Circle View (8 page)

“You need work done, lady?” he asks. “Your grass needs mowing bad,” he says, then looks away. Etta looks down at herself and pulls closed her housecoat.

“If you got a saw I'll pay you to cut down these trees.” She can't remember if this has occurred to her before, to cut them down. Police took the hatchet and never brought it back to her. She wonders if this boy can hear the trees, what they might say to him.

“These
trees?” he says, as if in answer to her thoughts. He straightens his ball cap, red lightning bolts machine stitched on the front. “When I was a little kid we called those Spooky Woods. Everybody thought you was a witch or something.”

“Well, they don't mean a thing to me. Trash trees.” She lifts her chin and reaches for the missing belt on her housecoat. She closes her eyes to see herself all the ways others see her:
Miz Cayce, the witch, the old crazy lady
.

“There's a bunch of ‘em anyhow,” he says, scratching his head under his hat.

“Two dollars apiece,” she says, trying to remember if there is any money in the house. She thinks of the blueglass tobacco jar in the kitchen where Garrett stored away his dollars for six years, saving to buy more land for more trees, and how for six years Garrett Junior stole out of the jar, she the only one knowing it and never telling, never letting on, like it was some secret conversation between them. After the gun in Garrett's mouth she put the money in still, and still he took it for the seven years until he left, but during that time it never meant anything, a secret kept from no one.

The boy rummages the cart to find a chain saw and starts it up. She watches him bend and guide the saw (slowly, as if he is leading a dance partner) into the base of the first tree in the staggered row. The saw deepens its noise, spitting out white chips and blue, lingering smoke, the chips covering the boy's shoulders and the hair that sticks out from beneath his cap. When he is almost through the first trunk the saw screeches, kicks back at the boy, and dies. The silence that follows whistles in Etta's ears.

“Hit a damn knot or something,” the boy shouts. He shrugs, and the sawdust falls from him. She remembers now, like water unwaving itself. Garrett coming through the door with the tiny crabapples crushed in his fists, his mouth gaping as if his words have fallen out of it. She knows the smell of crabapples—a sticky-sweet molting—from her girlhood, as she knows it now mixed in the smell of chain oil, as she has known it always, as if by chance alone it is the odor of her living. Garrett says nothing, but rubs at his face as if to wipe away tears that won't come, smearing the jam of the crushed apples in his red beard. She has to remember back to think of the gun still hidden under the dusty shoes in the box of letters on the floor under her bed. Her first thought is
Where are the McIntoshes?
but then she understands that they are not anywhere, that what Garrett had bought from the man on the same day she hid the gun was the absence of McIntoshes. He walks out through the back of the house, flies swarming at the crabapple mess on his face. She hears bellowing from Garrett, then hears the hatchet he bought to prune back the branches of his apple trees in winter as it hacks chunks from the mahogany of her dining room table, the apple press that he'd made from it. He walks back in, his hand bloodied with the gash from the hatchet. Without speaking he is out the front door and into the orchard. She makes the front window just in time to see him grab the first peacock he comes to and drag it by its tail from the low branches of the apple tree, put his boot on its neck and hack the bird in half. He tosses the tail into the yard while the bird twitches under the tree. He takes them one by one, in the calm of work, as if he
is
pruning branches. They screech
and
flap, then are caught by the blade, their noise hacked
off
just as sudden, their iridescent tails tossed away like sheaves of winter wheat.

Ten of them dead in the thin shade of the young trees, then Garrett stops and turns to look at her looking at him through the window, where it seems she has stood for six years, waiting for this to happen. He is dressed in blood, the bits of feathers shimmering green like sequins along his arms. She is glad to God then for Garrett Junior not home, for the school she knows he has skipped with the money he has stolen from the tobacco jar to play pool or watch movies in town, and she knowing for these six years and not telling. She thinks of telling Garrett now, reminding him of what he'd given up or lost in Japan, that his place is at the head of a family and not at the head of an orchard, that there is discipline to hand out. That boy, he'd say if she told, and smile admiring the trouble a son will find. When Garrett starts toward the house he is running, the hatchet loose in his hand. She steps onto the porch wearing the housecoat he had bought her when he was happiest about his apples, silk and blue-green, Garrett telling her in nighttime whispers it was the kind of present he should have brought her from Japan—the kind the other men brought to their wives and girlfriends—if only he could have found his way out of his sadness to do it. She opens her arms to him and then sees the hatchet and the emptiness in his face, and in that moment all her muted love for him is bubbled out by fear, and she turns so that the belt of the housecoat catches on a nail on the porch rail post and tears loose, slipping its loops. She runs in through the house and hides herself behind the wingback chair in the den. She hears Garrett crawl under their bed, hears him find the box, and in the silence that follows she knows that he is tossing her letters one-by-one across the quilt on the bed, their sound almost silence, like the sound of snow hitting the windowpanes, and she knows then that he is gone already and that this tossing of the letters, not tearing them, not throwing, is the last gentle thing he will do. In the noise of the singing of the trees what has not been kept, not sung nor said, is the sound of the pistol shot, its edges softened by palate and cheek and closed lips—a noise long since let go, scattered and blown away like papers caught up in a windstorm.

The doorbell rings and Etta thinks of Garrett home from war, no telegram or letters to warn her, ringing the bell of his own house as if her not answering it would send him away.
Silly Garrett
, she says when he walks in with his duffel bag and sunken eyes, Garrett Junior climbing his legs while Garrett's arms remain stiff at his sides. She opens the door and the tinny voice that comes from her says again
Silly Garrett
, while the boy in the red lightning hat, his face powdered with wood, wipes the sweat from his neck with the back of his hand.

“They're cut,” he says, “but they're not down.” He blows his nose into his fingers, and his fingers pull away bloody. “Saw kept kicking on me,” he says.

Behind him she sees the crabapple trees tall against the sky, their leaves full of voices, the five blackened trunks.

“I'd like you to take down those trees,” she says. Every word in her mouth feels old, some made thing not of her throat. “Two dollars a tree,” she says.

“Ma'am, I
cut
the damn trees. Kudzu's got ‘em all strung together and they won't fall. Just leaning a little. I'll need rope and my truck to pull ‘em down.”

She looks past him at the trees leaning in toward the middle, huddled together, the whites of the wedge cuts shining in their trunks like crescent moons, one after the other.

The boy turns his hat back around the wrong way. “I'll get on it first thing tomorrow, but I'd like to get paid first.”

She goes for the money in the blue tobacco jar, Garrett saving it up, Garrett Junior spending it on candy and Cokes, pool halls and nights away. The jar is not there on the hutch where it always sat in the kitchen. She comes back to the boy and the trickle of blood runs thin into his mouth. He swipes the blood across his face.

“You don't have my money, do you ma'am?” he says. He shakes his head and snuffs, spits across the porch rail. In his sweat is the smell of the crabapples.

“That boy,” she says, and after a minute realizes she's forgotten to shake her head and smile at all the trouble he's caused.

The boy mutters to himself, wipes his head on his forearm, and reaches toward her. She opens her arms, thinking of Garrett reaching for her that first night after the trees were in the ground, the burlap and twine left piled on the roof of the Chrysler. Reaching for her after a year of nights in the kitchen, sitting on a stack of papers and watching the darkness drag the house into night. Reaching and slipping the robe from her shoulders, weighing her small breasts with the tips of his worn fingers, grazing her nipples with his thumbs.

The boy tugs the frayed edges of her housecoat to pull it closed. “Just keep yourself covered up, ma'am,” he says, “and we'll call it even.”

She hears his boots on the gravel drive as her arms lift away from her like balloons set loose by a child. Garrett lifts her from the floor, her thigh scraping his belt buckle, the smell of outdoors in his hair. Her robe sticks to the sweat on his stomach as he lifts her away from him and onto their quilted bed.

“We're apple farmers, Etta Cayce,” he whispers. “How the hell do you like that?” He smiles touching her; the hatchet he has bought to prune the branches that have not yet grown hangs in the workshop, the blade he has whetted and then coated with oil to keep away the rust until the time that he will need it. He kisses her along the length of her body, his Sears & Roebuck clothes soaking in the basin to take the stiff out of them, the sapling trees stretching their roots into new soil, the man in the hat riding off somewhere counting his money, the peafowl not yet hatched on the ranch where Garrett will buy them out of a magazine. The gun is hidden, this time for good, she thinks, beneath the bed where she opens herself to him and he moves on top of her. Above her where she lies, the trees lean in, the holes in the green letting in the failing light of evening. She hears sounds, music, shaken from the branches. Garrett moans, the sound of it like sap running out of the trees; she hears babies crying with new-cut teeth, Christmas music from school assemblies, the sirens where Garrett Junior lives, the Atlanta Catholics praying their rosaries, dogs caught in raccoon traps, wrestling broadcasts on the radio, peafowl in the trees at night, their tails whisking the dust. She hears her song, “Dream a Little Dream of Me,” stolen right away from her. I
don't see what all the fuss is about
, she thinks to say. Her hands find the crabapples, one bite missing. Her housecoat lies twisted around her; she needs to find that belt, to close it up tight. She thinks of herself while the noise of the trees swirls around her,
Miz Cayce, that old witch lost out there in the Spooky Woods
. The trees sing to her now.
Blood is falling
, they sing, some old church song, but she won't hear of it, not for a minute. She lifts a crabapple to her mouth for a bite, the bitterest fruit she knows.

P
ORTER'S knuckles were swollen big as lug nuts, so his fingers hardly worked anymore. He stood at the front window, sore hands braced on the sill, and leaned his nose against the pane, his breath slowly fogging the glass. When he moved, his bones cracked, a sound that put him in mind of broken ball joints. He wiped the window clean to watch the house across the street. Mrs. Burke opened the door and five cats spilled into the yard, then Mr. Burke leaned his large head over his wife's shoulder.

“Me,” Porter said aloud to the empty room. “He's looking at me.” Burke walked across his lawn toward his red Mercedes parked at the curb, testing its paint for dust as he passed. He continued into Porter's drive; Porter thought to hide his face behind the curtain, but too late—he'd been seen. Burke did a fast lap around the white Dodge ragtop propped on stands in Porter's driveway, shook his head, and mounted the front porch steps. His heavy boots sounded on the boards. A knock sounded, and Porter stepped to answer, his broken shoe flapping the carpet like a flat tire.

“Enough is enough, Porter,” Burke said. He stood, hands on hips, dark hair slicked back into a bladelike widow's peak, eyebrows thick and black as a row of birds on a wire. Porter had spoken to him occasionally in the three years the Burkes had lived there. Moving day, before his boxes were unpacked, Burke had come across the street to sell Porter plastic gutter liner.

“The car has to go, Porter,” Burke said. “It's an eyesore for the whole neighborhood.” Porter tried to remember his last conversation with anyone—Wednesday, the box boy at the store.

“Diesel,” Porter said, his throat rattling. Burke looked surprised, the line of birds making a jump.

“Your Mercedes. Runs on diesel. Tough things, engines like hateful women. Never would touch them.”

“We weren't discussing my Mercedes, Mr. Porter. Your car doesn't run, hasn't been moved, and it's bringing down my property value. You'll have to have it towed.”

“Used to take coffee breaks whenever a diesel came in the shop. Noisy, smelly. You take that old Dodge convertible out there, powerglide transmission, in-line six. She hums, sings tunes, whispers in your ear.” Porter rubbed his knuckles.

Burke nodded. “I'd hoped it wouldn't come to this, Porter,” he said. “But if you don't move the car I'll call the homeowners' association. I'll call the cops. I mean it.” Porter nodded and extended his hand, wincing when Burke shook it. Burke walked across the street, stopped to blow dust off the glossy surface of the Mercedes, waded through the cats, and disappeared behind his door.

That evening Porter walked, broken shoe flapping, to the Tick-Tock. A pint for his knuckles, to lube them up. Along the road, deep gashes of red clay filled spots where houses had been, new condominiums were planned. On the corner rose a gleaming office park where three years before had curved a gravel road marked by a weedy ditch full of beer bottles. As Porter waited to cross the street, two fire trucks rumbled past. New buildings go up, he thought, old ones burn down.