“We’uns hired Kobert’s Earthmovers and Mining to bring in a bulldozer, one of the kind that does top-down mining. We’uns going to drill a hole in the trunk, put a stick of dynamite in, and set it off. Then we’ll dig up the roots, haul the whole thing out, every leaf and limb and stick of it. And burn it until nothing’s left but ash.”
I nodded, remembering the branches I had burned last night, feeling the chill and wet, as oversized snowflakes settled on my head and shoulders and melted onto my scalp, wetting my clothing. “Cut off the branches first so nothing goes flying with the dynamite.”
Sam nodded, pursing his lips slightly as he considered why that might be a smart thing to do. “Freaky,” he said again.
“Don’t leave anything on the ground for long. When you dig up the roots, don’t let the rootlets or the cut branches touch the ground. Load every branch and leaf and root up on to something made of metal, maybe a metal-bed truck or dump truck. Cart it to a place that’s stone, like the quarry, with no soil or water. And drench it fast with gasoline. Burn it hot until it’s nothing but ash. Then make sure you police the grounds here and there twice a day, every day, and dig up and burn anything that looks remotely like it. Fire. Fire will kill it.”
Sam nodded, staring at the branch that hung over the wall. It seemed to be growing even as we watched, the leaves, which never fell on a live oak, thick and heavy, a green so deep it appeared to have hints of red in it. “What is it, Nell?”
“I don’t know.” I tilted my head to Sam. “But I got a sapling that looks somewhat like it on my property. No leaves, just bare wood. No real bark either. I cut off the branches last night and they bled, and when I left them on the ground for a bit, they rooted. Too fast to be normal. But when I burned them, they burned true. I’ll be cutting it down and burning it when I get back.”
“You’un need help, you call. I’ll bring some gas.”
“You always did like fire.”
He slid a look my way. “Begging your pardon, Nellie?”
“Um-hummm. That campfire that took off and burned down a field of hay on the Vaughn farm when you was maybe fifteen, sixteen? Even John and Leah and I heard about that event. I always figured that fire for you.” When Sam didn’t reply I said, “You ever confess?”
“I did. Got my backside tanned right good.” He sounded rueful, and at the same time almost proud. “I had to work a whole summer of twelve-hour days to pay the Vaughns for the hay I ruin’t.”
I shivered hard and knew I couldn’t postpone this anymore, so I changed the subject to the important part of my visit. “I need to touch the tree, Sam,” I said.
“Why’s that, Nellie?”
“You might not want to know the answer to that.”
Sam stared at the tree for a while, thinking that over. Likely thinking about Mud and her telling him the tree wanted blood. Looking from the tree to me, his expression told me he was remembering my gifts with growing things when I was a child. How the church wanted to burn me at the stake. Adding in my comment about him being a fire bug when he was a kid. The things sibs knew and accepted and kept quiet about.
The fall of snowflakes thickened and landed on my uncovered head with soft plops. Melted snow dripped down my scalp and neck and into my collar. In spite of the snow and the heavy clouds, the day lightened. I wiped my head, but I didn’t move otherwise, giving my brother time to think. This was too important. “You’uns ain’t no witch,” he said firmly, the syllables steeped in church patois. “The mamas had the townie witches test you.”
“They did. I’m not.”
“How much does this have to do with you’un making most anything grow? How much does it have to do with the way Mindy can do the same thing?”
My brother had decided to take the bull by the horns, as I had with Daddy. I wasn’t sure if I was happy he had grown some or disappointed that he decided to grow now, about this tree and Mud and me. “Can you handle the truth?”
Sam chuckled softly at the movie reference, which he actually got, and shoved down on his fists, buried in his jacket pockets. “After the things I saw with the colonel and his progeny, I reckon I can handle most anything, sister of mine.”
“Then yes. I’m not human. Mindy might not be human.”
He made a soft mmmm sound, not surprised at all. “What about the rest of us?”
“So far as I know you’re all mundane and boring.”
“Tell that to my SaraBell. She thinks I’m amazing.”
“Ick and eww. TMI, brother,” I said, wondering if he knew that reference.
“TMI. Listen to us culturally aware adults talking in a God’s Cloud compound. So. You’un need to touch the tree. What’s that all about?”
“I can tell things about plants. Can’t explain it.” I pointed to myself. “Still not a witch.”
Sam said, “I can look at the sky and breathe the air and tell what the weather’s gonna do by morning even before the weather report. I can tell when the frost is coming a week before. When we’ll have too much rain and risk washing out crops. When we’re going to have a drought and how long it’ll last. Like that?”
“Yes. Like that.” And my heart may have skipped a beat at the acceptance in his tone and the calmness with which he confessed to a paranormal gift that normal, mundane humans didn’t have. I said, “You know how the tree attacked the little girl? Well, it might attack me. If it does, I need you to cut me free, even if you have to take some skin.”
Sam pulled a small knife from beneath his jacket, a gut-hook knife with a four-inch blade, designed for skinning and gutting deer. I remembered the Christmas he received it. I was still living at home, which would have made him less than fifteen. Even in the gray dawn light I could tell he kept the blade wicked sharp.
I wiped my hand dry inside my pocket and walked closer to the walled tree. I reached up to a branch hanging over the wall. With one finger I touched a single leaf. Nothing happened—no branches grabbed me to yank me over the wall, no roots wrapped my ankles to hold me down. I ran my fingers across the leaf, learning its shape. It felt slippery, thick, like a succulent, and it had faint, spiny ridges on the blade and margin like an aloe leaf. I moved my finger to the petiole, which was thicker, denser, heavier, and more elastic than an oak’s. The tree was storing water and nutrients in ways no live oak ever could.
I closed my eyes and sank into the tree. Not a deep read. Not a full scan. Just a brush of awareness across its surface. Bright. Hot. Spiky. Intense. My breath felt harsh with fear and with awareness of the thing I touched. Not a tree. Something else.
I pulled away and withdrew three steps, looking up at the boughs, which were gnarled and twisted like a live oak, rising into the sky and reaching down over the wall to the ground. The tree was more than it had been. But it hadn’t tried to take me down or grow roots into my body or trap my feet in the soil, so that was something.
“Okay?” Sam asked.
“Okay.” I heard him close and pocket his knife. “And before you ask, I’m not sure what I felt. I need to think on it a mite.”
“All right. You’un seen enough?”
“Yeah.” I wiped my hand again inside my pocket where it was dry. Behind us, Daddy turned his truck and drove away, taking the extra illumination from his headlights and leaving us in the dark. “Tell me about Daddy,” I said.
Sam turned and walked back to my truck, his legs cutting through the headlights and snow. I followed and got into the passenger seat. Buckled up. Waited. Sam got in the driver’s side and got the engine running, the truck’s heater pumping warm air onto my feet. We sat in the dark, not looking at each other. It was church etiquette. When important things needed to be said, eye contact was kept to a minimum, likely a trait gained from multifamily living and the impossibility for real privacy in the homes.
He leaned forward, his arms resting across the steering wheel, staring out at the tree. “Daddy looks bad, don’t he?”
“You know he does.”
“He won’t talk about it. Mama Carmel says it goes back to the shooting and that he needs more surgery to correct what’s still messed up in there. She made him see the townie doctor that saved him when he was shot. A general surgeon. He did some tests—X-rays and a scan of some kind. The surgeon agreed with Mama Carmel. Said it was likely one of two things. Scar tissue—fibers holding things together that shouldn’t be held together. Or some tiny little bleeder that keeps breaking open and spurting blood inside, causing more damage, though the doctor admitted that he didn’t see such a thing on the scan. He wants to go back in and see what’s what. Do what he called an exploratory.”
Sam leaned back and put the C10 into reverse, pulling out across the slushy white carpet of snow. The tracks we had made upon entering were nearly gone, but Daddy’s new tracks were dark in the fast-melting snow. My head was completely wet and cold, even with the heater running full blast. This was a wake-up call to put winter supplies into my truck, including a scarf, gloves, a hat, extra socks, a blanket, food, and water. “So when’s that?” I asked. “The surgery?”
“Daddy won’t have nothing to do with getting cut on again. Says he’ll get well or he won’t. God’s will.”
“Daddy ain’t right bright, sometimes.”
“Love my daddy. Respect him too,” Sam said. “But I can’t argue with that assessment of the current state of his intellect when it comes to doctors. All the mamas got more brains than him.”
“They need to gang up on him. You all do. I’ll come back and help. In the real world they call it an intervention.”
“Real world?” Sam shook his head at how far I’d fallen away from the church. I could read on his face that he wanted to talk to me about my salvation, but he pushed it away for now, for which I was grateful. I didn’t want to fight with my brother about God. “You think an intervention will work?”
“No. But it might get him to thinking.” Sam didn’t reply. “And if that don’t work, sic Sister Erasmus on him.”
“Why her?”
“Don’t know why, but Daddy respects Sister Erasmus. Even John did, and John didn’t respect or listen to nobody except Leah. If Erasmus told Daddy he was cutting the fool, he might listen.”
Sam nodded as we pulled back to the house. “You coming in?”
“Not this time. I gotta go to work. Tell Mama I’ll let her know when I can make a family dinner. I want to meet the woman who was dumb enough to marry you.”
“You’ll like SaraBell. She’s something else. Redheaded and saucy. Eyes blue like the sky and skin like the finest cream.” He thought a minute. “I reckon you know it, but I’ll say it anyways. The only way Sara’d agree to marry me was for us’uns to get it done legal. We’uns went to the justice of the peace in Knoxville.”