Up On Piney Mountain

Mar 1, 2015 | Southern Lit

[title subtitle=”fiction: Marla Cantrell”][/title]

Allie Walker pushed aside two trashcans that held chicken feed, scooted past the riding lawn mower and grabbed her ex-husband’s handsaw. The shed was dark, even when the sun was out, surrounded as it was by oaks and pines.

She’d always loved the way a saw sounded when you bent it and then let it loose, that twang it made, like music, like Patsy Cline, all sorrowful and strong at the same time.

Inside her house were two dozen people, filing past the deviled eggs right about now, sipping wine and whiskey sours and talking about God knows what. She hated every one of them, including Deacon Luther Tomm, who’d been drinking nervously while he pontificated, so his rambling sounded like an infomercial for Jesus.

Allie put the saw in the back of her Ford Escape. Her son, Joey, called the SUV the Allie-mobile, ever since she’d decorated it with decals she’d made herself. She’d brought home vinyl scraps — her boss called it “negative space,” the pieces that were torn away to reveal letters and pictures — from her job at Jinx Sign Shop. After six years of work, there was hardly a space on the old car that didn’t have an alien or a headless horseman or an angel with flames where its wings should have been.

The road leading to the town square was quiet. It was that murky time of day, and clouds were tumbling in. Trash skittered across the street. An ad for the new pizza place flew across her windshield and Allie hit the brakes. She looked at her hands. She was gripping the steering wheel so hard her knuckles stuck out.

The magnolia, planted on the day in 1896 when the town was formed, stood at the center of the square like a villain, dark and brooding and invincible. The gash where the pickup had hit it was white and deep. There were fake flowers where the trunk met the ground, and baseballs, and notes written on poster board with glitter paint. Life is but a dream, one message read, and Allie felt her stomach clench.”Stupid,” Allie said. “Life is anything but a dream.” She stepped from the car, grabbed the saw and a long length of rope, and walked to the tree.

Today was her birthday. She was thirty-seven. Middle age was so close she could feel it. Her shoulder ached in winter and her right knee popped when she climbed stairs. Today, though, she felt equal to the magnolia, and she hoisted herself up on the lowest limb. The saw hung from the rope that she’d looped through the opening in the handle, and the thing now swung across her back.

Allie climbed slowly, watching her feet. It wouldn’t do to slip. The sky rumbled and a flash of lightning fell across the eastern sky, too far away to matter. She stood as upright as she could in the big tree, bracing her back against an “L” where a thick branch grew straight out, slid down to a sitting position, and grabbed the saw. When she was twelve, she’d climbed the pecan tree in the city park, hid in its branches, and eavesdropped on the people who wandered by. That’s when she learned her math teacher was in love with a woman who was not his wife. He had said, “I cannot bear the complexity of my feelings.” She wanted to hate him for it, but she couldn’t. From then on he seemed like a fraction that didn’t have a common denominator, like a problem you couldn’t work out on the biggest chalkboard in the world.

Allie surveyed the old magnolia. She began sawing just past the place where she sat, the scrape of metal on wood the only sound she wanted to hear.

When the limb finally fell, she leaned back, letting the tree support her. The fallen part of branch hit the ground with a thump, bounced once, lay still. She let out a sigh, looked around. It was getting dark, although it was barely five o’clock on this spring day. Her arm was hurting. She liked the feel of it, the burn that ran from shoulder to wrist. The rain started then, big drops that went splat, the sound loud as knocks at a door you couldn’t open. The lightning that had been a mile away only minutes before moved closer. Had it not been for the cover of leaves, she would have been soaked, but so far she was only damp.

She held the saw straight out, pushing it through the waxy green leaves. What she wanted at that moment was for the lightning to find her. She could imagine it, the electricity striking the metal, running through her hand, ripping into her heart. If a spark from the saw started a fire, all the better. It could light up this tree, and the tree would flash orange and red and burn to the ground. She said aloud, “I should have brought gasoline.”

If your spirit stays where you draw your last breath, then she should be able to feel Joey here. But she did not feel him, just as she did not feel him in his bedroom, where his jeans still lay crumbled on the rug, and his anthropology book lay open, face down, on his oak desk.

There was speculation, of course, that he’d been drinking when his truck hit the tree. He’d been going sixty in a place where thirty could get you a ticket. He had not been drinking — she had seen the toxicology report. What she feared most was that he’d done it intentionally. That kind of desperation ran through Allie’s family, had taken her own father when he was younger than she is now. But Joey was more like his dad: easy going, fearless. His junior college baseball team, the Maysville Tigers, had just won the state championship, a slow pitch game, and he’d been coming home: excited, happy, careless.

No, he did not kill himself.

Down below where the rain hit everything, Talbott Benson, the only deputy in town, shined his flashlight and called out. “Allie Walker, is that you up there? Your car’s right here. I know it’s you.” He paused, rubbed his neck. “You’ll catch your death,” he said, and then stopped abruptly at the word ‘death.’  He shined his flashlight on the ground where the newly cut limb lay, “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

Talbott shook his head. He pulled on his gray rain slicker and grabbed the lowest limb.”I’m coming up,” he said. A bolt of lightning hit the lightning rod atop the courthouse just across the way. Thunder roared and the earth shook and Talbott let out a string of cuss words that sounded just about right to Allie.

The deputy was younger than Allie by two years, and handsome in a way that made you turn your head when you tried to look at him straight on. Now, his face was shadowed by his hat and the gloaming of the late afternoon. Today, nobody was beautiful. When he reached a foothold just below Allie, he said, “I believe you’re committing a crime of some kind.”

“What if I am?” Allie asked. “Are you going to arrest me?”

Talbott blew out his breath, reached in his shirt pocket, pulled out a cigarette. He sat down, straddling one of the middle tree branches, and flicked his lighter. He took a long draw. Smoke seemed to stay in a cloud in front of his face. “I don’t believe I am,” he said, finally.

Rain pelted Allie, thunder roared farther away this time, and she suddenly felt as heavy as an ox.

“Helluva view when the sun’s out,” Talbott said, craning his neck to see Allie. “I used to climb this tree all the time. I used to hide from my daddy up here. He was bad to drink, did you know that?”

“The whole town knew that,” Allie said.

“Hard to live with a daddy like that.

Allie let go of the handsaw and let it hang limp from its rope. She made a motion like a noose at her neck and craned her head to one side. “My daddy did himself in. I don’t know why.”

“Enough trouble in this world to fill the Grand Canyon,” Talbott said, and those words, the Grand Canyon, caused Allie’s heart to jump. She’d taken Joey there when he was seven. He’d stood on the overlook and spread his arms out and said, “This is bigger than God’s cereal bowl!”

When he was eight, he came in from feeding his Quarter Horse. He took Allie by the hand and led her outside. Queenie stood beneath the morning sun, which was shining so bright the horse seemed to almost disappear into it. Joey said, “Queenie sure is pretty at night, but this morning light is too much. This morning light defeats her.”

Allie had taken to writing down Joey’s words. She had a gallon jar on her dresser, hundreds of slips of paper with his observations, his sweet, sweet words that seemed like something a prophet might say.

She had cried so much in the last three days, trying to do it now was like having the dry heaves. Her face ached, her nose felt like it did when she plunged into the city pool and drew in a wave of chlorine.

“I can’t stand this world,” she said.

“I don’t blame you,” Talbott said, “nobody blames you,” and then he dropped his cigarette and reached up and touched Allie’s ankle. Allie closed her eyes. “Let’s get down from here,” Talbott said.

He made it to the ground first, and he held his arms up in case she fell. She swung down easily, slipped on the wet grass, and lay there, the rain hitting her hard. Talbott scrambled to get her up,  took her by the hand, finally, and led her to the police car just as a new wave of lightning hit. He jumped, but she didn’t. There was a thermos in the front passenger seat, and she wrapped her hands around it for its warmth. He turned on the motor, cranked up the heat. The scanner and radio, he turned off. Wiped his face with the back of his hand.

“Take me somewhere,” Allie said, “away from this,” and she pointed at the tree.

“Don’t you think you ought to go home?”

“I don’t ever want to go home.”

At the Quickie Pik, Talbott went in and picked up a roll of paper towels so Allie could dry off, a bag of pretzels, a bottle of whiskey.

“Take a sip,” he said, when he got back in the car.

Allie uncapped the bottle, drank, shivered.

“I could get fired for this,” he said, and pointed at Allie, at the bottle, at the turned off equipment.

“You want a drink?”

“Don’t touch the stuff,” Talbott said. “My daddy and all.”

They drove then, out past the city limits, on the back roads they both knew so well.

“You may be crazy right now, Allie,” Talbott said. “That’s understandable.” Allie took another sip of whiskey and considered this.

“I may be crazy from now on,” she said, and then she grew quiet. The road bumped beneath them — it was a patchwork of potholes and crumbling asphalt. After a while, she said, “Tell me about the last time you were happy. I need to hear a story that has happy people in it.”

Talbott rubbed his leg, he grabbed a paper towel from the roll and wiped the back of his neck. “I got this cabin up on Piney Mountain. Not very big, half a century old. The walls are cedar inside and out, the floors are black oak. I go there on my days off. There’s this deer that’s taken to me, a doe. She’ll eat out of my hand. Last week I went for a walk up the ridge and the yarrow is starting to bloom and the black-eyed-susans. Well, this doe comes with me, like a dog would, and she keeps nudging me from behind, and when I sat down on this big mossy rock, she keeps rubbing her head against my shirt. And I thought, I haven’t seen a lot of evidence of God in my life, but maybe this is enough. This ridge, this doe, the sky blue as a lady’s dress.”

“The doe could die,” Allie said. She looked out the window. “Come hunting season.”

“I haven’t worked that part out yet.”

“My family has a history of doing themselves in. Not just my daddy. My aunt Ida. A cousin in California.”

“And my daddy drank, but I do not.”

Allie’s hair was almost dry now. It fell past her shoulders, straight, brown, shiny. Her jeans were just barely damp, but her socks had gotten wet and she’d taken them off. “It’s my birthday,” she said. “Thirty-seven, but today I feel a hundred.”

“Thirty-five in April,” Talbott said.

“Joey won’t ever be thirty-five,” Allie said, and then coughed, and then took another sip of whiskey.

“I’m more than sorry,” Talbott said. “Wish there was something I could do.”

“Nothing anybody can do.”

“I got a friend, an old guy I met on a fishing trip to Canada, who’s from the Dakota tribe. He believes the spirit world is only three feet above us, and that’s where the dead go, and they become our guardian angels. They have a ritual that lasts for four days, making sure the spirit is settled in good and proper. Everybody feels better when it’s over.”

“What do you think?”

“I think that sometimes horrible things happen to the best people on earth. I don’t know why. I don’t know how we’re supposed to get through it, but I do know we have to help the ones left behind. We can’t leave a crazy woman up in a tree, for example.”

The whiskey had settled Allie down. She lay her head back against the seat and listened to the windshield wipers whoosh. She hadn’t slept a wink in three days. “I wouldn’t mind Joey being three feet above me. You were below me in that devil tree and I could hear every word you said.”

“Joey was a good kid, always polite. I saw him in the halls at the middle school when I was their reserve officer. Saw him help a kid who’d dropped his books. He was one of those bused-in kids from down by the river.”

“It hurts to hear his name. It hurts not to hear his name. I’ll have to move. I can’t face that tree every day.”

“I’ve been told you can’t make big decisions for at least a year after something like this happens,” Talbott said.

“I may decide not to get up tomorrow.”

Talbott ignored the meaning of that sentence. “Stay in bed as long as you want,” he said. “Get some rest. When you wake up, do it slow. Make sure you eat something every day. Soup is good. Hot tea is good.”

When he turned the squad car around, Allie protested. “Don’t take me home,” she said, and so he veered off the highway, cut across the valley, and started up the slick mountain road.

Allie took another drink just as the road turned to gravel, and another when the gravel turned to mud. When they got to the cabin, Talbott came to her side of the car and opened the door. He took her hiking boots and put them on her feet. The rain was steady but the storm had passed. When she tried to stand, she couldn’t do it, so he lifted her easily and carried her across the porch and into the cedar cabin.

She hadn’t been lifted up since she was a kid, back before her father died. She used to pretend she’d fallen asleep on long car rides, just to feel his strong hands lifting her from the backseat, just to feel safe in his big arms.

The thought of it made her stubborn tears start, and Talbott stroked her hair while she cried. He set her down on the couch and made hot tea. The rain was serious now, and the wind howled.

She slept, eventually, and when she woke Talbott was still there, out cold in the old recliner that listed to one side.

Allie went out on the porch. The rain had stopped, and the air was cold and pure. She found a tree stump Talbott used as a side table, cleared away the ashtray and stood atop it. Allie held her hand straight up; she knew she was at least three feet taller that way, and imagined Joey in the mist of morning, in a place where everything made sense and nobody died. As long as she stood like that, she felt a warm hand wrapped around hers. The feeling might have been grief, she understood that. But it might have come from the clarity grief brings.

As soon as the thought materialized, Talbott’s doe showed up, buff-colored and glorious. She climbed the steps to stand beside Allie. Talbott rose from his chair as this was happening. Allie was not on the couch. He checked his gun; it was still in its holster, and he said aloud, “Thank God.” When he bounded onto the porch, he saw Allie standing still, her hand raised, her hair tangled. The doe did not even turn to greet him, just stood transfixed, watching. Allie stood like that for longer than seemed humanly possible, in the soft light of morning, and Talbott bore witness to it all, though he would never speak of it again, not to anyone in this broken old world but Allie.

Do South Magazine

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