Mr. Tall

by Tony Earley

  The man stopped about fifty yards away and stared in the direction of Jack and his boat, his head cocked thoughtfully to one side. “Jack?” the man asked as he edged closer a slow step at a time. “Is that you?”

  “Why, Tom Dooley,” Jack said. “I wouldn’t have thought about you for a hundred dollars.”

  For coming up on a hundred and fifty years, the fans of Jack and the fans of Tom Dooley had fought over which man was rightful heir of the high kingship of Appalachian folklore. Jack’s proponents denounced Tom Dooley with his lone ballad as a one-hit wonder, while the Dooleyists maintained that the real Jack was Jack’s English forebear, famous climber of the beanstalk, and not this Jack here, stalker of the southern highlands, climber of the dialectical beantree. Although neither Jack nor Tom Dooley would ever admit it, each of the assertions hit a nerve with one or the other: Jack was secretly sensitive that his renown, while considerable, was almost entirely regional; Tom Dooley silently suffered because, despite his greater success farther afield, he was summoned in only a solitary song. They had never been formally introduced, but had often glared at each other across auditoriums and coffeehouses. Both their crowds, oddly enough, seemed to run in the same pack.

  Tom Dooley hung down his head. “Look here, Jack, to be honest with you, I don’t feel much like feuding today. Can we put it in a poke for now?”

  Jack exhaled, relieved. “That seems fair enough.”

  Tom Dooley scratched his chin and considered the tree spread over Jack’s boat. “Jack, ain’t that tree you’re sitting under a Quercus alba?”

  Jack picked up a leaf and studied it. “Yep. Quercus alba.”

  “Shoot, I was hoping it was a Quercus rubra. Ordinarily I try to avoid white oaks.”

  “I don’t blame you,” Jack said, “but since this one ain’t down in some lonesome valley, it’s probably all right.”

  Tom Dooley considered some more. “That boat you’re sitting in, ain’t it the flying boat where you picked up Hardy Hardhead and the Well boys and went and beat the witch out of all her gold and broke the enchantment the witch put on the king’s daughter?”

  “It is, but I don’t think it flies no more.”

  “I always liked that story,” Tom Dooley said. Then he winced and swallowed and looked at the ground, so painful the admission that he admired anything having to do with Jack.

  Jack stared up into the leaves of the tree and drew a deep breath. “And I always liked that knife/life couplet in your ballad. The word ‘knife’ sounds sharp, like it’d cut you if you drew your finger across it. It makes sense you could use a knife to take a life.”

  “Why, thank you, Jack. I always thought that rhyme made the song.”

  Neither man spoke for a stiff moment.

  “You doing any good with the song?” Jack finally asked.

  “Oh, just middlin’,” Tom Dooley said. “A little Girl Scout action, that’s about it. Occasional old hippie frailing a banjo. To be honest, I ain’t done much good since Burl Ives died. Jack tales doing all right?”

  Jack made a face. “Ah, storytelling festivals, mostly. Appalachian Studies scholar every once in a while, but the pointy-heads have done drunk that well about dry.”

  “Law, law,” Tom Dooley sighed. “What a world.”

  “I know it,” Jack said. “Don’t I know it.”

  “Jack?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Can I get up in that magic boat with you and sit a spell?”

  “I don’t think it’s magic anymore, but you’re welcome.”

  All the benches other than the one on which Jack sat had rotted into collapse or been shoved askew by the growing tree. Jack scooted to one side and Tom Dooley sat down beside him. Jack cast a weather eye on the approaching cloud. It had grown so tall he had to tilt his head back to see its anvil top. Shreds of updraft steamed continuously along its black sides. He hated to leave his boat again after all these years but figured that it would soon be in his best interest to head for the woods. Whatever mayhem that storm was packing, Jack didn’t want to be caught out in it. In the forest he might find suitable shelter. A robbers’ cabin would be good. The robbers were never at home in the stories, but the wife of the leader always was. The wife tended to be lonely and he often talked her out of a little slice before she hid him in her hope chest when they heard the gang coming back with their spoils.

  “Jack?” Tom Dooley said. “I need to ask you something else. Is today tomorrow?”

  “Hmm,” Jack said. “It was yesterday.”

  “I was afraid of that. See, my song’s always been mostly in the future present tense. You know how it goes, “Come this time tomorrow, that’s when I’m supposed to be hanging from the white oak tree down in the lonesome valley.”

  “So? If today is today, then tomorrow’s still going to be tomorrow, so you’re all right.”

  “But I took off running yesterday, Jack, and I run all night, which I have never done before because it ain’t in the song, and when it got first light this morning I said, Oh shit, Tom Dooley, you just run plumb out of yesterday and into tomorrow and now you’re in a world of trouble.”

  “That’s an interesting temporal conundrum,” Jack said.

  “Tell me about it. You ain’t going to believe this, Jack, but I’m being pursued by a talking dog that maintains he’s going to kill me because I’ve lost cultural currency.”

  “We’re in the same boat, there,” Jack said.

  “He’s after you, too?”

  “Got after me last night.”

  “I’ll be damned,” Tom Dooley said.

  In the far distance the wheat began to thrash away from Jack and Tom Dooley, almost parallel to the ground, sucked toward the cloud by some virulent rip, while the leaves clinging to the topmost branches of the white oak still shivered away from them on a high breeze Jack could not feel in the boat.

  “Tom Dooley, we better move on out,” Jack said. “I fear this gathering cumulonimbus bears us ill will.”

  “How about you try the boat again?”

  “Sail, Boat, Sail!”

  Nothing.

  “Maybe if we got out and rocked it back and forth a little bit,” Tom Dooley said, “tried to prize it loose from the dirt.”

  “Alas, the boat I fear / Shall fly no more / Its magic run aground / In this landlock of grain,” spoke an ancient voice whose component parts seemed to flutter down around them.

  “Day Lord have mercy, Jack!” Tom Dooley said. “It’s a talking tree! It liked to have started me to death.” He craned his neck and squinted into the canopy. “Why does it talk like that?”

  “In the sacred timbre / Of my ancestors / I speak,” the tree said.

  “Oh, cut it out,” Jack said. “This is North Carolina. We’re prose people.”

  “Ah, sweet Carolina! / With your virgin soil / Grasp me by my taproot.”

  “Was that dirty?” Tom Dooley asked.

  “Come on,” Jack said. “This pretentious prosody weighs heavy on my person. We need to move on out of here before the storm or the black dog one gets us.” He stood and started to step out of the boat.

  “Wait!” the tree cried in panicked prose. “You’re Jack, that Jack. I’m the last of the talking trees, and the black dog has promised to raise its leg against me! What should I do? Where should I fly?”

  “What did you just say?” Tom Dooley said.

  The tree didn’t answer, but a flail of leaves rattled down among them.

  “Jack, the damn tree’s holding out on us!” Tom Dooley cried. “Your boat can still fly!” He stood and from somewhere in his overalls produced a bloodstained butcher knife of priapic length. “You listen here, stovewood. I swear on Laurie Foster’s lonesome grave that if you don’t make this boat fly I will carve hearts and obscenities all over your worthless trunk.”

  “All right, all right!” the tree said. “Put that thing away before somebody gets whittled. The truth is, once I took root I began to absorb the magic that leached out o
f the boat as it rotted away. I don’t know if I can make it fly or not. I’ve never tried. Trees are naturally averse to flying.”

  “Why you deciduous son of a bitch,” Jack said. “You broke my boat.”

  “The boat was rotten when the squirrel buried my nut! You can’t blame me for your toxic waste!”

  “If I still had my silver ax…”

  “Hey, Jack?” Tom Dooley said.

  “I wonder how many two by tens I can get out of you?” Jack snarled.

  “Jack—” Tom Dooley interrupted.

  “What?”

  “There’s a posse coming yonder.”

  From beneath the storm cloud a countless multitude of men on horseback pounded toward the boat, guns drawn, long dusters flapping out behind them like black wings. Bright whips of lightning cracked all around them. Hounds whose stiff tails cut periscopic wakes through the wheat loped among the horses; their trailing bays melded into a single cyclonic moan.

  “Why so many of ’em?” Tom Dooley marveled.

  “Every time someone sings that song of yours a lawman sets out on your trail with a brace of hounds,” the tree said.

  “God Almighty,” Tom Dooley said. “Look how famous I am!”

  “Look how famous I am,” Jack simpered. “Well, you ought to have seen the crowd of maidens I diddled run through here this morning.”

  The hoofbeats of the horses thrummed faintly into earshot, intermittently drowned out by fusillades of thunder. The sounding of the hounds rose in pitch and ardor and the lawmen raised their weapons. Shreds of gun smoke ghosted silently from the barrels of their pistols, followed moments later by almost inaudible pops. Bullets dropped softly into the wheat between the riders and the boat, along with the first frigid splats of rain. The throbbing of the hooves grew louder. Beneath Jack’s feet the ground buzzed with their drumming.

  “Okay, I’ve enjoyed my renown enough for one day,” Tom Dooley said. “We need to head on down the road.”

  “Let’s see what you got, tree,” Jack said. “Them posse boys are coming for us all.”

  The tree cleared its throat, wherever that was. “O ancient gods of earth, wind, and fire, gods of sky and cloud and rain, gods of leaf and blossom and bole, gods of light and dark and season—”

  “Oh, good Lord,” Jack said. “We ain’t got time for this pseudo-religious New Age nickering.”

  “Be respectful, Jack,” Tom Dooley whispered. “The tree’s pantheistic.”

  “—summon from my reaching roots the magic once contained in this vessel’s enchanted planking and lift us into the darkening sky! Save us from the black dog! From the approaching posse! From the lightning and wind and storm! In the name of the sacred buzzing bee, MAKE US FLY!”

  Jack and Tom Dooley sat very still.

  “Well?” Jack asked.

  “Wait a second,” the tree said. “Okay. Try it now.”

  “Sail, Boat, Sail,” Jack commanded.

  For a moment nothing happened, but then, for yards around the boat, the tree’s roots tore themselves free from the ground with a great ripping noise. Clod-spewing waves of root rolled toward the base of the tree and the boat bucked in the ensuing collision.

  “Son of a squirrel,” the tree groaned. “That hurt like a woodpecker.”

  A handful of bullets from the approaching riders snipped almost delicately through the tree’s leaves, and a salvo of thunder ignited above them. Tom Dooley ducked and laced his fingers above his head as he attempted to hide beneath his hat. The tree flopped back and forth with a clatter of branches and leaves as it struggled to pull its anchoring taproot free. “Say it, Jack!” the tree grunted. “Say it again!”

  “Sail, Boat, Sail! Sail, Boat, Sail!”

  The cloud had moved almost directly above their heads, thinning the light around them into near darkness. A roaring curtain of rain dropped from the sky and slid toward them across the field. From inside the deluge the baying of the hounds approached hysteria and clamored into a frenetic yipping.

  The closing riders shouted in vicious paraphrase, “Tom Dooley! Tom Dooley! Your head! Hang it down!”

  The boat trembled beneath Jack. “SAIL, BOAT, SAIL!” he screamed.

  “Tom Dooley!” taunted the lawmen. “Guess what you’re bound to do!”

  “Go, go, go,” Tom Dooley prayed. “Go, go, go.”

  As the taproot rent from the ground the vessel shuddered into the air a ripping inch at a time. Most of the rotted planking in the bottom of the hull peeled away as the boat rose. Jack and Tom Dooley grabbed hold of the bench and lifted their feet. When the root broke free with a final snap the boat floated into the sky as lightly as dandelion down. It rose as high as a house, a barn, a tree, a standard-sized giant, a two-headed giant, a three-headed giant, two trees. They rose as high as a mountain, as two mountains. At three mountains high the boat banked gracefully toward the woods; its bow tipped urgently forward as it shot away from the swirling maw of the cloud, its roots swimming aft like tentacles, leaving a silver contrail of leaves spinning in its wake. Within moments it crossed the boundary of the forest, sailing for far shores. The leading line of lawmen pulled up at the crater that remained where the tree had stood and gazed after the boat, their faces pallid beneath the wide brims of their dripping black hats. The hounds cast about the trampled wheat in confusion, as if they had made some mistake in their trailing. Jack looked for the black dog but did not see him in the rain. Not one of the watching lawmen thought to shoot at the boat as it grew smaller in the distance. Looking back, Jack glimpsed the full magnitude of the peace officers come to lay Tom Dooley in his grave. A slick of riders and dogs blackened the field as far as he could see. Millions.

  “We’re flying, Jack!” Tom Dooley yelled. “We’re flying!”

  Jack’s joy at once again sailing through the air in his boat was tempered in almost equal part by his wish that the boat were still intact. He wasn’t afraid of heights—he was a jim-dandy beantree climber, after all—but found that flying at great speed in a boat without a bottom, while exhilarating, made for a vexatious voyage. He gripped the gunnel so tightly that when his Saturday hat blew off he didn’t even try to grab it. At last he allowed himself to look down past his dangling shoes and through the writhe of roots. A topography of trees blurred beneath them. As he watched the forest passing he realized that the posse wouldn’t be able to follow them through such verdant woods on horseback. The lawmen would have to dismount and send for lumberjacks and that would take time. He had gotten away! He was still Jack, that, by God, Jack! He let go of the gunnel first with his left hand, then the right, and placed his hands on his knees. He couldn’t see forward because of the tree trunk (and didn’t think to look aft, where the storm still avidly pursued them), but he reckoned that, for now, seeing where he was going didn’t matter as much as the fact that he was gone. He was once again flying in a magic boat. The whole world and its riches lay ahead of him. He thrust his arms into the air. “Woo-hoo!” he hollered. “Woo-hoo!”

  He wrapped his arm around Tom Dooley’s shoulder and gave him a shake. “Where to, Daddy?” he asked. “Where do you want to go?”

  “Why, I don’t know, Jack.”

  “How about we pick up a couple of maidens, you and me, get a bite to eat, see the sights?” He had forgotten, for the moment, his recent maiden-related resolutions. “How about we get you a girl up here in my flying boat?”

  “Better not,” Tom Dooley said. “I’d just wind up sticking a knife in her chest and burying her in the woods.”

  When Jack removed his arm from Tom Dooley’s shoulders, he drew back a long string of blue sparks along with it. He felt as if the air around him were being inhaled. His blowing hair cackled with static.

  Tom Dooley turned to him and said, “Jack?” just as the sky blew up.

  A white scald of light blinded Jack; a cannon shot of sound deafened him; the rivets on his overalls branded him, and fire shot from the nails of his boots. For a heartbeat he gazed at a blank page i
n a book and wondered what happened next. Then he smelled wood smoke and opened his eyes. He found he was clinging to the starboard gunnel with both arms, his legs waving beneath him. The boat rotated slowly—first this way, then that—as it slipped from the sky. The tree’s trunk was split and scorched and smoking all the way down to its base; its canopy unraveled in a corkscrew of blackened leaf scrap as it fell. Tom Dooley was fighting to keep hold of the snarl of roots beneath the boat.

  “JAAACK!” Tom Dooley yelled.

  Jack swung a leg up and clambered back into the boat. He was considerably singed, but nothing seemed to be burned off.

  “JAAACK! HELP!”

  “Sail, Boat, Sail, Sail, Boat, Sail, Sail, Boat, Sail,” Jack begged.

  Nothing. The boat began to pendulum as it stalled toward the woods far below. The wind rushing past Jack’s ears roared with fervor.

  “The boat’s not working, Tom Dooley!” Jack called. “Hang on! We’re going down!”

  Tom Dooley managed to claw his way up into a root snarl near the base of the trunk. “Tell the tree to say a sestina or something! He’s the one sucked up all the magic!”

  “The tree’s dead, Tom Dooley! It took a direct hit. There’s sap all over the place.”

  “Not dead,” the tree rasped, “but cleaved.”

  “You’re alive!” Jack cried.

  “Charcoal, Jack. I’ll be briquettes soon enough.”

  “No! Wait wait wait wait wait wait! Listen. We’re in a bad way here. We’re going down. We’re going to crash. Tell us what to do. Tree! Hang on long enough to tell us what to do!”

  “Taproot,” it rasped. “The magic’s leaking from my taproot.”