Devil Tree

by Vernon, Steve

  “It’s not my child.”

  So he knew. Yet why the raving? Had her infidelity driven him mad? And what about Duvall? Was he dead or tied up as well?

  “I can’t go,” she said.

  He wasn’t listening.

  “I won’t go.”

  Still nothing.

  “Listen to me, Lucas. I can’t go with you. I love another.”

  His face darkened. Her words had effect. He stopped trying to drag her.

  “Lucas, I love Jonah Duvall.”

  He stared, thunderstruck.

  “I love him.”

  He hit her with the end of the rope, as if it were a knout. The pain was nothing compared to the humiliation.

  “Lucas, don’t do this.”

  He stared at her, deliberately raising the rope.

  “You don’t frighten me,” she said.

  He struck her again.

  A small voice inside her wondered what a beating might do to her unborn child.

  Children, the small voice whispered deep inside her.

  Your unborn children.

  “Very well,” she said.

  “I will go.”

  3

  She fought him subtly with every step, dragging her feet and shifting her weight against his efforts like a stubborn, balking plow horse. He worked for every inch of their desperate flight.

  “You will come,” he repeated, chanting it in his need to find strength. The ground shifted beneath his weight. His pegleg slid and caught on a root. He sagged against a tree. His strength ebbed. He panted, almost panicked. His head began to sing.

  “Goddamn Duvall.”

  “What did you do to him?” Tamsen asked.

  He ignored her question, slapping his ears to take his mind off of his terror. The sweat crawled, tormenting his brow.

  Damn Duvall. What spell had he worked to bewitch her in such a fashion?

  He massaged his pounding temples.

  Damn it.

  He had dropped the rope.

  He looked up, fearing that she had bolted.

  She hadn’t moved a muscle and yet she seemed further away, like a drifting boat.

  “Damn it,” he swore.

  Somehow a tree had come between them, the rope running neatly through a fork in the branches.

  Had she done that?

  How had she done that?

  Lucas fought the rope free from the tree’s grasp and then caught up her hand. She still didn’t resist. She could have. She was heavy enough.

  Damn it.

  After three years of marriage, he could not bring forth an issue, yet Duvall managed the trick in short order. How long had it gone on? How many times had he laid with her, in the dirt, in the bed, in the darkness? Lucas found his mind trapped, haunting madly about the possible scenarios.

  He dragged on, putting his head down and tugging. Her breath grew harsher as they continued; more rapid, her face becoming deathly pale.

  Damn it.

  He didn’t like to see her in such a state, but it couldn’t be helped.

  She clutched at her heavy middle, wincing at each fresh pain.

  “Lucas,” she called out.

  He wouldn’t listen. He was having too hard of a time navigating their course from this valley. She’d feel better, once they found their way out. Once they got far enough from the valley’s dark boundaries.

  He could see the ridge of the valley. All he needed to do was walk straight. The way was clear. The Greensnake River waited below. Freedom lay within easy reach but every cursed tree and root turned against him, causing him to step around until it seemed he was traveling in circles.

  Tamsen was no help, in more pain than ever.

  He dragged her as he swore he would. She would see the light of reason. It was not that close to her birth. She wasn’t big enough, not yet.

  When they reached the outer ridge, almost to the lip of the valley, she fell, dragging him to his knees. She lay there gasping like a beached trout, heaving in great shuddering convulsions, refusing to move.

  He could almost see the Greensnake heading westward towards distant freedom and bidding him follow. Leave her, it seemed to whisper.

  Let her go.

  He stared at her bloated body. When had he truly loved her? She seemed so huge, so grotesque. A wave of revulsion crawled over him. He turned away. It would be easy to flee; to leave the bitch to her chosen fate. To die or to give birth to what he realized could never be his child. The father was another.

  Not Duvall, but another.

  Let her go.

  He ought to leave her for Duvall. The man could feed her to his hound or plant her beneath that hell tree, should that be his pleasure. Lucas wanted nothing more of her or this stinking valley that bound her so.

  He cut the rope. Without looking back, he began to walk. The way seemed clearer, now that the tie was severed. He could taste the sweet clear waters and felt strangely rejuvenated. By God, he could walk clear to California and back, if need be. He was halfway over the ridge, moving steadily towards clearer ground and the river, when he heard her call.

  “Lu-cas.”

  Her voice was weak. He had never heard it so weak before. He paused without thinking. He did not turn. He didn’t wish to gaze back the way he came, over the body of his wife and down towards that devil’s valley.

  “Lu-cas,” she called again, weaker now, almost gone.

  She was dying and would doubtless be dead by nightfall. He was certain of this. There would be no use for him to return, no need for him to try and deliver and wet nurse her stinking bastard child. It would be better to bury the two of them up here where the ground seemed so much cleaner.

  He blinked.

  Had she called his name a third time? He couldn’t tell, not for certain. He listened in vain. He stood stock still, gazing towards the invisible horizon. He couldn’t walk away, not without knowing if she lived or if she died.

  He closed his eyes. When he opened them it was as if a great stone wall grown up before him.

  The door had closed.

  He couldn’t leave her.

  He turned and walked back towards Tamsen. He walked towards the woman and the valley. The breeze lifted and flapped the wings of his father’s black coat as if he might take flight and leave this place forever. The illusion lasted until he was deep within the confines of the valley’s deceitful walls, where the wind no longer dared to blow.

  Tamsen gave birth that very night, in the trees and the wilderness where she lay hopelessly tangled.

  4

  It was a long and painful delivery. He was certain it would kill her.

  At times he wished it might.

  “Can you move? Can you walk?”

  No answer.

  Perhaps she couldn’t.

  He settled for removing the rope. He loosened her clothing and made her as comfortable as he could.

  She looked in such pain.

  His mother once told him birth was the only miracle people were allowed to create but Lucas didn’t believe miracles were anything like this.

  Tamsen lay on her back, her face twisted in pain, her every muscle pulled taut as a fiddle string. She called for Lucas, for her mother, for someone named Jacob and of course Duvall.

  Her breathing wasn’t much comfort. She panted, rapid and shallow. With each inhalation the walls of the forest crept closer. The trees loomed above them like tall, hungry vultures.

  “Lucas?” she called out.

  He didn’t know what to do. He bent his head in prayer.

  It passed the time.

  He saw the first sign of the baby at the stroke of the witching hour. He didn’t have a watch to tell the time yet somehow he knew. He saw a tiny foot drizzled with blood, sprouting between the fork of her parted legs. Feet first was a bad sign. Even he knew that. It marked a bad birthing.

  He didn’t know what to do. A part of him wanted to grab the leg and uproot it. He saw a vision of himself swinging the child headfirst into
the trunk of a tree.

  The tree.

  Tamsen’s moans grew louder. Lucas stared in breathless fascination. The child’s second leg wormed outwards. Lucas drew his clasp knife. He knew something had to be cut. He prayed to whatever gods listened that he’d know what to do when the time came.

  Tamsen arched her back and groaned loudly as her body formed itself into an organism designed solely for the expulsion of the precious meat within her womb.

  Womb. Wound. It was strange how the words sounded alike.

  “All women possess an unhealing wound,” Lucas’s grandfather once said. “Try as he might, a man can never hope to fill such a wound or satisfy such a hunger. Only a babe can ease her need.”

  The child’s hips broke through, followed by its tiny gut. There was something bound to its belly where its navel ought to be, as if a snake of some sort had crawled inside her.

  Kill it, he thought.

  He raised his knife, aiming for the snake.

  Then, with a tired laugh he realized the snake was part of their bond, mother and child, the very thing he must sever. He pricked the knife point lightly against his finger tip, drawing a drop of blood with a satisfying flinch.

  The pain was good. It cleared his thinking.

  The legs spasmed and kicked like a tiny spider-legged sailor lurching into a jig. Was the child bewitched like its mother? There was something desperately wrong. Yet until he knew what was wrong he dared not interfere.

  He sat silently, watching the horrible jig play itself out, petrified in terror.

  The kicking stopped as suddenly as it began. Tamsen heaved in sheer physical relief. Her womb pushed out the tiny body until it dangled from between her outspread legs and even Lucas could see what had happened. A part of the cord, the cord that Lucas had been supposed to cut, had wound itself about the child’s neck, strangling the very life from its small form before the spark had fully entered. The dead child hung there, like a wretched bit of gallows’s bait, its black and wrinkled face pressed obscenely close to Tamsen’s soft furred mound.

  Such a strange looking beastie, he thought dispassionately. Not at all what he imagined a baby would look like. It looked more like a small tailless tree squirrel.

  “What is it, Lucas?” Tamsen asked, sensing the wrongness of the thing in Lucas’s wide staring eyes.

  He couldn’t answer.

  “Is it boy or girl?” she asked. “Lucas, why doesn’t it cry?”

  Her voice rose unnaturally high.

  “I cannot say,” he began.

  Then, like a drunkard’s last meal, a great mass of blood, fluid and tissue gushed from within her; a thin soupy mess that doused the little corpse, spilling over and anointing its soft blue face, soaking downwards into the thirsty forest floor.

  Tamsen raised herself up. She propped her hands behind her for support and looked down at her child in the cradle of her lap, still hung from its cord.

  “I have killed it. I have killed it,” she keened as she gently caught it up in her hands, carefully unwinding the cord. She held the dead thing up to her milk-swollen breasts as if it might drink.

  And she sang to it, come-butter-come, come-butter-come and as she sang a second issued from her open wound, a third, and a fourth, tiny black spider-legged little things, each swaddled in its own fleshy noose, each suffering a like fate, despite Lucas’s best efforts and by the fourth Lucas swore that the cord was not a cord, but a sinister bit of twig.

  Tamsen kept keening and crying, her eyes shining and staring until at last she spoke to her husband with a fearful solemn lucidity.

  “More, Lucas. More.”

  “The tree wants more.”

  FALL

  I think that I shall never see

  A poem lovely as a tree

  A tree whose hungry mouth is pressed

  Against the earth’s sweet flowing breast.

  Joyce Kilmer 1886 -1918

  A jack pine is like no other tree

  with branches that swoop and bend

  like the calling crows who calmly crane

  their black and scowlish cowlicked heads

  grinning from claw-hung perches and beaking out

  hoarse-harsh shouts of mar, scar, and war.

  Steve Vernon, “Jack Pine Sonata”

  Chapter Fifteen

  Lucas rose early, stiff and bleary-headed from the night’s broken sleep. He set the morning fire, taking a small pleasure at the sight of the flame’s flickering tongue curling about the freshly split wood.

  It was a fine way to begin a morning.

  He frowned at the rapidly emptying wood box. Tamsen burned too much as of late, building high fires and refueling them constantly. She rarely stirred from the cabin’s interior, preferring to sit and gaze at the fire she kept burning, and the bucket of water that she had asked him to place beside her. Both fire and bucket were constant companions of her. Sometimes he saw her talking to them, sometimes sitting quietly in the attitude of one who listens.

  She must be mad, he decided. She must have broken beneath the strain of their attempted flight and the subsequent miscarriage and what she had delivered but he didn’t really know what to do for her. So he let her sit there and do whatever she wished.

  The keeping of a fire was a harmless enough pastime, and one that certainly would prove necessary come winter. He would just chop a little more wood, was all.

  He watched her nervously as she threw log after log into the hungry flames. He worried about the hazards of an out of control blaze that could easily swallow the entire cabin. He was thinking of Jezebel, of course. Sometimes he thought this might be the best thing. To go up in smoke and leave this valley, even though their ashes would remain behind.

  It was cold.

  He took his axe and stepped outside. His breath made smoke in the cool morning air. He lit the pipe Jezebel had given him to make further smoke. He flapped his arms like a great featherless loon, trying to conjure a bit of warmth. Finding none, he looked about the yard for the first tree.

  He selected a small pine, entangled in a dead alder thicket. He dropped his crutch and knelt, grunting as his knees bent and pushed into the chilliness of the hard packed ground.

  Patiently he hacked at the alder.

  The alder gave way before the axe. In a short time he cleared enough room to swing. He scrambled to his feet, cursing his wooden leg as it gave twice beneath his weight. He caught hold of the crutch and pulled himself up with it.

  He sized up the pine. He chose the proper angle and pushed the tip of his wooden leg into the stiffened soil to support his weight. He cocked his arm, steadied the axe.

  He wondered if Duvall were out there in the woods, watching from the shadows.

  And then he swung the axe.

  2

  Tamsen awoke with a cramp. She sat up but could not find the strength to stand. She forced herself to breath slowly, placing her hand on her side as she kneaded the stubbornly knotted muscle as if it were a bit of risen dough.

  Her stillborn legacy was a bloated abdomen, pouched out legs and a fiercely swollen blue-black vein that crawled in the shadow behind her knee. What man would look at her, fat and barren or as good as such?

  Not even Duvall and he had slept with Jezebel. She had certainly been as large and bloated. Tamsen was sure she was in far worse condition than Jezebel ever was.

  She felt the fire nodding behind her, a voice whispering beneath the flames and she turned to listen.

  3

  After clearing the last branch, Lucas started back in on the wall. He pried another stone from the dirt about the cabin. Once he’d unearthed the rock he carried it to the stone wall he’d raised about the perimeter of the cabin.

  Duvall was sitting on the wall, watching his labor.

  “Keeping busy?” Duvall asked.

  Lucas grunted.

  “You remind me of a goat,” Duvall went on. “Running around its pen while the slaughter man sharpens his knife.”

  Luca
s laid the rock where it fit best.

  “It won’t help, you know,” Duvall predicted.

  Lucas knelt for another stone.

  He wouldn’t answer the man.

  He’d started the wall after Tamsen lost the child.

  It passed the time nicely.

  “It won’t help at all.”

  For just an instant Lucas closed his eyes, trying to block out the image of what had crawled and slithered from his wife’s open womb.

  Duvall spit, like a small boy eating watermelon.

  Lucas eyed the man’s dirty habit. A part of him feared that Duvall’s spit would somehow turn to seed and sprout.

  Duvall spit again.

  Lucas continued to build. He’d raised the wall up as a kind of moat, using field stone and the discarded cuttings he’d cleared from about the cabin. He’d built in an instinctive circle, cutting the corners and rounding them, the cabin rooted roughly in the center of the clearing.

  “It won’t work,” Duvall repeated.

  Lucas regretted his choice of geometry. He built the wall out of a strange and futile impulse, not entirely his own. In his darkest heart he knew he couldn’t run. The valley bound the two of them as securely as any cage and in answer he’d built himself a cage within his cage.

  “Wasted work,” Duvall said. “Nothing but wasted effort.”

  Would the wall hold?

  Finally Lucas spoke.

  “It will work as long as I need it to,” he said. “When the snow falls it will kill the undergrowth and Tamsen and I can escape.”

  “Escape through the snow?”

  “When the woods are still.”

  Duvall snorted.

  “Just how far do you believe a madwoman and a cripple can travel in the winter, afoot without shelter?”

  Lucas shrugged.

  Duvall spit.

  “Build your wall,” he said. “At least it’ll take your mind off of the trap you have stepped into. Maybe it’ll be a comfort to you.”

  Duvall turned and walked away.

  Lucas uprooted another stone.

  He played a fool’s game and he knew it; building himself a lidless coffin and lying down in it. All that remained was for someone or something to come along and pound the final nails. He looked back at the cabin, thinking once more about Tamsen. She’d be sitting by her bucket and her fire.

  She’s waiting, he thought.