Mud’s eyes went wide. “Make . . .”
Make. It. Grow, I mouthed. We hadn’t talked about her ability with plants. Nor my own. That was a discussion for private places, surrounded by rich soil and clean water and the soul of the earth.
“You . . . you know?”
I gave her a twitch of a smile and said, “I am.”
Mud sucked in a breath, eyes so wide I feared they’d pop out of her eye sockets. She took off as if her britches were on fire.
“Nell, you let that child get ready for devotionals and eat,” Mama said. “You want tea or coffee?”
“Coffee, Mama.”
“Coffee for me too, Mama,” Sam said.
“Gitchur own cup, Samuel,” Mama said briskly. “You ain’t a visitor, and I ain’chur maid. If I hear you been making Miss SaraBell get you’un’s coffee, I’ll tan your bottom.”
Sam laughed and got a mug from the cabinet. It was chipped, the lip brown with coffee stains, the enamel cracked and worn, the shine long gone. “I take good care of my wife, Mama.”
“You best do. Get a plate, Sam, if’n you want French toast.”
Across the room, as the minutes before sunrise arrived, the sister-wives, Mama Carmel and Mama Grace, gathered up all the children still eating and led all the young’uns out of the house, to devotions, all of them waving to me and to Sam and to Mama. They were all dressed for the cold, but didn’t stop to talk. Which was strange, as all this morning felt strange. And I realized that Mama was skipping morning devotions to have a cup of coffee with me. Which was incredibly sweet. Or . . . maybe not. If Mama had something to say, she would grab the first opportunity and say it. An impromptu meeting. When I was growing up, such meetings had been a precursor to me getting a good whipping.
Not wanting to start a conversation that I suddenly didn’t want to have, I ate Mama’s delicious French toast, made with real vanilla, heavy cream, butter, sugar, and her secret ingredient. Whatever that was. No one knew. As I ate, Daddy ambled out of the back. With a cane. Mama watched him, lips tight. Sam watched him, his expression a mirror of hers.
Daddy joined us at the table and sipped on a cup of coffee, his eyes on me. He looked bad. I had been gone only a little while, a couple of months, but Daddy had lost weight, maybe thirty pounds. His face was gray and tight with pain. I wasn’t a doctor, but I knew my daddy was in trouble. Yeah. This wasn’t just breakfast. It was a meeting, in the odd quiet of the strangely deserted house, just Mama, Sam, Daddy, and me, hastily engineered by Mama when I called.
My French toast gone, I sat back in my kitchen chair, the mismatched spindles pressing into my spine. Mama put on a fresh pot of coffee to percolate, no longer looking at her husband or her son, or even at me—working, keeping busy. Like I did, when there was trouble. I frowned and got up, pouring myself, Mama, and Daddy more coffee from the pot that was ready, and leaving the coffeepot on the table in front of Sam to pour his own. “Daddy?” I asked. “You got a broken leg or something?”
“Jist a bit of digestive upset. Mama Carmel’s got me on half a dozen decoctions and infusions. I’ll be right as rain again soon. Good to see you, Nell.”
“But, Daddy—”
“No. This is not a topic for discussion. You’uns say grace yet? No? This is a Christian household. Sam. Give thanks.” Daddy lowered his head, and that ended any chance for me to speak to Daddy’s health.
I sighed, the breath little more than a whisper. I had been right. Daddy was sick and was being contrary about seeking medical help.
NINE
In the middle of the nearly unbearable silence of breakfast I finally asked, “How are things? How’s the land?” And the most important thing—other than Daddy’s lack of health—“How’s the . . . the trees?”
Daddy looked up at that, set his fork down, and sipped his coffee, his eyes boring into me, just as they had when I had played hooky from work or lessons when I was a child. Back then Daddy had let silence do his dirty work for him, letting it build until I started crying and confessed. I couldn’t help but remember the whippings that followed. My heartbeat sped, my breath came too fast. But I was far too old to get a whipping. And for that matter, I was too old to fall for the silent treatment. So I frowned at my father. And thought about the tree I had fed with my blood and that had healed me and that was now tied to Brother Ephraim. And waited.
“You’un got a specific tree in mind, Nell?” he asked a couple of aeons later.
“Yes. One behind the church. An oak.”
“And how would you’un know that a tree was acting strange, Nell?” Daddy asked. “Should we’uns have sent for you’un when it started changing?”
“She’un’s not a witch,” Mama said, her tone strident. “Nell did not curse that tree.”
“I did not curse anything,” I said calmly, though all I could think of was that if my gift had been made known to the church when I was a child, it was possible that I’d have been burned at the stake. And that I had to protect my sisters from the church finding out. I knew that, yet I had given Mud seeds and told her to make them grow. I was stupid beyond belief. And I had to deal with that soon.
“A little bird told me that there might be problems here,” I lied. “Law enforcement officers hear things.” The truth in fact, but in context, still a lie. “The tree. Changing how?”
“Some things are best seen in person,” Sam said. He pushed back from the table and stood. “Let’s drive down.” The tree wasn’t far. But Daddy couldn’t walk that distance. Daddy had cowed the family from doing the right thing for him. But I wasn’t part of this family anymore, which gave me lots more leeway to say what needed to be said. That was why Mama had arranged this impromptu, intimate breakfast.
I watched as Daddy struggled to his feet and got the cane beneath him to take his weight. “We’uns is talking about your health. Soon,” I said.
“You’un getting uppity since you joined the police,” Daddy said, affront in his voice.
His hand was white from the stress of standing, his face pale. A slight tremor raced through him, and I thought he might fall. “Sure. That’s as good an excuse as any.” I stood. “Can you drive, Daddy, or are you too sick for that?”
Without a word, Daddy turned and led the way outside, where he got in his truck and drove toward the chapel.
Sam and I followed, wrapping up in warm clothes, my brother chuckling beneath his breath. “Nellie, you’un got big brass ones, that’s all I got to say.”
I had learned what the saying meant at Spook School, and thought it was silly, as testicles were small, easy to remove, and easily injured. I had seen enough farm animals castrated to know that for a fact, but it sounded like Sam was giving me a compliment, so I just gave him a “Humph” and got in my truck. Sam got in the passenger side.
Oddly, the temperatures had chilled during breakfast and snow fell heavily around us, flakes as big as my fist, drifting down in the still air, settling into a melting white mush on the ground. The sunlight was dim and distant, the world gray and black and white in the headlights. Sam and I drove toward the back of the chapel, the road with a single set of tracks in the layer of white, the porch lights we passed casting glowing circles on the snow.
The headlights of Daddy’s truck caught the chapel in the background, painted white against the white snow, trees black and stark. Bright lights fell from the paned windows onto the pristine expanse in arched, pointed shapes. The sound of voices singing muffled through, yet were clear as a childhood memory. The notes of “’Tis Winter Now, the Fallen Snow,” seemed proper and appropriate, and for some reason I couldn’t explain to myself, felt sad, melancholy. Maybe because I knew something bad was wrong with Daddy.
The headlights stopped on the garden spot where the tree that healed me grew. A few months ago it was just an oak tree, surrounded by plantings I had rooted or seeded there when I was a child. Now it was surrounded by a cement brick fence, gray and dull in the snowy light. The fence was about ten feet on a side and ten feet tall. There were cracks zigzagging up and down through the mortar, and the top wasn’t level. The bricklaying looked sloppy, unlike the usual careful work of the churchmen, who tended to take pride in craftsmanship. And then I saw the reason why the bricks were out of plumb. Roots grew up through the ground, pushing high and lifting the foundation, making it appear that the wall had been frozen in motion, a blocky lizard or snake. Branches pressed against the walls and poured over the top, draping down the sides, cracking the mortar even more. Thorns gleamed wetly in the headlights, spikes sharper than needles. The leaves looked wrong. Just wrong. The garden spot, with its beautiful flowers, was no more. This was the tree that had healed me when I’d been shot, had grown inside me. It was also what Brother Ephraim’s soul was attached to on the church land.
Daddy sat in his truck, but I turned off the Chevy and Sam and I got out, moving along the line of light to the wall. The roots on this side had been cut through with chainsaws. The draping branches had been clipped and sawn. The tree itself smelled of herbicides and gasoline and soot. Someone had tried to poison it. Burn it. Cut it down. Yet still it grew.
Sam stood in the headlights, his shadow rising up the wall, broad shoulders hunched, hands in his pockets. Staring at the tree. “We’uns had to brick it up,” he said.
“Why?” I asked.
“It attacked a little girl. Tried to bury her. Mindy said it wanted blood, but we’uns don’t sacrifice to trees.” The last part was spoken with humor, as if he was trying to make a joke out of something that wasn’t funny.
I stared through the snowflakes at the place where I had been healed not so long ago.
“Is Mindy—”
“I’ll take care of Mindy,” I said.
“Good. She may need to come live with you’un someday. To keep her safe.” When I didn’t respond, Sam went on. “The tree. It grew thorns. And the leaves cause a rash, like poison oak. It tries to spread, puts out runners, sends seeds into the air. They come up everywhere. We’ve found thorned saplings and infants as far away as fifty feet. The Perkinses have a small front-end loader. They bring it in and dig ’em up for us. Then we burn them. The tree keeps coming back, no matter what we do to it. The tree just won’t die, not even after we salted the ground.”
The song in the church ended, and I heard a man’s voice speaking. Prayer, I figured. “What color is the sap?”
“Bloodred. It ain’t an oak no more. It’s freaky.”
My lips trembled into a smile at the modern term coming from my brother’s mouth. And I remembered the roots that Occam had cut from my body. They had bled. The sapling on my own land had bled, thorned and bloody. I had changed this one, giving it access to my blood, mutating it during the process of healing. Ephraim had gotten here through the ground in which he was trapped. And had used the tree on the church grounds to learn how to grow his own tree at the site of his death. Maybe to mutate it again, to grow something even more different. I had changed Ephraim too, when I killed him. We were all linked now, somehow. And I needed to find a way to destroy the Brother and his evil trees. “Yeah, I reckon I can see how that might be so,” I said, knowing I had fallen back into the church-speak of my youth, and realizing that here, at this time and in this place, it spoke to the bonding of family. Of true sibs. Despite the tree Daddy thought I had cursed. “What’s the long-term plan for getting rid of it?”