Treeborne Page 7

  “Hell, just go on,” Lyle said. “You remember what to do don’t you?”

  Ricky said he did. Then he stepped into the yard and started walking toward the trailer.

  “What’s he doing here?” Janie asked.

  “Got to get her out the door.” Lyle fished a snake rattle hanging by a string around his neck out from underneath his shirt then rolled it between finger and thumb. “She’ll be too skittish if it ain’t somebody she knows.”

  “Call him back.”

  “You going in his place?”

  Martin had spotted Ricky. When the chubby little dog came at him, Ricky stopped and kneeled and let him sniff. Martin’s tail wound like an off-kilter propeller. Ricky talked slowly as he picked up a rock. Martin bowed, wiggled. When Ricky reared back and chucked, the dog took off toward where the rock landed other side of the driveway.

  “She’ll see it’s him!”

  Lyle clamped ahold of the girl’s jaw, shook, and said, “You had plenty chances to change that mind.”

  “He’ll tell.”

  “Now listen to me,” Lyle said, “Ricky Birdsong don’t know his ass from a hole in the ground to tell what or how, if they even try asking him.”

  It didn’t matter. Ricky was already knocking on the door.

  Seemed like forever, that door opening. Then there Tammy stood, backlit by milky television glow, wearing high-waisted pink shorts and a see-through blouse overtop a white swimsuit. Ricky grabbed her. She fought, but it didn’t matter one lick. Lyle bolted into the yard, whooping for Pud to come on. Goodnight emerged too, running with the machete held upward, as if to battle. As Ricky was dragging Tammy down the steps she managed to bite a plug out of his arm. He hollered and let go. Tammy began sprinting right toward where Janie hid. The girl didn’t know what to do. She scrambled for something, a weapon, tried to remember why she hated her aunt so much. It was easier to hate her, something real. Just before Tammy reached the woods Goodnight tackled her. Martin, a slobbery rock in his mouth, took off running toward them right when Pud Ward wheeled into the driveway.

  “I run him over,” Pud bellered, nearly falling out of the pickup truck.

  Martin was yelping, pinned underneath the tire.

  “Put on your goddamn mask,” Lyle said.

  Pud did. Sobbing, he went to let down the tailgate. It was stuck. The dog still yelping. Pud yanked and yanked. The tailgate wouldn’t come down. Ricky took back ahold of Tammy and held her like they were slowdancing partners. He patted the back of her head and shoulders, Martin still yelping where he was smashed between the tire and the ground.

  “Move,” Goodnight said. “Move before the whole damn valley hears.” She rolled the pickup backward then got down and dragged the dog out from underneath. Pink guts dangled from his crushed rear end. Goodnight lined up the machete. Martin hushed after the first blow. She swung again, the blade sparking gravel. She wiped the dog’s blood off her hands and said, “Just put her in over the damn side.”

  Ricky lifted Tammy into the truckbed. Lyle tied her wrists and ankles. Pud tried stuffing a sock in her mouth. She bit at him too till Goodnight pressed the machete to her cheek. Then Tammy accepted the sock. They covered her with a tarp. Lyle ran down to the mailbox and placed a peach pit inside. Raised the flag as a final touch. Goodnight got in back, Pud driving and Lyle shotgun. Just like that, they were gone, except for Ricky Birdsong.

  And Janie.

  Janie didn’t move. The dry-flies were blowing like organ pipes. Or was it in her head? She watched Ricky Birdsong pick up Martin in two ragged pieces and tote him to the opposite treeline. Once the shadows swallowed them both, she grabbed Crusoe and took off toward the river fast as she could run.

  Treebranches switched her face and neck and arms. Briar picked holes in her dress. She ran and she ran. Tried keeping one arm up to protect her face, but Crusoe was heavy and awkward to tote at such a clip. Where she was running to she had no idea. Just needed to run. The plan had been to meet at Jimmie Nell Duncan’s old houseplace, where Lyle and Goodnight had been living throughout the summer. Janie knew she wasn’t going there though. Not now. It’d been so easy to imagine before the horror of what they’d done had revealed itself and the truth of what now lay ahead. Not now, the girl thought. No more.

  She could catch an occasional glimpse of the river through the brush and the treebranches that yet lashed her. On she ran. All it took was one branch growing at just the right height, pointed just the right direction. Her eye accepted it. She staggered, but didn’t quit running till she’d made it underneath De Soto Bridge.

  She set down Crusoe, stripped off her boots, and flung herself into the Elberta River. The paperbag had spilled when she shed her boots, money and the newspaper clippings fluttering down the bank. Let it, she thought. Her eye stung. She touched the lid, already swoll and matted up with gunk. She splashed with water then wiped with the tail of her dress. God it hurt. She held a hand over the eye that hadn’t been poked. The world turned foggy and she jerked back like she’d been bit. Crusoe stumbled down the bank. “Don’t,” she told him. “No.” He waded in up to his bloated belly and grease tailed off from him on the gentle current. A vehicle passed overhead. The underside of the bridge rang long after the vehicle had gone. Janie covered her good eye again, keeping her hand there long enough to be sure of this new truth.

  She sat down in the sand and Crusoe crawled onto her lap. He was slick and he stained her dress a blue-gray. He smelled like coming rain. She petted his knotty head and cried a little. He made bird sounds back to her, trying to speak.

  “I can’t see a thing,” she told him. “I can’t see nothing.”

  What Mine Eye Hath Seen

  1958

  It’d been five days.

  Janie bypassed downtown. She’d read that criminals tended to return to the scene of a crime. She was surprised to see Lee Malone’s pickup truck parked on the shoulder by De Soto Bridge. She eased down the slope. No bucket, no poles, no Lee or Buckshot. There were bootprints and pawprints all in the sand though. The girl didn’t know, but she’d just missed her aunt’s search party. Most of the money and newspaper clippings she had come to get rid of had already blown away. Good. She climbed back up the bank and headed to The Seven. She just knew that the first time all summer she came down onto the family property and didn’t hear a chain saw would thrill her to the bone. Foot if it did. The absence like to struck her down as she cut across the weedy yard toward her grandparents’ house.

  Though nobody had lived in the house for years, Maybelle kept the place in shape enough that a person could. Janie opened the door to what’d been her grandmomma’s bedroom and laid down on the mattress, trying to smell her there. Geronimo yowled from another room. Janie now the cat’s one-eye kin; an owl had snatched Geronimo’s eyeball when he was still a kitten.

  Doc Barfield had been kind and spoke softly to Janie while examining her. His hands were cold and butter-smooth. He hadn’t flinched at Crusoe when the girl toted him into the room like he was a plain doll. Doc Barfield saw oddness all time, Janie suspected. His family was old Elberta and he lived in one of the mansions by the river, a few doors down from where Mr. Prince had lived. They tell Doc’s granddaddy killed and boiled the bones of a black man so he could study putting a skeleton back together—and that’s how the Barfields got into medicine. A nearby national forest was named after his kin: N. W. Monroe Barfield, a lawmaker who got subsidies for peach growers, and made the Hernando de Soto Peach Days Festival an official state holiday. Not the kind that gets you off work or out of school, but still, folks were proud of this distinction. Doc gave Janie a bottle of eyedrops and a patch. She would not regain the vision in her injured eye, he said. Janie’s momma, Nita, was far more distraught over this injury and what it meant than the girl was herself. Nita’d hoped her daughter might one day go for Miss Elberta Peach. Janie Treeborne was a pretty thing. Hair black as Bankhead coal, eyes and nose and mouth just a little too big for her soft round face. Tall
like a Treeborne. Nita herself was short, but she’d been a pretty thing too. In yearbook pictures she’s slim and petite, perky set of tits and a thousand-dollar smile. She was a Dautrive and had a dark mole right there on the chin. Janie’s blindness tore up Nita more than it ever did the girl herself, who always kindly liked the strangeness of it.

  Janie checked Geronimo’s food and water. At least her aunt and uncle were feeding the yellow cat. On her way out to the studio, she cracked the door so Geronimo could come and go as he pleased.

  Together she and Crusoe stared up at her granddaddy’s history. The assemblie sagged at its most paint-heavy parts. Over the years some of the nails securing it to the rafters had popped loose. The pulley long paralyzed. Her granddaddy, Janie knew, had started work on this assemblie sometime after the storm of 1929. Twenty-six people died, and Hugh was badly injured. She could pick out certain things among the assemblie’s incompleteness: the true wilderness, a tribe of Elberta Indians, De Soto and his caravan marching through the valley, clearing and cutting and planting done by early peach growers, downtown Elberta rising in wood then in stone along the river it was named for, the war, the dam, the wide-eyed dead and a manicured football field grown over them, radio towers, more war, so on and on forth. There were people portrayed amidst all this. Janie did not know who they were in truth, but she liked imagining these figures as her family and others she knew around town. Her granddaddy died in 1947. The girl often wondered what the history would of become had he lived to keep working on it. Maybe taken up the whole studio, grown so expansive it had to be hung in the pole barn. Dirt daubers and wasps had added mud and paper parts, spiders their gauzy webs, and dry-flies their shed skins, same as the insects had on all the shelves yet filled with cardboard boxes and wooden crates Hugh Treeborne had left unsorted but to his own mind. These filled with bolts and washers, motors, strange gears and teeth, animal bones, radio parts, dishes, jars of blood and paint, bent and rusted metal plucked from Prince’s Peach Cannery. If something was loose or could be pried so Hugh Treeborne would tote it to The Seven.

  She took down her granddaddy’s toolbag and arranged his instruments on the hard-packed ground. She recited names MawMaw May’d taught her: chisel, scuth, file, rasp, gouge, fishtail. With her grandmomma gone the girl felt responsible for remembering these names and many others. Maybelle had been the girl’s connection to Hugh, making her death twofold. Janie had learned the story of Crusoe’s creation from her grandmomma. The dirt boy loved hearing it told. Sometimes tee-ninesee salt crystals would form ecstatic all over his blue-black body while he listened. As they sat there he asked for it and Janie obliged.

  After she told the story they climbed up on the roof. The hot tin bent and popped. This had been their perch all summer. They could see across the untended pasture to her uncle’s clear-cut, where splintered stumps were left half-burnt in the broken ground, and trees too small to fool with had been scraped barkless and now bowed in shame. Other trees had been pushed over, so an underside of pale fibrous roots showed like a woman who’d bent over and raised up her skirt. In the holes beneath, what little rain had fallen collected in muddy red puddles, where tadpoles awaited a leggy transformation beneath bobbing gold clouds of gnats. The biggest hardwoods were stacked along the edge of the pasture. The timber company had paid Wooten part up front. Among this wreckage was a foundation for the new house. Janie saw Geronimo rolling on his back on the sun-warmed concrete.

  The cat would often follow, like a dog, Janie and Maybelle on their walks. It was these walks that Janie could not reckon with losing. Her grandmomma naming plants and trees, showing what could be eaten and not. In her thirteen years Janie had tasted nearly every root, berry, leaf, shoot, fruit and bark in this valley. Maybelle showed animal signs and told stories about the creatures that made them. Maybelle didn’t go to church, said she praised God by loving his creations. On these walks they hunted for lost pieces of Hugh’s art too, and took turns toting Crusoe. Maybelle’d seemed no different last spring than any other time Janie could remember her. But she must of been. What else could explain her dying like that? Janie needed to figure it out. Maybe if she retraced enough of their walks, she thought. The logging, her aunt and uncle’s new house, was a threat to this. A threat the girl could not abide.

  A motorcycle in the distance. Janie climbed down and waited. Jon D. Crews slid to a stop but kept the engine running. Thunder, the old wooden ballbat given him by Lee Malone, was propped across the handlebars. The barrel had cracked and Jon D. had long outgrown being able to use the bat in games.

  “Look,” Janie said, lifting the patch covering her eye.

  “Get on.”

  “Don’t you want to—”

  “Get on,” Jon D. said. The engine choked. He played the throttle till it leveled out. “Leave that,” he said, meaning Crusoe.

  “I ain’t doing it.”

  Jon D. waited to call her bluff, but Janie meant what she’d said. She hadn’t been without the dirt boy since her grandmomma died. “Just get on then,” he said.

  They roared down 67 past Big Connie Ward’s used-car lot. A couple burnt-out vehicles by the road. When Big Connie couldn’t sell something he found ways to collect on the insurance. The motorcycle bounced across De Soto Bridge, the fresh paint job already peeling. The Elberta River ran clear and slow beneath. Janie could see the safety barrels she and the older kids had chucked off Peach Days night. Seemed of another time. Jon D. slowed down then turned right onto a cut. He swerved in and out of ruts and washes. The air got cooler the deeper they rode. The cut funneling down till briars and branches scratched from both sides. Janie tucked in behind Crusoe and Jon D. till the way opened up again. They came out in an overgrown clearing where a house stood and, across from it, an old chickenhouse.

  She got down after Jon D. shut off the engine. Her legs felt wobbly and her face vibrated from the ride. She yanked at her bloomers where they’d crawled up her crack. Jon D. handed Crusoe to her then he grabbed Thunder. They headed for the house. It’d lost most of its paint and a pine tree grew up through the collapsed front porch.

  “Daddy told me about your eye,” Jon D. said. “Does it hurt?”

  “Not really?”

  “Let me see then.”

  She stopped and lifted the patch.

  “Sickening,” he said.

  They walked on, stopping at the foot of the remaining steps.

  Lyle appeared in the doorway. “Am I seeing a ghost?” he said, coming down into the yard. “I wonder could my eyes be playing games on me.”

  “I brung her,” Jon D. said, nudging Janie with Thunder. She turned around and slugged him on the arm, and he quit.

  “How many days it been?” Lyle asked. He wore a pair of sky-blue coveralls that stunk to high heaven. “What happened to meeting up babygirl?”

  “Can I not go?” Jon D. said.

  “Yeah, go on,” Lyle said.

  But Jon D. didn’t leave right away. His betrayal, maybe, dawning on him.

  “You retarded or something?” Lyle said.

  “My glove.”

  Lyle went inside then came back with a baseball glove. A fat rubber band kept it folded tightly shut. Though it was new, the glove had been dipped in motor oil, rubbed with gritty riversand, then baked so many times it looked softer than a calf’s ear.

  After Lyle handed over the glove, Jon D. shot his big brother a bird and jogged back to the motorcycle. Straddled, stomped, the engine sputtered to life. The treeline devoured him except for white exhaust left in his wake.

  Lyle led Janie into the kitchen. Nobody had lived here since Jimmie Nell Duncan, the house a one-story square box that still smelled like snake. Jimmie Nell Duncan had owned hundreds of snakes. Most she kept penned in the old chickenhouse, but her favorites she let crawl and nest among her wherever they pleased.

  She put on a show every year at the elementary and the high school. Beautiful violet fangmarks dotted the inside of her arms when she held up writhing snakes fo
r the kids to see. End of every show Jimmie Nell picked several to hold a python named Samson. Somebody from the Times-Journal would take a picture of this that teachers later cut out and tacked on bulletin boards. This tradition went on till the year Jimmie Nell broke from her usual snake stories and started talking about evolution. Janie remembered it well. She’d ran to the gym ahead of her class so she could sit on the first row of bleachers, hoping to hold Samson.

  “Do you honestly reckon God made all this then just stopped?” Jimmie Nell asked.

  The kids had never considered what God did after creation. The scalps of the few that did that day might as well of been peeled open and their brains scrambled with a fork.

  In the kitchen Lyle Crews opened a cooler and sloshed around for a tub of ice cream.

  “Where’s Goodnight at?” Janie asked.

  “Town.” He took a mixing spoon from the sink. The ice cream was vanilla and it dripped down his chin as he slurped. “They pick up Ricky yet?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Probably will before long,” he said. “Happened to your face?”

  “Where’s she at Lyle?”

  “Where’s my money at?”

  “I ain’t got it with me right now,” Janie said. “Is she okay?”

  Lyle finished the ice cream then dropped the empty container in the sink. Janie followed him outside and across the yard. He slid open a noisy door. The floor inside the old chickenhouse was silty and quartered off by warped boards and chickenwire. Snakes thumped against wood and sunlight filtered through plastic tarp tacked over holes in the walls and the roof. It was hard to breathe. Lyle reached into a box and grabbed a handful of white mice. They wrapped pink tails around his fingers and clung to him by their claws. He walked over to a pen then shook them loose. They fell onto the floor next to five rattlesnakes—one bigger around than Lyle’s forearm. The rattlers weren’t immediately interested in the confused mice though. They flicked their tongues to taste the air then halfheartedly coiled up.