Sam said to the others, “We cut off the branches, poured herbicide on it, and burned it. It kept coming back. Last night we tried to knock it down. It ate our bulldozer.”
“Mean-assed tree,” T. Laine said thoughtfully.
My brother coughed and laughed at the same time, surprised by the language. T. Laine looked at him, an innocent expression on her face. I just shook my head. “A dog nibbled the lichen last evening,” Sam said, his face going hard.
“Dogs’ll eat anything,” T. Laine said.
“This one died,” Sam replied. His voice was even, but something in his stance suggested he was not at ease at all. And then I realized what had happened.
“Oh. Sam,” I whispered. “Tell me it wasn’t one of Chrystal’s grandbabies.”
My brother scowled and hunched his shoulders. Chrystal had been his best hunting dog, a liver, white, and tan springer spaniel who could sniff out a bird at a hundred paces. I had heard she had passed while I was at Spook School due to a sudden-onset cancer. She had been fine one day and died the next. Sam hunched his shoulders tighter in the dawn light and said, “It was Tally. That tree’s dangerous.”
Tandy placed a hand on Sam’s shoulder, the first time I had seen him voluntarily touch another human in... ever. Sam looked at Tandy and controlled his double take at the up-close sight of Tandy’s Lichtenberg lines. A sense of pride opened in me like the lift of a hot air balloon. My brother was more open-minded than I had expected.
Mama walked up, her long skirts swaying in the headlights, a heavy scarf around her shoulders. “You’un gonna curse this tree, Nell? Lordy. I swear it’s a devil tree. It ate that behemoth yonder”—she gestured to the vine shrouded bulldozer—“and then it tried to eat Mindy.”
“Curse—? I’m not sure how to curse anything, Mama.” Mindy—Mud—was my true sib in more ways than genetics and parenting. Mud was a nonhuman creature like me. Whatever I was. And had it tried to eat her or incorporate her? They were very different things. Ultimately the same result, but different intents.
“Kill it,” Mama said. “Kill the damnable thing.”
I blinked. And blinked again. Mama cussing? I resisted looking at the sky to see if Jesus had come.
“Mama speaks from a position of power,” Sam said, his tone carefully modulated to demonstrate no emotion at all. “She and Sister Erasmus are the newly selected deaconesses, in charge of women and women’s complaints. And the women want it gone.”
Deaconess? Mama and the outspoken Sister Erasmus? Women with positions of power in the church?God’s Cloud was about to face trouble with a capitalT. A chortle bubbled in my throat, but I forced it down, deciding to not respond to Sam’s comments. “Any chance there might be breakfast for guests?” I asked Mama instead. And the thought that I was a coward flashed through me.
“Always, baby girl. I’ll see you and your friends at the kitchen table in half an hour.”
“We’ll be there,” I said.
Mama and her sister-wife Mama Carmel moved away, trailing my true and half sibs. Other attendees to the morning devotionals made their way home, and in every case, avoided the tree.
When the last church member was gone and it was just Samand my coworkers standing in the brightening daylight, T. Laine murmured, “Is the tree like the things growing at the pond and the neighborhood?”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “They read differently on the psy-meter 2.0. They have a different color.”
“They?” T. Laine asked.
Ouch.I had forgotten that I hadn’t told them about the tree on Soulwood. But now that Rick and company were running around naked and pelted on my land it wasn’t much of a secret. Quietly I told them about the newly butchered tree. “What I did to it isn’t a curse. And the two trees we’re seeing are not the same things as the other odd growths. But they might be connected in some way to the sleeping”—I made a little circular gesture with my hand, trying to find a word for what I felt when I communed deeply—“entities...? In the earth? The Old Ones. The things we aren’t supposed to disturb.”
“We have to take your word for that,” T. Laine said.
And there was nothing to reply to that truth. But Sam wasn’t so complaisant. Voice hard as stone against stone, he said, “My sister don’t lie. Not when she was a little’un, and not now.”
A warm glow lit me from within, and I said, “She’s talking empirical evidence, Sam. Not trust.” At least I hoped so.
“Trust we have in plenty,” T. Laine said. A tension I hadn’t noticed eased from my brother’s shoulders. Protective. My brother wasprotectiveofme. It brought a silly smile to my face.
“PsyCSI could rule out that the two things are the same,” Tandy said quietly.
The tension hunched me up again. But he had a point.
“If you break off a thorn and a leaf and scrape up some of the red stuff, that should be sufficient,” he said. And even softer, he added, “I can do it for you.”
I looked up from the study of my toes. “You think the tree will let you?”
“I think I can convince it to let me.”
