Mr. Tall

by Tony Earley

  “I see it!” Tom Dooley yelled. “Law, law, Jack. The damn thing’s shitting rubies!”

  “Bleeding rubies,” the tree said.

  “Rubies?” Jack asked.

  “Magic in its solid form. Ordinarily it’s a gas.”

  “Magic rubies,” Tom Dooley wondered out loud. “Damn, Jack, this here is some more kind of story.”

  “Can you stop the leak?” Jack asked him.

  “I think so!” Tom Dooley said.

  He hung upside down trapeze-style and jammed his finger into the hole.

  “Ow!” the tree yelped. “Take it easy down there!”

  “Sorry!” Tom Dooley called.

  The oak’s rocking slowed and stilled. The bow tipped up and settled. The boat came to a full stop and floated becalmed in the air.

  “It worked, Tom Dooley!” Jack shouted. “By God, it worked! We’re not falling anymore!”

  “Huzzah!” Tom Dooley shouted anachronistically.

  It was not long, however, until their deliverance from death began to strike them as more plight than providence. Although the boat hovered easily, it proved incapable of progress. When Jack commanded it to “Sail Over Here!” it did not respond; when he ordered it to “Sail Over There!” it remained anchored in place. The cloud slid blackly by mere yards above their heads and tried to beat them from the sky with head-knocking hailstones and icy cataracts of rain. It lit up on the inside as if some haint with a lantern were seeking them through its dark passageways, opening doors and peering inside rooms in which they might be hiding. The earth below them had disappeared beneath the deluge. Jack shielded his noggin with his forearms and shivered mightily; he had never been so cold—or so frightened—in all his many travels. The tree could offer neither comfort nor counsel as its condition worsened; scores of leaves leapt into the rain as its consciousness wavered. When the end came only a few lifeless stragglers flapped from its boughs, ragged flags among the rigging of a ghost ship.

  “I think that I shall never see,” the tree whispered, then spoke no more.

  After the tree died Tom Dooley grew broody and silent. “Jack?” he finally said. “I’m getting a cramp in my finger, and all the blood’s run to my head.”

  “I reckon that would be the case, given your predicament.”

  “And you know what I just realized? I’m hanging from a white oak tree, just like I say I’m gonna be doing tomorrow, in the first-person part of my song.”

  “I hadn’t thought about it, but I guess that’s right,” Jack said. “Spirit of the ballad, anyway, if not exactly the letter.”

  “I never been in a tomorrow before, and when I finally get to one I wind up hanging from a daggum white oak tree. It’s been interesting, though—the talking dog and the talking tree and the flying boat and getting struck by lightning and the magic rubies leaking out. To tell you the truth, I’ve always envied you living inside a story instead of a song. Not knowing what happens on the next page, all that setting out, going on down the road, seeing what happens the other side of the mountain.”

  “I’ve had some good times, I guess,” Jack said. “You don’t like living in your song?”

  “It sucked the soul out of me a long time ago. It’s always the same. Even when I close my eyes I can hear that refrain a-comin’. I got to where I looked forward to somebody screwing up the lyrics just for a change, but they’re so damn simple hardly anybody ever did. Today’s the most improvisation I ever been involved in.”

  “I’m sorry about that,” Jack said. “The limitations of the lyric. At least you’re out now.”

  “I don’t know about that, Jack. I just realized my head’s hanging down, just like it says in the chorus.”

  Jack sat up straighter. “Hey now,” he said. “That’s just happenstance. It’s the only way you could stop the rubies leaking and the boat from crashing.”

  “It’s not happenstance, neither, Jack. It’s prescient, is what it is. Even after all I been through since yesterday I’m still locked up in the song. Head hanging down. Hanging from a white oak tree. The whole pokeful. It’s the damnedest thing. Narrative inevitability.”

  Jack glared down at the bottoms of Tom Dooley’s shoes. “You ain’t locked up in shit,” he said. “Ain’t nothing inevitable. That ain’t how a story works. You get to a hard spot you make a decision and you set out from there. You go on down the road and you see what happens next. Then you make another decision. You got agency.”

  “But I ain’t got agency. It’s all an illusion. Face facts.”

  “Them ain’t my facts.”

  “I come this far, Jack, I might as well go on back to my ballad. I know it ain’t much of a song, but if I’m bound to die I’d just as soon do it on the home ground. If my words get all the way forgot, well, then that’s all right. You seen all them lawmen riding after me through the wheat field. I been sung about more than most.”

  “That’s chickenshit rationalization, Tom Dooley. If that’s the way you think, I don’t know why you even bothered running from that dog.”

  Tom Dooley bent forward and moved a tangle of roots out of the way and blinked up at Jack through the rain. “Why, Jack,” he said. “Ain’t nobody likes getting bit by a dog.”

  “Tom Dooley, if you pull your finger out of that hole, we can’t go back. We’ll both die and I flat don’t care to. I ain’t never been killed before, in all these many stories, and I don’t aim to start now.”

  “Well, I’m bound to die, Jack. I don’t know about you.” And with that he pulled his finger out of the hole and shook out his arm.

  Jack saw a ruby bob out from beneath the tree and hover in the air. Magic. The boat shivered ever so slightly.

  “Why, you son of a bitch,” he said.

  “Hey, Jack,” Tom Dooley said, glaring up, his murderer’s eyes blackening with glee. “Come this time tomorrow, reckon where you’ll be?” Then he laughed, somersaulted backward, and vanished into the rain.

  Before Jack finished wondering if Tom Dooley had hit the ground, the taproot belched out a clot of rubies and the boat dropped far enough to yank a holler out of Jack. Without thinking he leapt feet first through the bottom of the boat and on through the root-jumble, hooked his legs on the trapeze root, and jammed his finger into the ruby hole. Although the boat now floated steadily in the squall, he found himself pondering the same predicament that had stymied him while Tom Dooley was the one who stanched the ruby-bleeding: namely, how to get down from the sky. As he hung upside down his head pounded and his feet numbed and his finger throbbed and he shook in the downpour, and when a rogue hailstone caught him in the testy parts, he let loose a malediction of blasphemous execrations worthy of the most degenerate giant. At least the cloud had stopped shooting lightning at him. Just as the idea of ending his own tale with what he now thought of as the Dooley solution flickered in the far darkness of his considering, it occurred to him that he might lower the boat by letting a few rubies at a time drip from the tree. The plan worked well enough but he couldn’t grow used to the lurching in his gut each time the boat jerked, even though he knew it was coming. After a while he began to worry that the tree would run out of rubies before the boat lit on the ground, and that he would be squashed into Jack jelly when the tree landed on top of him. Lost as he was in the deluge, unable to gauge or guess at his altitude, he also worried that even if the tree didn’t run out of rubies he would still be mashed into mush if he didn’t see the ground coming up in time. The rubies themselves proved irksome. They didn’t fall once squeezed from the tree, but instead floated around Jack’s head like a swarm of glittering gnats worth, in his estimation, upward of a bazillion dollars. He tried cramming a handful into the bib pocket of his overalls, so as to sell them later, but had to let them go when he almost floated away. Thus the greatest treasure hunter in the history of the high country was reduced to waving away from his face the greatest gob of gemstones he had ever laid eyes on. If only he could have gotten his feet on the ground with a couple of poc
ketsful he would have been able to set himself up in the biggest king’s castle in the countryside!

  Jack had no idea how far the boat had descended, and he had grown almost bored with the process of bleeding the taproot when the last of the magic rubies was birthed from the wounded tree. He stared in disbelief at the hole until he felt the boat falter, then he scrambled out of the root ball and up the tree trunk, squealing like a kindled witch. He wrapped his arms and legs around the tree’s biggest limb with no inkling how far he was about to fall. The boat dropped like a golden egg out of a goose but turned out to be only a two-headed giant or so above the ground when it fell. It was also dead-aimed for the roof of a tiny house. Jack had only a second or two to close his eyes and brace for impact. The crash sounded as if the whole valley of Ezekiel’s dry bones had broken at once, but the tree remained providentially upright. Jack was none the worse for wear. The boat and tree, however, had smashed the house into a pile of mayhem and midden approaching the smithereen. From his perch in the tree Jack spied in the rubble half a burnt-looking cornbread pone, the intact globe of a kerosene lamp, a disemboweled feather pillow, a Sunday school Quarterly wrinkling in the rain, a wrecked wardrobe chomping a pair of overalls, and the lower part of a woman’s leg, shod in a worn brogan laced halfway up, sticking out from beneath the brick pile formed by the toppled chimney.

  “Hello, the house,” he called to the shoe, neither expecting, nor receiving, a reply.

  Jack first hoped that the leg and the boot belonged to a robber’s wife, which would spot him tolerable time to run away, given that robbers never came home until midnight, some nights as late as one or one thirty. But when he slid down from the tree and squatted beside the boot, he remembered that all the robbers’ wives with whom he had lain had been lovely in their loneliness, and that he had never taken any of them away from the hard lives in which he had found them, although many of them had asked. And while he had killed a fair number of regular men over the years, he couldn’t recall ever killing a woman who hadn’t been a witch. This was new ground he was clearing. His first impulse was to take off before somebody happened by, but setting out seemed simultaneously like a good idea and the worst intention. He thought that saying a few words over the foot might be appropriate, but he had never learned any of those words. He poked the sole of the boot with his forefinger. He pinched the first little piggy and wiggled the foot back and forth. Finally he whispered, “Sorry to bother you, ma’am,” then stood and turned and picked his way through the wreckage, forlorn and baffled. Although killing the woman hadn’t been his fault exactly, he was starting to believe the maidens in the wheat field had been right about his character, or lack thereof. And it did not, in fact, occur to him to dig the woman out.

  Around the house-yard stood a passel of paltry outbuildings peculiar in their decrepitude. Each of them tilted so far toward toppling it seemed miraculous not one of them had fallen over. No two of the hovels canted in the same direction, which made them dizzying to contemplate. The door to the outhouse—the most upright of the shacks—banged open and the old man stomped out into the rain and the mud sop, struggling to pull up and secure his overalls while surveying the shambles.

  “Dagnabbit, Jack,” he spat. “Can’t a feller even loosen his dung bung without you dropping out of the sky in a stricken watercraft and busting up his living-house?”

  “Old Man!” Jack cried. “It’s you! You’re alive! Why, I ain’t seen you in forever and half a while.”

  “No offense,” the old man grumbled, “but I’d be a heap better off if you wasn’t seeing me now.” He walked to the door stoop and surveyed the shock of scrap that had lately been his house. He studied what little remained of the flying boat. He gazed into the top of the dead tree. He considered the fallen chimney. He turned and pointed a long, yellow-nailed finger at Jack. “You have visited carnage upon me,” he said. “You have wrecked my real estate and busted up my chifforobe. You have killed my old lady deader’n a plow-tongue. She always said, ‘Old Man, mark my words, you will come to regret trusting that Jack rascal with a flying boat,’ and now I see that you have proved the poor thing prophetic, bless her heart.”

  “I’m sorry,” Jack said, the words queer and toxic-tasting on his tongue. In the past he had said them only to notch a bit of this or that, usually maiden love-favors. But this time he really was.

  The old man blinked in surprise and sniffled. “Why, thank you for the sentiment, Jack. Her biscuits’d bust your tooth out and her cornbread wasn’t fit to eat, but she was a good old witch and I loved her.”

  “Say what, now?” Jack said. “You mean to tell me that long as I’ve known you, lo these many years, all those times I run into you sitting by the roadside during my settings out, you were married to a witch?”

  The old man scowled. “Who else did you think I’d be married to?”

  “Not a dadblamed witch!” Jack cried. “You know how I hate a witch! I spent my whole career trying to cull the coven!”

  “Then you might as well cull me, too.”

  Jack grabbed his head and twisted it back and forth. “Oh, naw,” he moaned. “Not you. Please tell me you ain’t a witch. How could you betray me like that and you the nearest thing to a friend I ever had?”

  “Doggone it, Jack, I oughta spell you right now for saying such. Where do you think all them magical implements I give you come from? You can’t go down to the crossroads and buy truck like that in the store. I made and spelled everything I give to you. You see them sheds falling over empty? They used to be full of conjuring components. I give you everything I had. That dab of seeing juice I sent by the twins was the last of what there was. Hell, when you was just a little feller, I’m the one bartered you the magic beans for that dried-up cow your conniving mama sent you to town to trade, and they was supposed to be my supper. So don’t you come up in here and tell me I betrayed you.”

  “Mama told me there wasn’t nothing wrong with that cow!” Jack said.

  “Oh, just hush,” the old man said. “That was the poorest cow I ever seen. There wasn’t enough milk left in that sack to squirt a barn cat and it sitting in the bucket. You always have been too much of an idiot to know you was one.”

  Jack stepped forward with his fists balled up. “You need to remember who you’re talking to,” he snarled. “I’m still the only giant-killer in this settlement, and I don’t need no magic gewgaws to cull out a witch as old as you.”

  The old man reached into the side pocket of his overalls and produced a hissing copperhead, which he tossed at Jack’s face. Jack opened his mouth to scream, but the snake disappeared into the air an inch before it struck him. Still, he beat and whacked his head and the front of his overalls as if the snake had landed around his shoulders; he danced a jerky jig and stared wildly about his feet.

  The old man reached again into his pocket. “You want me to peg another one at you?”

  Jack shook his head and whimpered unintelligibly.

  “Son, you need to remember you ain’t no match for any kind of witch, even one as old as me, unless you got some magic on your side. No regular man is. You’re just lucky I’m a good witch.”

  Jack staggered through the sucking mud past the old man, his heart crazed with beating, and melted onto the wet stoop. He had seen his reflection in the copperhead’s eye. “That didn’t seem like much of a good witch thing to do,” he said.

  “Well, you had it coming.”

  Jack conceded the point with a nod.

  “To be honest with you,” the old man said, “I’m only mostly good. I will eat me a kid every once in a while, but only the bad’uns that sass their mamas and don’t say their prayers. Now, the old lady, she had a sweet tooth for virgins and I had to hide her broom come full-moon time. Her people was all bad witches.”

  “Did I ever run up on any of her people?”

  “Let me see. You kilt three of her cousins in that haunted mill just this side of Argyle, and you disfigured one of her great-aunts up by Gran
dfather Mountain. It was sometimes a source of disharmony between me and the old lady, the nature of my calling.”

  Jack shook his head. “I don’t know how you come to spend all those years and spells and truck helping me when you could’ve boodled up all the treasure for yourself. You could’ve been the one diddled the maidens and flummoxed the giants and stole the gold and soared around in the flying boat with Hardy Hardhead and the Well boys. Why, you could’ve used your magic to make yourself king of the settlement.”

  “Jack, you ain’t going to understand a word of this, but being a king didn’t interest me none, and I never developed a taste for treasure. But making sure no harm come to you once you set out? That there made me rich as I ever cared to be.”

  A nameless cry laddered up the inside of Jack’s ribcage toward the light. “But I’m ethically challenged,” he said.

  “You are that.”

  “And I never think about nobody but myself.”

  “You do not.”

  “I don’t deserve a single thing you give me.”

  “No, sir, not one. You always have been, and continue to be, a most unworthy vessel.”

  “Then why—”

  “Because, honey, that’s what makes it count.”

  Jack ruminated on the stoop about what the old man had said while the old man circled the tree and poked around in the wreckage, picking up and examining this or that—a wooden spoon, a page from a calendar, a handful of yellow shotgun shells. Every so often he absentmindedly pulled a brick off the chimney pile and tossed it aside. Finally he leaned against the tree and stared into space.

  “It doesn’t make a lick of sense, what you just told me,” Jack eventually said.

  “That’s how it ought to be. Anybody it makes sense to ain’t doing it right.” The old man held a vegetable grater up to the light and peered through the bottom of it with one eye.

  “What are you rooting around for, anyway?”

  “Something outta this mess to give you, I reckon.”