Hugh opened the cooling machine and reached inside to check some part. The machine shuddered and exhaled cold chemical air.
“I still kindly smell them,” Maybelle said. The weather had turned cold. Too cold to run this machine, she thought. She felt nauseated too—as she often did lately.
“Just your mind,” Hugh told her. He banged on something with a wrench. “Hold on a minute. Damn thing still ain’t doing right.”
He fooled with the machine’s innards a while longer. Just when he was ready to quit, the engine backfired and, a moment later, snow blasted out of the chute. There, he said, as flakes swirled throughout the house. The snow melted when it touched their hair, their clothes, their skin. Dampened the floorboards and the papered walls and the mattress. Maybelle stuck out her tongue to catch some, and Hugh took ahold her hand and slipped a gold ring onto her finger. The ring was tight but it fit. He leaned in and kissed her, and they collapsed and made love twice. After, they toted a jug of muscadine wine to the backporch.
“I ever tell you you’re uglier in person than in the paper,” she said.
He kissed her temple. She loved that joke. “Never claimed to be a looker.”
“Or a artist.”
“Some things claim you.”
She played with the cowlicks on back of his head. “When you reckon that yankee’s coming back?”
It’d been four-five months since Loudermilk left with a backseat full of assemblies. Hugh said he didn’t reckon the yankee would return.
“But what if he does?” Maybelle went on. “Now that you’re done with that other mess maybe you can start back gathe—”
Hugh interrupted. “What if he does May.”
Planting the bones at the worksite bought enough time to finish exhuming the cemetery and decide what to do with Velston and the birthmarked man. Still mad at Lee, Hugh’d consulted Maybelle about what to do. She told him she wasn’t having anything to do with the decision. Which wasn’t quite truth. They were together. She was with child, though she still had not revealed this to him. She was putting on weight; he’d figure it out soon. Her presence on The Seven maybe not an affirmation of the thing Hugh Treeborne had done, but a kind of forgiveness for the inextricable nature that’d driven him to it. In the end Hugh left the Authority men in their borrowed graves and let the water cover them.
After the first of the month, time payday came, Hugh and Maybelle hitched the mule to the wagon and rode into town. She wore one of his heavy coats during the long cold trip. They waited at a counter behind which stood a judge named Aderholt. The judge said a few words, asked a couple questions. Hugh and Maybelle said yes they did. The judge stamped a certificate and the couple kissed. They bought roast beef sandwiches and carried them down at the river. Hugh wished he could tell Lee he was married. He’d passed by The Hills a few times since the night Lee walked out on him. Never was home. Fool could hold a grudge too, Hugh thought as they ate.
Later, as they loaded Maybelle’s belongings into the wagon, Beachy the butcher came out to say goodbye. He gave them a country ham. That night Maybelle sliced into it, the interior sparkling ruby red and marbled white with delicious fat. The ham smelled nutty and sweet. She could eat no more than a slice before feeling sick.
Though Hugh’d moved the corpses out from underneath the house, he hadn’t reburied all of them yet. He delayed too long and the ground froze. He’d have to wait for spring. Meanwhile, he had no excuse for not gathering assemblies. At least none Maybelle allowed him. He loved her, so he did not tell what he’d learned Loudermilk had done. He braved the biting cold, and hauled assemblies out of The Seven’s many crooks and hollers. Pieces he hadn’t seen since his daddy was alive. He stacked them in the clearing behind the pasture where he’d put the now frozen corpses. An unintended monument.
That winter Hugh considered quitting The Authority. His mind changed one chill night when he pushed into Maybelle from behind, wrapped his arms around her, and felt something move inside her stomach. He didn’t remark upon it as they made love or afterward, lying there finger-threaded and bare. The sense of pride and fear he felt rendered his tongue useless. Then, come morning, it seemed too late to mention. The knowledge too obvious to speak. He did not blame her for keeping this from him. After all, he was keeping a secret of his own. He began doing things to signal that he knew about the child and accepted their future though. Framed a crib, cleared extra land to garden that year, carved small horses and owls for the child to play with. From a cedar chest he took the last surviving quilt his momma’d made before she ran off with the riflemaker and he placed it with the wash for Maybelle to find.
The counter at the post office hid her growing belly all winter. Not from Dee Sargent though. Early on she’d placed a hand on Maybelle and asked how long. Dee herself was childless and thought it for the better considering Tucker’s propensity for going on historic drunks. Maybelle’s secret was safe with Dee, but she did not linger in town those days for fear of someone else noticing her condition. She’d have to tell her superiors at the post office sooner or later. They’d bring in another postmaster. Likely a man. She wouldn’t get her job back after the child came. The Seven’s isolation, which’d fascinated Maybelle at first, would become her. She had to tell, but not yet.
* * *
By March the weather had warmed to the point where folks in town debated how many cool nights the peach orchards were getting, which would determine the length of this year’s harvest. For days unbearable humidity blanketed the valley. Like being slapped in the face with a wet sponge. It would of been miserable enough had Maybelle not been pregnant and forced to walk the miles between work and home.
One day it got so she could no longer tolerate the weather in town. She closed the post office early and left. The wool dress she wore kept slipping up her hips as she walked. Her body no longer felt like it belonged to her, the baby had taken on such size within her. Tall oaks shivered along the path leading to The Seven. The postal service had given her only two dresses. An ordeal apparently. Both now fit snug. She sweated, thinking she would of gladly worn button-up shirts and loose britches like men—or, on a day like this, nothing at all.
Hugh was nowhere to be found when she got home. It was Saturday, she remembered, his day off. She felt too exhausted to search for him. She hollered his name a few times then sat on the porch and watched lightning flash in the bellies of black clouds bulging over the treeline. The sky beyond them sickly green. The world gone quiet; air soupier than it’d been all spring. Hot hard raindrops began pecking at the ground. Maybelle stepped down into the yard and called for Hugh again. Only the blood that beat in her ears replied.
She busied herself fixing supper, using the last of some vegetables they’d put up before winter killed the crops. She was looking forward to gardening this summer. She’d sketched on an envelope where she wanted things planted. Fixing supper always reminded Maybelle of her mother, who was not a good cook at all. She tried not to think about Alice when possible. On the verge of becoming a mother herself, Maybelle could imagine how it felt not knowing where your daughter was or if she was even alive. Sometimes she told herself she’d travel down at Bankhead after the child was born. A lie she believed no more than up was down.
Near dark she caught sight of Byron crossing the pasture. The mule cocked its ears as she approached. The rain had stopped and some great unseen pressure filled its void. She asked the mule where was Hugh. Byron clacked his teeth then continued into the woods.
She took hold of the mule’s tail, walking to the side so she could not be kicked. Bursts of lightning showed a worn path before her. The clearing was the last place she expected Hugh to be, despite the ground thawing. But a flash of lightning revealed him wielding a shovel, surrounded by assemblies and corpses. Maybelle waited for another charge. When it came she saw the dirt boy Crusoe upright and staggering on his own two legs. No, she thought. She felt the child pressing against her bladder. She begged it to quit. The next round of lightning strobed for such duration it might of signaled the universe’s last act. The mule hawed and Hugh spotted them. A peculiar look came over him and he began wildly gesturing at her, then he scooped Crusoe and ran thataway.
He grabbed her. She’d never seen him so frantic. He was saying something, but she couldn’t hear what. She tried to tell him that she thought she’d lost him. Her words also consumed by a yet unseen clamor. Something that sounded like kadunk. She spoke again and her words were lost. Hugh’s mouth was moving, but she could not hear him. Kadunk kadunk kadunk. To their left a tree jumped into the sky. Kadunkkadunkkadunkkadunk. Another tree, then another and another, hundred-year hardwoods, all around, lifted up out of the ground. Hugh dragged her away. She smelled on him dirt and sweat and death, and the air hummed. Above them swirled the brownest thing ever imagined, swaying, brown tentacles grabbing all they could. A cow flew past. Lumber, kartsy rock. They were in the woods, which were no longer woods, running toward the fishpond. She couldn’t hear anything but kadunkkadunkkadunkkadunk. Treetops snapped and rolled past like paperballs. An assemblie nearly took their heads. Kadunkkadunkkadunkkadunk. Something wet trickled down the side of her face and neck. Hugh had picked up a sheet of tin, and they were still running. Stumbling. He fell in a depression and pulled her down.
He held the tin overtop them as it rattled and bent. He mouthed something. She hollered back. The tin slowly curled, slicing into his palms. She could see everything that should of been rooted now airborne. Trees, pieces of houses, the things he made, art, water, dirt, bodies, floating among a terrible terrible brown cloud.
The tin wrenched loose.
Hugh rolled on top of her and dug his fingers in the ground. She felt the child kick and only then did she remember that she was carrying it. The selfishness of survival caused her to sob. She tried to remind Hugh about the child. He was hurting her. It was too loud. He was saying, Shut your eyes and it’ll be gone before you know it. Just shut your eyes May. But she would not. She saw Crusoe take flight. A shovel fell from the brown mass and jabbed upright not two inches from her. The handle wobbled. She could not look away. A sandstone slab bigger than a tractor flipped across the pasture. She could not look away.
She didn’t feel Hugh being lifted. It happened all at once—like a bad burn. Something whipped her throat. Her dress was torn from her body. Hugh was no longer there, she realized, seeing shards of glass stuck in her belly.
Then everything ended. Her ears were whistling. The shards of glass moved up and down, up and down, updownup, with each pained breath. Just like Hugh’d said, it was over, it was gone—and him too.
* * *
It rained twelve days straight after the storm sheared the valley, water gushing down hillsides laid bare and pooling up in low-lying spots. The Elberta River topped its banks, covered the docks, seeped into town. Homes slipped off foundations and floated into woods. Piss ants abandoned wet earth, climbing any tree they could find and stripping bare the leafy tops. Owls, birds of all kinds, snakes both poisonous and not, rabbits, forgot their differences and hid together underneath any dry bluff they could find. Some dared under the hoods of vehicles, inside attics crowded with forgotten things, and waited there while catfish floated through yards like unloosed ships. The people of Elberta, Alabama, thought the rain would never quit. But on the thirteenth day it did and floodwaters slowly began their retreat, carrying off debris and wreckage, creating mountains of mud. What cotton grew rotted and other crops washed away along with the rich black topsoil, leaving patches of clay resembling open wounds.
The dirt boy couldn’t see a thing. He climbed out of a hole and ripped off what was left of his clothes. Roots ran clear through his body and anchored him to the ground. He yanked loose then angled his head and fished moss out from his earholes. He took a step, feet heavy as cinder blocks. He cracked what stubby toes weren’t missing, then walked without aim, knowing no more than a stone, while a reluctant sun split blue-black clouds piled up overhead like burial mounds.
The sun would not move, even as the bunched-up clouds evaporated and gave space. Memories yet escaped the dirt boy. He felt as if he was walking in a time misplaced as he waded floodwaters topped with rusty orange needles that slopped against his waist. He stumbled and the current pulled him under. Drifted till he caught hold of a tree and dragged hisself to shallower water. On he walked, loosening up as he did. Now if he could just remember. Flying, lifted, flung. A vague notion he’d been named—but by who and for what?
He held out his arms for feelers and tried making sounds with what was left of his jaw. Wild animals called out in reply as he followed a rain-fattened creek that jumped belowground then seeped back up as if the earth wept. He couldn’t remember the names of these animals. He ran from what he did not know, descending into a close-walled holler where water rose past his chest. He gripped the slick rock walls with nubby hands. His foot slipped and he was again at the water’s terrible mercy, drifting no telling how far before he stopped.
He crawled up onto a ledge and back into a crevice and lay there for a time among some bones. A steady knocking came from deeper within the rock, taunting him. He couldn’t remember anything except flying. How long was he gone and how far had he flown? Without memory he was only dirt—eroded bits and pieces of hills that once were mountains rising from a vast ocean. A wanderer. But wanderers come from someplace, so the dirt boy must of too. Though, till he figured out where, he was but a searcher; lost.
He came out of the holler into a hardwood grove. The sun warmed the trees, so branches creaked and popped like a ship at sea. He gazed upward. This did not fix his eyes. He walked on, pictures and words coming to him broken and half-formed. He tried them on the stub that was his tongue. They sounded painful as it felt to form them. He crossed a creek where see-through fish darted here and there in chalky blue water. On the other bank the woods were in sweet-smelling bloom, he noticed. Also something sharp and metallic, something favoring rot. With his next breath of this odor came a rush of names: yellow honeysuckle, blue flags, wisteria vine, tin, camellia blooms, bodies, Indian braids and purple hollyhock, wild laurel, Death. And another memory: before being lifted, before flying, a man on his back holding a piece of tin. A woman there too. The tin whistled, slowly peeling. They were hiding from something. Up high, the dirt boy had spotted the tin turning flips. But not the man, not the woman, then the world had sucked into itself and all became black.
Top of a hill the dirt boy sat on a log and wandered fingers to his eyes. He picked till a toadstool cap came loose from one eye then the other. Now he could make out a town snuggled inside a riverbend, which hooked off into a great-big forest that stretched toward the yet-gloomy horizon. Memory came easier with sight. He knew the town’s name, the river that’d lent it, and he recognized its flooded square: a statue of a Spanish conquistador, a cafe and several shops, beyond them, painted houses with fenced-in yards and fruit trees, a peach orchard, mansions up on the riverbank among towering oaks yet reaching limbs across a soupy red road. Elberta, De Soto, The Fencepost, people, human folks. This rush of knowing jolted the dirt boy so much he lost his balance and nearly fell.
He sprawled out on a flat rock. Buzzards appeared circling overhead, thinking the dirt boy something dead. The big bald birds rode an updraft like screws being loosened from a hard board. An inky flock gathered above the hill and shat and shed greasy feathers long as the dirt boy’s legs. He collected a few feathers and stuck them in his knotty head and squawked. Two buzzards landed and unrolled tongues from their beaks. The dirt boy could of disappeared wrapped up in their wings. They waddled toward him. He ran. The buzzards did not hunt him but lifted back up into the sky, coasting toward something easier to collect.
He crossed hill upon hill, daylight giving way to dark. He came upon uprooted trees, climbed over their great-big trunks and picked his way through their twisted tops. He saw at eye-level bird nests and beehives. No eggs, no honey. Holes where the trees had stood now filled with rainwater. In them floated playing cards, a sack, more peaches, a dead cat, what looked like an arm, household objects, a calf with its skin ripped clean off, red socks, a coffee cup. Some treeroots reached taller than the roof of a house would and held stones big enough to crush a wagon. He stopped at a rain-filled cavity electrified with minnows. The fish surged together, maybe trying to tell him something, but what he did not know.
He took a flooded path around a sanded-down bluff toward a row of cigar-shaped houses the color of cooked liver. A pack of wild dogs wandered out of a field where black-eyed Susans sprouted like yellow plates. All down the path folks sat on porches and in yards. They whistled and prayed as the dirt boy passed. Some chucked handfuls of dried beans at him, or came down and tried knotting ribbons on his arms and legs.
It was dark time he reached the end of the path. There stood a house with the door cracked open. The dirt boy saw the woman from his broken memory inside this house, sucking on a honeycomb as if it was a hammered thumb. He saw too a man with blue arms not far off from his own color. When the dirt boy entered the room the woman sensed his presence and picked him up.
“Where’d you find this at?”
The blue-armed man came over and petted the dirt boy on the head. He pulled out the feathers and put them on a shelf. “Out in the woods,” he said. “You can carry it back to him.”
The woman held the dirt boy on her lap. “You really ain’t coming? I know y’all argued, but he got flung off and kindly beat up.” She did not mention the injuries she’d suffered. “He can’t cut this tree off the house by hisself. And he won’t let me try.”
“But he’ll send you over here in this condition,” the blue-armed man said.
The woman instinctively touched her stomach.
The blue-armed man picked up a guitar. He plucked a string that rattled and buzzed. He plucked another and another, driving out a rhythm, and sang, State lines ain’t good for much, except for keeping you and me out of touch. He sang till he ran out of words then he just hummed and plucked a simple melody, which shifted like the floodwaters outside the door. The final note, when played, took much longer to fade out than it should of.
“Well,” he said, propping the instrument against a wall, “I reckon we ought to head on if we’re going to.”
He told the woman to go ahead. Wasn’t safe for them together. He knew a boat, faster than walking around the flood. She listened close to his directions then picked up the dirt boy and headed thataway.
This was not the place the dirt boy hunted. He waited till they were well out from dry land before diving off the boat. Looking up, he saw the woman’s face beyond the rippling surface as he sank and sank all way to the silty bottom, where a catfish big enough to swallow him stirred up from the mud and leaves. Rusted hooks dangled from the fish’s thick scarred lips and its wide pale face and its bloodred gills. The fish acknowledged the dirt boy with a timeless stare then brushed past, long whiskers wrapping around him like a blessing, and was gone.
He swam to the bank and walked on. It was daylight time the dirt boy came to a familiar spring in familiar woods. All sudden he remembered this water and his strange birth from its bank. Startling awake to the man from his memory’s big tan face. The way the horror of existence rolled and rolled and rolled as he held the man’s hand that day, walking together across a shaggy pasture, past a barn standing with no walls, down to a fishpond beyond it, to a tangle of honeysuckle big as a parked vehicle. There were blackbirds among this vine. Slick-feathered, red-winged creatures fluttering like wind-whipped cloth.
The man tossed seed onto the ground, and a few birds lit down and pecked it. He strewed more and more, coaxing the birds closer. The dirt boy could see his own reflection in one’s unblinking eye. A dark dark boy with eyes blue and deep, and hair—the dirt boy had hair, he realized, touching it then—soft and black, growing in sweeping cowlicks all over a head that seemed too big for his body.
The man shot out his hand and grabbed this blackbird. It cried out dik-dik-dik and ruffled up the feathers around its neck. He told the dirt boy to stand still as he pressed the struggling bird up against his throat.
Water began pooling up in the dirt boy’s mouth. He could feel the bird’s itty-bitty heart. It quit crying out and an itch started in his throat. Water leeched out of his cheeks. The itch became painful as it fell down into the dirt boy’s chest, spread throughout his jaws and threatened to pry apart his head.
Then the man opened his fist and the blackbird burst out like a wad of shot. It landed back among the vine. The other birds moved away. The pain vanished as the dirt boy wrenched open his mouth and struck his tongue to life.
“Who am I?”
The man did not answer. He motioned at the blackbirds and said, “Shoo.” They took to the sky in a murmuration, folding and spinning into themselves, as if he’d somehow stitched them together. Before long they’d left sight of the clearing, except for the lonesome one, which remained, working its beak up and down like a pump handle, stretching so hard the dirt boy wondered if its bones would tear through feather and flesh.
Back at the spring the dirt boy pushed aside fallen branches. He caught sight of his ruined reflection and splashed it gone. The image returned. Eternity squeezed itself into what remained of his busted head. He felt his consciousness expanding like the elaborate fungal threads buried in the loamy forest floor. The man who made him believed everything was created from all the same parts, not a thing in this world in and of itself. The dirt boy splashed gone the clods dangling from his knotted vine and wound wire innards. Though the image returned to the water’s surface, he was, he knew now, something more than what could be seen.
* * *
The storm had slung Hugh sixty-some feet by Maybelle’s count. When she found him his clothes were missing, as was one boot. With some effort he was able to cling to the mule, who was unharmed and unimpressed by the storm. Maybelle led them to the house. An oak tree had fallen through the roof. She tied a tarp between it and the wall, and this is where the Treebornes waited out the days of intense rain that followed.
Both Maybelle and the unborn child, as far as she could tell, were fine. Her cuts would heal before long. Meantime, she cooked root vegetable stocks. She scrambled quail eggs with hog brains, fed Hugh fresh honeycomb mixed with candied nuts, a raw egg dropped in buttermilk. She cleared limbs off the springhouse and emptied its reserves—blackberries, smoky jars of persimmons, pickled beans and onions and green tomatoes, peach butter and molasses. She cooked for herself as much for him, her appetite like a motor that leaks oil. She wanted dessert. Pound cake with chopped pecans, and top milk poured over it. These cravings seemed as much a living part of her as the child she carried in her stomach.
Once the rain stopped she went into town to check on the post office. A window had been broken, but otherwise the building looked fine. Though the mail would not run for weeks, folks were waiting outside the door. They had stories to tell. A relative asleep in bed with clean bloomers tucked under her pillow was lifted across the road and not a hair on her head harmed—the bloomers where she placed them before going to sleep. A hickory behind Elberta Second Baptist fell and formed the shape of a cross. A whole deck of cards stuck in the side of a barn as if thrown there by a magician. Goliath, the crane, had toppled onto the dam. Dee and Tucker Sargent found their fighting roosters huddled in a culvert, pecking each other’s eyes out.
When she got home that evening she found Hugh standing on his own weight. Bruises on his body the color of rotting bananas. “You lost your mind,” she said. “Here, sit back down.”
He ignored her and pushed through the fallen tree’s branches to the trunk. He thumped it like you might a cantaloupe to check its ripeness and said, “I need you to go get Lee Malone for me.”
After she left, Hugh sat on the porch and fretted over sending Maybelle across the valley alone. No other choice to his mind though. His experience in the storm had given inspiration for a new assemblie. He needed a frame, and the oak tree seemed divined.
After what Loudermilk had done, Hugh thought he’d never make another assemblie. It wasn’t just the gamble he’d lost, the money that never was, but how the yankee, by taking credit, had become him. Hugh’d let this happen. Not again.
Maybelle and Lee showed up later that night. Hugh kissed her and asked was she alright. Even touched her round belly, which was as near as he’d come to outwardly acknowledging the child. It was plain to anybody who looked that she was in the family way. He hugged Lee’s neck too. The men laughed to keep from crying, everything bad between them now gone.
Come dawn Lee began cutting the tree off the house while Hugh supervised from an overturned pail. Took half the day. Lee loaded as much wood as he could fit into Hugh’s wagon. Woodrow would be glad for the fuel to smoke his hogs. The rest of the tree’s trunk he piled next to Hugh’s studio. “Hope you ain’t expecting me to strip and plane it for you too,” he said.
Hugh told him he would handle that and did.
As his body healed, Hugh worked the oak tree down and used the timber to build a large frame. He constructed a pulley system in the studio so he could raise and lower this new assemblie. He cut mesh wire and attached it all over, then began shaping this wire by hand and with the taps of a tiny wooden mallet. He had in mind to create an entire history. Onto the wire he slathered clay. When it dried he added another layer, then another. Each movement of his hands, minute though they were, called to mind the shifting of the earth. Maybelle could do nothing but watch—afraid if she spoke it would break the spell.
* * *
No one asked Lee Malone to track down and bury the corpses on The Seven. One evening he just showed up with a shovel and began work. At dark Maybelle carried him a cheese sandwich. He thanked her then ate it on the walk home.
As far as Maybelle could tell, Hugh had not noticed Lee’s presence or the work he’d done for them. He rarely left the studio. She’d heard The Authority was beginning to rehire men, but Hugh’d shown no interest in going back. She could not coax him inside the house no matter how late the night wore. She worried the child would come while she was alone and Hugh would not be able to hear her across the yard. Meantime the new assemblie grew and it grew. He’d flipped the frame so he could lie on his back and work on it from below. Maybelle worried the pulley might give and the assemblie crush him.
One night she found Hugh plucking the feathers of broke-necked birds, which in the days following the storm were as common as pokeweed. She was restless from the continuing spring humidity and heat, and from carrying a living thing inside her.
After a long silence she tried convincing Hugh to come inside the house. She wanted to make love with the cooling machine blowing on them. She yearned for Hugh to put down his art and be with her, his wife.
But he would not.
After she left, Hugh continued plucking dead songbirds. Tiny bodies cold and rigid in his hand. He realized Maybelle wanted him. But this history of Elberta meant more than either of their desires. He took a knife and gutted the birds in turn then pinned up their hollow carcasses on the wall. He would use feathers to represent the waters running all throughout this land. Inside the house he heard Maybelle trying to start the cooling machine. She hollered out of frustration and kicked the thing so it rang out.
When he was through Hugh walked down at the spring to rinse. Being alone on The Seven rarely unnerved him, but this night he felt the immensity of these woods and their blue-black darkness. He remembered how his daddy would disappear into them as if entering another universe. Having reached the moon-sheened water, Hugh saw why he felt the way he did. There was the dirt boy. Hugh asked him where he’d been at but the dirt boy did not reply. Hugh scooped a handful of clay then stopped hisself. He would fix up Crusoe tomorrow, he decided. Tonight he needed rest.
Maybelle was faking sleep when he got down next to her. “Look what I found,” he whispered, setting Crusoe on the floor. “Thought he’d been lost for good.”
Maybelle rolled over to see, her roundly shape visible underneath the quilt. “I wonder would we be better off if he had.”