The Killing Tree Read online

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Copyright © 2009 by Rachel Keener

  All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

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  First eBook Edition: March 2009

  ISBN: 978-1-59995-186-7

  Contents

  Copyright Page

  PART ONE: Beneath the Peonies

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  Chapter IX

  Chapter X

  Chapter XI

  Chapter XII

  Chapter XIII

  Chapter XIV

  Chapter XV

  Chapter XVI

  Chapter XVII

  Chapter XVIII

  Chapter XIX

  Chapter XX

  PART TWO: Eternal Peacein Glory

  Chapter XXI

  Chapter XXII

  Chapter XXIII

  Chapter XXIV

  Chapter XXV

  Chapter XXVI

  Chapter XXVII

  Chapter XXVIII

  Chapter XXIX

  Chapter XXX

  Chapter XXXI

  Chapter XXXII

  Chapter XXXIII

  Chapter XXXIV

  Chapter XXXV

  Chapter XXXVI

  Chapter XXXVII

  Reading Group Guide

  For Kip, and his promise

  And thanks to Andrea Somberg

  PART ONE

  Beneath the Peonies

  Chapter I

  The chickens began to creep on a steamy day in June. They were used to walking and pecking. But on that day, they learned the same thing that I had. You have to creep around the silence to survive it.

  My grandfather, Father Heron, sat and stared out the front-room window. His black eyes searched the gravel road that wound around Crooked Top Mountain, Crooktop to the locals. It was a twisted road that cut through squirrel-filled trees, blackberry hollers, and past his house, the one he was born in. The one that I was born behind.

  I had studied his silence many times. And learned that people speak the loudest when they’re quiet. They create words, even conversations, just with the twitch of their brow or the grit of their teeth. Sometimes his silence screamed so loud I wanted to cover my ears. “Be quiet!” I wanted to shout at his unmoving mouth. But I didn’t, because I knew that he was telling me things. About locked doors, blood, and murder.

  I spent my time waiting for a look, a sign, that would tell me what to do to survive. I was born waiting on him. My momma didn’t live long enough to teach me anything herself, so I had to soak up my lessons from her in the womb. And she taught me that her daddy, my grandfather, was a man that women should dance around, but never with.

  “She say when she’s coming back?” he asked without looking at me. His words were simple. But the dance wasn’t.

  “Yes sir. Not ’til you promise not to kill any more of her chickens.”

  “Her chickens?” he asked, leaning forward.

  “Your chickens, sir, ’til you promise not to kill any more of your chickens.” Around . . . dance around, not with.

  “And why? Why does that crazy woman think I shouldn’t kill my own chickens?”

  “ ’Cause she’s sick and tired of making your chickens happy just to have to chop off their heads and fry ’em,” I whispered, my eyes lowered to the ground.

  “God gave man dominion over every creeping thing on the earth,” he hissed.

  I nodded my head.

  “Mercy, does a chicken creep?”

  I knew that chickens could walk, strut, peck, and scurry. But from that day on, they would creep too. Because the silence told them to.

  “Yes sir, I reckon it does,” I said with perfect rhythm. I knew his dance.

  He jerked his eyes off of me and turned them back to the road, daring the sun that squinted them to tell him that chickens don’t creep. I hurried outside of the house that rose defiantly on the side of the mountain. It was a crooked mountain. Like its top was broken. Not its peak, there weren’t any mountain peaks in the Appalachians. Just slopes that rose rounded and wide. Like giant hills really.

  But the people there didn’t mind. It didn’t bother them to live on a broken mountain. Most of them were born there. Some left in their youth, but most returned. Not for the jobs. When the boom of coal left Crooktop, so did most of its jobs. There was still a little for truckers to haul away to other sites. Just enough to cover the town with its dust. Coal was the god we could all see. It had built our little town in the valley. And it’s why the most fundamental rule of Crooktop etiquette was to take your shoes off before you walked on carpet. Otherwise, all the rugs of Crooktop would quickly turn black.

  People didn’t stay on Crooktop for its entertainment either. Its valley had two clothing stores, Ima’s Boutique and the Discount Family Shopper. The nearest shopping center was over the mountain, at the Magic Mart. And Crooktop only had three restaurants. A hamburger joint, a meat and three, and a barbecue diner. Only the diner served beer. There was no theater. No swimming pool. No skating rink. And if you bought a radio you wasted your money. The mountains blocked reception so the only stations that could be picked up were ones from nearby mountains. And those were only AM bluegrass or gospel stations. If you wanted to listen to FM music, then you had to buy tapes. You had to guess at what music was new and cool, because the radio couldn’t tell you. So young people stuck with the safe bets. Lynyrd Skynyrd and Aerosmith were always new and cool on Crooktop.

  People stayed on Crooktop because it was a way of life that couldn’t be found outside the mountains. And it was protected. Hidden by the giant hills from the eyes of the world. Hidden by its poverty from the interest of the world. Outsiders never knew of the love or wars that festered on the side of that crooked mountain.

  And in the middle of all the festering rose the Heron house. It was a small two-bedroom-one-bath house, painted white and topped with dingy green shingles. Built in a nearly perfect square, it seemed to say, “Every angle of the Heron family fits neatly together.” But it was a lying house. It was his house. And though I spent all my days and nights there, it never felt like mine.

  Sometimes to escape it all I would go to Mamma Rutha’s tomato patch, touch the prickly leaves, and breathe the heavy scent—an earthy mix of moist dirt, sweet ripeness, and green, green, green. It was a smell that soothed me nearly as much as the smell of seng on Mamma Rutha’s hands made me ache. At age six, when I learned Mamma Rutha was crazy, I saw her standing fierce-eyed and naked in the garden, with the stain and mystery of ginseng on her hands. Hair as thick and shiny brown as molasses spilled down her back in wild tangles. Small breasts, shaped like fists, barely rose away from the ribs that jutted from her chest. Her legs were scraped and scarred from running through thorn-filled woods. Her small wiry frame burned such an image in my mind that when I think about that night I have to remind myself that
she was a speck of a woman and not the tower I remember.

  Why I consider that the day I learned about Mamma Rutha, I really don’t know. Looking back, it seems she had always been crazy. Planting her peonies haphazardly through the yard, like some sort of random connect-the-peony-dot game. Or religiously watching the early spring moon to know when to plant her garden, carefully sowing the seeds and then refusing to harvest it. When I was little she poured a dizzy, heated sort of love on me, crowning me with honeysuckle headbands and then forgetting to feed me supper. She was a woman who talked to the moon, who took her clothes off and stood naked amidst her pile of seng, who forgot to make sure that I had clean clothes for the first day of school, who never noticed when I went barefoot well past Indian summer. But she loved me breathlessly. Clung to me. Cradled my head and sang to me, strange songs about dragonflies and june bugs. Cried when I cried. Scoured the mountainside for a soothing remedy for my every complaint. My crazy Mamma Rutha, a woman who fell in love with her chickens and couldn’t kill them anymore.

  Folks down in the valley whispered that Mamma Rutha hadn’t always been crazy. Father Heron, though, he had never changed. He was raised on Crooktop, graduated high school down in the valley, took a wife, and began establishing himself as a hardworking, levelheaded man. He was the sort of man that made a list of the things he must accomplish in life and then set about to check them off. Graduate—check. Wife—check. Deacon in church—check. Raise granddaughter—check. He felt humiliated by Mamma Rutha, until he realized that staying with his crazy wife made him look like a martyr in the eyes of the valley. His fellow deacons muttered their sympathies and called him loyal for staying with her, and brave for trying to raise me. So it was stay with crazy wife—check, and continue raising granddaughter—check.

  But raising is different than loving. So different that it sent me running to my mirror searching for a sign that I belonged to another family, even though the whole valley still talked about how my momma had died and my daddy ran off. But my eyes were always there staring back at me with the same black of Father Heron’s. I could avoid my lips, that twisted into the same slightly crooked smile of Mamma Rutha. Or my nose that was a little too round—like my momma’s, Mamma Rutha always said. But I could never avoid my eyes. Proof that I belonged, even when I didn’t want to.

  Chapter II

  Why Mamma Rutha fell in love with her chickens was a mystery. Early in their marriage Father Heron would proudly take her fried chicken to his deacon fellowship dinners. She said the secret to her recipe was to raise a happy chicken, and then use an iron skillet to fry it in. And she spent many hours making sure her chickens were happy. She sang to them, petted them, and fed them more often than she fed herself.

  The day she sobbed over her iron skillet was the day I knew that her chickens would soon be as sacred as her unharvested garden. Her eyes were red and swollen as she served supper that night. Father Heron noticed too. But we were too busy stuffing ourselves to care. She paced the length of the kitchen, wringing her hands and murmuring beneath her breath.

  “Sit down and eat,” Father Heron growled. “Or at least get out of here so I can eat in peace.”

  Her red eyes flashed wild and she began to murmur again. Father Heron picked up a drumstick and slowly took a bite. He smiled at her, bits of happy chicken peeking from between his teeth. She put her hands over her face and strangled a sob. I laid my fork down, but I didn’t go to her. Even though I knew that I should cradle her head the way she had so often cradled mine. But what did she want? To take away the only decent meal we had had after weeks of living off barbecue from the diner I worked at?

  “Shhhhhh,” she said to our silent room before running out the back door. She had heard our thoughts, or felt them at least.

  We finished our supper. Savoring the chicken. I knew that it was seasoned with her tears. And I knew that it would probably be the last happy chicken I ever ate. A suspicion which was confirmed later that night, when I awoke to see her pale blue eyes staring down on me.

  “Mercy baby,” she whispered.

  “Mamma Rutha? What’s wrong?”

  “Please don’t eat no more of my chickens!” she gushed, her eyes glowing with intensity.

  Strangely, I asked her why. I had stopped asking that question a long time ago. Her eyes began searching me, asking me why I didn’t know better than to eat the chickens she loved. She expected me to understand her, and I couldn’t.

  I sighed. “I won’t eat ’em no more.”

  The next morning I found her burying the chicken bones under the June apple tree.

  “Morning, Mamma Rutha.” She didn’t answer. “Looks like it’s going to be a hot day, huh?” I asked. Still no answer.

  I sat down across from her and watched. Her dress was covered with the dirt that her hands were slinging. Beads of sweat began to form on her face as she feverishly clawed the ground. She was silent. But it was a different sort of silence than Father Heron’s. Sometimes she just felt things too deeply for conversation. Or she felt them as they really were, hot emotions too jumbled to organize into words.

  After she had clawed a hole a foot deep into the ground she gently placed the bones side by side, making sure each had its own resting place before covering them over with dirt.

  “Let’s pray now,” she said as she reached for my hands. I bowed my head.

  “God,” she said with her face uplifted, “please take care of my dear friend. Don’t forget to feed him. He likes dried corn a lot. Pet him a little too. His favorite song is ‘Turkey in the Straw,’ but when you sing it to him, could you change the words to ‘chicken in the straw’? And Lord, please forgive Mercy baby, for she knew not what she eateth. Amen.” She squeezed my hands. “Say a blessing verse.”

  Mamma Rutha knew all the blessing verses by heart, the ones in the Bible and the ones she made up herself. Sometimes she spoke them as though they were her own special language, which always disgusted Father Heron.

  “Holy scripture ain’t meant to be used by the likes of a crazy woman and her peonies,” he would mutter when he would see her singing them to her flowers. What bothered him the most was that she knew every word of those verses by heart. They were a part of her. I loved to hear her whisper them over me as I slept, or over the picture of my momma that she kept by her bed. I loved to watch her kneeling in the middle of her garden whispering, “The mountains and the hills shall break forth into singing before you, and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands. Instead of the thorn shall come the cypress tree, and instead of the briar shall come the myrtle tree.” And her garden always produced an unharvested bounty, the envy of all other gardeners.

  “What should I say, Mamma Rutha?”

  “I think the one about bones would do nicely,” she said as she ran her hand over the patch of fresh dirt.

  The bone blessing. It was the one she had taught me to say anytime we came across death. When my baby possum died, we whispered the bone blessing. When Father Heron’s dogs killed a stray cat, we whispered the bone blessing. And now that the happy chicken was buried, it was time to whisper the bone blessing.

  “The Lord will guide you continually,” I said solemnly, “and satisfy your soul in drought. And strengthen your bones. You shall be like a watered garden, like a spring of waters, whose waters do not fail.”

  “Amen,” she whispered as she leaned forward and pressed her forehead on the ground. I heard her kiss the grave.

  After that day, things were peaceful for a little while. I kept bringing home barbecue and Mamma Rutha kept her chickens happy. But even hickory-smoked pork becomes unappetizing after several meals. Especially to Father Heron, who always had to swallow a Tums after he ate. So one evening he took my brown bag filled with barbecue, dumped it in the trash, walked outside, and chopped off the head of a happy chicken.

  Mamma Rutha was sitting in her garden, singing to her okra when it happened. We both heard the noise. The whack, the shrill squawk, the sudden silence. Her e
yes grew wide and wild. We both ran to him. As he tossed the limp chicken head to his dog, the body jerked violently and hopped around the yard for a few more seconds. I can still smell the hot blood that squirted from that headless chicken. And I will always hear the wild scream that escaped from that tiny bit of a woman. It scared me. It scared him too.

  She chased the chicken’s body until she cradled it in her arms. “You’re okay. You’re okay,” she cried to it. Her face and neck were flecked with warm blood. She ripped the mangled chicken head from his dog. “You’re going to be okay. You’re okay,” she said to the head. The dog didn’t protest, she scared him too. Then she ran far and fast, up the mountain. Long after the woods had swallowed her body we could still hear her.

  She didn’t come home that night or the next. It wasn’t the first time she had disappeared. There were rumors about families living high on the mountain, back in the thickest part of the woods. Families that never came down in the valley, not even to send their children to school. Some said they were remnants of the Cherokee tribe that used to live there. Nobody had actually seen anyone, but I believed Mamma Rutha had. There was a reason why she would come down from the mountain carrying a pint of shine, or carry supplies back up and return without them.

  When a week passed with no Mamma Rutha I went to look for her. More out of desperation for some real noise, some laughter and song, than out of concern for a woman who seemed to need only the mountain to survive. I heard her blessing verse before I saw her. She sang to the trees about knowing the wind, the rain, and the secrets of the owl.

  She lovingly placed her thin hand upon each of their trunks. I longed to be one of those trees. To be content with the love she offered, without hoping for anything more.

  “Mamma Rutha,” I whispered, like we were in church. She looked at the tree as though it had spoken.

  “Mamma Rutha, it’s Mercy.”

  “Hi Mercy baby,” she said, still looking at the tree. She didn’t ask why I had come, or how I found her. She never took her hand from that tree or her eyes off its bark. She simply gave me her message for Father Heron and then walked further into the woods, sending me home alone to dance around him over her chickens.