Treeborne Page 5

  “Lord at this place,” she said.

  “Grab a drawer,” Ren said, emptying the contents of one onto the bed. “Just about through.”

  Instead Tammy wandered into the kitchen. She turned on the faucet and brown water petered out. When they were kids she complained without end about living way out on The Seven. Begged to move into town. Civilization, she called it. Tammy was a Treeborne to the bone though. She needed wilderness, space, even as she denied it. The proof was in her and Wooten’s decision to now build on the land she once tried to refuse.

  “Ever remember her wearing this one?” Ren asked, holding up a pale blue dress. “I can’t tell the difference no more.”

  “It nearly looks good in here with all the mess cleaned out,” Tammy said.

  “You hear from Luth?”

  “I went by the veterans’ hall yesterday.”

  “I wish he’d just come stay with me,” Ren said.

  “Where at? The dam?”

  “Or he could stay here. Lee wouldn’t care.”

  Tammy adjusted her bra strap. “Maybe Luther’ll learn something from this,” she said. “Bad as it seems, a cleansing can be good.” She fooled with her hair and smacked her lips at a window reflection. “Oh, you won’t believe what happened the other day.”

  “What?”

  “Woot come out the front door and there was something like a mannequin on the porch.”

  “A what?”

  “Tumped over and like to knocked him down.” Tammy pointed at Janie where she sat with the dirt boy Crusoe. “Looked kindly like a bigger one of them.”

  “I’ll be,” Ren said. “How you reckon it got there?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “Kids probably,” he said. “You know how wound up they get come Peach Days. Remember that time in school when you and them Bryant girls—”

  “Ren, back then’s ancient history to me.”

  Janie toted Crusoe outside before she betrayed herself. Did her aunt Tammy know? So what if she did? The girl was mad at herself for caring. She longed to be reckless as she felt this summer. She’d tried so hard to stop her aunt and uncle from logging The Seven to build that stupid new house. At first Jon D. Crews even helped. They poured water into the gas cans and the bulldozer her uncle Wooten had borrowed from Orville Knight. Jon D. assured her the engines wouldn’t run afterward. Lie, Janie thought the next day as she watched the chain saw roar. Did smoke a little more than usual, quit two-three times, but that was all. Next they set loose a bunch of snakes in the clear-cut early one morning. None of them were poisonous—Jon D.’s condition. The snakes either slithered right back into the woods or just lay there till Wooten came along and lopped off their heads. Janie heard her uncle making fun of Lyle Crews, ignorant to why the boy would not help kill the snakes.

  Crusoe had begged Janie to quit this mess—told her what they needed to be doing was toting the art down at the spring.

  Janie ignored the dirt boy’s plea. Toting art? She was one-tracked, believing she could stop this change to The Seven her way yet. “Besides,” she told him, “we ain’t supposed to move them assemblies from where Granddaddy Hugh put them.” This had always been her grandmomma’s one rule about playing in what she called the junk garden. Janie wasn’t fixing to break it now that her grandmomma wasn’t around.

  Summer’d wound on. Janie wasted afternoons with Jon D. at the baseball field—a cracked table of orange clay on the westside of town. For bleachers the town’d set up hard boards on upright cinder blocks, and built two chickenwire dugouts with tin roofs along either crookedly chalked baseline. Feedsacks filled with riversand passed for bases on an infield littered with sharp rocks washed down from a knob rising just beyond third. Jon D. and the other boys didn’t give a rip about the field’s condition. They’d of played on broken glass. In sports the line between winning and losing was clearly marked. Bunch of Elberta County boys had a say in how things turned out. For the rest of their lives they’d carry the puckered scars and swoll joints and offset bones to remind themselves it had, for a glorious time, been thisaway.

  Only time Janie could get her mind away from what was happening to The Seven was when she and Jon D. rode his motorcycle down at The Washout—a deep slough hemmed between sandstone bluffs where older kids partied and sometimes camped. Janie and Jon D. would strip down to their drawers. She’d paddle out while he climbed the bluffs, took off running then jumped—arms and legs windmilling till he splashed into water warm as piss. She counted Mississippi how long it took him to come back up. Owls roosting in some pines kept time with her and, come dark, the birds swooped out to hunt. Most nights Janie and Jon D. stayed long after stars had spilled across the sky like sugar on a counter. They’d float on their backs, lakewater lapping up against their heads and blurring the edges of their sight.

  It was down at The Washout in early July when Jon D. told Janie that a dope shipment had gone missing. Lyle had swapped vehicles with Big Connie Ward’s mechanic, same as usual, and drove down to Livingstown. Nothing was packed inside though. Not up underneath the engine, not in the door panels, not between the cab and the bed. Way Jon D. told it, Van and Lyle tore the entire vehicle apart hunting for the missing dope. So far they’d kept this secret from Big Connie Ward by giving him some money Van had saved. But Elberta’s dope supply was drying up, and Big Connie’s patience with it.

  “Lyle says him and Goodnight might just run off.”

  “Where to?” Janie asked.

  “Somewhere that ain’t here. He asked me to borrow money.”

  “You going to let him?”

  “Ain’t got none,” Jon D. said. “I bought me a new glove.”

  “Uncle Woot’s paying him.”

  “Ain’t enough,” Jon D. said.

  It occurred to Janie then that she might could pay Lyle Crews to sabotage her aunt and uncle. At least buy some time. She didn’t get much further than that though. Next she went over at The Seven, Wooten had plowed Hugh’s assemblies into the edge of the woods so he could level ground for the new house’s foundation.

  After discovering what her uncle had done, Janie toted Crusoe into the studio and they sprawled out on the ground. That’s it, she thought. Her granddaddy’s incomplete history loomed overhead. Looking up at it was like looking down at the valley from some great height. History an insufficient word, but the one the Treebornes used. Time had been brought together at once in this enormous assemblie. One unfinished area of paint-spackled clay and glass, Janie thought, looked like a face if you stared long enough. As she did a new idea began percolating. Time she got up off the ground the girl knew what she had to do.

  She finished most of the work in a four-day spurt down by the spring while Crusoe stood watch. Never set out for the thing to look like her grandmomma, but as Janie Treeborne drank from the cold spring where tadpoles shivered next to the bank, as she squatted behind bushes and scratched dirt overtop her hard black leavings, as mosquitoes sucked her blood and she did not squash them, she began to feel a particular wildness that manifested itself in the thing she made and called Her.

  “Gives me the creeps,” Jon D. said when she showed him.

  “You going to help me move Her or not?” Her weighed, Janie bet, close to a hundred pounds.

  “Where’s the lady parts at? God them teeth Janie.”

  “Jon D.,” she said.

  “Okay, but we ought to wait for dark.”

  Her was good and hard; Janie’d made sure. Yet the girl worried the thing’d come apart during the move. Clouds had spread across the sky like jelly under a knife. Heat lightning pulsed on occasion. Rain could ruin Her—and, in turn, Janie’s last-ditch plan.

  She and Jon D. could see light from the television through a window in the singlewide trailer. Wooten probably watching Thursday night wrestling. Another yellow light illuminated the scummy surface of the aboveground swimming pool where her aunt Tammy liked to lay on the deck and tan her legs. Janie had offended her aunt no telling how many ti
mes by turning down offers to come over and swim. The girl didn’t understand why you’d choose a pool over De Soto Lake or the Elberta River.

  They lifted Her and started toward the trailer, staggering under the weight as if they were a couple sots from Hernando’s Hideaway. Martin ran up, but he didn’t bark. They somehow mounted the porchsteps without alerting Wooten to their presence. Jon D. was for laying Her out like a dead body, but Janie convinced him to get some rope instead. They rigged Her upright against the door then hustled back down to the road, the hard-packed dirt now covered with toadfrogs hoping for rain. In their despair some were eating others, legs kicking out of mouths. Martin grabbed one fat toadfrog and toted it back to his hiding spot under the porch. Beyond the hills thunder rumbled a yet dry promise. Jon D. and Janie got on his motorcycle. She braced Crusoe between them. On they roared, Jon D. Crews laughing his head off. This night all in fun for him. But for Janie Treeborne it wasn’t a far leap to much more serious behavior.

  When Janie came back inside the cottage, her aunt Tammy had stopped folding clothes and was eating boiled peanuts from a bag. “Sister, that thing’s got you filthy,” she said. “And it Peach Days. Come on let me clean you up.”

  She followed her aunt into the bathroom. Tammy took Crusoe and set him in the tub. A spider hurried down the drain. Janie caught sight of the pistol in Tammy’s purse when she took a handkerchief out. Sheriff Guthrie must of given the pistol back since taking it the day they found Maybelle’s body on The Seven.

  “Feels like me and you ain’t seen each other in forever,” Tammy said, dabbing her niece’s cheek with spit.

  “Yeah.”

  “Woot sees you poking around The Seven all time though.”

  “Uh-huh,” Janie said.

  “I worry over you Sister. I know it’s hard having your daddy at the dam so much. He’s a good man though.” Tammy licked her thumb then rubbed a spot on her niece’s orange dress. She glanced at Crusoe, who’d slumped down in the bathtub as if he might follow the spider’s path. “Folks’ll get the wrong idea about you toting that thing around,” Tammy said. “And I can tell you too, the hardest thing to change is a mind once it’s been set.”

  They loaded the last boxes of Maybelle’s belongings into Ren’s pickup truck. What wouldn’t fit went in back of Tammy’s, alongside her water-meter-checking equipment. A square shovel, six rolls of orange flagging, a few gummed-up wrenches. Ren took out his billfold and a pack of Blue Mountain cigarettes from the glove box. He lit one then put the pack back where it’d been—right on top of a copy of Maybelle’s will. Janie’d found the document while prowling one day while her daddy went in the Quik-Stop:

  I, Maybelle Treeborne, being of sound mind and memory, do this twelfth day of March, 1957, declare this document to be My Final Will and Testament.

  I give all my possessions and property to my only daughter, Tammy Treeborne Ragsdale. If she is deceased at the time of this document’s execution, I give all my possessions and property to her husband, my son-in-law, Wooten Ragsdale. To my sons, Ren and Luther Treeborne, I leave five dollars each—and any of their daddy’s old junk they may want and can find.

  Tammy offered Janie the boiled peanuts. The girl shook her head no. She loved boiled peanuts but would of rather eaten rat poison that moment. She knew her aunt had put her grandmomma up to writing the will. MawMaw May would never be so hateful. The Seven was supposed to be split equal among the kids. Everybody in the family knew that. Janie’s daddy had promised part of The Seven would one day belong to her. Now she doubted it would.

  The Elberta County High School marching band came past the cottage, tuning their instruments for the parade. It was time to go.

  “You want to stand with us Tam?” Ren asked.

  “I’m meeting Woot. Y’all have fun though. This ought to be one for the books.”

  On the way to the parade Janie and her daddy passed by The Fencepost Cafe. The front door was propped open with a brick, letting escape the smell of frying bacon and butter biscuits. Somebody had The Peach turned up loud, and every stool facing the window was taken up by bleary-eyed big-talkers and bullshitters and used-to-bes who were trying to defeat hangovers of this magnitude or that. They all greeted Ren when he ducked inside for a coffee and a biscuit to-go, leaving Janie and Crusoe on the sidewalk.

  Folks funneling toward the square gave strange looks to the girl and the dirt boy she held in her arms. Janie watched her daddy pass beneath framed peach-and-white jerseys, and pictures of old Conquistadors hung on the restaurant’s walls. Pictures of hisself, Big Connie Ward, Van Crews, Ricky Birdsong, Uncle Luther, other Conquistadors the girl knew and some she did not. Willy Ramsey was trying to get Ren to sit. He shrugged Willy off though, came back out and put his arm around Janie, and they kept on toward the square.

  The crowd bottlenecked at the corner of Madrid and De Soto. Ren blew into the wax paper cup. He held an egg-and-cheese biscuit toward Janie. She shook her head no. Day before the parade the floats lined up at the old riverdocks. They paraded up through downtown, pausing at the square for the announcement of Miss Elberta Peach before going on out to The Peach Pit. Around midnight everybody would head over at the ballfield to watch the first Elberta County High School Conquistadors practice of the season in buggy light cast by vehicles parked around the sidelines and behind each end zone.

  Ren and Janie squeezed through the crowd toward the pawnshop. Gene Kilgore shook Ren’s hand and said hello to the girl. A stage had been built underneath the statue of Hernando de Soto. Gene’s Pawn & Gun was a prime viewing position. Standing on the stage was Mayor Karl Hearn and the five high school girls vying to be the next Miss Elberta Peach. The girls wore crushed dresses of different light colors, and their hair and faces were done up to a tee. Smiling like loony birds at the crowd gathered below them in the grass and on the sidewalks. Behind the girls stood the ECHS marching band. When the lead parade vehicle turned the corner, the uniformed kids struck up “Fight, Fight, Fight On You Conquistadors!” and everybody whooped and clapped and sang along.

  “There it comes,” Ren said, squeezing Janie’s shoulder.

  She tried to act excited for her daddy’s sake as Lee Malone waved from behind the wheel of an orchard truck and tossed handfuls of hard candy into the crowd. This was tradition, The Peach Pit orchard truck leading the parade, established by Mr. Prince before he died. Even the girl noticed Lee was the only black person who participated in the parade. All the faces in the crowd white too. In back of the orchard truck waited Miss Elberta Peach’s throne—stacked haybales under a threaded arbor of peach tree branches.

  The first floats followed the orchard truck. Washed-and-shined show vehicles followed them. Then folks steering tractors and riding lawn mowers, motorcycles, antique wagons, anything that rolled, really, followed by folks walking prize heifers and hogs, a strange herd of yellow-eyed billy goats with brass bells a-clanging, Boy Scouts and social clubs toting banners and flags, various church groups, and on till the end.

  When the parade halted, Mayor Hearn stepped up to the microphone. He tapped it and a screech shot out through the square. The mayor apologized then began reading from a stack of index cards slid out from his coat pocket:

  “Welcome to our annual Hernando de Soto Peach Days Festival. Sure is good seeing so many of y’all here with us. I know it’s hot. We thank you for coming out.

  “Now the time’s come to crown our new Miss Elberta Peach! We’d like to thank each and every one of these beautiful young ladies up here. Give them a hand folks!”

  The mayor went on. Janie tuned him out. The girl’d never given a rip about Miss Elberta Peach. She and MawMaw May used to make fun of these girls. Wouldn’t know a snake if one raised up and bit them, Maybelle would say. And Janie would laugh while her momma, Nita—who’d vied for Miss Elberta Peach her senior year—glared. Her momma was skipping out on the parade this year. The girl wasn’t sure why. She’d heard her aunt say to her daddy that Nita seemed awfully depressed.
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  Janie scanned the crowd for folks she knew. There stood boys from Jon D.’s baseball team selling raffle tickets for an Italian-made shotgun. Jon D. hisself wasn’t with them. Janie hadn’t seen him since the night they left Her on Tammy and Wooten’s porch. The Wards stood in some shade next to the post office. Big Connie dressed in full De Soto outfit and Pud, his son, digging in his nostril like he might strike oil. Janie spotted her uncle Luther and some other veterans sitting on a bench. Looked like they’d been drinking watery beers all morning down at the hall, where Luther was living since his house burnt down, while they watched old war movies till the film melted and the reels had to be thrown out. She spotted her aunt Tammy and uncle Wooten near where Lee Malone had stopped the truck. A man trying to get a better view of the stage spilled booze on Janie’s boots. Crusoe let his mouth fall open and the man backed off. “You devil,” Janie whispered in the dirt boy’s snail-shell ear.

  “This year’s Miss Elberta Peach,” the mayor continued. “This year’s Miss Elberta Peach is June Renee Bishop!”

  The marching band struck up the fight song once again while June Renee made a real show, Janie thought, of winning. June Renee was a tall girl and so stooped when the mayor placed the crown on her blond head. Somebody from the Times-Journal took pictures. The marching band parted so the mayor could lead June Renee offstage. Lee Malone let down the tailgate then set up a stepladder so Miss Elberta Peach could climb up onto her throne. June Renee waved and waved and waved as she mounted those steps. Meanwhile Lee slid behind the wheel to whisk her off to The Peach Pit, where she’d pose for more pictures with little girls who aimed to grow up and be just like her one day. Made Janie want to puke. Before Lee could put the truck in gear though, Sheriff Guthrie grabbed him by the elbow. After a brief exchange the sheriff gestured for Lee to get out of the truck.

  “Son of a bitch,” Ren said, stepping off the sidewalk and into the crowd.

  Janie pushed toward De Soto then used a bench to climb up onto the statue’s base. From there she could see that Deputy Polk had got behind the wheel of the orchard truck. He was trying to pull away, but folks pressed in to congratulate June Renee Bishop till the deputy had nowhere to go. Meantime the sheriff was leading Lee Malone to his cruiser parked at the corner of Water Avenue. Their path had been blocked by the marching band though. Janie spotted her daddy, who stood a head taller than most everybody, moving toward the sheriff and Lee. She spotted her aunt headed the same direction. Tammy had her right hand shoved down inside the purse slung on her left shoulder and moved with a purpose that Janie understood in her gut before her mind.