The Killing Tree (3 page)

Father Heron sat whittling on the back porch.

“Brought you some supper,” I told him.

He didn’t look up, but I wasn’t expecting a response. I sat for a long time staring at him. Sitting there whittling. Looking
old. Maybe even feeble, with his mussed-up white hair, tinged yellow from pipe smoke. Sitting a little slumped, his round
belly straining against his belt. The man who as a child I swore could smell my fear. I wondered what he’d do if I challenged
him, whether he’d become my felled Goliath. I imagined standing over him, patting a pocket filled with five smooth stones.

But I was a coward. I wouldn’t even bend down to pick up stones for my pocket, much less build a sling.

“Rusty asked about Mamma Rutha. He said everybody knows. He said he heard some of the deacons at church mention that maybe
we should have a search party for her, in case she’s lost. Said it would be like a mission, you know, reaching out in Christian
love to a lamb lost in the wilderness. He wanted me to tell you he would be willing to help, since you’re so busy you can’t
really be expected to be her shepherd,” I said, carefully watching him as the rhythm of his knife steadily slowed.

My dance was short. But the shrill sound of metal pounding metal that woke me the next day showed me that the steps were perfect.
I peeked out of my little window and saw Father Heron hammering metal rods down into the ground near his garden, the one that
we harvested. A few feet from where he was standing I saw a bundle of chicken wire. He was building a new chicken coop.

It had only been a few years since he had planted a new garden. The baby ears of sweet corn had just ripened, and Mamma Rutha
had stood guarding her garden from any harvest, butcher knife in hand. Father Heron swore at her and quoted scripture about
how the ground was cursed for man’s sake, that he may toil in it and eat from it. His voice rose and stressed the word “eat.”
She never moved. All through the day and night she stood planted amidst her corn. Whenever Father Heron approached her, she
would calmly raise her knife and whisper, “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, an arm for a stalk, a hand for a fruit.”

Father Heron wisely chose his limbs over sweet corn. And that day another garden was planted. One that wasn’t sacred. One
that wasn’t sung to or blessed. One that to his great frustration, and the amusement of the valley, was never quite as bountiful.

Once the coop was built, I heard him start his old Chevy and head down the mountain. I knew that he was going to get his chickens.
Unhappy chickens. Chickens that Mamma Rutha could cook without tears. Chickens I had never tasted, but already knew would
not be as good as the old ones.

I was in a good mood at work that day. I freely accepted Rusty’s offers of smoke breaks. I didn’t even count my tips. And
when Della, my best friend, came to the diner I let her convince me to go to the docks that night.

Della and I had been friends since my freshman year in high school. We bonded through shared misery. High school had taken
me by surprise. For eight grades I had faced the same school and same faces every day. My first day at high school left me
breathless. The cafeteria seemed bigger than the whole building of my old school. I went through the lunch line that day only
to face endless rows of tables and strange people. How was I supposed to pick where to sit? Where had all my old friends gone?
After glancing at my plate of pasty lukewarm spaghetti, I tossed it in the garbage can and ducked outside. I leaned hard against
the brick wall, feeling its support.

“Wanna apple?” a voice spoke.

“No thanks, not hungry,” I replied to a tall curvy girl, with hair as red as the apple she held out.

“Don’t blame you. Me neither. Lunchtime is a ridiculous tradition. I don’t observe it out of principle,” she said, looking
at me with approval.

I was unable to resist asking her to explain, and she told me that eating involved a celebration of death—death of the apple,
death of the cow, preventing death of the human—and that therefore hunger alone and not tradition should justify meals.

Della continued to defy tradition throughout high school. She bloomed into a beauty that frenzied the boys. But like me, she
never seemed to fit in the world of her classmates. Instead, she preferred to hang out with older boys. She cut as much class
as she attended. And she despised the “tradition” of grades, as “useless numbers that only limit us.” She craved attention
the way I craved to be hidden. Often teased for being a drama queen, she justified her sassiness by calling herself a revolutionary.
Fifteen-year-old Della was a wannabe hippie, two decades too late, in a region too removed, and with a face that wore too
much makeup. But despite her boisterous ways, she had a glow. A glow that outshone the dirt floor that she was raised on.
Della’s father was killed in a mining accident when she was three, leaving behind a hungry mother with five children. All
of her siblings fled the mountains the day they became old enough to escape their mother’s clutch. But not Della. Even after
she quit high school the day Mr. Hillbert called her writing style “too inflammatory,” I knew that she would stay. She had
promised me so.

It’s hard growing up alone on a big mountain. So when we found each other at fourteen, we gulped a sigh of relief and swore
we’d always stick together. “Girls like us have to love each other,” Della said. “Ain’t no one else around to do it.”

She was always in some sort of trouble, either as the victim or the perpetrator. She changed boyfriends as frequently as she
changed her hairstyle. In fact, she had a theory about that. She always said that you could predict a girl’s love life by
the way she wore her hair. A girl that was always willing to spice up her look with new colors, new cuts, and new styles wasn’t
afraid to spice up her life with a new man. And a girl that was always content with the same old look would be willing to
settle for the same old boy. So with every new man, she got a new do. Whether it was golden streaks or a swingy bob, a new
man meant a new Della. And according to her, that was the problem with my love life.

“I’m telling you, Mercy,” she’d say, “as long as you stay straight, long, and brown that’s what your love life is going to
be,
boring
. You gotta spice it up. I could put some real wham into your life if you’d just let me put a few streaks in your hair.”

But it wasn’t
my
love life that was on her mind the day she ran into the diner to beg me to come to the docks with her. With fresh highlights
in her hair, I knew that she was eyeing a new fling. Going down to the docks was never my idea of fun. But her timing was
right. If my good mood could make me a willing smoke pal for Rusty, it could certainly make me game for some of Della’s sport.
So I told her I would meet her at eight, to give me time to run home and find Mamma Rutha.

U
nderneath the June apple tree, freshly cut flowers were laid across the chicken grave. Mamma Rutha was sitting by her garden,
singing to it.

“I’ve missed you,” I told her as she cupped my face in her leathery hands.

“My Mercy baby,” she said, smiling. She patted her lap and I laid my head across it. My eyes closed as her hand gently tugged
through the tangles in my hair. There was someone to love me again. Even if it was crazy love. It was finally home.

“I found a new blackberry thicket. Do you remember the baby deer and his momma that used to come eat from the garden? Well
he’s clean grown up now. Starting to get little points for antlers. He showed me the blackberries.”

I opened my eyes and looked at her. Her hair spilling in curls and tangles around her. Her blue eyes shining. No one would
know that she had spent fourteen days in the wilderness.

“Where do you go?” I asked.

“In the mountain.”

“Do you have a shelter?”

“I have my sisters, the oaks,” she said, smiling. “And a soft bed of brown mountain earth. The mountain takes good care of
me, don’t you worry.”

She was a fairy-tale grandma who spoke of sister oaks and blackberry thickets. Her life was a poem. But sometimes the poetry
was too much. I craved some real answers.

“Mamma Rutha,” I said as I sat up and faced her, “you were gone for two weeks. You never came home for food. You didn’t have
a blanket. But you look fine.”

She didn’t respond.

“Is there somebody else up there?” I finally demanded.

“God,” she said, the smile fading from her face. “You know that.”

“Who else?” I asked, just as Father Heron appeared.

He stopped and looked at us. He was pleased she was home, though he’d never voice it. It was another milestone on his list.
Rescue wife from the wilderness—check.

Mamma Rutha’s hands froze in my hair.

“Evening, Rutha.”

“I put your barbecue in the fridge,” I told him, trying to distract them from each other.

“I was thinking we could have some chicken . . . one of my chickens, tonight,” he replied.

I looked at Mamma Rutha. Would the new chicken coop work? Were all chickens sacred?

“Sounds fine, Wallace,” she said calmly as she rose to her feet. “Mercy baby, go pick some okra.”

Father Heron stood looking at me after she went inside.

“Thank that boy Rusty for his kind offer to help with the, uhmm, the situation. Tell him that I took care of everything.”

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.