Devil Tree

by Vernon, Steve

  Use it, use the flame, the salt, the steel, use it now.

  She pushed, hard. She sliced the axe blade quickly across her wrist, feeling nothing but a small pinch.

  She stared at what grew, leechlike, upon her wrists.

  Pine needles.

  Little crawling pine needles that crawled from her open wound and clotted the gash before the blood could even flow.

  She dropped the axe.

  She stared at the pine needles, moving like busy little tailors, stitching up her flesh.

  It was too late.

  “I am damned,” she said.

  She stoked the flame and stared at her child swollen belly, freshly bloated overnight, as the pine needles finished their mending and fell to the floor. How long would the child take to come?

  A month?

  A week?

  A day?

  Lucas ignored the blatancy of her belly. He chose to overlook it. Maybe the devil tree had blinded him.

  She stared again at the axe.

  What would happen if she used it hard? If she hacked her hand off? Would the blood gush and gutter out or would she simply sprout a new arm or a tree branch?

  She made her decision.

  She would use the axe soon enough. Not in the way the fire wanted, not in any simple way, but she would use it.

  She stared down into the valley, down towards the devil tree.

  Soon enough.

  3

  The fire died. The smoke filled the pine bough lean-to. Lucas hacked out a dry deep cough that lingered into a wheeze.

  A vision crawled into his consciousness.

  Lucas gazed through the eyes of an Indian child in a sweat lodge. He didn’t know how he knew that. It was just something he accepted.

  The air was hot inside, although he could hear Grandfather Winter riding the wind that whistled the dead autumn leaves down from the trees. His father and he sat together here in the belly of the lodge. His mother sat by the opening where it was cooler. His father smoked his pipe, not the long one that he kept for ceremony, but a little clay pocket pipe, carved with the sign of the deer.

  “You are old enough now,” his father said.

  His father was short and squatty like a stump in the woods. When he wasn’t robed in his ceremonial garb with his antlered head dress, he seemed smaller still. But there was a dignity in the man, an inherent strength that quietly proclaimed that he would not be bent or broken.

  “When I was not much older than you, my father took me into the sacred lodge, where the old men sat, for it was my time of turning.”

  In three days time it would be my time of turning, the boy thought. I will meet my test and make my ordeal and my father will prepare me in his own manner. There were no rules for this ceremony. It was a special time; different for each man.

  “What was your ordeal, father?” the boy asked.

  “The old men cut me into pieces like the deer that has been slain,” his father said. “And they ate me and swallowed me whole like young children eating berries.”

  The boy’s belly rumbled. It had been many days since he had last eaten. He sucked upon his lower lip but the salty taste did little to assuage his hunger.

  “Father, how long?”

  “It took many days,” his father answered, either purposefully or unintentionally misunderstanding the boy’s question. “Afterwards they shat me out upon the ground and sicked me up and rolled my pieces in the earth and pine needles and sewed them together with a darning needle of bone and gut taken from my totem, the deer.”

  Despite the heat of the lodge, the boy shivered. He peered at his father’s joints, looking for signs of stitching, for a loosened bit of gut. If he found it, if he pulled on it, would his father fall to the ground in many pieces? Would his mother be able to mend him back up?

  His mother smiled and nodded, as if in silent answer and the boy realized she was sleeping, dozing in the arms of a happy dream.

  “Are you ready, my son?” his father asked, in his great and terrible voice.

  Ready? Ready for what? Had he missed something? He wasn’t ready to be eaten, nor cut up and sewn together. He wasn’t ready to be a shaman.

  The boy jumped up, his sudden movement startling his father and awakening his mother. He ran from the skin tent and from his duty and from his father’s hoarse shouting, knowing full well that he could not run forever. His father would find him, would dress him in woman’s garb, would call him he-she and laugh his terrible laugh.

  Lucas woke, startled, sitting beside the drying meat and the dying fire. He shook his head. The vision was nothing but a dream. He stood up and made his way back to the cabin to where his wife sat waiting with the axe.

  4

  It was night and Lucas dreamed of the lean-to where he had sealed the meat in, trapped within its smoky memories. The lean-to called to him and in his dreams he walked these woods for the very first time, or rather he crawled.

  He remembered the smell and taste of the snow, sweet and sticky upon his lips. He had come to forget, something or other, he could not remember, until he saw the devil tree with young Peter standing atop it, arms outstretched like Christ on his cross, calling to him, Lu-cas, Du-vall, and he had come, god help him he had come all of these miles, in heed of this silent beaconing cry.

  The rope was still there now hung as if by magic with its noose loudly proclaiming his fate. Eli was gone, swallowed, no more. Here, he thought, here it would end. Here in this godforsaken valley, a hundred day’s walk from civilization it would end.

  He stared up into the heart of the tree. He was Lucas, he was Duvall, he was Cord – three men in one. He climbed with the surefooted ease of one who has scaled many a mast. His right leg felt numb, at times he could not feel it at all, he did not know why and yet he continued to climb.

  He stared for a long time at the noose before finally working up enough nerve to slip it over his head. He drew the noose firmly as a preacher’s collar, feeling his Adam’s apple bobbing beneath the surface of his skin. He felt the hemp rope chaff against his plum sized goiter, full of cancerous growth that the doctor had told him would one day be his death.

  He knew that there was a certain point at which he must place the knot, to guarantee a quick clean breakage but he couldn’t determine exactly where that was. The Russian hadn’t told him where. He slid the knot behind his ear, the left was closest, reasoning that his father said the left side of god stood in darkness and was reserved for murderers, thieves, adulterers, and those damned desperate men who took their own lives.

  It was suicide. It was the final retreat. Lucas knew it was his destiny and he did not fear it, but still he was strangely hesitant.

  Come on now, Lucas told himself. Up and over and be done with it. He began to sweat despite the chill of the winter’s evening. It should have been simple. He became uncomfortably aware of the roughness of the hemp.

  His mistake had been looking down. Never look down, they’d told him, the mast monkeys and crow’s mates who’d first taught him to scuttle up the rigging like an overgrown wharf rat, clambering up masts like a born aborigine, squatting for hours in the nest. He leaned over trying to ease himself off of the branch.

  He panicked, drawing back to catch hold of the branch in a fearful grip.

  Failed, failure. The words fell like a dirty rain upon his head. His fingers strayed to the noose of their own volition. He bent his head forward, partly out of shame, partly to aid in the removal of the noose.

  It was at this precise moment that he felt the gentle teasing push of someone close behind him, nudging him over the side with fingers like long spindly branches, off of the branch and airborne, with the noose still fitted snugly about his neck.

  5

  It was at this moment that Tamsen awoke, startled from her dreamless reverie by the sound of nothing but the wind or a breaking branch; nothing but a pinecone full of seeds, falling to the dirt.

  She stared out into the darkness, listening to the whisp
ering of the wind, completely ignorant of her husband’s silent torment, as his still body lay quietly beside her, twitching as if he were helpless in the clutches of some dark and desperate dream.

  6

  In his dream Lucas arced outward, seeing the ground rushing up towards him, straining his legs, his feet braced in hope of breaking his fall, trying to catch footing but ultimately missing, feeling only the sickening emptiness of thin air hissing past his ears. Then, as the rope reached its limit, his body scribed its last terrible arc and he slammed into the merciless trunk of the tree.

  He expected to hear the brittle snap of his neck bone cracking.

  A sharp stub of a branch bit into his flesh. The branch almost pierced the base of his spine, holding him up and free from the rope’s bitter tug. He wanted to scream but only managed a groan. The rope cocked his neck up and backwards, dragging his head against the pitchy bark and choking him into silence.

  Something wet splashed about his legs. He was unsure whether he’d lost control of his bodily functions or if it was just blood. He couldn’t tell because the rope’s sharp tension would not allow him to look downwards. He opened his eyes wide. A previously-denied, half-throttled scream clawed from his throat. He felt the tree squirm beneath his flesh like an anxious suitor taking a helpless virgin.

  He found his knife and cut the rope but it was not until the sun had risen and set again that he found the strength to pull himself from the branch, or rather, that he had been allowed to pull himself from the branch.

  As he hung there, staring up at the sightless moon, he saw countless young children capering about the base of the tree. The roots writhed in the dirt like so many cheerful serpents. The tree turned into the darkness like a lily following the light. One side was infested with hordes of crawling vermin, the other was all green and virgin and hungry.

  Hungry, yes, Duvall was hungry. Yes, Lucas was hungry. He wrapped his hands about young Peter’s sleeping throat and lifted himself from the tree, and cut with the knife his grandfather taught him to keep so sharp and crawled to the cabin, and hid in the darkness of the belly of the ship and held the frozen meat within his mouth, watering hungrily, until it had thawed enough to chew.

  Meat and guilt, he filled his belly full.

  7

  When she awoke the second time and saw her husband kneeling beside her, clutching his throat and moaning incoherently, she was not surprised. Nor was the sight of his bare, almost squamoid flesh agleam with the sweat of torment, nor the open wound at the base of his spine, open as if pierced by a freshly sharpened stake, particularly troublesome.

  It was the wooden leg, alive and moving in his flesh. The pine leg was infiltrating each cell, splintering into the veins and pores of his flesh like the erosion of a river bank. The wooden leg was moving and growing and melding, wood into flesh, a thing alive that tore the scream from her lips.

  She forced herself to lie still, but she slept with the axe close beside her for the rest of the night.

  Chapter Twenty–One

  Blam! Blam!

  The wind rattled about the valley like a runaway wagon, barreling from out of the woods and into the clearing, wrapping itself about the cabin and catching at the futile door, tugging at its binding and slamming it against the doorframe, again and again, like some great, old battering ram until it threatened to tear from its hinges.

  Blam! Blam!

  Tamsen watched it in helpless fascination as the door slammed against the restraining cord like a dog strangling on its own chain. It seemed to her almost as if something were trying to gain entry.

  She was glad Lucas hadn’t taken the axe.

  Lucas had gone out, not saying why, perhaps to check upon the “deer”. His footsteps headed that way but she couldn’t be sure. In any case he was gone and she was free to proceed with her plan.

  It was a simple plan. It had come to her in the night, in a dream, perhaps, or a vision. In this valley one couldn’t trust dreams or visions but she didn’t feel she had all that much of a choice.

  And she needed the axe.

  Blam! Blam!

  Damn that door.

  At first she’d thought it was the wind but it was too persistent, too regular for that. Had Lucas left anything outside? Anything that hung upon the wall, like a pot or pan that might rattle or clatter?

  No, he’d always preferred to keep his belongings inside.

  She threw a tattered blanket coat that she’d makeshifted for herself. It flapped loosely about her and stank of dead things but it was better than nothing.

  Blam! Blam!

  It was the deer, she decided without looking. Lucas had shot a deer and dragged a man’s corpse home instead. Now the ghost of the deer had returned, indignantly banging at the cabin door with its great spread of antlers, demanding to be hung, to be drawn into slivers of meat and dried in the smoky lean-to, demanding to be eaten.

  Blam! Blam!

  She reached for the door and then hesitated. If she was really going to open it she’d better be ready. She picked up the axe, cutting a few practice swings through the unresisting air.

  Blam! Blam!

  She opened the door. Duvall, or what was left of him, hung from the cabin rafters, his silent laughing corpse swinging in the breeze, the wooden heels of his cross-carved boots clattering against the door in one final jig.

  The stiffened bone of an erection tented out the earth stained fabric of his trousers. His jaw hung open and she could see a pine needle stuck like a jaunty toothpick between his dirty yellowed teeth. His neck swung at a peculiar angle. When she though he was about to speak, she screamed and swung the axe in a short overhand arc.

  The axe caught him dead on, passing through his forehead, sliding as easily as a cane through daisies, carrying her body forward with its weighty momentum, pulling her into the thing that had been Duvall.

  She felt a chill pass through her, a sensation akin to leaping through a stained glass window, all color and blood and sharp-toothed pain and she saw Duvall’s body shivering into a thousand serpents of pinewood that slithered like roots into the dirt as she pulled herself up and got ready for another cut.

  But Duvall was gone as if he had never been. Nor was there any trace upon the axe, save for the dirt and unmelted snow upon the blade from where it had bitten into the earth. It had to be just another vision. The valley was full of them. She would have to keep her wits about her, if she was to ever leave it.

  She straightened up fully, her eyes upon the horizon, when she saw the noose dangling before her like a forgotten prophecy.

  It was no vision. The noose was real, damnably real.

  She stood upon the wooden bench, staring into the noose’s unholy Judas-blessed circle.

  Was it a message? A warning? An omen of things to come?

  She reached up with the axe to take several hesitant cuts at the rope’s root, until it slithered harmlessly to the earth. She touched the rope with her foot. Lucas must have left it. She didn’t know why he’d do such a thing but he had to have been the one who left it.

  Who else could have?

  She looped the rope about her waist to hold the blowing blanket-coat securely.

  Then she shouldered the axe and began her final walk into the valley.

  2

  Lucas walked his route from habit, checking the meager fortifications of his pitiful stone wall. As of late he’d found roots creeping slowly towards the cabin and he went to great pains to pull them out or cut them up.

  He remembered an old shipmate’s story of a peculiar tree found only in Africa whose limbs could bend towards the ground, forming fresh root systems as they made contact with the earth and then sprouting fresh limbs. In such a way an entire grove might be formed from the trunk of one lone tree.

  A man can do that, he thought. A man touches many people in his life like a rock thrown into a pond, spreading out ripples that connect with other ripples, other rocks, forming and reforming their patterns until they fade and die.<
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  But what if they never died? What if the ripples kept on spreading like a cancerous plague, crowding out all others, filling up the pond with just one set of ripples, just one rock? A man can do that, as well, he thought. A man can fill his own life so fully that there is room for no other.

  What kind of man, what kind of god is that?

  Tamsen.

  He thought he saw her, back there, walking from the cabin but it was so far that he could not be certain.

  Did she see him?

  He couldn’t tell.

  But there was the root poised in silent triumph over a freshly displaced boulder. The roots were strong, easily pushing aside the rocks he’d piled in their path. He hacked at the thing with his mattock, glad of the distraction.

  It was slow hard work. The blackened bit of root slipped from his grasp, twisting and turning like a frenzied serpent. The axe would have done a better job, but he hadn’t brought it with him, fearing to use it lest some hidden rock or mistimed blow might dull it. As of late he’d developed an inordinate fear of dulling the axe blade, as if some hidden terror rooted deep within his mind was telling him he’d need a good, sharp axe, sooner or later.

  3

  Tamsen walked into the forest trailing the spool of thread behind her. When this spool ran out she had plenty more in her little willow sewing basket. The basket had been her mother’s dowry present, one of her few belongings to survive the wreck. Tamsen planned to tie the threads together as she walked, in order to mark her path.

  A sapling stood in her path. She could have easily gone around but remembering their last escape attempt she resolved to turn aside for no tree. That was what the axe was for. By now she was quite used to cutting firewood and the axe handle was an old friend to her. She took her stance and hacked fiercely at the offending bit of fauna.

  She cut the tree and shoved it out of her way. Then she picked up her spool and stepped over the stump feeling the splinters catching at her heels. The spool emptied and the wind caught and blew the loose end into a nearby tree. She retrieved the loose end, knotted it securely about the next spool of thread, and resumed her pilgrimage.

  She cut a second tree, a bigger one that took nearly a half hour to fell. She thanked god or whatever dark spirit was looming and listening, that her path avoided the elder timber. It was nearly noon, by the sun. She stared at the distant horizon, trying to bring it closer through sheer force of will. She could return to the cabin to start afresh tomorrow. The thread wouldn’t move, would it?