Treeborne Page 3
There were a few halfhearted attempts to encourage Wooten otherwise. Then the men finished their barbecue and set out in a line of pickup trucks. Hound dogs on toolboxes, pink tongues dangling like flags in the wind.
“Why don’t you come with me,” the sheriff said to Wooten. He popped a little white heart pill in his mouth and crunched it with his molars. “Down at the office.”
“Go ahead and arrest me Aaron. Only way you’ll keep me from being out yonder with every other damn fool you done gathered up for this.”
The sheriff relented, and Ren and Wooten headed out to catch up with the rest of the search party. Other side of The Peach Pit they met Lee Malone in his truck and stopped in the road to speak. He was carrying Ricky Birdsong home. After Ren told what’d happened, Lee wouldn’t have it any other way but to come search for Tammy too. Bad idea, Ren knew, especially since the Peach Days incident and everything prior to Maybelle’s death.
“Ricky didn’t look good,” Ren said after they’d pulled away.
Wooten grunted and scratched his beard. Sawdust sprinkled onto his britches. He brushed it off and readjusted how he sat.
Ren fooled with the radio. Sometimes The Peach faded out the closer you got to the Prince Building, as if all the voices and music were being shot out at too steep an angle to be heard in town. Ren wanted to know if Pedro Hannah had broken the news about Tammy being missing yet. Pedro was midcommercial though, rambling on about an upcoming bean supper at Elberta Second Baptist Church, then about Big Connie Ward extending his Peach Days sale for one more weekend and one more weekend only.
“Everybody had it hard,” Wooten said.
“I reckon so.” Ren shook out a cigarette from a smushed pack then lit it. “You’ll have to answer the sheriff about these last several days, you know it?”
“You might have to answer for some things too,” Wooten said. “It ain’t no secret you and Tam’s been at odds over this mess with your momma.”
Ren inhaled then blew out and coughed. “Well,” he said.
“You really don’t reckon I’d hurt your sister do you?”
“I sure hope not,” Ren said. “I sure sure hope not.”
At the river landing the men plugged tobacco into their mouths and pretended to look away while Wooten held the nightgown for the hounds to sniff. The sight of the gown gripped in his bad hand, which looked like a skint dove the way it shined with barbecue grease, sickened them. It was obscene too the way the hounds buried their wet noses into the silky fabric. The men were jealous—not only of the hounds, but also of each other, wondering which confederate among them had made it with Tammy Treeborne Ragsdale way back when. Of this they felt sure: Wooten had done something to his wife because she’d betrayed him. Killed her, chopped her up into a million pieces and sunk them in the lake, buried them somewhere off in the deep woods where they’d never be found. Still they had a duty to fulfill. They traced calloused fingers across a map, then set out in a loose line for the river.
The current picked up speed as limestone bluffs pinched toward each other. The men poked the ground with sticks and hoe handles, with the butt-end of rifles and handed-down shotguns. They swapped off hollering her name, and shared drink and cigarettes. Near downtown they spotted Deputy Polk at a landing other side the river. Big Connie bellowed directions while the deputy acted like he understood. After Polk drove out of sight the search party headed on.
Farther downriver they came to the Hernando de Soto Bridge. A pickup truck was parked beyond the guardrail. Lee Malone leaned against its side. Big Connie made a joke about a gorilla escaped from the zoo and Ren shot him a look. Big Connie said, “Come on and join us Brother Lee! And bring that mutt too!”
Lee and Buckshot ambled down the slope. Lee’s clothes were sopping wet and he had, for him, a near frantic expression about his face. Buckshot hiked a leg and pissed on a sapling while staring up at Big Connie Ward.
“Everything alright?” Ren asked.
“Uh-huh,” Lee said. “Yeah.”
Ren trusted Lee’s word, but he also understood how this appeared to the rest of the men. Folks knew about Lee’s relationship with Maybelle Treeborne. Many predicted it would end in just the kind of tragedy that’d befallen her. The circumstances too perfect, Lee Malone squirrel hunting the exact part of The Seven where Maybelle’d been found dead. Some folks suspected Lee was involved with Tammy’s disappearance too. Ren’s word would carry only so much weight. Treebornes just a step above white trash to begin with. The further time distanced the town from the days of Mr. Prince, who, in many folks’ minds, had crowned Lee Malone by bringing him out of Freedom Hills and letting him run the peach orchard, the less likely folks were to bend toward, what they saw as, the eccentricities of a dead man and the few folks, like Ren Treeborne, who dared defend them as just.
“Y’all hear they found a peach pit at the scene of the crime?” Big Connie Ward said. The men mumbled. “Seems to me like somebody who knows about peaches might could reckon why a pit’d be left behind thataway.”
“Fuck you Connie,” Lee Malone said.
“Not in this life nigger,” Big Connie said back.
The men laughed and jeered.
“Let’s keep walking,” Ren said.
Sinkholes and gaps opened like mouths in the earth. Weak-rooted trees laid downhill, their tops baptized in the Elberta River. Limestone white as milk showed through thousands of years of dead leaves covering the unreliable ground. The men checked each hole best they could, letting the hounds nose the blackness till they just about slipped and hung themselves by the neck. Daylight was bleeding out, playing shadows everywhere they looked. Gnats circled the men’s sweating heads, and mosquitoes lit onto their flesh and sucked and sucked. They slapped themselves and each other. To an onlooker, the men would’ve appeared insane. Nobody wanted to be the one to say it: They ought to just quit, come back and try again tomorrow. Ren picked up on this feeling and spoke for the group.
“Might ought to head in before it gets too dark.”
“Just a little farther,” Wooten said.
He led them through a poison-ivy patch. The hounds sneezed and pawed their snouts. Some men threatened to turn back, but Big Connie Ward threatened them if they did. They traversed a hillside strewn with trash: drum rings, blown-out tires, a washing machine and a dryer. They weren’t far from a road. Tammy, they hollered in echo of each other. A breeze carried woodsmoke upriver from Livingstown. Somebody mentioned Van Crews being absent from the search—and him distant Treeborne kin.
“Van’s delivering a vehicle for me,” Big Connie said.
The men knew what that meant, and they said no more of it.
They wandered into a maze of mountain laurel and let the hounds off chain rather than stop to untangle them every few feet. Wooten kept out in front of the group. Ren and Lee tried keeping up with him, but it was no use. All sudden, the unloosed hounds bayed and sprinted, and Wooten took off after them at a run.
They’d already sniffed his niece and backed off time Wooten got there. Her dress was torn at the neckline. She was dirty, pinestraw caught in her black hair, and she held on her hip the dirt boy doll her granddaddy’d made. Crusoe, they called him. Fear caused the girl to appear younger than her thirteen years.
“Where’s your other boot at?” Wooten asked.
The girl did not answer.
“Sister,” Ren said. He touched his daughter’s head, still not used to the eye patch on her face. “Is that gasoline I smell? Listen to me, your aunt Tammy’s gone missing.”
The girl seemed stunned stupid.
“Give them some room,” Big Connie said.
The men chained their hounds. Wrong scent idjit, they muttered. While Ren and Wooten tended to the girl, the men pulled ticks and smashed them against bootheels. Dusk came full. Dry-flies screeched in the treetops. The men grew more agitated till Big Connie Ward pulled a small blue-green bottle out of his shirtpocket. Then they held back their heads in turn and dripped dope
underneath their curled red tongues till the bottle was emptied. They thought little of the Treeborne girl being out in the woods thisaway. She had plenty of her grandparents in her. That sort of blood, the men figured, which had them traipsing out here to begin with, was reason enough for her appearance.
The Peach Pit
1958
Lee Malone stood at the high end of the peach orchard watching the pickers down below. Six this time of year. Julio, Tony, Pee-Po, Bear, Fred and Raul. The number would shrink further in fall, winter, swell again in spring before the branches budded. Most of this fruit would be made into jelly or pickled and sold on the shelves at The Peach Pit’s roadside stand. The orchardfield looked alive with the bees and yellow jackets and red wasps drunkenly tumbling across fallen peaches turning to mush where they lay. Lee swatted a stray insect.
From this part of the orchard he could see all the property he owned. More than any other black man in Elberta County. The tip-top of the last crumbling smokestack at the old cannery and other side of the road, the two-bedroom house where he lived with his dog Buckshot. The first nigger to come out of The Hills, he liked to say. If Lee squinted he could see the cottage in town he’d rented to Maybelle Treeborne after her husband died. She couldn’t tolerate living on The Seven without Hugh. Lee understood. Town never suited her though, he thought.
He whistled for Buckshot. When the dog came running Lee was struck with a young man’s urge to take off too. Fifty-six and could feel five-hundred-and-six. His back was still stove-up from spending the night on that jail cot during Peach Days. But today neither a bad back nor being practically deaf in one ear from the blast of a pistol could get him down. He was still getting used to wearing a bulb jammed inside his earhole. He fiddled with it as he watched Buckshot snapping at grasshoppers this big around flinging themselves into the air.
The dog got distracted and trailed off another direction. This orchard was Buckshot’s kingdom, and he did as he pleased. Lee loved the dog to death. He’d found him living out at the abandoned Rampatorium, a crusted-black shotgun wound on his side. He nursed the dog to health with lukewarm chicken broth, raw bacon and pure-dee love. Lee saw in this four-legged creature’s salt-and-peppered face what he imagined folks meant when they uttered the word God. What Momma Pat and Mr. Robin, the white folks who raised him, thought Lee the boy saw as he stood at the altar whupping a homemade guitar, legs jostling inside too-big churchbritches, and singing songs so old they’d never even been written down, as if pencil markings would vanish from paper if somebody dare tried. Mr. Prince, Lee now thought, knew better though. He’d confessed he came to the church out in the county for the music itself—not what the music represented. Lee whistled for the dog to come on.
While he waited he picked a peach and bit into its tender flesh. What makes an Elberta peach so sweet, Lee Malone knew, is how long it’s allowed to trouble the tree. That and, he believed, something in the dirt here and nowhere else on earth. May’d believed it too. Died in the month of her name. It was early August now. Most times Lee fought the fool’s urge to plot his past, as if doing so might yet change how things’d wound up, but lately, he’d struggled.
He checked a few trees for blight. Worried one on this row would need to be pulled up. The stems were ashy and black. He’d replace it with another from a nursery in Poarch County, though. Spending money didn’t bother him. Never been much in peach growing anyhow. Lee knew that even before he came into this business with a handshake and a couple dollars. Growers didn’t make out like bankers did. He needed to find someone who understood this—and other essentials—to leave The Peach Pit to one day. He had no family. The place had to belong to somebody who understood that peach trees were miracles. Marvel at how roots found moisture, how leaves gathered sunlight into food so buds begat plump fruit. Foot, Lee weren’t no scientist. Neither had Mr. Prince been. Lee Malone cherished mystery as much as knowledge. Maybelle’d thought the same exact way. He could confess such foolish feelings to her and to nobody else he ever knew. He loved Maybelle Treeborne, and now she was gone. Among the black treebranches there was a still-green peach though. He pinched off some leaves so the hard fruit would get better sunlight and have a chance to ripen yet.
When Buckshot caught up he flopped and rolled on his back. Lee watched the dog revel. He glanced downhill and saw somebody coming thataway. Lee held up a hand and squinted—whoever it was was moving at a good clip. It didn’t take much longer to put a name to this particular gait: dip, the leg swinging out wide. Ricky Birdsong’s hip was bad to come out of socket, a torment since he made his living mowing yards and cleaning the hallways and bathrooms at the Hernando de Soto Dam. The sight of him walking would break your heart if you remembered the old galloping motion: compact and deer-sprung as the boy dodged the outstretched arms trying in vain to bring him down before he scored for the Conquistadors yet again.
Ricky was talking to hisself, which wasn’t unusual. The boy often saw Jesus. The shirt he wore was filthy and half-buttoned wrong though, and the thin brown hair at his widow’s peak cowlicked. He usually kept up a handsome appearance. The women whose yards he mowed couldn’t help remarking about it at The Fencepost on Saturday or in the pews of Second Baptist on Sunday. Some men noticed too, chiding the women in the same breath for fawning over somebody who was, you know, thataway.
“What say Ricky?”
Ricky did not answer. Hands balled tight except for the first finger on each fist, which moved like they were following the path of a blowfly.
“Mower tear up on you again?”
If the boy registered Lee’s words he did not let on. Buckshot sniffed Ricky’s britches then huffed. Maybe he’s got sunstroked, Lee thought. Way the boy worked he came near being so at least once a summer. It had been hot and dry lately. Most folks in town worried not what more the sun could do to Ricky, but Lee and a few others did their best to care for him. The Conquistadors booster club gave him a small check for helping tote the marching band’s equipment on and off the field during halftime performances. It was, after all, partly the club’s blame Ricky Birdsong’d wound up thisaway.
He tried walking past and Lee caught him by the shirtsleeve. The boy’s one eye widened while the other yet drooped. Some folks referred to this one as his pussy eye. Lee held on tight, knowing the violence that once made Ricky Birdsong so beloved yet lurked inside his body. Looking at him, it was easy to forget he was still a young man. As if the injury had changed the shape of his skeleton, the makeup of the bones underneath his tanned skin, as if the injury had become him.
“Let’s go get us something to drink,” Lee said.
Ricky eased up and Lee let go. He picked a ripe peach and handed it over, noticing something gummed-up around the boy’s fingernails and in the hair on the back of his hands. Too flaky, he thought, for engine grease or motor oil. Maybe paint? Lee heard his white momma, Momma Pat, say idle hands were the devil’s best tools. Foot, he thought, after a lifetime spent working with his own two. He made sure Ricky had ahold of the peach before letting go, wondering might the boy rear back and let the sucker fly, way he used to a baseball, the peach sailing across the road and splattering on the roof underneath which Lee and Buckshot slept. Baseball nothing but a distraction in Elberta, Alabama, till the next coming of fall, when the Conquistadors returned to action. Lee enjoyed the sport though, its leisurely pace, the long moments of silence punctuated by the pop of leather, the crack of wood, mild hollering from a handful of folks sitting on lopsided wooden bleachers. The youngest Crews boy, Jon D., looked like one hell of a baseball player. Lee’d given him his first bat seven-eight years ago. Now the boy was playing two years above his age group. Ricky Birdsong could of made out at baseball too. But in Elberta it’d always be football first.
Buckshot crawled underneath the cabin Lee used as his office and flopped down on the cool packed dirt. Lee could hear the dog panting when, inside, he opened two coke-colas then dragged over a chair for Ricky to sit. A cypress cabin propped on f
our riverrock columns rubbed smooth as eggs by the Elberta’s waters. Lee’d moved the structure onto the orchard shortly after Mr. Prince sold to him then died. By then Momma Pat and Mr. Robin had no use for it. Two rooms all the cabin was, and Lee the boy had once slept on the wide-spaced floorboards, laid by the white couple who raised him, where now he kept a big oak desk with nothing much in its drawers but for a pack of spearmint chewing gum, a bottle of watered-down whiskey he sometimes aimlessly lipped, a notebook stuffed with various business receipts he’d never need, weather observations and half-reminders to hisself about one thing or another. Lee had little use for a desk other than as a form of decoration, something to fill an otherwise empty space. It was, Momma Pat would of said had she been alive to see it, plumb gaudy of him.
The desk’s primary purpose was to display one of Hugh Treeborne’s assemblies. Lee caught Ricky looking at the thing. You couldn’t help but look at Hugh’s stuff. Art, Lee thought, correcting hisself. The making of which being one of two things both men loved but never spoke the truth about. And now it too late. Hugh dead how many years? Maybe one day in heaven, Lee sometimes tried to believe. But heaven, foot.
The assemblie was made of wound guitar strings, filed-down pennies and hunks of colored glass melted onto wooden backing. What they called abstract. Lee moved the assemblie over just a hair then resituated how he sat, bumping a suitcase record player on the floor. On it set the only recording Lee Malone ever made. It was awful-sounding, guitar down in a hole and breathy vocals up front, the acetate mixed with Wisconsin dirt.
I don’t go to church on Sunday if
I’m hungover from Saturday night.
A girl from Mississippi and a bottle of whiskey,