The Boys in the Trees

by Mary Swan

  The next time his father led Prince out of the stable Eaton asked if they could go to the boy’s house to get a kitten, but his father said no. And when he kept pestering his father slapped the side of the buggy, said he’d been wrong to take Eaton there at all. He said they’d talk about it later but days went by, the kittens all the time growing into cats, and they never did.

  • • •

  Shiner climbed a little higher in the tree and hung from his bent knees, his upside-down face moving between the leaves. It made Eaton think of the magic lantern Will’s father had and the way the pictures flickered, Mother Goose on her gander, Samson with the temple crashing down. When he had told Miss Alice about it once, she said that she would show them something even more amazing. After lunch, she led them into the back kitchen, dark because she’d draped a black cloth tight over the only window. She told them to stand on that side, facing the opposite, whitewashed wall, to stand still, let their eyes get used to the murky light, and look straight at the wall. What Eaton saw first was hazy, something shifting, that was no color he could put a name to. Keep looking, Miss Alice said, out of the gloom, and just as someone whispered, I see it, he saw it too. Something square and beside it a shape in the softest green, still shimmering but coming clearer as he looked. What is it? Rachel said, and then one of the young ones said, A clue, can we have a clue please, Miss? One clue, Miss Alice said. It’s upside down.

  One clue was enough, and Eaton blinked and knew it. A tree, he said, it’s a tree upside down, and he knew it so surely that he couldn’t believe that just a moment before he hadn’t. And a building with windows, someone said, maybe Rachel again, an upside-down building. Do you all see it? Miss Alice said, and they all said they did, though Nina didn’t sound sure. Then Miss Alice climbed on a chair and pulled down the black cloth and they all saw through the window, saw the green slope down to the river, the bulk of the stone factory on the other side, the dense plume of the maple tree just at the corner of it, all bathed in the light of the high sun.

  Miss Alice said it was Science, said they all knew that sunlight was made up of colors, didn’t they? They did, most of them did, and she told them that the light of day bounced around all in a jumble, colors flying here and there and all mixed up. Then she said that she’d made the whole room into something like a magic lantern, maybe more like a camera; someone had shown her the same thing once. She showed them a hole she had made in the black cloth, explained that when the sunlight could only come in that one hole, it meant that only a bit of each color could get through. That was why they saw the tree, the stone wall of the factory, even though those things were behind them, and turned the other way. She couldn’t remember why they were upside down but she said that what they had seen was real, not magic, although it was very like magic. That the trembling tree, the building, were always there, that they just needed a way to be seen. They did it over and over, the boys taking turns on the chair, fixing the heavy dark cloth and taking it down again, seeing the same picture, a little more of it each time.

  He remembered that, looking at Shiner’s leaf-dappled face, remembered that he had thought about it for hours, maybe for days. If they were there all the time, the factory and the tree, then so was the river, so were the houses, every person walking about. And that meant, that had to mean, that he was walking all the time through a hazy, upside-down world, that the empty air was filled with quivering shapes, just waiting to be revealed, that every solid thing in the world had a ghostly opposite. He thought about it for days and then set it aside, not able to understand how it could really be.

  • • •

  There were more people than on the busiest market day in the street around the closed front gate, and faces peered over the rooftops across the way. Three young men had climbed the tree after them, and wouldn’t let anyone else up. They were talking loudly about a dance they’d been to, and someone named Chas who was sweet on a girl named Louisa, how he never went anywhere now unless she gave permission. An old man walking beneath heard their shouting laughter, looked up and shook his cane, called them ghouls and said why didn’t they get jobs instead of carousing all hours, instead of finding entertainment in watching some poor wretch lose his life. The young men just laughed more, and one of them tried to tear off twigs to pelt the angry man. But the twigs were green and bent instead of breaking, a handful of stripped-off leaves floating down to land in the space he’d already left.

  I’m a ghoul too, Shiner said, hunching his shoulders and rubbing his hands together, twisting his face. Eaton copied him, but he didn’t think that was the whole reason he had made the plan. The rest of it was something he didn’t seem to have a choice about, something he was caught up in. Something that must have started with the murders, because he found it hard to remember a time before.

  It seemed to be all about waiting, this day, and in the tree he thought again that it was a good thing Will hadn’t come, thought about what it would have been like with that high voice chattering in his ear. Shiner said that Will just talked for the sake of hearing his own voice, and not much of what he said meant anything at all. He had said that the day they were supposed to hunt buffalo with Will’s real bow and arrows, Shiner waiting out of sight while Eaton knocked on the heavy front door. Will said he couldn’t come and closed the door quickly, before Eaton had a chance to ask if they could take the bow anyway. Before the door slammed he heard Reverend Toller’s voice, talking in a church way. Sometimes the whole family had to spend the day on their knees.

  The bows they’d made themselves didn’t work very well, the arrows plunking to the ground far short of the cows grazing in Arnold’s pasture. They left them lying there and went into the woods to look for more feathers, and Shiner said it was nice, just the two of them. Shiner didn’t talk much usually, and he didn’t like to explain the ideas he had. Usually he’d just charge off into something and Eaton and Will would follow, figuring it out as the game went along. He could run like the wind and he could fight if he had to, and he had the loudest yell of all of them, sending pigeons flapping through the dusty sunlight in Ridley’s falling-down barn. But sometimes he went completely still, seemed to disappear behind his own eyes. The way he did that would help him when he went to the Wild West, would make him a good scout, a good hunter. But Eaton didn’t like it, it even scared him a little, the way Shiner could remove himself. Something like Eaton’s father, when he raised his eyes from a book, turned from a twilight window. The way he had to blink a few times before he was really there, before he realized who was talking to him.

  • • •

  Drifter Dan could sit for hours without moving, even when a rattlesnake slithered right across his boot. Eaton wriggled to settle himself, his back against the smooth main trunk, his legs drawn up, feet resting on a solid branch. Shiner had his own branch and was digging at it with his penknife, bending to blow bits of tree dust from the cuts. Eaton stared at his moving hand, the scratching blade, until they started to shimmy a little, until he noticed a far-off buzzing in his ears. He bent his head to touch his knees, the way his father had shown him once when he almost fainted. That was the morning of the funerals, when he sat at the breakfast table and everything looked strangely sharp-edged, the sound of the cutlery echoing, the sound of Lucy’s footsteps. He didn’t think he’d said anything but maybe his father was looking at him, his cool hand suddenly on the back of Eaton’s neck, his calm voice saying, Put your head down. Put it down. His new trousers were scratchy against his forehead, his cheek, and as he noticed that he realized he was feeling better, sat up slowly, saying, I’m all right, in answer to his father’s question. He opened his eyes to a frozen scene, his mother’s finger curled in the handle of her teacup, Lucy standing still, two white plates held in her raised hands. But just as quickly as he noticed it the scene changed, moved. His mother raised her cup, drank; his father picked up his napkin from the floor and sat down again in his chair. Lucy stepped forward with her plates, and the glistening yellow e
yes of the eggs stared back at him. He didn’t think he could bear to touch them with his fork, see them burst and flow. He tore off bits of dry toast and put one in his mouth where it thickened, hard to swallow. It was a thing that made his mother cross, when he picked at his food, but that morning she just said, You don’t have to do this. We could find someone else.

  For a moment the possibility was there, but he knew it was a coward’s moment, closed it down. She had said the same thing in his room the night before, laying out his clothes, and she hugged him after she said it, his face crumpled into the slippery stuff of her dress, her smell both sweet and a little tart. Just as he felt himself begin to soften into her, she let him go, with a little push on his shoulder, and he took a deep breath. Sometimes, to his shame, what he most wanted was to curl up in her lap, the way he must have done when he was very small.

  From across the table his father said, It will be fine. You remember how I explained it? He nodded his head, the toast paste in his mouth making it impossible to speak. His father had said that they were honoring Rachel by carrying her coffin, Eaton and Lucius and Nina’s older brothers. He explained exactly how it would be, where they would sit, what they would have to do, and when. Eaton nodded again when his father asked if he was all right now, egg dripping from the end of his fork.

  Excused from the table, he sat on the back step, his arms around his drawn-up knees. Everything was stiff, the unfamiliar trousers, the newly starched shirt, and his skin beneath felt scraped raw, as if the slightest touch might make it bleed. He was tired beyond even knowing it, the last nights filled with tossing dreams. A fiend chasing him down a dark hallway and then appearing suddenly in front of him, turning slowly to reveal a version of his father’s face, pointed teeth dripping blood. At the table he had told his father that he was all right, but he knew that wasn’t so, knew that nothing would ever be right again. Rachel had given him her book to hide, the book she was making as a present for Christmas. And now she was dead and he couldn’t give it back, and her mother was dead, her sister Lil. There was no one to give it back to, and he didn’t know what to do. Only her father left, his eyes glowing in the dark dungeon, and it didn’t seem right that he should have it. Just days before, Reverend Toller had read the story of Abraham; he pointed to the stained-glass window and the light falling through that same window made his pointing hand glow red. He had talked about Abraham’s anguish, knowing that he would have to slay his only son, but he didn’t say anything about what it was like for Isaac, tied to the altar, looking up at the knife in his own father’s hand. Isaac lived and that was supposed to make it all right, but what was it like for him, walking back down the mountain at his father’s side? What kind of dreams did Isaac have?

  Eaton knew that they were in Heaven, Rachel and her mother and her sister, and he knew that was the part he was supposed to think about. How everything was peaceful and they were happy in Heaven, looking down on him, on everyone, with their hair flowing loose, soft wings, with light all around. He knew that at that very moment Rachel was looking down, that she was looking down at him, smiling, with a big hole in her head.

  • • •

  From where they were they could see the apparatus, the raw new wood that had been sliced from a tree growing tall and straight, maybe somewhere not far away. A tree that, growing, looked just like all the other ones around it, the ones that would make kitchen tables or a little boy’s sled, the house that he lived in. The crossbeam was high, and sun flashed now and then on the pulley the rope ran through. One end of the rope canted over to the upright, ran down the side and merged into a tangle of other ropes, some of them holding the weight the newspaper had described, hanging ten feet off the ground. The other end was the noose, dangling down in the middle at a man’s height. It looked just like the picture of the noose that had been around Drifter Dan’s neck on the cover of Fiends of the Wild West and that gave Eaton a start, like something that was just a story had come to life.

  Shiner said the Hangman would have come on the midnight train, his hat pulled low so no one could see his face. A shiny black case carrying his own coiled rope, the one that they now saw hanging, completely still. He said that the Hangman traveled from place to place, as he was needed. That no one knew what his real name was, that he was notified by a coded message in the newspaper, the same way King Carter got in touch with the Boy Detective. Between times he lived alone in a tall dark house, and who knew what he did? Counted his piles of gold or cracked small animals’ bones, or strung up unlucky strangers for practice.

  • • •

  Eaton decided it was more like a fair than a revival after all. Loud voices and laughter and the men lower down in their tree trying to make each other fall. But they must have been listening hard all the same; the squeak of the door hinge was not very loud but they all fell silent as a group of men filed out of the jail, crossed the yard and stood near the scaffold. Maybe ten or twelve of them, most in dark coats, most with familiar faces.

  There was still a low rumble from the crowd outside the front gate, but then someone gave one shrill whistle and that stopped too. The eight o’clock bell began to toll and while the last stroke still shivered, Reverend Toller appeared in his long white robes, a book open in his hands, and there was a hiss of indrawn breath that seemed to come from everywhere. Rachel’s father was behind him, his neck looking strange, no collar on his shirt. His arms were bound behind his back, the same way he held them when he paced in the Sunday school, listening to them recite their verses. The sheriff was a little behind and to the side, one hand out as if to steady, but although Heath walked slowly, he didn’t stumble. Behind the sheriff, two jailers in their uniforms, and between them a man with short, carroty hair, wrists hanging out of a too-small jacket. Then Eaton’s father and that gave him a start, like seeing the noose. He must have known his father would be there but he hadn’t really thought about it and he watched him now, keeping pace with the procession, and remembered him reading in his chair the night before, remembered him saying good night, just like any other time.

  It was not a long walk but it seemed to go on and on, each moment filled with things he noticed, spilling into the next, into each other. There was a call from the rooftop across, cut off, and Heath’s head jerked up, then bowed down again. Reverend Toller was reading aloud and Eaton realized that he’d been reading since the door squealed open, the murmur of the words now beginning to separate and stand clear. Man that is born … full of misery … fleeth as it were a shadow …

  Reverend Toller stepped to one side and continued to read, his eyes on the page, although he must have known the words by heart. Heath stopped beneath the dangling noose, and the red-haired man stepped forward, a thick strap in his hand. That’s never the Hangman, Eaton heard Shiner say, but even as he did the strap was wrapped around Heath’s pin-striped legs, drawn tight; he was facing the wall but the man turned him, carefully, to face the jail yard, the silent, black-suited men. In the midst of life …

  The sheriff stepped up and spoke close to Heath’s ear, but Heath shook his head once, and he stepped back again. The Hangman placed a black hood over his head—where had that come from? He reached and looped the noose over it, and even from where they were they could see it shake in his hand. O holy and merciful Savior …

  The red-haired man stepped back and stood by the hanging weight, and like in a dream, in a nightmare, something sharp suddenly glinted in his raised hand. Our father … and Eaton wasn’t even breathing, wasn’t thinking. Thy will be done … and the sharp thing flashed again, the weight fell with a heavy thud, a puff of dust. Heath jerked up but only a little way, just as quickly down again, his pointing feet a breath away from the ground.

  • • •

  His toes were a ragged breath from the ground and they were moving, and their movement caused him to turn a little, at the end of the rope. His hands were moving too, clenching and opening. At first, Eaton thought it was an escape he was seeing, what a horse might do, ha
ving blown out its belly while the cinch was tightened. What King Carter did, craftily turning his hands so the palms faced out while the villains bound them, able to slip free the first time they were distracted. But he thought that only for a moment; the silent world was filled with a terrible groaning sound and it was clear that there was no escape, even though the feet were still moving, the fingers of the bound hands twitching and flicking, frantic.

  Someone in the tree said, Jesus, in a whisper that rasped like the noises coming from the black hood. The black hood that moved, part of it did, the cloth sucking in and out with the groaning. The red-haired man bolted back toward the jail; the sheriff lifted a hand as if to stop him, but let it fall again. Some of the dark-coated men turned their backs, some still faced straight ahead, and all had their hands clenched tight at their sides.

  And it went on and on and on, the jerking and the straining and the black cloth sucking in and out, longer than any buggy wait, longer than any thundering sermon in the stifling summer church, longer than the longest dream-torn night. It went on and on, and then Eaton’s father stepped forward and touched the bound man’s hands. He’s going to cut him loose, Shiner breathed, and Eaton flicked his eyes, Shiner’s face as pale as cream, maybe his own was too; he said, No, he’s going to check his pulse, though he didn’t know how he knew that. But his father didn’t do either of those things, not then. Instead he slipped his hands between Heath’s, clasped them tight and they clasped back; Eaton could see it from the tree. Thought he could. And the terrible dancing feet slowed, stopped, the groans lower and longer until they stopped too, and everything was very quiet. Only the tumbling thoughts in Eaton’s head, spinning and making their own kind of noise and telling him that he’d been wrong, all wrong about the plan, that nothing was over. He had worked it all out, like Drifter Dan would have, but high in the tree he knew that the success of his plan had only thrown him into another kind of nightmare, that it was the farthest thing from what he really wanted. He tried to take deep breaths, the way he did when he woke in his own bed in the dark, and down in the jail yard his father shifted his hands, one now holding Heath’s black-sleeved arm, two fingers of the other pressed inside the rope, the way he’d shown Eaton how to count pulse beats. But there were no beats to count; the sheriff took out his watch, said Eight fifteen, and one of the watching men wrote in a notebook. Then they filed back across the yard toward the invisible door, two jailers remaining beside the hanging man, his hooded head drooping forward, the black body stark as a carefully drawn comma. Eaton’s father looked up as he neared the wall, seemed to look straight at him. And Eaton didn’t duck, didn’t move; he held his father’s gaze for what seemed like a long time, thinking that if he could only understand what it was telling him, it would be a thing he would know for the rest of his life.