh said.

  “Give me one blessed minute and I will.”

  Myra on the other hand couldn’t tolerate music. She said Lee’s singing was no-count. Drove her crazy—and not the way Lee so wished. He tried pushing Myra from his mind as he strummed the dead man’s guitar, hunting a rhythm and some words. Sometimes when he was drunk he’d make up filthy songs and sing them to Myra just to get a rise. He hummed, trying again to forget his ex-wife. Even Hugh didn’t know about Myra Lytle. She’d left Lee in what felt like another life—truth not six years ago this day. Lee pressed down the strings with his left hand, his right sweeping down, up, up, down. He hummed and hummed and he mumbled till far-flung parts of hisself began coming together. This feeling beat any dope or booze he’d ever tried. Forget Myra Lytle. Forget Maybelle Treeborne too. It was a wonder Lee hadn’t been sleeping at the fishing shack the other week when she came to find him in Freedom Hills. Hugh’d been badly injured in the storm, but Lee still didn’t think it right to send Maybelle there alone. Not for her or for Lee, who could of been killed by any number of folks had they known a white woman sat by his woodstove all that long-ago night.

  He shut his eyes and he sang:

  My billfold it is empty and

  somebody stole my best comb.

  I lay around this house just trying to figure out

  why you left me here all alone.

  “Goddamn it buddyroll,” Hugh said when Lee was through.

  Lee was holding the guitar by its neck and bottom, vibrations running all throughout the instrument. He tilted the guitar forward, sloshing water out of the sound hole. When he tilted the instrument farther out jumped a fish. Lee and Hugh got to laughing so hard they cried slow tears. They sat down on the porch and shared a bottle of peach whiskey.

  “You ain’t toting that dummy,” Lee said.

  “Not today.”

  “Reckon that yankee’ll ever show back up?”

  “Might,” Hugh said. “Might not.”

  “A mite’s what grows on a chicken’s ass.”

  Hugh did not laugh. Lee wondered did he get the joke. Then, all sudden, Hugh reached out and clasped Lee’s hands in his. “When the storm got me I seen it all from above,” he whispered as if sharing a secret. “How it’s all laid out down here.”

  How it’s all laid out. Lee knew how it was all laid out. So did this warden, who was big and fat and wore a cream-colored bow tie around his big fat neck. He wanted Lee searched for contraband before joining the prisoners. The guards approached. One reminded Lee of the policeman who came hunting him after he showed his grubby little-boy’s dick to Annie-Fay Wilhite—a white girl at the True Believers church who always smelled like cinnamon sticks and fresh-cut grass—because she threatened to have her daddy string him up and lop it off and feed it to the dogs if he didn’t whip that sucker out from his britches and show her right now. Annie-Fay’s daddy one of the men who terrorized the blacks leaving Elberta back into what became Freedom Hills. “Ew,” Annie-Fay said when she saw Lee the boy’s pecker, “looks like a burnt dill pickle.” Lee’s new parents more likely the only thing that kept him alive after this incident, though not from a vicious beating with a cane swung by Annie-Fay’s daddy.

  The sheriff tried easing the warden’s concerns. “Lee ain’t toting a thing but that guitar and the prettiest voice you ever heard. Come on now C.R., let’s enjoy the show.”

  The warden was convinced and the guards backed off. Lee picked up Rosette. Pennies he kept inside her body shifted. “Now you sure that thing’ll play?” the warden asked.

  “Yes sir,” Lee said as he slipped the leather strap behind his neck and fixed it on his shoulder. His hearing aid whined. He reached in his pocket and adjusted a knob on the little tin box.

  A buzzer buzzed and the door to the cafeteria opened. The prisoners all sat up straight as posts when the warden entered. They looked generally bored, Lee thought. He spotted Ricky Birdsong up front and center. The boy had shed weight since last Lee’d seen him. His lip was split and a yellow bruise shaded his left cheek like bad makeup. Overall seemed like Ricky was doing alright in prison though. He made and sold a version of his daddy’s brittle with sugar packets that other prisoners and guards secretted him, using an aluminum can and balled-up newspapers as a burner. Not like Lee could of helped the boy had he not been doing well. Aaron Guthrie pulling strings was the only reason Lee Malone had been allowed to visit the white prison block at all. The privilege could at any moment be revoked.

  “Now there’ll be some entertainment today,” the warden bellered from the back of the room. “So listen up!”

  Lee stepped on a fruit crate that would be his stage and tested a chord. Didn’t sound right. Another. Still not it. He picked a hillbilly melody. During the drive over Sheriff Guthrie had warned against playing nigger music. Lee’s mind wouldn’t focus on where his fingers landed. He kept remembering how, the day he found the guitar he came to call Rosette, him and Hugh’d finished that bottle of whiskey then watched a roof drift past them. Underneath, maybe, an entire house filled with furniture and keepsakes an
d drowned bodies. Who could know? The whiskey gone, Hugh pitched the empty bottle into the river. It bobbed, the water mending itself, then floated off too.

  “You ought to keep that,” Hugh said that day, nodding toward the dead man’s guitar. “Ain’t like he needs it no more.”

  “I don’t want to own something like this.”

  Lee already had a guitar bought off Manuel Dyar, whose daddy was a Mexican that hopped a train, and whose momma was a black woman born in the Mississippi pineflats where Manuel’s daddy broke his leg when he jumped off. Nobody remembered how the couple wound up in Elberta, Alabama, but they did remember the Dyars pushing a tamale cart up and down the streets while baby Manuel rode underneath the warming compartment with a fist stuck in his mouth. When he wasn’t sucking fist Manuel Dyar was singing. He learned to play guitar. All his days Manuel Dyar was small and misshapen except for two long hands and ten slender fingers. But only folks in The Hills knew Manuel Dyar for his music. The rest of the valley knew him for a garfish he caught in the Elberta River. Ten foot long—still a record—and Manuel broke his wrist fighting the sucker over an eight-hour stretch. Manuel kept the garfish on show in his living room. For a nickel anybody could go in and look. You could touch its papery flesh for a penny, but for no longer than five seconds at a time. Manuel counted Mississippi though so you got your money’s worth. Then one day Manuel Dyar electrocuted hisself to death plugging in his new candy-red guitar. Whole house burnt down to ashes—garfish included.

  Rosette soon took the place of the guitar Lee’d bought off Manuel Dyar. She fretted without effort and sounded bright and clear. One night the summer after Lee Malone found her he performed at Roger’s Lounge. He needed to be at The Peach Pit early the next morning. Didn’t want to disappoint Mr. Prince. Time he finished playing a streak of red light marked the horizon though. He walked toward it, toting a jar of beer in one hand and Rosette in the other. The peach harvest had recently peaked and he thought he’d bring a basket to Maybelle after work. They’d been spending more time together. The ever-present child and at least some remaining good sense kept Lee, for the time, from pushing friendship beyond its bounds. He cut across a useless field, grass hip-high and damp, thinking of Maybelle, and was about halfway to the treeline when a boy snuck up silent and forced him on the ground.