The Killing Tree
Page 5
“Seven years of bad luck would seem like a loss to me.” I laughed. He watched me laugh, and smiled back.
“Preacher once talked about seven years of famine. And then seven years of feast. Way I figure it, my famine’s been goin’ on so long, ain’t no use in waitin’ for the feast. And if the feast ain’t comin’, no broke mirror’s gonna hurt me.”
I knew of the feasts and the famines. Once in church all of the children had to march forward to say who we wanted to meet the most when we got to heaven. After a row of Jesus answers, I said Joseph. Not the most famous Joseph in the Bible, not the Joseph that was Mary’s husband. But Joseph the dream interpreter. The man in the colorful coat that understood dreams and prophesized of famines and feasts. I wanted to ask him why I was beginning to dream of a crushing body of water that I had never seen.
“You’re saying a curse can’t hurt an already cursed person,” I said.
He nodded. “I broke one big ol’ mirror a long time ago. Reckon I can do what I want now. Can’t put that mirror back whole again. There’s no changin’ my luck, but at least I’m free.”
“Free to be a mater migrant?” I asked, wishing I had said “field hand” or “crop worker” instead. He held his hands palms up and looked at them.
There was a long silence, and I began to feel a deeper chill from the rain. He looked back up.
“Free to quit waitin’ on the feast. And let any good thing shake me up, no matter how small.”
“Like the fire trout?” I asked.
He smiled then. “That’s right. Like seein’ a fire trout and hopin’ every day to get to see it again. Wanna see where he was?”
I didn’t have to answer yes. There were some things that even the rain couldn’t hide.
Inside his truck, I guessed that it was his home. Dirty clothes were piled around cans of Skoal that lay on the floorboard. Fishing line and little packets of feathers and animal fur were scattered on the seat. The air was filled with heavy, damp scents. The sweat and tomatoes of his dirty clothes, the yeast of warm beer, the wintergreen of Skoal, and the rain sitting on our skin. The vinyl of the seats was ripped in several places, exposing the wires that lay beneath. And there was a patch of rust growing in the floorboard through which I saw flashing bits of the road beneath. Realizing that our only conversation had skipped proper introductions, I asked him if his name was really Trout. He told me it was, since it was the only name he could remember being called.
“So it’s not your birth name?” I asked.
“Huh-uh,” he said. “I didn’t ever get one of ’em.”
“How could somebody not have a birth name?”
“If they got a young momma, I reckon. Mine’s fourteen when she had me. And she was dead set against bringin’ me into the world a bastard. She told my daddy that I was gonna have his name whether I was a girl or a boy and he’d better go on and claim me and marry her. So while I was in her belly they called me Earnest Grover Price. Good thing I was a boy, huh? Can’t hardly see a girl being called Earnest Grover,” he said, laughing. “But ol’ Earnie ran off with Momma’s sister, and set out for California to try and be in pictures. After that, Pap Red, man that lived next door, said she’d cuss anybody that’d say my daddy’s name around her. She hollered that he’s worse than dead to her. Swore he’d never even lived to her. But for all her hollerin’ she couldn’t keep his baby from comin’. Once I did, I didn’t have a daddy’s name to take. I’m the bastard son of a man that ain’t ever lived. They all called me ‘baby’ for a while, and then ‘boy.’ Then one day at a river baptism, Pap Red said I started walkin’ out in the river. Preacher saw me, and I reckon he thought I was bein’ called to baptism. He started hollerin’ about how even a child knows the curse of sin enough to fear hell and started yellin’ for me to let the Holy Ghost carry me through the water to joy. I waded out a little ways to a pool, no higher than my knees. Then I reached right down and scooped up a little rainbow in my hands. Even Preacher was shocked at me, a little tike, scoopin’ up a trout with my bare paws. That day on, they all called me Trout. Trout Price. It’s the only one I know, so I reckon it’s my name, even if my momma didn’t give it to me,” he said, studying my reaction.
“Pap Red took me home and cooked that rainbow up for me. Made me eat it all too. Eyes, brains, everything but the chokin’ bones. He said the trout chose me, had claimed me. And I had to eat it all so I could think like one, so that I could see the things they see. Worked too. Was the best thing anybody ever done for me.”
Maybe he was crazy after all. I had expected to hear that his name was John or Bob and that his friends just called him Trout. But instead I learned that the man who spoke of fire trout, feasts, famines, and broken mirrors believed he was part trout.
“How about you, what’s your name?” he asked.
“I’m Mercy. Just plain ol’ Mercy Heron. And that’s my birth name. Though while I was in my momma’s belly it was Naomi. She had wanted to call me Naomi, but my Father Heron refused. Said I shouldn’t be named after a lady in the Bible when I was born of sin.”
He looked at me, and I could tell he didn’t quite understand, but was hesitant to ask.
“I’m a bastard too,” I said, only half laughing. “Just like your momma wouldn’t give you your daddy’s name, my Father Heron wouldn’t let me have a Bible name, or take my daddy’s last name. So it was Mercy Heron.”
As he pulled his truck off the road, he joked, “Just a couple a bastards ain’t we, on our way to hunt the fire trout.”
It was hard for me to smile, even though a great deal of people in my mountains were bastards. In a part of the world where the closest movie theater, skating rink, or bowling alley was at least two hours away, dating for most teens meant having sex. There was little else to do to fight the boredom. But it was still hard for me to grin and call myself a bastard, the insult reserved for despised, worthless people. He must have sensed that too, because he asked me if I liked my name.
“What do you mean? It’s my name. It’s just what people call me, it’s not anything to like or dislike,” I said. I could tell he disagreed.
“When a momma picks one word, out of all them words out there, it means somethin’. Somethin’ near holy. I ain’t got that kind of name. My momma didn’t pick a word for me. It had to pick me. I reckon luck traded me up.”
“Yep, I think Trout’s better than Earnest Grover,” I said.
“Maybe you was traded down.”
“How?” I asked.
“Your momma chose a word. And maybe that word’s what fits you. But it didn’t fit your grandpa so he traded you down. To Mercy. ’Cause it’s what he figured suits a bastard.”
I looked away. Staring out the truck windows at anything that couldn’t see my emotion.
“Mercy’s a good name. But maybe it ain’t your holy name,” he said. “And a name’s like walkin’ shoes, if it don’t fit, it’s gonna blister.”
I followed behind him while he held back briars and branches for me to pass through, wondering what he expected me to do, just tell people to start calling me Naomi? For the first time, I focused on my name. I whispered it to myself and listened to the way it sounded. Did it mark me as a child of sin? Is that why Mamma Rutha had never called me Mercy, but always Mercy baby? Would being called Naomi feel holy? It couldn’t melt my cages. My cages were born of a birth, murder, and a locked door. Letters weren’t strong enough to build those cages. Letters weren’t strong enough to trade me down to where I was. Were they?
I heard the creek before I saw it. The rain had slowed to a misty drizzle, and little of it touched us beneath the shelter of the woods. He sat on a rock and motioned for me to join him.
“That’s where light was comin’ out,” he whispered. “And I dropped it in the water here, watched that brown swim up and eat it.”
The mood of excitement that had swept over him at the docks when he spoke of the fire trout didn’t come. Instead he was quiet, almost reverent. We sat for a long
time, neither of us speaking, watching the water. I felt privileged. He had taken me to the place where the fire trout was born. And for the moments I sat on that rock staring into the water I was a believer, the fire trout was real.
It gets dark more quickly in the woods. As though there are two sunsets. The first when the light becomes too weak to pierce through the leaves. The second when the sun actually disappears for the night. Soon I could only sense the heat off of his body, I couldn’t see him.
“Say it,” I whispered.
“What?”
“My holy name. I just want to hear what it sounds like,” I said, thankful he couldn’t see that my face was hot with the flush of blood.
“Naomi,” he said, in a voice that washed over me as though he were holding me down in that stream. “Naomi,” he whispered, his mouth brushing my ear. He was so close that I was sure I could smell the scent of crushed tomato vines.
I felt dizzy. Emotions swept through me so hot and jumbled I couldn’t even name them. I tried not to cry, but tears spilled from my eyes. His arms slipped around me as I struggled for control. But it was no use. He had unbound me, and I ached to show him more of my bruises.
Later that night, in the safety of my bed, I wondered about my flood of tears. I whispered Naomi to myself in the dark. And then I knew. It wasn’t the name that made me cry. It was the man who whispered it. It was the way he said it. Like it meant something.
Chapter VI
I broke three glasses at work. Spilled one pitcher of tea and turned my new apron red with barbecue. I kept hearing it. The word he spoke to me. Five little letters that sounded so different when he spoke them. Like a whole new word. I kept smelling him. The smell of those crushed tomato vines. My skin kept feeling him. The graze of his lips across my ear. My eyes saw him everywhere. In the tomato that I sliced for a sandwich. In the stain of barbecue that spilled over my hands. In the bathroom mirror that was slightly cracked at the corner.
I needed Della. I could always count on her to distract me. She came to see me that day at work, with a soft new crinkle in her hair.
“How’s Ben Franklin?” I asked her as I filled her tea glass with beer when no one was watching. She tossed a lemon in it to complete the disguise.
“Wonderful,” she said, grinning. “I’m in love with Mr. Ben himself. He’s perfect. Steady but with a wild streak, stable but still exciting, and cute, of course.”
“What’s his name?”
“Well, in front of the other employees it’s Sir. When it’s just the two of us it’s Randy, though sometimes I still call him Sir, you know?” She winked. “But I’ll tell you one thing, I am tired of having to drive down to the damn docks to do it.”
Della was an expert on sex. And she knew more than any book could teach, because Della earned her knowledge the hard way—through old fashioned hands-on experience. My first week in high school she told me more about men in fifteen minutes than I had learned in fourteen years with my grandparents. And besides being a general expert on the subject, Della also considered herself my teacher. Knowing that if she didn’t teach me nobody else would, she felt it her duty to inform me of all the details of what she called “the magic.”
“The magic is wonderful, Mercy,” she would tell me. “It’s one of the only things in the world in which the woman is totally powerful. We can cast our spell over a man and make him do more tricks than any white rabbit in a hat.”
I always listened, but I secretly believed that Della’s powerful magic was a spell that only she could cast. There was nothing magical about me.
“Why don’t you go to his house, I mean, he has one doesn’t he? He is the manager.”
“That’s where his wife is,” she whispered, leaning forward.
“Married! Della DeMar what in the hell are you thinking?” I shouted.
“SHHH!” she said. “ She’s practically forcing us to have an affair. She treats him just awful. Spends all of his money on her eighteen cats. She feeds them steak and she won’t even let Randy sleep in her bed. No room for him and all the cats. Besides, he’s good to me. I told him about a dream I had, and, you are gonna die when you hear this, Mercy,” she said, leaning forward, “he had the same dream. The same one on the same night. He wasn’t lying either. I can smell lies on the breath of men, and he wasn’t lying.”
“Nothing’s as dangerous as a woman who knows the name of her husband’s lover,” I said.
She stared at the table and twisted her napkin. “I know it may be dangerous. And I know it sounds real sinful to a deacon’s granddaughter. But I reckon I am sinful, Mercy. I know the way people talk about me. So why stop and care about what they say now? If my love for this man is some real bad sin, it’s just because it comes from my black heart. But I found a man that dreams my dreams, a man that satisfies me, not my mind or even my body, but satisfies me right here,” she said, placing her hand on her chest.
I couldn’t help but smile. And I told her that Randy was lucky that she dished out love the way grandmas are supposed to dish out oatmeal. She had dished it out to the shy and scared Mercy Heron she found hugging a brick wall outside of the high school, to the old blind dog she adopted, to her mother that had tried to swallow her whole, and now to this tortured husband.
She finished her beer and told me about her new perm and I told her about the jelly jar jeans I was going to buy. Sitting there with her I felt like an invisible thread was sewing me together again. I felt like the old Mercy Heron. And then she unraveled me all over again.
“You remember that mater migrant, Trout?” she asked me, carefully eyeing my reaction. “He is one crazy man.”
“Really?” I shrugged, doing my best to hide my interest. I was scared that he had told her about our walk in the woods. I had never told Della about the name I was supposed to have had. And I couldn’t bring myself to describe how it felt to hear him say it.
“Randy’s wife insisted that he bathe all them cats last night, so I went down to the docks to hang out,” she said. “Anyway, we were all sitting around when Trout walks up. Daryl sort of knew him, so Trout sat down with us. Pretty soon Daryl starts complaining how there’s nothing to do here. And Trout told him he just didn’t know his mountain. Daryl got a little smart, and said, ‘You mean the way you know maters?’ And Trout didn’t say anything. I felt bad for him too, ’cause he seemed sad after Daryl said that. So I suggested that we should all name one Crooktop thrill that other people might not know about. Daryl said, ‘I would say laying with Della DeMar, but everybody already knows about that.’ He can be such an ass. I can’t believe I ever dated him. Then Trish said Daryl’s daddy’s pot patch. I said stealing makeup out of the drugstore. As long as you unwrap it before you put it in your pocket, the clerk can’t be sure it’s not really yours.”
“But why’d you say Trout was crazy?” I asked, trying to focus her. “What did he say?” I hoped that he hadn’t shared the secret of the fire trout with them, like he had with me.
“Nothing for a while. It was his turn, but he just sat there. Daryl got after him, asking him what Crooktop thrill he knew about if he knew our mountain so well, and telling him that mater women didn’t count. All the sudden Trout looked up and said, ‘I guess it’d be holdin’ death but not dyin’.’ Just like that, all low and quiet. It gave me the shivers. Daryl asked him what the hell he was talking about. And Trout told him you could hold death and not die on Crooktop. Sure we were drunk, but it was strange. Daryl said he didn’t believe him. Thought Trout was stoned out of his mind and talking nonsense. So Trout said he’d show him if he wanted. Before I knew it, me and Trish and Daryl were all piled into the bed of Trout’s truck, heading off into the night.”
“Where did he take you?” I asked, feeling like I was about to learn something big.
“A place like none other. He was right. There’s a place on Crooktop where people hold death but don’t die.”
“Well, tell me,” I said, growing impatient. “Where did you go?”
“What was it?” I asked.
“People moaning and wailing. Some laughing. Some shouting. It was like every noise in the world, all mixed up together. Light was pouring out the doors of a little shack in the woods. And I swear, Mercy, that building was moving. It was smaller than your house and the whole thing seemed to breathe. Inhaling and exhaling, shaking with its noise.”
“Where were you?”
“I will never be able to tell you. If I had a thousand years to figure that out, I couldn’t find my way back there. It was like trees were growing out the side of the building, like trees were growing on it. We got out of the truck and Trish screamed that they had better take her home. She was crying and saying how her daddy would get them good if they didn’t take her home.”
“Didn’t you want to leave too?” I asked her, noticing how flushed her face was becoming.
“Don’t get me wrong, Mercy, I was scared to death. Them people, they were screaming like they were dying. But I couldn’t move. All I could do is stand there and look at that shack.”
“What’d Trout do?” I asked.
“He was like me. Standing there watching it. Daryl asked him how he found that place. ‘Just did,’ he said. Like we were the strange ones for not knowing it was there.”
“Did he tell you what was inside?”
“He showed me,” she said, her eyes growing wide. “I told Trish to lock herself in the truck and we walked towards it. I knew I shouldn’t. But I couldn’t stop myself. My feet just kept carrying me closer, and I figured finding out what was in there just might be worth my life. I was so scared I don’t see how I was standing. I had one hand on Trout’s arm and another on Daryl. Kind of funny now that I think about it. A few minutes earlier I was thinking Trout was going to kill us all. And then later I was grabbing on to him for protection. At first all I saw was the doors. Somebody had carved crosses into ’em, and they were open wide. Then I started to hear this thumping noise. Boom. Boom. Boom. Just like that,” she said tapping her hand on the diner table. “Boom. Boom. Boom.”