Sam said, “I can look at the sky and breathe the air and tellwhat 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 itwas 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 anexploratory.”
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 intellectwhen 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.”
I was proud that my brother had taken him a wife of legal age, according to the law of the land. Something inside me relaxed, what the churchwomen called “heart ease.” “Mama told me. Good for SaraBell. And good for you.”
“That ain’t all, and Mama and Daddy don’t know this part, so keep your mouth shut. I had to promise SaraBell, no other wives and no concubines.”
I kept the shock off my face with an effort, and my voice neutral, though that was even harder. “How do you feel about that?”
“I’m a man of my word. I love SaraBell to the ends of the earth and back. So it ain’t no hardship. Mama won’t be happy about not having a passel of grandkids to raise, though. ’Specially withyou’un leaving the church, childless and without a husband. And you’un widdered so young.” He glanced at me and away. “She wants you to find a good man. She’s of a mind to introduce you to one or another fella in the church. Casual-like. As if by accident.” A small smile touched his face, telling me he knew how easy that would be to see through.
