Treeborne Read online

  “Are they some of hers?” Janie asked.

  “Goodnight and me caught these,” Lyle said.

  “Where from?”

  He grinned. “Come on.” Lyle grabbed a gas canister that had a spraywand attached to it. “You might want to leave that,” he said, pointing at Crusoe.

  “Nuh uh.”

  “I ain’t asking.”

  Janie propped Crusoe up against the wall. Lyle handed her a forked pole and he grabbed a bunch of burlap sacks. They crossed the yard then tromped through a pitiful orange stream trickling into the woods, and they headed up a steep hillside covered in pine needles and the scraggly trees that’d shed them. Janie kept slipping. She used the pole for balance. At the top of the hill Lyle stopped near a cluster of rocks. He jabbed the spraywand into a hole then pumped the canister several times. The smell of gasoline wafted throughout the air. Janie covered her nose and mouth with the neckline of her dress.

  “Now some’ll come out looking drunker than a nigger over at Roger’s place,” Lyle said. “Be ready. There’s some fire out fast as greased lightning.”

  The first hole wound up a dud. Lyle moved on to another one. He pumped, clicked the trigger, waited. All sudden a rattler slithered out into the pinestraw. Janie stabbed with the forked-end of the pole, but missed.

  “We’ll add that one to your tab,” Lyle said.

  They gassed, maybe, a dozen more holes, catching just two stubby rattlers with scales that reminded Janie of the dried pinecones scattered across the ridge. After Lyle had knotted the tops of the burlap sacks he sat down and unbuttoned the top of his coveralls. He idly scratched the tip of the purple scar on his chest then unscrewed the spraywand and huffed at the opening of the canister.

  “Thousand miles away before long,” he said, taking another good deep breath. “You best be too when the shit all hits the fan.”

  He was right, Janie knew. She had but one option now. She wasn’t sure she had the guts to go through with even it. She sat down beside him. “Is she okay Lyle?”

  “Last I saw,” he said, and started humming. Hummed so loudly Janie thought his lips would come apart and his voice sing. But they did not. He stopped and turned toward her. “Well,” he said, “am I going to have to take it?”

  After enough time had passed that Janie should of answered, Lyle lunged on top of her. She hollered while he felt all over for the money, yanking off her boots and shaking them. When he found nothing he chucked one boot off into the woods. Janie grabbed the spraywand and swung. Lyle caught it in his palm and slammed her head against the ground. Bursts of light appeared on the underside of the black patch covering her blind eye. Lyle cussed then got up, grabbed the burlap sacks and headed back down the ridge. Janie lay there for a moment before getting up too.

  He was staring into the pens when she got there. She worried if she could stand seeing the rattlers feed. The girl had, her grandmomma used to say, her uncle Luther’s tender heart. The mice were fine though, climbing all over each other in one corner of the pen while there in the middle the biggest rattler had its jaws clamped on Crusoe’s head.

  Janie tried to go over the side. “Hold the fuck on,” Lyle said, pushing her back. She looked down. Another rattler ready to strike. Lyle nudged the snake that had Crusoe with the forked pole. It would not release the dirt boy. Panic moved in waves up Janie’s chest, around the back of her neck and her skull. Lyle tapped the rattler again. Still wouldn’t unhinge its jaws. He pressed down and dragged the snake, and Crusoe, across the pen.

  “Can’t hurt that thing no way,” he said.

  “Please.”

  “Please what?” But Lyle knew. He grabbed a hoe. “You’ll have to,” he told her.

  When she brought the blade down behind the rattler’s head, its body spun across the pen as if propelled. The jaw still clung to Crusoe’s face. While they waited for it to let go, Lyle took the body and quickly skinned it. He rinsed the blood and meat off the underside then laid the velvety skin out to dry. “Sometimes they’ll bite for hours after they’re dead.” He reached for the lacquered rattle hanging around his neck. When he rolled the rattle between his fingers it sounded like rice being sprinkled into a bowl. “She could get them to do nearly anything just by talking to them. Never have seen anything like it.”

  When word spread that the school’d canceled Jimmie Nell Duncan’s snake show, Lyle Crews thought she might no longer need her snakes. He had Samson, the python, partway out the chickenhouse when Jimmie Nell came on him with a shotgun. She didn’t call Sheriff Guthrie, way he figured. Instead she fixed a pot of coffee on the stove and served him vanilla ice cream with crushed candied nuts on top. Time he’d finished the first bowl Lyle had agreed to help tend the snakes. It was more work than Jimmie Nell could handle herself. Lyle loved the work—and soon her. They were in bed the first time somebody chucked a flaming beer bottle at the house. Together they beat out the burning curtains and swept up the broken glass. There were more flaming bottles, chunks of concrete the size of cantaloupes. What she’d told the school kids could not be unsaid. She had to leave. Lyle wanted to go with her, wherever she wound up. But one day she was just gone. He found a note and the snake rattle. This was, she wrote, where he was meant to be—and Lyle Crews had despised Elberta for it ever since.

  When the rattler’s head let go of Crusoe, Lyle raked the dirt boy to the edge of the pen then lifted him out. Janie fingered the sticky puncture marks on his face.

  “What’s your deal with that thing?” he asked.

  “My granddaddy made him.”

  “Well it’s too bad he ain’t worth nothing.”

  As they waited for Goodnight to arrive, the odor of gasoline, the blurred afternoon light, the rattlesnake drone tired Janie. Lyle paced the pens, stopping twice to pull out a shed skin and hang it on wire. Janie held Crusoe tight. The dirt boy mixed with her sweat and streaked black down the insides of her legs. She shut her eyes for what she meant to be a moment. Somewhere in the depthless dark she heard singing: Love lifted me, even me. Love lifted me. She wanted to open her eyes, but it felt like fishing weights had been tied to the lids. When nothing else could help, love lifted me. The singing seemed to hurt whoever was doing it. She wanted the singing to stop and to keep going too. Her eyes were still closed and she was rubbing against the hard floor—felt like somebody else doing this; not her in control of her own body. She moaned and her eyes jumped open.

  There sat Lyle Crews on a tumped-over barrel, coveralls now rolled down to his waist, singing, Love lifted me. Love lifted me. When nothing else could help, love lifted me. As he rocked, the snake rattle swayed on the string tied around his neck. Janie dared not move from where she was prone and let Lyle know she was awake. She licked her lips and tasted dirt. She admired how hard singing was for him. Truth, she knew, only hard things were worth doing. The Seven had to be preserved, her aunt kidnapped. Hard. Life ain’t easy Sister. She began to see a confederate in Lyle Crews as she watched him repeat those lines over and over.

  When Goodnight pulled up outside, Lyle stopped. Janie still pretended to be asleep when he shook her shoulder, told her to come on, get up.

  Goodnight stood next to a pickup truck far too nice, Janie thought, for anybody in Elberta who was their age and not named Pud Ward to be driving. Goodnight kissed Lyle on the neck and said, “Thought I’d surprise you.”

  “Well,” he said, scratching the back of his head. He wouldn’t look at Goodnight. At either of them. He sulked into the house.

  Janie and Goodnight faced each other. Goodnight looked the girl up then down. Her dress had been stretched and torn in the fight with Lyle, stained from sweating against Crusoe and the ground in her sleep. She was old enough to understand how this looked and she was, Janie remembered then, nervously wiggling her toes, also missing one boot.

  “What was y’all doing in there?” Goodnight asked.

  “Lyle was just showing me them snakes y’all caught.”

  “That right?”

&nbs
p; Guilt showed on the girl’s neck like day-old sunburn. But guilt for what? She didn’t take time to reckon with it at this moment. Off she ran, Goodnight hollering for her to stop, hollering for Lyle to get after that sorry little bitch.

  Janie made the woods, breaking branches to throw off Lyle and Goodnight. She stumbled down to the river then followed it up toward town. The bank petered out. She cut farther up into the woods, pausing every little bit and listening for Lyle and Goodnight. After a while she found a mountain laurel grove and hid there.

  Around dusk she heard voices. The hounds surprised themselves coming up on her like that. They stood this tall to her chest, pressed cold noses to her skin and sniffed as if to consume her. Janie shut her eyes. A hound nipped her thigh. Another tried grabbing Crusoe, and Janie popped it on the head. She felt sorry as the hound backed off. She looked up. There was Buckshot! Then she saw her uncle Wooten coming down the hillside ahead of a dozen or so other men—her daddy, Lee Malone and Big Connie Ward among them.

  “Lord, you got dirt all over you Sister,” her daddy said as he touched her face. “Does your momma know where you’re at?”

  “What you doing running around without no shoes on?” her uncle Wooten asked.

  Janie couldn’t answer them. If she opened her mouth and spoke she would of betrayed herself, her home, everything.

  “Your aunt Tammy’s gone missing,” her daddy said. He touched her face again and winced like it hurt him to do so. “I’ll see if Lee can’t carry you home.”

  She propped Crusoe on the seat next to Buckshot, who sat next to Lee Malone. The sun had dipped below the treeline and lightning bugs splattered the woods with dull green-yellow blotches. Janie caught sight of herself in the side mirror. It was like seeing kin who you don’t know yet—but deep down do. Lee turned on the radio. Pedro Hannah reminded everybody to watch for Tammy Ragsdale, missing five long-awful days, and any suspicious behavior. We’re all praying for a safe and swooft return, the radio announcer said, pushing a fiddle overtop his voice. This song goes out to her, wherever she may be.

  In the Beginning

  1929

  Everything stopped for the crane. You couldn’t get a wagon through the streets for gawkers watching the machine being unloaded off a barge. It was named Goliath and, The Authority said, ran on steam. If you owned a camera you could make two-three bucks some weekends off folks wanting a keepsake. Goliath was followed by a whole mess of equipment and by men dressed in new wool suits making a price on folks’ land, threatening jail time and court fees if you said no. Many houses were pulled apart nail-by-nail and hauled out of the county. It was those folks who stayed put that came and watched Goliath roar to life. A marching band played. The wild game fled to places unknown or forgotten. Change had come to Elberta, Alabama. From there on out the racket continued day and night, rumbling and explosions, and a concrete wall rose up where once had been but treetops and unbroken sky.

  The Hernando de Soto Dam was little more than two enormous concrete boxes built in the edge of the river the summer Hugh Treeborne took a job with The Authority. The morning of his first day he’d found what he thought was an inquiry tacked to his house. He’d heard they were through buying and his land, which was called The Seven, was nowhere near the dam or where the lake would soon back up, filling hollers and topping hills. A man with a red-brown birthmark on his face was deciding which crew Hugh would join.

  “You work building ever?”

  “Little bit,” Hugh lied, watching workers climb shaking scaffolding erected against the concrete face.

  The birthmarked man picked his nose. He had a pistol jabbed in his belt. “Well you can learn it,” he said. “Meantime we’ll put you to digging.”

  The Authority gave Hugh Treeborne a shovel and a lunch of greasy sardine sandwiches wrapped in butcher’s paper. The fish smelled slightly rotten and tasted salty, the bread stale. Hugh ate anyway. After lunch he wet his shirt in the Elberta River then tied it around his forehead. The other men on the crew nicknamed him Chief for this.

  Nearly one thousand men were working on the Hernando de Soto Dam, pouring three million cubic yards of concrete that would reach four hundred feet at its highest point, flooding more than ten thousand acres of deep woods and pastureland and homesteads that’d belonged to generations of local families. Most of these men did not consider such numbers or loss, nor did they have time to worry over what it meant for the valley. Hugh recognized but a few of the workers on his shift. They did not acknowledge each other. A job with The Authority meant a chance to start over from hard lives turned harder for reasons they weren’t sure of, reasons the paper said had to do with places faraway as New York and Chicago. These men had seen war, felt hunger. But this? This was something else. Foot, they joked, if nothing else the dam’ll make a good spot to leap from—way old Chief Coosa did.

  At the end of the day the birthmarked man fired his pistol. As the shot pealed down the river Authority men started home like ants fleeing a kerosene-soaked hill. Along the washed-out path to town Hugh walked past cut timber, much of it rotten and growed-up with jewel briar and goldenrod and blackberry. Off in the distance fingers of black smoke curled up from a collection of burnpiles. Hugh counted one two three four five.… Ash from these fires and others since burnt out mounted in the streets, compromised rooftops, drifted inside stables, where sag-backed horses and mules grunted and stomped for feed that was no longer available. The Elberta Valley like another world from the one Hugh the boy had known. He was glad his daddy, Caz, wasn’t around to see.

  He came upon a snapper lying in the weeds, its thick shell busted and all the innards pulled out but for a handful of brown and green organs. A group of kids appeared on the path. Bones pressed sharp against the underside of their dirty skin, ash dusting their hair, grime blackening their eyelids, and fingernails telling of sooty fields and inky creeks where they yet played. When Hugh looked thataway, the kids laughed, took off. Folks in Livingstown worried what the ash would do to the rice crop. It was smothering gardens. Fortunate the ash did not reach The Seven, he thought. Before long the only thing left to eat would be whatever canned food The Authority doled out.

  As he passed through town he saw several drunks sitting in front of the charred remains of Tupelo’s Hardware and Tack. The store had caught fire some weeks ago, flames spreading to six other buildings before being put out with riverwater and sand. One of the drunks grabbed Hugh by the britchesleg. He kicked loose and made like to strike the man. This—all of it, he thought—progress. That’s what the paper said. Heard it bandied in the streets too, by men The Authority paid or promised to pay. He watched one of The Authority’s photographers taking pictures of the drunks, who leered and drooled and cackled when the bulb flashed. The photographer was young, looked like a yankee. More and more outsiders coming into the valley. A skinny woman walked her kids across the street, covering young eyes from this lurid scene. From a new reality, Hugh thought, The Authority’s promise of a new South: electricity, jobs, warm and sturdy rental houses, and the time to enjoy a healthy family who bought all its food from The Authority store rather than raising it on your own free land. Look around and see all this progress. Explosions day and night, hundred-year-old trees toppled, fires burning and burning and burning, like hell risen up onto earth, and the valley itself rumbling as if the ground might come apart and swallow them whole. And now him part of it. Hugh Treeborne, an Authority man.

  He bought a piece of vinegar taffy at Gus’s Buy-All and chewed, trying to forget his latest sin, as he passed the square where Hernando de Soto stood tall on a limestone pedestal. The Authority aimed to name the dam and the new lake after the conquistador. What might the old Spaniard think? Ash had piled on his brow and shoulders. This particular statue a gift from Elberta, Texas, the town’s sister city. Folks told that De Soto came down off his pedestal and walked the valley some moonless nights. Casabianca, Hugh’s daddy, used to scare Hugh the boy with such stories and threats. Not too long ago a str
ing of stolen horses had been blamed on the conquistador. The real culprit, Hugh figured, climbing up onto the pedestal, more likely a hungry Elbertan who needed to feed his family. He dusted off what ash he could reach. He’d always admired the statue—De Soto was an outsider too. Though the conquistador had somehow, over time, become them. The statue was the first piece of art Hugh’d ever seen. He still felt envious of what bronze could do that the clay he dug up from creekbanks could not.

  Other side of the square stood the post office, where a tall woman from out of town had recently been made postmaster. Hugh sat down and watched folks hurry in the cut-block building before close. The Times had written against the new postmaster’s hiring. She was maybe the first woman in the state to hold such a position and folks did not appreciate that distinction being associated with Elberta. Sometimes Hugh saw her walking Sampley’s route, Sampley the mail carrier dependable as a gnat on a good day. She took long and determined strides, and toted the heavy leather bag on her shoulder as if it was nothing. Hugh never spoke when he passed the postmaster on his uncle Frank’s wagon, though he did wonder if she noticed him too.

  When he got home another inquiry was tacked to the doorframe. He did not read it. He chucked the paper in the woodstove. “Let them try,” he said, starting a fire there. He went to the springhouse and grabbed a fistful of sauerkraut. With the other hand he picked up Crusoe from where he’d left him on the bank. An earthworm wriggled out of the dirt boy’s head. Hugh pitched the worm into the water then walked back up at the house.

  When the flames died down and the coals turned hot-white, he fried pork belly in a cast-iron pan then warmed a slice of cornbread in the rendered fat. He liked his pork crispy, his cornbread buttered. He had no cows for the latter. The pork had been a gift. The sauerkraut was cold and bright on his tongue and a big broad smile crossed his face as he chewed, jaw muscles stretched that hadn’t been in some long time. Work would do that for a man. Hugh Treeborne maybe hadn’t smiled so hard since he was a boy working at Prince’s Peach Cannery, which was now shuttered and starting to give itself over to weed and to vine and to whatever animals nested inside its machinery and walls. Now those were good times. Days yet Hugh hunted doves in the tall grass grown around the cannery. Bricks beginning to fall off like dried scabs, large rooms once filled with the beautiful noise of local work otherwise gone silent. Even Mr. Prince wasn’t immune to what was happening with the world.