Devil Tree Page 2

Lucas released his grip on the root, turned to grab for her and slid inexorably backwards into the river’s eager grasp. He stretched his hand outwards and upwards.

  “I have you,” a deep timbered voice said.

  2

  Wet dreams, dreams of drowning, dreams of death.

  Tamsen’s dying mind was awash with the raucous laughter of the river gurgling within her ears. Whispering lurid suggestions as she floated and felt herself lifted upwards, heaven bound, a darkling vision of godhood hanging over her mouthing words she dared not hear.

  Up, down, up, down.

  Her head bobbed helplessly, choking and swallowing. The log reared over her like the great dripping member of some dark forgotten sea god. Poseidon, Neptune, Triton – names dredged from the pages of a childhood classical primer and other names she hadn’t read. Names she couldn’t speak. Names she dared not utter.

  Jacob? Are you there Jacob?

  The raft shattered like a broken vow beneath the log’s blind implacable thrust. She saw another river, another woman and another time. In the storybook of memory she felt the ropes, tough and twisted, cutting livid tattoos into her flesh. She felt her body bound to the unforgiving dunking stool. She felt herself moving within another woman, feet dancing in midair, old Delta.

  Up, down, confess, confess.

  A hand like chilled iron clenched around her wrist while the raft and her belongings and her life drifted past, moving down to something cold and hungry that waited far below.

  She heard a voice, loud and distorted in the echo-echo of the water, (Lucas, is that you?), a woman’s voice, loud like thunder, shrieking LET-HER-GO.

  Up, down.

  She saw Lucas’s ship, the ship she had never seen and yet she knew it. She knew the creak and groan of each ice-locked member, threatening to give way. She knew there was death all about, pushing at each bulkhead, seeking some means of entry, of relief.

  She knew that as dark as death outside of the ship was, darker still was the darkness of the belly, hidden deep below. She felt cold bitter hands and cold bitter flesh, cold upon each other, weeping cold bitter tears.

  Up, down, up.

  She felt herself being lifted and carried through the valley with his voice dark above her. His words dripped like sweet thick molasses, filling her up, drowning her and leaving her for dead by the warmth of a slow crackling fire that whispered ashy secrets and spoke of smoke and release.

  3

  Through the drown of darkness Lucas remembered a conversation, long ago and a lifetime away.

  “We must go,” he’d said to Tamsen.

  “But why?” she’d asked.

  “My father….”

  “Your father is dead.”

  “The townsfolk?”

  “People will talk but their memories are short. Give them time. They’ll forget the shame that has passed.”

  She sounded so confident.

  So sure.

  Had he ever listened?

  “We carry the cross of shame,” he told her. “Some memories will never die.”

  “Are you so certain?” she’d asked.

  “We must go,” he’d replied. “There can be no alternative.”

  And so they left.

  4

  “Are you going to sleep forever?” a voice graveled close as death to Lucas’s ear.

  Lucas raised himself up. He opened his eyes, attempting to clear his vision with several great sandy blinks. He shook his head and groaned aloud.

  The other man kept talking, far too loudly. “Alive, by God, alive. I yanked two fish from Lady River’s arms today.”

  Lucas remembered a strong hand grasping his. The hand of the Lord, he’d thought, raising him up onto Jordan’s rocky shore. Then a voice, strong and deep, I have you. From there he began a blissful descent into oblivion, blacking out while barely halfway on to the shore.

  “Can you sit? Can you speak?” the voice again, loud but farther away as if the speaker had straightened up. “Holy Christ man, are you helpless?”

  Lucas winced as much at the blasphemy as his discomfort. He felt cargo shifting within the hold of his skull. He touched his cheek, found a sticky wetness and reflexively touched his fingers to his lips. He tasted blood and spat it out as if it were a poison.

  “Tastes good, don’t it? I had to drag you out and you cut your cheek upon the wood. You and that woman were too damned heavy to lift but there was no way in Hell I could make you let go of her hand.”

  Lucas’s right hand squeezed reflexively upon thin air, cramping slightly with the effort. “Tamsen! Is she…?”

  “The woman? Sure, she is fine. She’s just taken on a little river water. I guess she swallowed when she should have spat. How the hell did that rope get around her anyway? She’s up with Jezebel now, in the cabin, drying off.”

  Lucas’s eyes focused upon a large blackened pair of boots – the left solidly planted, the right cocked upon its heel. A large cross was carved into the boot’s wooden sole. Lucas coughed violently, both to clear his lungs and to conceal his shock. His efforts at diplomacy sadly failed.

  “I am no godsman, if that’s what you think,” The strange man said. “I put the cross down there to walk upon, grinding it into the dirt wherever I go.”

  Lucas raised his eyes. From his perspective the stranger seemed huge, a barrel of a man as tall as a tree, coarsely featured and roughly hewn. His heavy arms crossed about his trunk in a manner that spoke of a hunter’s patience. A scraggly beard played about his cheeks like a forgotten smile and a savage scar furrowed a path down and across his left cheek.

  The stranger grinned fiercely, exposing a set of huge yellow teeth that contrasted sharply with his darkling features. He bore a strong hint of mulatto. One of Cain’s own, Lucas’s father would have said.

  The stranger wouldn’t stop talking.

  “A couple of sheep came ashore. One was dead. I saw a couple of crates as well. I’ll send the boy to look but the rest is gone for sure. Lady River don’t give back much, once she’s took.”

  “You got my thanks, sir. And my hand as well,” Lucas said.

  He raised his arm, surprised at the effort it took. The dark man’s grasp swallowed Lucas’s – a working man’s palm; thickened and horny with calluses and as dry as a piece of sun-bleached driftwood.

  “Call me Duvall, Jonah Duvall, for I am no man’s sir.” He gave Lucas a snaggle-toothed grin. “Maybe I ought to call you Jonah or Lazarus, the way you rose up from the deep.”

  “Moses would be just as apt, for he too was raised from the river but Lucas Sawyer is my given name.”

  Duvall nodded and tightened his grip. When Lucas realized the man meant to raise him to his feet he put as much effort into the act as he could manage. A wave of blackness washed over him. His knees turned to water but Duvall held him easily.

  “I think, Lucas Sawyer, we had best take this easy and slow.”

  Lucas nodded weakly and stood, leaning against Duvall like a man against a mast. Duvall wasn’t as tall as Lucas had thought. The man was a good hand and a half shorter than Lucas but built as sturdy as an oaken stump. Hesitantly, like two drunkards tottering home, they made their way along a twisted trail, back-tracking the ramble of a tributary creek branching down into the Greensnake below.

  Lucas saw the cabin from the top of a small ridge.

  The smoke caught his eye, a thin trail slithering from the gullet of a blackened mud-stick chimney. The building, like its owner, was a low, squatty thing. The only aperture was a door, hanging halfway open like the jaw of an old man, fallen asleep over evening conversation.

  “Come on,” Duvall said. “It’s cold outside today. Not summer yet, not yet at all. I’ve got a fire inside, nice and hot, hey?”

  A small goat pen sprouted from the cabin’s left side and within the pen’s confines Lucas spotted one of his sheep standing stock still while a largish billy goat mounted from behind. He hoped she was enjoying herself.

  “Is that my sheep?”r />
  “One of them,” Duvall replied.

  “Thank God the goat’s seed will not take hold,” Lucas noted.

  “God has nothing to do with the making of the two-back beast,” Duvall said. “Seed will root in the damndest of fields.”

  In the far corner of the pen Lucas noticed a second sheep trembling noticeably from the cold or the wet. Beyond the pen, close enough for the easy transport of dung, a shapeless patch of garden sprawled.

  To the right of the doorway a young man squatted in the dirt, working industriously at some task Lucas couldn’t see. A black dog of undeterminable pedigree sat beside the boy, its long red tongue lolling patiently.

  “I saved two of the sheep,” Duvall said. “They washed up, or maybe swam. Can sheep swim? The third one sure couldn’t. He floated in wrong side up. At least there’s mutton.”

  “Yes, there’s mutton,” Lucas answered dully, not quite grasping what the man was talking about.

  Then he realized the boy was stringing up one of his sheep; the younger one with the blackish spot about its right eye. He moved closer. The boy hauled on a line hung over a convenient peg jutted high up the wall.

  Lucas stared at the young man’s back, bent with effort, his shirttail loosened several inches above the belt line to expose a grimy patch of bare skin, slicked with sweat. He thought of Peter and he tried hard to keep his eyes from resting upon that patch.

  “Up boy,” Duvall commanded. “Get it up there.”

  In a half a heartbeat the sheep dangled several feet above the ground. The boy tied the line off and straightened upright. Lucas leaned against the roughened logs of the wall, sudden weakness swimming over him. The boy continued to work.

  Lucas feared to break the silence that hung about the three of them, as chill and as heavy as the gunpowder clouds hanging overhead. A bit of sun broke through, warming Lucas in the winter-like chill. Sunlight glinted on the blade of a clasp knife the boy pulled from his trousers. The reflected light danced across the bits of reluctant down-sprouted upon the man-child’s face.

  The boy was a savage, an Indian. This puzzled Lucas. As far as he knew, most red men lacked the capacity for growing facial hair.

  The blade was keen, sliding with a wet hiss through the belly of the hanging sheep. Entrails sprung free like a bundle of wet red snakes. The young boy neatly snared them, dropping them into a waiting wooden tub. The bright red blood flew unheeded, spattering upon the heavily stained wooden wall, spilling to the dirt. The hound lapped up what it could.

  Lucas’s legs buckled. He began a second slow tumble into the darkness. The last thing he remembered was barking his shin upon the door frame as he fell, tearing the trouser fabric and leaving the memory of his flesh imbedded in the hungry fibers of wood.

  Chapter Two

  For the better part of an eternity the woman lay drowning in her own sweat. The fire’s breath was hot and close, the soaked garments hung nearby only added to the miasma that lay close about her. She lay in an ill-cured skin that stank of death. The man had wrapped her like he was bundling a present. She drew the hide close to her naked skin. It was warm and it covered her.

  She lay there, baking by the fire the man had laid.

  Duvall. He’d called himself Duvall in a deep harsh voice as abrasive as river gravel. Her name hadn’t yet come back to her. It lay somewhere beneath the winding murky depths of the river where she’d died.

  Died?

  No, no dead. Not yet.

  Not quite.

  She stared blindly into the fire, watching the flame’s crimson tongue lapping the dead wood. She could see her name lurking there within the flame’s infernal heart and then all at once she remembered.

  Her name was Tamsen.

  A large black beetle crawled on her ankle and slowly up her leg. She didn’t feel it until the beetle had crawled up her back, over her neck and into her open mouth. She spat the bug into the fire. The carcass hissed for a single bright moment and then popped like a resin-ripe pine knot.

  There were others in the cabin. A woman and a young boy sat sitting and watching her, saying nothing. The woman, large and ancient, was heavy with child. She was a savage by the looks of her and the boy her son. Tamsen envied the woman’s blatant fertility, wishing it upon herself in place of the empty cradle God gave her for a womb.

  The woman was naked save for the rotting blanket that clung to her flesh. Her heavy dugs lay exposed, ripely swollen with milk, flattened out upon her chest like a pair of beached jellyfish. A drop of the fluid dangled from one of her darkened nipples like a bit of clouded dew. The young boy lay beside her, stretched upon the bare ground, occasionally reaching upwards to draw nourishment from his mother, if mother she was. Another part of Tamsen’s mind guessed the boy to be about thirteen years of age.

  The mother spoke to the boy, both in gesture and in a tongue that fell strangely upon Tamsen’s ears. He nodded, drawing another slow swallow from her breast. She shivered and parted her lips like a dying fish. He arose and went outside, where Tamsen heard him working at some unseen task.

  Tamsen dragged herself closer to the fire, trying to keep as much distance as possible between her and the savage.

  A body fell into the cabin, impacting upon the earthen floor like a heavy sack of seed. The body was that of a man. Tamsen might have known him once but she was uncertain of his identity. That too lay drowned far beneath the swollen river.

  Duvall entered from behind the fallen man, his thickish shoulders seeming to expand as they filled the doorway. In the flicker of the firelight he seemed to swell as if he drew stature from the darkness and would stretch the cabin walls into something that better suited his needs.

  “Tend his wounds, woman,” he ordered. “And dress yourself. We got company.”

  The old squaw rose, allowing her blanket to fall. She stood, staring down at Tamsen along the high pitched ridge of her nose. Tamsen looked away in awe of this woman and her obvious fecundity. The woman paid no heed. With a roll of her hips she wriggled into a dirty sackcloth dress.

  She brought a basinful of water to the man upon the floor, either unconscious or dead. No, not dead. Not yet. Tamsen watched his chest rise and fall. The savage bathed his face. She removed his wet clothing. Tamsen felt a strange pang of jealousy at this familiarity but said nothing.

  “We should eat,” Duvall said, turning to the fireplace where a large iron cauldron hung. He ladled generous portions of stew into heavy wooden bowls. The boy reappeared for his helping and just as quickly disappeared. The savage took her serving into the shadows, squatting upon her haunches beside the unconscious man, loudly sucking up her bowlful. Duvall carried two more bowls over to Tamsen, who sat watching from the floor.

  “You rivered far,” he said. “And you’re hungry.”

  Both were true.

  “Let’s eat,” he said.

  The stew was greasy, thickened with coarse flour, chunked with potato and knots of stringy unknown flesh. She ate silently, furtively, as if her hunger were something to be ashamed of.

  Duvall dangled a choice bit of meat before her lips. She accepted the offering wordlessly. The stew was bitter but it gave her a measure of strength. It was warm, although the warmth didn’t linger.

  Duvall ate slowly, grinding each bit of flesh with infinite patience, never taking his gaze off her form. She stared in fascination, spellbound by a bead of sweat slowly crawling along the man’s great brow, caressing each craggy furrow with its salty touch. She blinked in empathetic pain as the sweat slid into the corner of his left eye.

  He didn’t blink, continuing to chew thoughtfully upon a particularly gristled morsel of flesh. A large black rook landed upon his shoulder, having boldly flown in from the outside. Duvall chuckled softly deep within his throat. He crooked the corner of a grin towards his black feathered guest.

  “Are you dressed, woman?” he repeated, not bothering to look into the shadows where the squaw lay. “I told you we had company.”

  The
old squaw giggled in a manner unsuited to her massive proportions. She finished her meal and drew the ragged trade blanket over herself and the fallen man. She remained silent, making furtive rooting movements beneath the blanket’s tattered camouflage.

  Duvall gave his full attention to the bird upon his shoulder. With an artful movement he slid the too-tough bit of meat from between his lips. He dangled it before the bird, oblivious to its great hooked beak. The rook considered the offering for a moment before snatching it.

  Duvall was quicker. His raised hand closed about the bird’s outstretched neck. Tamsen stared in horror as the bird dragged its scimitared beak into the fleshy web between Duvall’s thumb and index finger, carving a gory furrow which rapidly filled with blood. Her mouth ovaled in shock as the bright crimson dripped down the length of Duvall’s outstretched arm, flowing like slow sap from the limb of a tree.

  Before the bird could inflict further damage, Duvall’s other hand snaked about, twisting and snapping the bird’s neck like a dried out twig. He cast the bird’s carcass up and over his shoulder to the floor. The squaw crawled from her blanket to retrieve it.

  “Cook me a pie for tomorrow but use no salt mind you,” he ordered. “We’ll have it for supper. Mutton and crow, by the blessed bark we’ll feast.”

  The old squaw rolled her eyes and made great rude smacking sounds with her tongue on her lips. She busied herself at a rude sort of a table, plucking the bird, hacking at it with a large hunting knife. After a while the boy brought the sheep meat in and dumped it in to a tub of water to soak the blood out of it.

  Supper was a silent affair. Outside the cabin, patient night fell upon the valley. Duvall rose from his meal and circled about the room, counterclockwise, in a peculiar hopping step. His eyes fixed squarely upon Tamsen’s, holding her gaze as a great black snake holds a sparrow’s eyes. His booted feet resounded like muted drums upon the hard packed earth. He chuffed great rhythmic exhalations, providing his own rhythm and backbeat. He shuffled and swayed, coming to a halt directly before Tamsen.

  He stood poised over her like a falcon before the stoop. For the briefest of instances she thought he planned to take her and lie with her in plain sight of the boy and the squaw who now bracketed the fallen man’s form like a pair of unwholesome bookends. She was unsure how she felt about any of this.