Everything stopped for the crane. You couldn’t get a wagon through the streets for gawkers watching the machine being unloaded off a barge. It was named Goliath and, The Authority said, ran on steam. If you owned a camera you could make two-three bucks some weekends off folks wanting a keepsake. Goliath was followed by a whole mess of equipment and by men dressed in new wool suits making a price on folks’ land, threatening jail time and court fees if you said no. Many houses were pulled apart nail-by-nail and hauled out of the county. It was those folks who stayed put that came and watched Goliath roar to life. A marching band played. The wild game fled to places unknown or forgotten. Change had come to Elberta, Alabama. From there on out the racket continued day and night, rumbling and explosions, and a concrete wall rose up where once had been but treetops and unbroken sky.
The Hernando de Soto Dam was little more than two enormous concrete boxes built in the edge of the river the summer Hugh Treeborne took a job with The Authority. The morning of his first day he’d found what he thought was an inquiry tacked to his house. He’d heard they were through buying and his land, which was called The Seven, was nowhere near the dam or where the lake would soon back up, filling hollers and topping hills. A man with a red-brown birthmark on his face was deciding which crew Hugh would join.
“You work building ever?”
“Little bit,” Hugh lied, watching workers climb shaking scaffolding erected against the concrete face.
The birthmarked man picked his nose. He had a pistol jabbed in his belt. “Well you can learn it,” he said. “Meantime we’ll put you to digging.”
The Authority gave Hugh Treeborne a shovel and a lunch of greasy sardine sandwiches wrapped in butcher’s paper. The fish smelled slightly rotten and tasted salty, the bread stale. Hugh ate anyway. After lunch he wet his shirt in the Elberta River then tied it around his forehead. The other men on the crew nicknamed him Chief for this.
Nearly one thousand men were working on the Hernando de Soto Dam, pouring three million cubic yards of concrete that would reach four hundred feet at its highest point, flooding more than ten thousand acres of deep woods and pastureland and homesteads that’d belonged to generations of local families. Most of these men did not consider such numbers or loss, nor did they have time to worry over what it meant for the valley. Hugh recognized but a few of the workers on his shift. They did not acknowledge each other. A job with The Authority meant a chance to start over from hard lives turned harder for reasons they weren’t sure of, reasons the paper said had to do with places faraway as New York and Chicago. These men had seen war, felt hunger. But this? This was something else. Foot, they joked, if nothing else the dam’ll make a good spot to leap from—way old Chief Coosa did.
At the end of the day the birthmarked man fired his pistol. As the shot pealed down the river Authority men started home like ants fleeing a kerosene-soaked hill. Along the washed-out path to town Hugh walked past cut timber, much of it rotten and growed-up with jewel briar and goldenrod and blackberry. Off in the distance fingers of black smoke curled up from a collection of burnpiles. Hugh counted one two three four five.… Ash from these fires and others since burnt out mounted in the streets, compromised rooftops, drifted inside stables, where sag-backed horses and mules grunted and stomped for feed that was no longer available. The Elberta Valley like another world from the one Hugh the boy had known. He was glad his daddy, Caz, wasn’t around to see.
He came upon a snapper lying in the weeds, its thick shell busted and all the innards pulled out but for a handful of brown and green organs. A group of kids appeared on the path. Bones pressed sharp against the underside of their dirty skin, ash dusting their hair, grime blackening their eyelids, and fingernails telling of sooty fields and inky creeks where they yet played. When Hugh looked thataway, the kids laughed, took off. Folks in Livingstown worried what the ash would do to the rice crop. It was smothering gardens. Fortunate the ash did not reach The Seven, he thought. Before long the only thing left to eat would be whatever canned food The Authority doled out.
As he passed through town he saw several drunks sitting in front of the charred remains of Tupelo’s Hardware and Tack. The store had caught fire some weeks ago, flames spreading to six other buildings before being put out with riverwater and sand. One of the drunks grabbed Hugh by the britchesleg. He kicked loose and made like to strike the man. This—all of it, he thought—progress. That’s what the paper said. Heard it bandied in the streets too, by men The Authority paid or promised to pay. He watched one of The Authority’s photographers taking pictures of the drunks, who leered and drooled and cackled when the bulb flashed. The photographer was young, looked like a yankee. More and more outsiders coming into the valley. A skinny woman walked her kids across the street, covering young eyes from this lurid scene. From a new reality, Hugh thought, The Authority’s promise of a new South: electricity, jobs, warm and sturdy rental houses, and the time to enjoy a healthy family who bought all its food from The Authority store rather than raising it on your own free land. Look around and see all this progress. Explosions day and night, hundred-year-old trees toppled, fires burning and burning and burning, like hell risen up onto earth, and the valley itself rumbling as if the ground might come apart and swallow them whole. And now him part of it. Hugh Treeborne, an Authority man.
He bought a piece of vinegar taffy at Gus’s Buy-All and chewed, trying to forget his latest sin, as he passed the square where Hernando de Soto stood tall on a limestone pedestal. The Authority aimed to name the dam and the new lake after the conquistador. What might the old Spaniard think? Ash had piled on his brow and shoulders. This particular statue a gift from Elberta, Texas, the town’s sister city. Folks told that De Soto came down off his pedestal and walked the valley some moonless nights. Casabianca, Hugh’s daddy, used to scare Hugh the boy with such stories and threats. Not too long ago a string of stolen horses had been blamed on the conquistador. The real culprit, Hugh figured, climbing up onto the pedestal, more likely a hungry Elbertan who needed to feed his family. He dusted off what ash he could reach. He’d always admired the statue—De Soto was an outsider too. Though the conquistador had somehow, over time, become them. The statue was the first piece of art Hugh’d ever seen. He still felt envious of what bronze could do that the clay he dug up from creekbanks could not.
Other side of the square stood the post office, where a tall woman from out of town had recently been made postmaster. Hugh sat down and watched folks hurry in the cut-block building before close. The Times had written against the new postmaster’s hiring. She was maybe the first woman in the state to hold such a position and folks did not appreciate that distinction being associated with Elberta. Sometimes Hugh saw her walking Sampley’s route, Sampley the mail carrier dependable as a gnat on a good day. She took long and determined strides, and toted the heavy leather bag on her shoulder as if it was nothing. Hugh never spoke when he passed the postmaster on his uncle Frank’s wagon, though he did wonder if she noticed him too.
When he got home another inquiry was tacked to the doorframe. He did not read it. He chucked the paper in the woodstove. “Let them try,” he said, starting a fire there. He went to the springhouse and grabbed a fistful of sauerkraut. With the other hand he picked up Crusoe from where he’d left him on the bank. An earthworm wriggled out of the dirt boy’s head. Hugh pitched the worm into the water then walked back up at the house.
When the flames died down and the coals turned hot-white, he fried pork belly in a cast-iron pan then warmed a slice of cornbread in the rendered fat. He liked his pork crispy, his cornbread buttered. He had no cows for the latter. The pork had been a gift. The sauerkraut was cold and bright on his tongue and a big broad smile crossed his face as he chewed, jaw muscles stretched that hadn’t been in some long time. Work would do that for a man. Hugh Treeborne maybe hadn’t smiled so hard since he was a boy working at Prince’s Peach Cannery, which was now shuttered and starting to give itself over to weed and to vine and to whatever animals nested inside its machinery and walls. Now those were good times. Days yet Hugh hunted doves in the tall grass grown around the cannery. Bricks beginning to fall off like dried scabs, large rooms once filled with the beautiful noise of local work otherwise gone silent. Even Mr. Prince wasn’t immune to what was happening with the world.
When Hugh was through eating he propped Crusoe up on his lap. Looked like the dirt boy had been walking around on his own. Missing a toe, and the bottoms of his feet were cracked. He toted Crusoe out at the studio and searched the shelves for the right clay, yawning as he ran fingers across buckets and jars. When was the last time he’d set foot here? Days he didn’t make art carried little meaning and were often hard to recall. Lived too many artless days period, he thought, since Caz died eleven years ago.
For some of those years, once the cannery closed, Hugh’d picked peaches and done other piecemeal work, like in the paddy fields of Livingstown, during summer. In winter he spent many idle nights at Lee Malone’s place for the company and the warmth. Lee hisself now worked as a dipper at a mill out in the county. Dangerous—the trip there for Lee and the work he did. He came home with arms stained blue up past the elbows. It was good reliable work though and the foreman let Lee cut firewood off company land. Let him, but wouldn’t of said so had Lee been caught. Lee gave what he couldn’t burn to Woodrow, who used it to smoke whole hogs that’d been splayed open down the gut and wrapped in chickenwire so the meat held together as they slow-cooked. Hugh Treeborne and Lee Malone met in the church where Lee the boy slapped guitar and sang. Hugh wasn’t holy; his daddy had wandered in during service and, crazed, started prying up the floorboards. Had a splintered stack four-five feet tall time Hugh caught up to him. The True Believers were speaking in tongues and laying hands on Caz, which did not a lick of good in the long run. Hugh never would forget the way Lee sounded that day—raw as the floorboards his daddy had pried loose searching for gold that did not exist.
Some winter nights Lee would sit up late late, and play and sing songs from his boyhood, others he’d picked up traveling the chitlin’ circuit in Florida and South Alabama and Georgia, while Hugh contentedly listened. Lee’d seen and played with the best guitar players of that time and place. Men named Papa, Blind-this-or-that, Sonny, Skip. Some with no name at all. Time, he figured to play the circuit till he could make a recording. Blacks up north with money would spend it on a decent recording, he’d heard.
Then one off night in Mobile Lee saw a hillbilly star pack out the civic arena. The big room smelled of cow shit from a rodeo held the night before. Lee and the rest of the black folks in attendance sat high up near the rafters, under watch of several fat policemen. The hillbilly star was gaunt. Looked like a string bean down there onstage. Lee knew his songs from the white folks who’d raised him. He began singing along under his breath, out of fear that the policemen would deem him a disturbance. Before long his neighbors in the balcony were cutting him looks. At first he did not care. He loved the songs and was taking what he could learn from the hillbilly star’s pitch to use in some of his own music. This is what he did; sponged. Then somebody kneed Lee in back of the head. He turned around, thinking it might of been an accident, and was confronted with rows upon rows of indignant faces. He did not wait for the show to end before leaving his seat and exiting out the side of the arena into the humid night.
He needed to get drunk to tell this story to Hugh for the first time. Between that night in Mobile and the night he told of it, he’d been asked to make a recording. Given a train ticket to go do so in Wisconsin. But Lee Malone had not gone yet. Instead he’d given up playing the circuit and taken the job at the mill. And for what? Hugh wasn’t sure, and he didn’t fully understand what’d happened in the civic arena that night.
When day began breaking Hugh got up and stumbled to the back porch. Waking up early felt like getting away with something. He pissed a gallon while listening to a mockingbird test its voice. Crusoe was waiting in the old chicken coop Hugh used as his studio. The dirt boy had laid out his tools and uncovered an assemblie set on tin they’d found at an abandoned houseplace near Livingstown. The assemblie had to do with De Soto’s boyhood home. Horses. Wouldn’t Spain have some kind of a desert? Hugh found his materials strewn all over the Elberta Valley. Felt like the land was offering up things, urging him to make art. Not even make, but frame, assemble. That’s how he’d come up with the word for the things he made. Crusoe came along on these walks and worked kindly like a magnet sometimes. The Elberta River too carried objects up onto its banks and into the woods when it flooded in early spring. The wind blew things down, rearranged what was already there. Pounding rain could unbury something lost. Most folks never noticed. You had to look. So much was thrown out, even during these tough times. Hugh gathered and assembled these objects to resemble the images filling his head, and when he was finished, he toted his assemblies off in the woods and left them there.
It was this last part that drove Lee Malone up the wall. Scared, he’d say, trying to taunt Hugh so he’d quit leaving his work to ruin. Hiding it like cat shit. Lee wanted him to share his art with the world. What world? Pot calling the kettle black, Hugh’d say. Then Lee’d turn the argument toward skin color, so he wouldn’t have to answer for why he’d quit the chitlin’ circuit and still hadn’t gone to make that recording. This argument went on till, often, Hugh’d let slip the word nigger, or something close enough to it, and the men came to blows.
Hugh lit a pine knot and burnt some of the paint already gobbed onto the assemblie. He covered his nose against the smoke. Crusoe stood on his toes and watched.
“Tell,” the dirt boy said.
Hugh waved him off, unwound a spring then began pounding it flat. Crusoe kept on begging. Stories were Hugh’s daddy’s thing; assemblieing his.
“Tell,” the dirt boy said. “Come on, tell.” He showed his animal teeth and pumped his hands like he was squeezing something.
Hugh finally gave in and told the story of Chief Coosa losing his soul to an owl, chasing the creature right off a bluff and breaking his body on the jagged rocks down below. While he told he mixed clay and began layering it onto the assemblie. Crusoe begged for a dab or two on his curved back. The dirt boy purred when Hugh obliged. Soon it was time to leave for work. Hugh toted Crusoe down at the spring and left him till evening.
Life went thisaway for weeks. Hugh stole from the day, working on assemblies while Crusoe watched. Didn’t drink much; didn’t see Lee at all. The work with The Authority allowed Hugh something near to peace. His long-sunk mind bobbed up. Crusoe noticed the signs in Hugh’s hands, which moved like a heron spearing toadfrogs from clear water. He finished the De Soto assemblie then three smaller ones that had to do with animals that’d disappeared from the valley since his boyhood. Panthers, bears. Native predators now gone. During these blissful weeks Hugh Treeborne often had a dream in which he uncovered a pit of bones in the channel the Authority men were digging to divert the river from the dam site. Digging was in his blood. Jarred awake, he’d return to the studio and assemblie till his eyes ached and his hands wouldn’t do right. This penance also pleasure. He never remembered going back inside, just woke next to Crusoe come morning, and a late owl hooting in a split oak out back.
* * *
He’d learned to read and write from pamphlets Caz would bring home from trips into town. The pamphlets would have titles like Our Caribbean Allies or How to Get Out from Under Debt. Rarely in life was reading and writing useful for Hugh Treeborne. In fact he hadn’t written more than his name in who knew when. So, the day he sat down to write something he could mail, it took effort to recall the shapes of letters and the order in which they went. He had no idea where the letter he was writing would wind up going once he turned it over to her. He wrote, If you some how git this I am sorree. He folded the paper twice then sealed it with wax. On the outside he wrote, To Frank Treeborne. When the wax’d dried he stuck the letter in his britchespocket then headed into town on his raggedy-ass mule named Byron.
Hugh stood next to the De Soto statue for several minutes before getting the guts to cross the street. A little bell chimed when he opened the door. To the right was a wall of brass boxes with ornate glass doors which folks rented out to receive mail. To the left was the service counter. The new postmaster stood behind it. She wore a blue wool dress with big gold buttons and had her hair styled up and pinned to her temples.
“How can I help you?”
Hugh set his letter on the counter. “I want to send this.”
She picked up the letter and looked at it. “You don’t have an address?”
“Right there,” Hugh said, pointing to his dead uncle’s name.
The postmaster kindly frowned. “This isn’t the address,” she said. “Do you know where Mr. Treeborne lives?”
“No,” Hugh said.
“You don’t know where he lives, but you’re trying to send him a letter?”
He didn’t know what to say. He’d assumed she’d just stick on a stamp and that’d be it. The letter was nothing but an excuse to talk to her anyhow. His uncle Frank had been dead longer than his daddy. “Well, thank you,” he muttered, then turned to leave.
“Now hold on,” the postmaster called out.
But it was too late. Hugh had rushed out the door.
Embarrassed as he felt, Hugh didn’t let this foolish attempt at courtship curtail the routine he’d established since starting with The Authority. Each morning he took a couple hours from the day by working on his assemblies. One such morning, hands crusted with blood from the gill plate off a carp he’d pulled out the fishpond, he heard a vehicle coming down a nearby path. He set down his tools but for a scraper and watched as a tar-black car came speeding down the hill. A thing so rare in this valley it might of been an airplane. Most folks in Elberta couldn’t afford to keep up a vehicle, let alone put gas in one. Not anybody who’d come down at The Seven anyhow.
A stranger climbed out of the driver’s seat. Hugh let him get all the way up onto the porch before sneaking up from behind and pressing the scraper to his neck. “I ain’t selling,” he said, “so you can go on.”
“I was passing by and noticed—”
“I ain’t selling my land,” Hugh said, pressing down harder. The scraper was so dull he’d need to saw if he meant to break skin. “I work for The Authority now too.”
“I believe you have me confused.” The stranger spoke in a clipped accent. If he’d of said Mississippi he’d of pronounced every last letter. Hugh let go and backed up. The stranger’s dark hair had been poorly slicked down against his squat skull. He was, in fact, plain slouchy-looking all over, and when he opened his mouth to speak again he revealed unseemly red gums. “Do you intend on using that?”
Hugh lowered the scraper. “I seen them notices y’all left.”
The stranger laughed a laugh too big and healthy-sounding for his appearance. He fixed his tie, which had a little yellow bird painted on it. His shirt collar was smashed and sweat-browned. He raised his eyebrows then walked back to the vehicle and took a fruit jar out from underneath the front seat. He sloshed around the pissy-looking liquid inside then drank from the jar and held it out toward Hugh.
“I can do without.”
The stranger drank. “Like I was saying before you held a knife to my throat, I was—”
“This ain’t no knife.”
“Does it happen to be for sale?”
Hugh looked at the scraper in his hand. “Does what?”
“Listen,” the stranger went on, “I purchase art. I’d like to purchase that odd little piece by the road if it’s in fair enough condition. I assume it’s yours?”
Hugh had forgotten about this assemblie—as he did all of them over time. It’d been growed-up in a honeysuckle vine since one drunk night Lee Malone decided to take it home rather than let Hugh tote it off into the woods and leave it. Lee got no farther than the path before deciding the assemblie too big and left it there.
“Mister, look—”
“How much?” It was a question impossible to answer, making a fool of Hugh in the most terrible way. “Here,” the stranger said, “let me show you something.”
He retrieved from the vehicle a stack of pictures wrapped in tissue paper and bound with twine. On back of each one a year had been scrawled: ’27, ’18, ’23, so on. Some of the art in these pictures looked kin to Hugh’s own. Up to now, whenever he saw art mentioned in the paper or a stray pamphlet, it’d been made long ago by a person now dead, and usually in some far-off land. Art itself being, he thought, a dead practice. But here was something made only a few years ago by people, according to the hard-to-read scrawl, from Memphis, Mobile, New Orleans and on over to Tallahassee. This angered and thrilled him. The stranger took some flyers out of a briefcase, making sure Hugh saw the prices printed on them in red.
“I believe you get what you pay for,” he said. “And I pay only for the best.”
“That right?”
“It sure is, Mister…”
“Treeborne,” Hugh said. “Jesse Absalom Treeborne. But folks call me Hugh.”
“Christ!” the stranger shouted, taking another swig from the jar. He gasped as he swallowed the firewater and fanned hisself with the flyers clutched in his hand. “People will love this. Name’s Loudermilk. Let me ask you a question Hugh. How long have you been one?”
“Been one what?”
“An artist,” Loudermilk said.
Hugh felt ignorant considering an answer. “I always been thisaway,” he said.
“Perfect!” Loudermilk shuffled through the pictures as if he’d forgotten why he was there. “That’s just perfect. People are going to love this!”
Loudermilk wanted to see more assemblies. As they walked The Seven, Hugh had a hard time getting a word in—and him born into a family of talkers. Loudermilk said he’d just come from the Gulf, but was originally from up north. He wanted to hear all about Hugh Treeborne, he said. But Hugh could not tell about growing up on these seven hundred wooded acres of old-growth cool and dim as a cave, of how some afternoons a flock of passenger pigeons blacked out the sky for seven Mississippi seconds, how bright yellow mushrooms like to walk on as steps grew up the trunks of those trees, or how Indians once lived here, and not the worn-out kind, but those whose descendants fought De Soto when the Spanish traipsed through hunting for gold not there, and how, centuries later, Hugh the boy picked up discarded birdpoints and broken pottery in the field his daddy plowed for a garden and a cotton patch, and how he picked up bird bones and tore those mushrooms loose from the trees and assemblied these objects, and others, according to what the land offered and what he saw in his head. Nor could he tell how the sweet smell of syrup and sugar and mashed fresh fruit used to drift down from Prince’s Peach Cannery so you could breathe cotton candy if you had a good strong set of lungs, how him and Lee Malone used to catch bats underneath the Hernando de Soto Bridge and tie string to the poor creatures’ feet, then let them swoop and soar after bugs while taking turns holding on to the shaking end, let alone did Hugh get to tell anything about his daddy’s sickness and the years after Caz died, about making Crusoe—now that would be a story, but Hugh couldn’t tell it yet—or how he was beginning to feel like he’d betrayed all the things he loved by joining The Authority, which was changing the valley in a way no one could yet grasp, because Loudermilk cut him off every chance he had, just like a damn yankee would.
Hugh remained wary. He slept with a rifle the first night Loudermilk camped on The Seven. He had a hard time believing anybody would pay for something he’d made. Doubted anybody cared what he did on these seven hundred acres—or if he even lived. A way of thinking rooted in his family’s past.
But as the week wore on and Loudermilk pulled more assemblies from the woods, his enthusiasm birthed in Hugh some fragile belief that maybe this wasn’t a con. Maybe he was telling the truth and folks up north would pay good money for his assemblies. He wanted to believe. He also reasoned that if there was money to be made from his art then Loudermilk would return for more. If not, Hugh figured, he’d be no worse for a few less assemblies sinking into the ground from which they’d come. The gamble seemed worth it.
Hugh waited for Loudermilk to make his pitch. He had lined up several assemblies he thought were interesting, he called it, alongside the studio. “It’s not often I come across something like this,” Loudermilk said, stepping back to take them all in at once. “There’s enough here to put on an entire exhibition of Hugh Treeborne.”
Hugh let his silence speak. He noticed Crusoe in the shadows of an azalea bush and toted the dirt boy to a bucket of filmy water and began wetting him down. As he worked, Crusoe’s coloring bled onto his hands and ran down his arms onto his shirtsleeves. Reshaping the dirt boy sounded like kneading too-wet biscuit dough.
“Let me talk to my people,” Loudermilk said. “I can return in a month—maybe less. Of course I’ll need proof. My camera, it’s busted and—”
“Go ahead, take them.”
Loudermilk seemed surprised. He wrote out a contract on butcher’s paper Hugh found wadded up in his shirtpocket. “Keep collecting,” he said after he’d filled the backseat. They both signed the contract, then Hugh watched the vehicle depart, wondering despite hisself if he would ever see the yankee, or the art he’d given over, in this valley again.