The Killing Tree (2 page)

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 eyes 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.

I did her bidding. I gave Father Heron her message, and the chickens began to creep. But she waited for a sign that her chickens
were safe. Waited for a reaction from a man who rarely reacted. I began to fear that she might have to wait forever.

I picked up double shifts at the diner so that my only hours at home were spent sleeping. It was the diner in the valley.
The only one that served beer, earning it the reputation of being a place where men hid out from their families on Saturday
night and then ushered them in after church on Sunday. And the smokers were always going full speed on the weekends, sending
me home smelling like a smoked pig. No matter how much detergent or fabric softener I used, it was a smell that married my
clothes.

After I graduated high school the month before, the diner became a welcome escape for me. Between serving up pulled-pork platters
and mugs of beer, I felt connected to something outside of that tidy little house up on Crooktop. When groups of rowdy teenagers
came in on Saturday night, there were brief moments when I actually felt like I was a part of their world. One where everyone
ached to be older. So as the boys smoked and the girls showed off their push-up bras, I ran to smear on Plum Passion lipstick
before sneaking them half mugs of beer. They would roll their eyes, swear about curfews or being forced to go to college in
the fall. And then I would feel our difference. As they strolled out arm in arm, whispering, “Thanks for the brew, Mercy,”
I knew how different we were. While they raced home to beat their curfew and count the days until classes began at the community
college over the mountain, nobody waited at home for me and I had never even seen a college application. Though my grades
were fairly decent, I knew college wasn’t an option for me. I didn’t have any money and it had never crossed my grandparents’
minds to send me. And even if money hadn’t been a problem, I had no idea how to go about getting into college. All the things
I heard the Saturday night crew groan about—the tests, the application fee, the campus tour, picking a “major”—it was all
foreign to me. So the highlight of my graduation was “picking a shift schedule” at the diner, since school no longer interfered
with my work.

I wasn’t angry. Anger is the child of surprise, and the fact that Father Heron never spoke the word “college” to me didn’t
surprise me. As my black eyes stared back at me in my mirror, I knew that Crooktop had its fist around me.

On Sundays the diner would become respectable. After attending First Baptist of Crooktop on the arm of Deacon Heron I would
change into my grease-stained apron. The tipsy teens and seeking adults of Saturday night were replaced by children in pastel
frills, mothers with hot-rolled hair, and fathers tugging at their neckties. The beer was exchanged for sweet tea. On my break
in between shifts I would sit and watch them. The wife playing with the curl on her husband’s neck, the sleepy baby starting
to cry. Sometimes I would imagine what it would feel like to go home with them. To be safely tucked away in the backseat of
a four-door family car.

The Sunday after Mamma Rutha ran away the diner was especially crowded. My boss, Rusty, was busy barking orders while we waitresses
were busy taking them. When the crowd finally began to thin, I took a seat at the bar to count my tips. But my eyes drifted
from my skimpy pile of change to a family in a back booth, and I soon lost count. There were three of them. And they sat together,
on the same side of one booth. The man had his arm wrapped around the woman as she nursed a baby beneath a blanket. It was
a picture so intimate that I felt both embarrassed to spy and forced to at the same time.

“Pretty gross ain’t it,” Rusty said. “If the lunch rush wasn’t over, I’d tell her to step into the ladies’ room. You can get
away with that stuff in a lot of places, but this here is a respectable eating establishment. The last thing families want
to see is swollen nipples and hot milk right before they eat.”

His words tried to sully the moment I had stolen from them. I asked him why, if this was an eating establishment, that little
baby couldn’t eat right along with everyone else. He looked surprised, started to reply, but saw the look on my face and decided
not to.

“Well, simmer down, Miss Sass, and come have a smoke.” He grinned.

“Can’t. Got one table I’m still waiting on to leave.”

“See, Mercy, that’s the difference between having just anybody ask you to come and smoke, and having your boss ask you to,”
he said as he called for another girl to watch my table.

I never enjoyed my daily smoke session with Rusty. He was sweaty, fat, out of breath, and always calling himself the boss.
But for the sake of a decent shift schedule I puffed away on his Camels and forced some conversation. Besides, I had seen
Rusty get angry, seen him turn red all over and throw dirty dishes at the cooks. If all it took was a smoke break to keep
me away from that side of Rusty, it was a small price to pay.

“Busy day ain’t it?” he asked.

“Sure is.”

“Hot too,” he murmured.

“Yup,” I answered, trying to sound interested as I leaned forward to light my cigarette.

“Sorry about your grandma.”

I didn’t respond.

“Sure is a shame,” he continued, “poor Deacon Heron and you stuck with somebody so crazy. Just ain’t right to run off like
that. I reckon nobody ever knows what old Rutha Heron’s gonna do next.”

“How’d you know?” I asked softly.

“Shoot, Mercy, you know that everybody in the valley knows about everything up on that mountain, just like everybody on that
mountain sees everything going on down here in the valley.”

I had long since quit trying to excuse Mamma Rutha to anyone. So I sucked in my breath and held the hot smoke until I thought
my chest would explode. My eyes started to water.

“Mercy, I didn’t mean to make you cry, sugar,” he said softly as he placed his greasy hand on my knee. My eyes fell to it,
red and puffy, cupping my knee.

“It’s the smoke, Russ. There’s just too much pig smoke in this air to be smoking cigarettes too,” I said as I jerked myself
up, throwing his fat fingers off of my leg.

“But it’s damn fine pig smoke! The finest pig smoke in these here mountains!” he yelled out after me.

Back inside the diner, my little family had left. As I wiped down their table I thought about Rusty’s hand on my leg. It seemed
so different from the gentle embrace of the man who had sat at the table I was cleaning. It seemed greedy. Most of my experiences
with men came from Father Heron, and the rest came from my conversations with Rusty. The other girls at the diner said that
he wanted me. That he wanted to be my boyfriend. The thought made me queasy.

“Wanna ride home?” he whispered over my shoulder.

I wanted to say no. But how could I feel superior to Rusty, manager of his daddy’s pig-smoking diner? I waited by his truck
while he locked the building up. He usually closed early on Sundays, so the sun was still out. I looked up at the sky, but
I didn’t see much of it. The view from the valley always made the sky look like a puzzle. Pieces of green and brown mountain
closing off and locking in the blue and white.

“How do you breathe?” an outsider asked me once. “It feels so claustrophobic,” she explained, “looking up only to see more
land, and no open air.”

Her words sent me digging beneath my bed for an old shoe box stuffed with magazine clippings of the ocean. I had collected
them for years, ever since my second grade teacher told me there was a body of water deeper than Crooktop and bigger than
all my mountains put together. I sorted through my clippings and noticed for the first time that yes, my sky was different.
Peeking between swells of land once rich with coal. My sky was a busy one. Not the empty sky filled only with an occasional
white puff and a bird. There was movement in the sway of the trees. In the daring trespass of the mountaintops. In the shadow
of the hawk. It was a living sky.

The squall of Rusty’s horn pulled me back to earth. “C’mon, dreamer, let’s get outta here!” he yelled.

I tried not to wince as the vinyl of his seats scorched the back of my legs. The thought of his hand on my knee made me uneasy
and embarrassed around him. Figuring that the more I puffed the less I was expected to talk, I asked for a smoke.

“Gawd o’mighty!” he swore. “This heat’s hell on earth.”

As I agreed with him, I added to myself that so was his truck. Smelling of stale Camels, sweat, and pig smoke, his truck made
my stomach turn. He pulled up by Father Heron’s mailbox, grinned at me, and started to speak.

“Thanks for the ride. I better get in and check on my grandfather,” I said, jumping out of the truck. I could feel his eyes
watching me run. I took special care not to sway my hips as I ran to the backyard.