The Killing Tree Page 3

  That night at dinner, we picked up where we left off two weeks ago. Eating chicken. But without the tears. I stared at my plate, at the mosquito on the wall, anything to distract myself from the tension that filled the room. I always wanted to make dinnertime a moment where the Heron family fit the house it lived in, pleasant and neat. I chattered about the new sauce at the diner and Della’s new hair color. Mamma Rutha tried to act interested, though her eyes were distant. And Father Heron forbade me to do something so whorish as to use hair dye.

  “I have to go back to work tonight,” I lied, knowing Father Heron despised the docks. “Gotta help paint the back room.”

  The mosquito flew away.

  “I don’t know what color, though. Rusty picked it out. I haven’t seen it yet.”

  “I think a shiny yellow would be lovely. Like the belly of that tree frog that lives in the apple tree,” Mamma Rutha suddenly said.

  “For heaven’s sake, Rutha, I don’t really think people want to have frogs on their minds when they go to a place to eat. I reckon a nice clean white would do just fine. Clean and simple, tell Rusty that’s what a diner should aim for,” Father Heron grumbled.

  They were actually speaking. We were having dinner conversation over my lie.

  “Then how about an orangey red, like that bucket of nails we left out in the rain. I reckon that would suit a barbecue joint,” she said, smiling.

  Father Heron just grunted and shook his head.

  “Cleanliness. All people need to see in a diner is cleanliness. Something you might want to consider, Rutha, next time you walk through that disease trap you call a kitchen.”

  It was true too. Mamma Rutha never bothered with what she felt were unessential details—like throwing out old food, or washing up dishes. When I worked double shifts at the diner, the dishes would stack in the sink until the whole house smelled sour. If it wasn’t alive, then Mamma Rutha didn’t notice it. And if it wasn’t “man’s work” then Father Heron would die before he touched it.

  “Well maybe the best color would be a blend of those two. Like a pale peachy rose. Light enough to be clean but still with enough color to look lively,” I offered.

  Father Heron grew even more disgusted, started to speak, and then decided just to shake his head and continue eating. Mamma Rutha began to hum to herself. “Pleasant and tidy” dinnertime was over. I cleared the table and started walking down the mountain.

  Halfway there I met Della, driving her momma’s car.

  “Boy are we gonna have some fun tonight!” she squealed as she ground the gears, desperately searching for third. “Wanna beer?” She used her teeth to twist off the cap of a bottle.

  “No, what’s going on at the docks?”

  “You know me, I don’t plan. I just prepare the way for fate,” she said, handing me her beer.

  I took a sip and tried not to gag as I swallowed. Beans. Beer always tasted like ice-cold bean soup to me. She laughed at the face I made.

  “It takes time to get use to. Maybe you should try wine coolers. Those taste just like Kool-Aid. But with patience and effort, you can train yourself to like beer. My momma started training me the day she bought me my first bra. You need to learn too, because beer and hair are the keys to men! That’s some of Momma’s wisdom.” She laughed as she took an extra-long gulp of beer to show me how it’s done.

  I took her beer back, tried again, and then gave up. She rolled her eyes at me and laughed.

  “Why’d you break up with Carl?” I asked. “I thought he was rich. Your momma must be awfully mad. Bet her wisdom never taught you to break up with a rich man.”

  “Carl was handsome, had money and everything. But I realized something important. You need to know this too, so you don’t make the same mistake,” she said seriously. “Poor girls can’t ever marry rich men. Ever.” She paused to let the impact of her words sink in.

  “I know my momma always said, ‘Della, you can marry rich as easy as you can poor.’ But that just ain’t true. How does someone like me, who never had nothing, talk to a man who always had anything he wanted? How do I say to him, ‘Carl, I never had a white dress when I was little because if I wore it inside my house it’d turn brown with dirt’? He couldn’t see where I had come from, or where I was at. Lord knows I tried to go up to his level. I talked about travel. I read up on new cars. And you know what I learned? Being rich is boring as hell. Nothing to think about, or wish for, or dream. Like us, we may dream about flying off to paradise on a big shiny plane wearing new Calvin Kleins and red sunglasses. But rich people, Mercy, rich people don’t dream. They just die at night. Why I would wake up from some wild dream, roll over and tell Carl about it, and he’d just look at me. So I asked him to tell me about his dreams. For a solid week, every morning I’d say, ‘What’d you dream last night?’ You know what he always said? He shrugged his shoulders and said nothing. People like us, Mercy, we live through our dreams. We see things in our dreams that we can never see in our lives. But rich people, they don’t have the need like we do. They lay there like a dead person dreaming nothing. And the last thing I want to do is sleep with a dead person.” She took another gulp of her beer before tossing it out the window.

  “But maybe,” I said, “Carl could tell you whether your dreams were true. Like my dreams of the ocean. Ever since I held that seashell to my ear in second grade, I’ve been dreaming about that ocean. I have a shoe box stuffed with magazine clippings of it. But I still haven’t really seen it. Only in my dreams have I heard it, smelled it, or felt it. But a rich man, a man that has seen outside these mountains, he could tell me if my dreams were true. He could tell me whether you can stand next to the ocean, lick your lips, and taste the salt.”

  “If you are trying to twist me back into dating Carl . . .” she began.

  “All I’m saying is maybe he deserved a better chance. I mean he’s no Jake. After what Jake did to you, I think sleeping with dead people sounds pretty good.”

  She grew quiet for a moment, her eyes saddened. “But what if I told you that you had to stay with a man who thought you were crazy for dreaming about that ocean? Who made you feel small for your dreams. Could you do it?” she asked. “Beat me or don’t beat me, I just don’t think I could stay with that kind of man. You couldn’t either.”

  She was right. I couldn’t love a man that made me feel small for my dreams. Or that had never spent a moment searching his mirror to see if he really belonged.

  “Well,” Della said, laughing, “tonight’s not the night for us to be worrying about it all anyway, rich or poor, cute or ugly, we are going to have us a little fun!”

  I had my doubts. The docks always felt like a bad high school dance for people too old for high school. It began as the political dream of an old mayor of Crooktop. As the whole world began to shift to other forms of energy, towns built around the coal industry began to worry. There was an election that year, and the election was won or lost on the issue of what was going to happen to Crooktop after coal. Tourism was the proposed solution. And a big part of that solution was the docks. The voters were told that people loved to come to the mountains. But Crooktop lacked one important essential to being a tourist magnet—water. We needed a lake, the mayor said. And the perfect spot was found in an old quarry where the ground had been stripped and blasted so much that a lake was the only thing that could hide the destruction. So there, in between the mountains, a small, muddy lake was born.

  The tourists never came. Eventually the docks became known as a place where you could still find people selling their moonshine and pot. Go parking. Blast Lynyrd Skynyrd out of your car. Nice people were warned that the docks was where a rough crowd hung out. Sometimes that was true, but usually it was just young people doing grown-up things and old people that didn’t realize they weren’t young anymore.

  We got out of the car and I stood awkward and stiff while Della looked around, deciding which direction to head in. She blended in perfectly. Looking casual and careless as she sca
nned the crowd. After four years of high school, I was still unsure of how to be cool. So I did what I felt like doing. I crossed my arms and folded them across my chest—awkward and stiff.

  Della pulled me toward a group huddled around a grill. The crowd absorbed her, while I hung on the outskirts. I watched her laughing, flirting, talking up her “theories” on life. They were all watching her too. There was something about Della that you just had to watch. Swinging between dreadfully serious and pitifully shallow, you just couldn’t help but like her. Whether she was angry, sad, hurt, or hungry, her glow shined through. If I hadn’t loved her so much, I would have envied her. Instead, I just stood in awe.

  She slid up to a tall muscular man flipping burgers. Mr. Next-in-line. She smiled at him, and ran her hands through her hair to show off her new highlights. With her attention fully taken, I walked to the end of a dock and lit a cigarette. Normally, I didn’t smoke unless I was with Rusty or Della. But I felt how alone I was. When everyone else had hidden themselves in the crowd, they could see my back turned to them. So I smoked to show them that I was just a girl enjoying a cigarette. I wasn’t a girl scared to feel alone in the middle of a crowd.

  “Gotta light?” a voice asked me. A male voice.

  I didn’t turn around. My heart pulsed in my toes and I hated myself for feeling all jittery just because I heard a man’s voice.

  “How do you think this got lit, see anyone else around?” I asked, trying to hide the shake in my voice with brave words.

  He stopped suddenly, and I cringed inside. I had wanted to sound like I didn’t care that a man walked out to me. But I ended up sounding childish and mean.

  “Awright then,” he said lowly, more to himself than me, as he began walking away.

  “Here,” I said, turning around and offering my lighter.

  My eyes quickly searched him and I guessed that he wasn’t from Crooktop. There were two types of Crooktop boys. Ones that dreamed only of driving coal trucks like their daddies. And ones that didn’t care what they did, as long as it didn’t have the scent of coal dust on it. I could usually pick either kind out with one glance. The coal boys looked like fresh versions of their daddies. Wearing caps that proudly advertised their future trucking company. Hanging around the trucks, tuning them up and making them shiny. They took cues from their parents and only looked worried when the threat of another strike loomed, or when coal prices began to dive. The other boys, the dreamers, didn’t wear a consistent uniform. They were the ones that felt in their bones that they were born for something other than coal. And if you looked closely enough, their faces betrayed their worry. Their fear that even if they were born for something else, coal was all that Crooktop could give them. And as far I could tell, the man walking toward me was neither. He just didn’t seem to carry the pride or the worry over coal that all Crooktop boys seemed to be born with.

  “Thanks,” he said, taking the lighter from my hands.

  He faced the last bit of the day’s sun. And the burn of it on his skin showed that he was as brown as any white man could be. He stood before me, showing me his skin, his frayed jeans and stained T-shirt, but he didn’t speak. I wondered why. Maybe he just wanted to smoke. Or maybe he was disappointed in me, now that he was close.

  He tucked the end of his cigarette into a bottle and hurled it into the lake. We watched how far it sailed before plunking into little muddy ripples. He shuffled backwards from the edge of the dock, and I noticed how worn and muddy his shoes were. It was time for him to go. And if I didn’t want him to, I was going to have to speak.

  I held out my pack of Camels. “Need another?”

  He shook his head, still looking out at the water.

  “You looking for something?” I asked, trying to sound casual. Trying to be Della.

  He nodded. “Fire trout.”

  Father Heron frequently fished, bringing home rainbow trout and brown trout. And occasionally, Crooktop Baptist would have a fish fry, and the tables would be loaded with catfish, brown trout, and rainbow trout. He didn’t look crazy. I lived with crazy. But there was no such thing as fire trout.

  “You mean rainbow?” I offered. “Those can’t be caught in this dirty lake. You gotta go up to the mountain streams, or even down to the riverbottom.”

  “Huh-uh, I mean fire trout,” he said evenly.

  “No such thing.”

  He shrugged his shoulders and stepped up to the edge of the dock again. He moved so close to the water that if I looked at him just from the waist up, I could see water rising out from him, rippling all around him.

  “Well, what’s a fire trout then anyway?” I asked, my voice trying to make peace, trying to become a thing he wouldn’t shrug off. He turned and looked at me. His eyes were a troubled mixture of green and brown, like dark sunflowers floating on green river pools. I held up my pack of Camels again. He took one and I waited.

  “You ever hear of foxfire?” he asked, once he was half finished with his cigarette.

  I nodded. Foxfire was a strange glow in the woods at night. A pale yellow light that outshone the moon. Some said it was ghosts, my high school biology teacher said it was a fungal reaction on the wood, and Mamma Rutha said it was the soul of the mountain, revealed to a chosen few. Not many people had ever seen it on Crooktop. But I had once when I was thirteen, after the worst thunderstorm I could remember. I hid in my room as the lightning lit up the sky and ripped through the trunks of old, mighty trees. When it was over I looked out my window and saw the glow in the woods. I crept through wet weeds and bur briars until I was standing in front of a twisted hickory slain by the storm. Its exposed wood glowed. So bright that I could see the tears shining on Mamma Rutha’s face on the other side of the tree.

  “It’s the soul of the mountain, Mercy baby. You’ve seen its soul,” she whispered with reverence.

  The sound of his voice when he spoke again was so even that he seemed quiet, even when he wasn’t. It was like river water. A constant flow that you can forget you’re hearing if you don’t pay close attention.

  “I was fishin’,” he said. “Fell asleep, got woke up by the light.” He paused and kicked a pebble off the end of the dock. “Light where there ain’t supposed to be.”

  “I’ve seen it too,” I said. “Once, in the woods.”

  He looked at me again, and I saw the subtle stir of his eyes. The mixing of the green and brown.

  “You touch it?”

  “No. You?”

  He nodded his head. “Made sure I wasn’t dreamin’.”

  “What’d it feel like?”

  “Nothin’. Just rotted wood fallin’ in my hand,” he said.

  “It wasn’t hot?”

  “Huh-uh.” I had been scared to touch it. The soul of the mountain should have been hot, the same way that it looked.

  “I always figured it’d burn.”

  “Nah, it just set in my hand a shinin’,” he said, holding his hand out over the water.

  “You keep it?” I asked.

  “Dropped it in the water. Lit it up too.”

  “It still glowed in the water?”

  He nodded, “Yup. ’Til an old brown trout ate it.”

  “A fish ate it?”

  He nodded, “A big ’un. Swam up, and ate it all.”

  “Well, what happened then?”

  “Still saw the light,” he answered, his voice rising like a swell in the river. “That brown swam away with a belly of fire. Been lookin’ for him ever since.”

  He smiled.

  “Hey Trout! Burger’s ready, man, c’mon!” someone yelled from the crowd.

  He looked over his shoulder and nodded his head.

  “Thanks for the smoke.”

  “No problem,” I called out as he walked away. My cigarette had turned into a solid row of gray ash. I had forgotten to dust it. He must think I am such a child, I thought. I turned and looked one last time into the water. I saw a glimmer of my own reflection, and a memory of flowered eyes. But no fire trout.r />
  Chapter IV

  I dreamed of an ocean. Surrounded by a shore that rose like a wet desert in slopes and dunes. I stared down into a pool that cradled shells, my childhood idols. Their images were carved into soaps that sat dusty on the back of our toilet. How my dirty hands had ached to wash with a pink shell. Once, overcome with temptation, I held one. Too scared to lather it, my tongue darted out to lick it and the taste of cheap perfume filled my mouth. Hearing Father Heron approach, I threw the soap back and ran away.

  But in my dream, I didn’t lust for the shells. I only wanted to feel the water all around me. I fell forward and sank low. The pool’s bottom was cold and full of shadows. The slippery snake wrapped itself around me, squeezing the air from my body. I woke up gasping for air.

  For years the ocean had visited me in my dreams. Sometimes violent. Sometimes glassy smooth. That morning, his words haunted me. Light where there ain’t supposed to be. It was like my ocean. Water where there shouldn’t be water. It was in my mind, drowning my dreams.

  I heard the shower cut off and knew that it was my turn. Father Heron always took his shower first on Sundays, to give him extra time to prepare for the service. He was a greeter at church. He stood on the front porch to shake hands and pass out bulletins. If visitors raised their hands when the preacher asked them to, then Father Heron would walk to them and hand them a copy of the church’s mission statement, a book of matches with “First Baptist Crooktop” printed on it, and a paper copy of the Gospel of John. He always woke up early on Sundays, to organize his little piles of paper and matches.

  “Young lady, you will not straggle into church today,” Father Heron called through my closed door. His God had never promised I am with you always. He only visited Crooktop from the hour of eleven to noon on Sundays. And if I took the time to shave my legs in the shower, he might just disappear. Mamma Rutha always said that God would meet me anytime, any place that I would make myself available. Which was a good thing for her too, since Father Heron demanded she quit church after her incident over the withered fig. The preacher had been talking about how Jesus had pointed at a fig tree and told it that it would never bear fruit again. And how the next day the disciples found that fig tree withered away. As the preacher described how a lush green tree was disfigured into a dry, brown, worthless plant, and how at any minute one word from God could wither everything around us, Mamma Rutha’s sobs broke through. Thinking she was having a moment of great spirituality, the preacher said, “Sister Rutha, do you have a word from the Lord?”