Treeborne

by Caleb Johnson

Janie watched her aunt driving. No radio, just silence. The girl no longer saw a woman cruel and destructive. When had this happened? She saw in her aunt the ability to start over, become anew, and she felt profound admiration every bit as surprising as the first time her body bled itself. Hatred, she realized, was in truth a sick kind of love.

  * * *

  On a windy day, all the miniature orange flags Sherrill had planted to mark the dig site snapping and popping, Janie removed the last bone, tagged it, and put it in a plastic container that resembled a tacklebox. They celebrated with a meal at The Fencepost. Sherrill was waiting on word of her next assignment. It hadn’t occurred to Janie that there would be another one. She kept this embarrassment to herself though. The uncertainty of where Sherrill would go was driving Tammy to drink nightly jugs of muscadine wine from the Quik-Stop. The empties she toted out back and shot to pieces.

  “I’m worried about your aunt,” Sherrill told the girl.

  “She was acting thisaway before you got here too.”

  “With that gun?”

  Janie said yeah. “Shooting at Granddaddy Hugh’s stuff.”

  “That’s a shame,” Sherrill said. “An archaeologist can’t help but wishing she was there when things were still new. That’s how I feel about that stuff your grandfather made. To see it when he was making it, you know?”

  “I’ll show you something when we get home,” Janie said.

  Back at The Seven she led Sherrill down at the spring. They opened the springhouse and flipped over the boat, where the best surviving collection of her granddaddy’s assemblies remained.

  “Where did these come from?” Sherrill asked.

  “Crusoe did it.”

  Sherrill appeared confused by the girl’s answer. She squatted down and examined an assemblie done on windowglass. “I have a friend who knows more about folk objects than I do,” she said. “I’ll get in touch with him before I leave.”

  * * *

  Tammy somehow managed to assemble fifteen minutes on film. Ren stitched together dozens of white sheets and hung them across the drive-in screen’s frame. No time to fit the panels before the date Tammy’d promised the paper. Janie and her uncle Luther took up money. Two hundred folks had come to The Seven for the world premiere of The Last Conquistador.

  Before the movie started Janie climbed up to the hastily finished projection room. It was stifling. Her aunt was there, waiting for the sun to set so she could begin the movie. Meantime Janie took a rag and wiped beads of moisture off the projector’s lens. She shooed Geronimo away, glanced out the window and said, “Won’t you just look down yonder at all them heads.” Some folks sat inside their vehicles, others were on quilts spread below the makeshift screen. Tammy got up and peered out the window herself. She turned to the girl and blinked, as if a curtain on some great secret had been pulled back. Carefully, she removed the reel from its canister, hung it on the projector then flicked a switch.

  The reel started spinning. The film slapped slapped slapped slapped. Tammy’d forgotten to thread the film through the sprockets and gates. Janie reached to stop it and her fingers got wrenched. She stuck them in her mouth. Her aunt, for some reason, did not seem bothered by this. Instead rifling through her purse. Tammy took a pack of cigarettes and shook one loose. She struck a match and the film burst into flames, which seemed to enjoy themselves as they burnt green and blue and yellow-white.

  Janie yanked the plug out of the wall. The reel slowly stopped spinning. She grabbed a broom and beat the film till the flames died down.

  Folks milled around the clearing, waiting to see if the movie might yet play. When they realized it would not, they folded their quilts and packed their belongings. Some wanted their ticket money returned. Most were too embarrassed to ask though, instead silently joining the procession of vehicles headed back into town.

  * * *

  The next week a letter arrived in Elberta telling Sherrill she was being sent to Wyoming. Must leave directly as possible, it said.

  Janie knew Tammy wouldn’t be able to watch Sherrill Robinson leave, so the girl stood in the yard and said goodbye for her aunt.

  “I guess she’s mad at me,” Sherrill said.

  “Yeah.”

  Sherrill laughed and wrapped her arms around the girl. “You’re a strange one Janie Treeborne. Oh, nearly forgot. I heard back from my friend and he wants to come take a look at your grandfather’s, what are they, assemblies. Make sure your aunt doesn’t run him off, okay. This needs preserving.”

  After Sherrill left, Janie went to check on her aunt. She found her in the bedroom watching films. Tammy’d positioned herself in front of the projector, so the images moved across her backside and were distorted time they reached the wall. Janie had to touch her to get her attention. She asked Tammy to go riding. Something about being in a moving vehicle always helped the girl feel better. It might, she thought, help her aunt in this case too.

  The N. W. Barfield National Forest was greening and filling out its understory. April in Elberta could go either way; sunny and warm or cloudy and cool. Tammy stopped at a gas station outside Bankhead, and bought a bottle of muscadine wine and two egg salad sandwiches while Janie waited in the truck with Crusoe. They drove on into town. The Bird’s Nest was packed for early lunch. Janie noticed a young couple toting a baby around the used-car lot. She’d been wrong in some ways about Big Connie Ward. Another to add to her growing list. Folks were neither good nor bad—her aunt included. Janie hoped someone would say the same for her. She reached into Tammy’s purse and pulled out a tube of lipstick. Put some on herself then took a map out of the glove box and gave directions.

  It took an hour of wandering to find the holler. They came in from above and walked down the landslide to the wreckage. Eight months later and some of the newspapers were still stuck on the windows. Janie tried peeling them off but they tore. She looked inside the trunk. The water had leaked out, or evaporated one, and scavengers had carried off all of the catfish but for its spine. Nestled in that bleached curve were things the fish had swallowed: a set of car keys, a broken knifeblade, a babydoll’s plastic foot, caps from countless coke-cola bottles thumped into the Elberta River by bored fishermen.

  Tammy paid these strange objects no mind. She climbed up on the smashed hood and opened the wine bottle. Janie set Crusoe in the trunk and joined her there. Tammy handed the bottle to the girl, and she drank. The wine sweet. Tammy smiled. They ate the egg salad sandwiches while daylight ran out into the trees and was capped by a dusk swarmed with the season’s first papery moths. When it was empty Tammy pitched the bottle into the woods.

  “About time,” she said.

  Janie returned to the trunk and folded Crusoe’s arms across his chest. Her aunt had already started walking out of the holler. Janie shut the lid, but it popped back open. Was she doing right? Crusoe offered no sign. She tried shutting the trunk again. Open it popped. Her aunt hollered for her to come on before they lost all light. Janie looked at the dirt boy one last time and she let the trunk be, leaving it open for someone else to discover.

  Stories We Tell

  TODAY

  “Down at The Fencepost they dump out the last sip in every damn coffee cup.”

  “How come?” the young man asked.

  Janie Treeborne shrugged and pitched wet grounds from her own cup off the side of the front porch. “Superstition, I reckon.”

  Beyond the orchardfield a black dog trotted along the shoulder of the road. Janie held up a hand and squinted, trying to make out whether she recognized this particular creature. Yips and howls in the woods. The dog perked its ears then cut up the field and trotted figure eights among peach trees so long-suffering the branches splayed out wider than they grew tall. Down near the bottom of the slope, where the roadside stand now stood empty, a few stubborn trees hung heavy with the valley’s last ripe fruit.

  “I got to talking didn’t I?”

  “That’s alright,” the young man said.

  “I
reckon we run out of time.”

  The young man said, “I think we got enough.”

  “Time’s all they could talk about in them meetings The Authority had,” Janie said, ambling inside. “Pedro and me went to every last one, buddy. Jon D., he come to a few at first. Then he decided the writing was up on the wall. Time to move on, he said. They said. Time to rethink the ways we live. I reckon there’s something wrong with what the dam does to the river downstream from here. Silt, I don’t know. Time it’ll get worse and worse, they say. All that time though and not a single goddamn minute to stop and listen at us.

  “I should of carried you around places. Go down at the radio station and visit Pedro if you can. I’m sure he’d love to see you for a minute. When you go carry some of this lunchmeat so them dogs that’s been running around don’t bother you.” Janie opened a cooler and fished out a graying slab of sliced ham and handed it to the young man. “You can’t miss the Prince Building. Pedro aims to remain up yonder when the water comes. Says it’ll hold. I reckon we’ll see. Just make sure and tell him Janie Treeborne sent you. He believes I’ll meet him there when the time comes. Then what?”

  The young man had no answer. He did have one more question though: “Can I see the film Miss Treeborne?”

  Janie turned on a small battery-powered radio and jiggled a warped antenna until Pedro Hannah’s voice emerged from static:

  Gladys Livingston

  Richard Bolivar

  Bebo Keller

  Rita Wadsworth

  Paul and Mary Ellen English

  Janie Treeborne

  And me, your host, Pedro Hannah

  She settled into her recliner chair while the young man recorded the radio DJ’s recitation. A blade of late sunlight cut the living room in half. Light, dark. When Pedro reached the end of the list he started reading the names over again.

  Janie could leave.

  But she won’t.

  She’ll feel the explosion, the dam breaking apart, feel it down inside her chest. Still she will wait. Wait for the dark water to roll through her orchard, to bubble up between the floorboards, slip underneath the door, break loose the hinges, debris riding the frothing surge as it washes over her slippers, furniture floating, peaches, her legs rising toward the ceiling, maps and pictures turned to paste, her lungs now choked—

  Janie Treeborne could yet leave.

  But she will not.

  “Just don’t tell Pedro no different, hear,” she said then reached into a box and pulled out a round canister.

  * * *

  The next day the young man carried the film Janie Treeborne had given him to a friend who owned a projector. This friend collected antiques and stored them in his vintage auto restoration shop and a large warehouse he owned across town. As they set up the projector the friend asked what they were about to see.

  “History,” the young man replied.

  Whoever’d spliced the fire-damaged film, the jumps were jarring. Wasn’t quite the eight minutes Janie said existed when The Last Conquistador was shown almost three decades after the initial botched attempt. The young man had newspaper articles that confirmed some things, but, over the course of their conversations, he’d often wondered how much of what the old woman said was true in the generally accepted sense of the word. Only person who could confirm the stories she told was Jon De Soto Crews. When the young man called earlier in the summer, Jon D. had said he didn’t want anything to do with the media though. The young man wasn’t sure whether Janie Treeborne knew he was not her kin, whether she remembered she was an only child who’d never married, if the young man was just another story she told herself for comfort against the truth that the Treeborne line had ended with her aging, ended long before The Authority ever decided to wipe Elberta, Alabama, off the map. But truth, the young man now believed, wasn’t for the author to reveal. Time would.

  In this case, the young man realized as he watched the images thrown up onto a wall, time already had. The only scenes that survived the fire back in 1959 were the ones Tammy Treeborne had filmed absent of actors. A creek flowing between knotty cedars, a deer eating wildflowers among a deep pinebrake, two finches fighting in a dusty yard, the face of a bluff cast in lapping shadow, hardwoods curving upward to impossible heights. The final shot was from Chief Coosa’s Overlook. Treetops to the horizon, not a person anywhere. The land all that remained to be seen.

  Elberta Dawn

  1958

  The day of her death Maybelle Treeborne woke up at her cottage in town and put on a pair of ratty canvas tennis shoes so she could walk to The Seven. Years ago the night had begun working deep down into her bones. She’d felt it there, razor-sharp as the spurs on Tucker and Dee Sargent’s roosters, lingering when she woke this dim blue morning and set foot on the bedroom floor. The first moments of each day were devoted to rattling the night loose from her body, chiding and cussing the devil it was, tormenting her thisaway when she longed for peace. At least she still slept. Plenty folks her age couldn’t. After putting on her shoes she let Geronimo outside then considered fixing a pot of coffee. She’d given up on breakfast. Used to love it. There was only her now to eat it, unless Lee stayed over, which he hardly ever did. She didn’t blame him. Takes a special kind of person to wake among such ghosts and memories. She decided the coffee could wait and began walking.

  Walking was something she meant to never give up. After Hugh died the first thing she did—before even telling their kids he was gone—was strike off on a walk. She didn’t give a rip if people thought that in poor taste. She could no longer remember where she’d walked to that day—how many years ago? Found Hugh in a chair on the porch. Geronimo purring, brushing back and forth against Hugh’s paint-splattered britches. Them big beautiful brown-gold eyes open yet without life. Two rough hands resting on his lap as if—forever the artist—he’d posed hisself thataway in death. The thought yet made Maybelle cackle. The disease so slow, yet death so quick. After she found him she’d struck out to the spring, she now thought. That’s right, that’s exactly what she’d done. Never had learned to swim, but she rolled up her britches that day and waded in till they got wet then stood there till she was ready to tell everybody that Jesse Absalom Treeborne was dead.

  When Maybelle got to The Seven she fixed some coffee. She kept enough makings around despite nobody having lived in the house for years. While the coffee made, Maybelle walked out to her husband’s headmarker and squatted down in front of it. Geronimo had followed her there, as the cat would often do. He flashed his tongue across the bulging pink mass where an eye had been taken when he was a kitten. Looked like a wad of chewing gum stuck on his face. Summer was coming on humid as a dog’s mouth, the sky rapidly brightening and warming the stone as Maybelle touched her husband’s name, the year he was born, the year he died. Summer was her favorite weather though. She liked sweating because it meant you were doing something. She touched her own name carved there next to Hugh’s, separated by a Bible verse. She didn’t know what had got into her and made her put the verse there. She wasn’t religious thataway. But here was some proof:

  MINE HERITAGE IS UNTO ME AS A SPECKLED BIRD, THE BIRDS ROUND ABOUT ARE AGAINST HER; COME YE, ASSEMBLE ALL THE BEASTS OF THE FIELD, COME TO DEVOUR.

  She touched the blank space beneath her name as if her fingers might bring out from the stone’s grain something that should not be known.

  A rifleshot pealed out from the woods.

  Maybelle stood up and listened as the shot faded. Figured it belonged to Lee Malone. The Seven was flat lousy with wild game, even this time of year. Lee used hunting The Seven as a reason to see her more often. They needed these reasons for safety, for the laws written to keep them apart, sometimes for sake of their own guilty minds. Falling in together after Hugh’s death was natural to Maybelle. That didn’t mean the memory of Hugh never troubled her or Lee. It surely troubled Tammy. The betrayal Tammy manifested in her mother’s love for Lee Malone cut even deeper for her than the color of his skin.
Maybelle cooked the animals Lee killed and cleaned, and they ate together at the kitchen table, or out on the front porch when the weather was good. They took special pleasure in eating, no longer worrying what food did to their bodies. A slow satisfaction known only to those who outlive the vanity of youth.

  Time, when she was young, Maybelle had been vain enough to want to be in movies herself. She never even had seen a movie when she left Bankhead though, following an advertisement in the paper about an open audition in Birmingham for a war epic. Packed two canvas suitcases and toted them four miles to the depot because her daddy refused to carry her in the buggy. Her momma traipsed after her for a good stretch of the way, hollering and crying, cursing the day Maybelle Chambliss was born. Standing on the yet-hot sidewalk in the middle of downtown Birmingham later that next night, every star and planet she’d known masked by city lights and factory smoke, her momma’s words ringing in her ears, Maybelle cried considering all the things her folks’ narrowness caused them to miss. She vowed to never be narrow herself as she bedded down on a park bench. Next morning in a department store washroom she splashed water under her arms and down between her legs then changed into a clean dress. She hid her suitcases in the bus station then headed toward the movie palace.

  A line of folks waiting to audition stretched down the block and around the corner. Maybelle took her place with them. More and more folks kept arriving. A hot dog vendor pushed his cart up and down the curb, hollering, “Ask for them, we got them!” Maybelle was sweating through her dress. Not a lick of shade till an awning just outside the golden doors. The man in line ahead of her wore what looked like an authentic Confederate soldier’s uniform. Maybelle watched him eat three hot dogs without so much as blinking his yellowed eyes. Later that afternoon the line cut off two places behind her. Those who’d stood all day in the heat and were now denied entry tried pushing into the lobby anyhow. Police officers astraddle chestnut horses arrived, swinging wooden paddles till the crowd dispersed.