The Killing Tree

by Rachel Keener

  “You fished any lately?” he asked.

  “Not since the other day with you. Not like I was really fishing then either. I guess I’d have to catch something before I could say that.”

  “You fished just fine,” he said. “Specially in that fancy fishin’ outfit.”

  “Don’t tease me about that,” I said, wishing my face would blush again, just so he would touch it.

  “I ain’t,” he said. “You was like a mornin’ glory, all white and purple. You ever seen one?”

  I had. People would plant them around their fences or mailboxes. The hardware store sold the seeds. But sometimes they would grow wild in the strangest places. Like weeds that didn’t know they were beautiful.

  “My momma used to grow ’em up the side of the porch. More like vines than flowers, ain’t they? Twistin’ and curlin’ all around the posts, clean up to our roof. It’s like she was hangin’ little white and purple flags off our house. And then there was you. A fishin’ mornin’ glory.”

  We were close. I could feel the rise and fall of his breath.

  “There wasn’t much glory in my fishing, Trout. Not much at all,” I said.

  “That’s crazy talk. You got glory all around you. Saw it on you at the docks. I had a light. I just wanted to see glory.”

  Glory. It was a strange word for someone to use to describe me. I wasn’t conceived in glory. I filled my momma’s belly with shame and embarrassed my grandfather. I wasn’t born in glory either. Father Heron was so angry with my momma’s swollen belly that he ordered her to take her sin out of his house. So she went to find my daddy. She was going to marry him, she said. But he wasn’t there. He wasn’t anywhere. Hewas gone. She got so upset she went into labor right there. And as pain gripped her body, she didn’t know where to go. Except home. To her momma, my Mamma Rutha. To her daddy, my Father Heron. She ran as best she could up the mountain. Blood spilling down her legs as I tore her apart from inside. She ran to that little square white house with the dingy green shingles. It was her home too. She put her hand on the back doorknob and tried to turn it. She pulled. She twisted. She screamed. She cursed. But the door wouldn’t open.

  I was locked inside her belly, trying to rip my way out, and I’m sure that I heard her scream. Heard her beg. Daddy, please. Please! OhGod,please! Just let me have my bed, Daddy! Daddy, it’s killing me! It’s killing me, Daddy!Please, God! Oh please open the door! Please let me have my bed!

  That doorknob never turned. It would never turn for her again. While Father Heron sat silent, locked inside his house, Mamma Rutha pulled me from within her daughter. My momma lay sprawled and naked on the ground, her blood, our blood, soaking the grass and the dirt as I entered the world. I was born in blood and dirt and a dying girl’s screams. There was no glory there.

  “Where you standin’?” he asked gently.

  I was quiet for a long time. I listened to the river, the sound of water, cleansing water.

  “I don’t know if I am. I’m sinking. Or floating. But there’s not much ground for me to stand on. You don’t see me really. You see somebody standing in glory. What was it you said, a different kind of woman? Maybe I am. But not in a good way. Not the way you think.”

  “We ain’t from the same place,” he said. “Ain’t no use in pretendin’ we are. But just ’cause I pick maters don’t make me a blind man.”

  “I wasn’t saying that. I wasn’t saying it’s because of your work. I’m just saying you don’t really know me. You just see me as part of the rest of Crooktop, but you don’t see how I can never be that. You don’t see the things that have been done that will keep me from ever knowing glory.”

  “I saw how you believed in the fire trout. And how you looked at me the same way after seein’ my hands. Nobody like you has ever done that before. And that’s a different kind, Mercy. That’s glory.”

  “Well, I like how you see me,” I whispered, my face feeling flushed again.

  “You’re standin’ on a bad mirror. Starin’ at somethin’ that ain’t really you. We oughta go on and break it.”

  I wouldn’t tell him about the mirror I was standing on. About my daddy leaving, for God knows where. About the doorknob that wouldn’t turn. Long ago I had locked my secrets away, safe as the jelly jar. But every time I walked through the back door, I was surprised that it opened for me. And sometimes I felt sure I could smell the hot blood of my birth in the backyard.

  Chapter X

  The next morning, a car pulled up to the house. One that didn’t rattle or sputter. A sheriff’s car. Always clean and always fast. Father Heron walked out of the woods and shook Sheriff Barnes’ hand. I walked over to the back porch to string and break beans, so that I could listen.

  “Four dogs. Champion line too,” I heard Father Heron say. “And I paid good money for those dogs. No telling what they’d be worth now that I’ve trained ’em.”

  Sheriff Barnes was listening. Shaking his head. Stroking his beard. He looked like the law.

  “Way I figure, it’s a pretty big crime,” Father Heron continued. “And somebody’s got to pay. Can’t have that kind of stuff going on up here on Crooktop. Never happened when we was growing up.”

  “Glad you called the law,” Sheriff Barnes said. “I’m gonna do my best to get your dogs back, or catch the bastard that took ’em. But I don’t want to inspire false hope in you. Four dogs are hard to track. I’ll do my best.”

  Father Heron had called in the police. Over four missing dogs. And it wasn’t because he loved them, or craved their wagging tails. It was because he wouldn’t be beaten. At his own home, on his own land, with his own dogs. I laughed right into my bean bowl. Because I knew there was no dog bandit. Just a wife and a granddaughter. And we wouldn’t be caught. Father Heron wouldn’t allow it. The Herons had a whore, craziness, and a bastard baby already. No need to add criminals to that.

  The two men stood in the driveway and discussed their strategy.

  “I’ll ask some questions around town. Meanwhile you keep looking. Take care now, Wallace. Tell Rutha I said hello. And Mercy,” Sheriff Barnes said as he drove away.

  “Coon! Here boy! Come on Coon! Fox!” Father Heron began to shout. But his voice lacked hope. His shoulders were slumped and his hair mussed. But he wouldn’t stop calling those dogs. The hate called from within him. He didn’t need the hope.

  But my heart held enough hope for the both of us, as I entered the first happy time of my life. I started meeting Trout nearly every day, even if it was just for a few minutes of conversation in his truck, before heading to work. Della liked to gossip about love. Girls at school had declared it. But this was different. It wasn’t something that was scribbled across a locker or passed in a note.

  “Tell me,” Della begged. “Give me all the details!”

  But it wasn’t “magic” that Trout and I shared. It was love. And the difference between the two made me realize that I had something too special to talk about.

  “But I tell you everything!” she said, pouting. “You love him, Mercy? You do. A girl always loves her first boy. Just remember, save room in your heart for others. You don’t know what else is out there yet, something better always comes along.”

  “No,” I whispered.

  “You can’t say that yet. You ain’t never spoken to another boy besides Rusty. Don’t quit looking around.”

  “And how about you? You’re looking in someone else’s garden.”

  “Yeah, I can’t wait ’til he divorces his wife. Imagine it, Mercy, I’m gonna be the wife of the manager, the manager, of Ben Franklin. I know it’ll just burn up all those priss misses from high school. I’ll wear pretty clothes and cook nice dinners, and we’ll have a big house. And maybe one day, once my figure’s starting to fade, we’ll have babies. I’ll have real class. Real respect. Folks will forget about my old dirt floor.”

  “When is he going to divorce her?” I asked.

  “Soon. He’s afraid of what she’ll do when he leaves her. She’s a rea
l nutcase. Even though he hasn’t said it, I know he’s really worried that she’ll try and hurt me. Which he shouldn’t be. Della DeMar can handle any kooky cat woman. I was raised on kookiness, I know every trick it can pull. But it really stresses him out to talk about it, so I don’t bring it up much. You know, he’s different than most men. The other night we were looking up at the stars. I said the stars over these mountains shined brighter than anywhere else in the world because of the coal here. When the miners stripped it all out, the only place it had to run to was the sky, and the moon and the clouds pressed against the coal so much that it all turned into diamonds. And you know what he said to me? He didn’t tell me I was full of nonsense, or hurting his head with all of my stupid ideas, he said he liked to listen to me. That I had pretty talk. Not that I was pretty, lots of people have told me that, but that my ideas were. Who knows, Mercy, what if you’re right after all? This may be it. One day when we’re forty we may look back and laugh at us, sitting here now talking about the men we love. We may be married to those men, and sick of ’em by then. This summer may have been the start of it all. Does Father Heron know about Trout?”

  “He’d kill me. Or Trout,” I said.

  “But he’ll find out eventually, you know that, right?”

  “Why?” I asked, feeling panicked.

  “Well when the mater migrants pack up and Trout stays, talk will probably spread. You know how Crooktop is when there’s a newcomer. Trout will have to find a job. A place to live. People will notice. People will talk,” she replied. “Where will he stay?”

  Staying. It was a detail we hadn’t thought to cover. We were loving as though there were no October.

  I shrugged my shoulders.

  “Oh Mercy. Pull your heart back in. Don’t give it all to a man that may take it and run. You’ve got to get some control.”

  I lied and said I would, then asked her about Rusty to change the subject. “I haven’t encouraged him. Honestly, I don’t know where he got it into his head that I would be interested.”

  “Some men just live in lies. They ain’t like women. Women see too much of the truth in themselves. They see too many dimples in their thighs and too much sag in their breasts. But some men are just the opposite. They lie and tell themselves that they aren’t really fat. Or bald. Or that tight white jeans actually look good on them. And they’ve lied so long they think it’s the truth. Rusty’s just told himself that sweet little Mercy adores him, aches for him, needs him.”

  “How do I fix it?” I asked.

  “Gently,” she said. “We need to make him think that if you could have any man, you’d have him, but there’s just some reason why you can’t.”

  “And what would that reason be?” I asked.

  “It’s gotta be something that he can’t try and fix. Something he won’t want to chat with Father Heron about. Maybe . . . maybe I’ll tell him you’re sick. With female trouble. Men always hate to talk about that. He won’t even ask questions. I’ll just say you have female trouble real bad and that the doctors have told you to stay away from men for at least a year, ’til you’re better.”

  “I don’t know. You’re gonna tell him I got a disease? Like the kind girls get from the docks? What if that spreads around to Father Heron?”

  “It won’t. He won’t want to admit to knowing something like that. If he blabs to the deacons, won’t they wonder how he knows? Besides, I’ll tell him that you’re waiting only for him. That way, he’s not been refused, just delayed,” she said.

  “And what happens this time next year?”

  “Why you’ll be Mrs. Mater Migrant of course, silly!” She laughed.

  I laughed too. Della thought of everything in beginnings and endings. Her only concern was the once upon a time, and the happily ever after. But I was losing myself in the middle chapters. And discovering that’s where all the love is held.

  There were no romantic getaways or kisses beneath fireworks. No feuds or jealousies. There was just a hot thick love that shook me, but not the earth.

  Our only struggle came from my refusal to take him home. I had promised him the red ropes from my closet, to better secure his tent. And he asked if he could swing by to pick them up.

  “I’ll bring them to you,” I insisted. “ ’Cause you can’t ever come to my home. Ever. It’s just the way things have to be.”

  “Just get on home then,” he said angrily. “Why’d you say you chose me, when all along you was still gonna live for them?”

  “It’s not that I want to live for them. It’s that I’m scared of what’ll happen if I don’t.”

  “I don’t know what your home is like or how bad it gets up there for you. But I’d rather be dead than scared all the time. Ain’t no freedom in that. Ain’t no sense in not being able to love who you want,” he said, his eyes flashing trouble.

  “I don’t know what you want from me. You think going to my home, meeting my grandparents, will change everything?”

  “It’s time you learned that sometimes a three-legged dog was meant to be a three-legged dog. And maybe you was meant to love a man with red hands. You want me to make ’em smooth and white again? You wouldn’t love me if I did,” he said, walking back down the riverbottom with a look of disgust on his face. “You just go on home, and dream about a perfect life that ain’t got no trouble in it. Think about how maybe you wouldn’t be you, here with me now, if you hadn’t been raised by your grandparents. Maybe what you think is all messed up is the reason why I saw glory all over you. Maybe the things you’re always runnin’ from are what you oughta be runnin’ to.”

  I did run. But only to him. And it was perfect enough. Not completely perfect, because it was love and fear. The fear of being discovered. The fear of what we would do when the harvest ended. Like our love, September was a subtle month on the mountain. The wind became a little cooler, day by day. Gardens began to pant, winded and out of breath. Yellow schoolbuses dotted the roads again. All of them baby steps toward winter. A thieving winter, that would steal the sun, the crops, and the tentworld.

  I stared at the rows of tomatoes and prayed that they would last another week. Another month. The rows gave us precious time. To fish and gather around the fires of the tentworld. To water the sunflower field that was growing in my heart.

  Chapter XI

  There was supposed to be beauty. But there was just heat. Ripening the fruit. Withering the men. And sweat. Of more than water, of the minerals that filled their bones. And pain. As the bees stung them. As their backs humbled themselves. As their flesh was burned by the leaves that I had imagined tickled. And it was ugly. Maybe even low. With the spitting. The cursing. The peeing on the plants. And he was a part of it all.

  “Hey Trout! Pick up that crate, boy! You got eight more to fill before you rest!” a white man yelled.

  My eyes sought the source of the voice and tracked down the row where the man had yelled. Until I saw Trout. His shirt was off. And I thought back to the first time I saw him that way. How my eyes had traced the lines of his skin. How beautiful it had all been. Naked shoulders. Naked back. But as I stood on the bank, I saw that he was just a man. Whose shoulders looked like all other men’s. A man whose naked back was just as humbled as the one next to him.

  And I pitied him. Wondering, why did he choose this? And as I watched him curse and sweat, I wanted to pull him away and polish him. To make him shine the way he had before I learned what it meant to be a mater migrant.

  When they stopped I met him at his tent. I really saw him then. I saw how he held his body, a little to the right, because he had picked the maters on the right of the rows that day. I saw how the red on his palms wasn’t just the juice of red stain, but was the blister of his skin too. From jerking the frayed ropes that held the plants to their stakes. Rope after rope, tighter and tighter. I smelled his sweat. Not for the earthy scent that I had originally thought it. But for the scent of misery. I saw how hungry he was, but how he dreaded the taste of those tomatoes. I saw how
hard he worked to keep it all from me. Teasing me about smelling like pork. Joking about how he’d like to smoke but was scared to ask me for a light.

  “Why do you do it?” I asked.

  “Do what?”

  “This work. This life. Why?”

  “Don’t know no other way,” he said, encircling me in his arms. “Got my own tent. And free food. Them coal boys always runnin’ outta work. Not me. Not with this rich mountain dirt. Oughta plant gold here, ain’t nothin’ it can’t grow.”

  “I saw you,” I said.

  “What?”

  “I came after lunch. I watched you all afternoon.”

  His arms fell loose and to his side.

  “And I just don’t get why you would choose that. It’s such a hard life. I know you can do better,” I said. His eyes left mine and fell to a place I couldn’t follow. “You spoke of freedom before. And of spinning. And that all made sense and was pretty. But it can’t cover the hard life you have to chase to have it.”

  “I ain’t got a pretty answer,” he said. “Maybe to a fourteen-year-old boy, breakin’ a body is better than goin’ home. Or maybe I just ain’t never been able to see nothin’ but them rows. Everywhere I turn I see them rows. Nothin’s certain for me, ’cept rows. Man can’t just walk away from that, without somethin’ else to go to.”

  If I could have nestled him beneath my skin and made my body his living shrine, just so those rows could never find him again, I would have. But all that I could do was look at his palms. Not see past them anymore, but really look at them.

  I picked up his hand. I kissed the top, where the thick veins hid. I kissed the little row of hairs at his joints. I turned his hand over and kissed the calluses that rose just beneath his fingers. I knew the truth. He was a mater migrant. And it was miserable. Maybe even low. I kissed his palm. Full in the center. I tasted his flesh. I loved all of him. All that was beautiful. And everything that wasn’t, and would never be.