Circle View (7 page)

She ducks to go inside the trees, the canopy they make above her thick as brocade, their greeny tops woven by the honeysuckle and kudzu that have taken over her yard. All around her are the crabapples, each with a small, perfect bite cored out and then discarded, the birds not liking bitter fruit. The last of the kerosene in the white bucket, the last inch black with dead insects, she pours out in tiny rivers around the roots of the five biggest trees, the ones Garrett planted first, before they pushed him to put the pistol in his mouth. Drips of kerosene fall on her yellowed feet, soreness growing in her joints. Red ants scatter in the path of the tiny rivers. The air under the trees is cooler, like a room with the shades drawn.

The wind thickens and she hears the trees lift their voices, a church choir humming in the rustle of leaves, children singing in far off rooms. She still holds in her mouth like hard candy the best song she knows…
Say nightie-night and kiss me
…. She shakes as she pulls the matches from her pocket and opens the box. The leaves of the trees shine in the dim light with the oil of the kerosene, the smell heavy in her nose.

The match flares in a whip of light and there is Garrett home from Japan and smoking cigarettes, Lucky Strikes folded in the arm of his T-shirt. Something new he picked up, the way he picked up not sleeping at night, staying awake to watch after the darkness that surrounded the house, sitting on a stack of newspapers in the middle of the dark kitchen with a wet towel on his neck, his pistol held in his lap. This new Garrett who came home, his arm and chest muscles hardened, his skinny sideburns graying, his jokes all wiped away like chalk from a slate. Nights in bed when he stayed soft in her hand.

The match burns down toward her fingers, her swollen joints, and she tosses it, the whispers of the trees finding their way in through the end of her song.
He is, he is
. She recalls a time when she could not hear the voices of the trees, the year the reporters came, the TV men with their cameras and microphones. Somewhere in the house is the article from
Southern Travel
magazine, “The Singing Trees of Byleah, Georgia.” She thinks of the Catholics from Atlanta arriving in church vans to hear in the sound of the trees the voice of the Holy Mother, the voice of miracle. Even now Etta sees their hopeful pilgrim faces, the withered priests and nuns, the pink-eared boys, girls in plaid skirts. All grown now, she thinks, the old ones dead.

Flames rise at the base of the biggest tree, climb the trunk quick as a squirrel, heating her long, iron-gray hair. She walks out of the canopy of trees into bright sunlight, back toward the house, the trees' sound like the murmur of a crowd, voices at a train station.
Where is it?
she hears them whisper, their words always nonsense to her, like street corner drunks, arm in arm.

On her porch she turns back to them, hearing the crackle of green wood. “Why crabapple?” she asks. Her face is wet, her hands oily with kerosene. For a time the trees gave back to Garrett what it was he lost in the Pacific, brought him out of himself for the six years the trees grew before bearing fruit. His plan was to turn their acre of side yard into a tiny orchard of fifty trees. The saplings he planted on weekend mornings in October, the days edging toward cold, Garrett kneeling in the grass, smoking while he worked, digging out the dirt with a wooden spoon from her kitchen, tamping it down with his fist while ashes shook across his shirtcuffs. When he finished he stood behind her on the porch and curved his dirty hands around her waist.

“McIntosh apples, Etta,” he said. “Right in our own yard. You ought to learn how to make apple butter and apple jelly and apple fritters.” He spoke quickly. “Think apples,” he said.

“Right now?” she asked. He laughed like he'd just remembered how, and rubbed the fronts of her thighs through her dress. “Give yourself about six years,” he spoke against her neck, “then we'll have fruit.”

Six years till the fruit, she thinks, pulling her housecoat closed. Like he set an alarm clock. And the echo of the pistol's slap still rebounds through these low hills.

Etta scrubs her hands with borax to take away the kerosene. She moves toward the phone to dial Garrett Junior, away somewhere in Chicago or St. Louis. She remembers Garrett telling her once during a phone call from Japan that the words he said took over a minute to travel around the world. That by the time she heard them he was saying something else she hadn't yet heard. That's how it has been since he died, like she is waiting for the next thing he said to get around to her.

She lifts the lace priscilla curtains to see the blaze, to see that it is not nearing the house, if the neighbors have gathered around. In her yard stands a teenage boy hitting the fire with his flannel shirt, stomping it with his boots. A pitiful fire of brown smoke growing in curls away from the shag grass under the trees. The trunks of the trees are only scorched. With her knuckle Etta raps on the windowpane.

“You stop that,” she shouts, her words fogging the glass. The boy wears sunglasses on a string around his neck, a red bandanna tied to his thigh. He chews on a plastic drinking straw and looks up to wave.

“You let that fire go,” she says, and raps with her knuckle until the windowpane is shot with cracks. The boy lifts tiny headphones from around his neck to his ears and waves again, then gives an okay sign with his fingers. The fire now is only thin smoke, like steam from a kettle. The boy has a red pushcart standing parked in the road, piled up with a lawn mower, hoes and rakes, post hole diggers, hedge clippers, all thrown together and tangled around with garden hoses. He takes a shovel from the cart and tosses gravel from her driveway to cover the last of the fire. Then he gathers his tools on the cart, his head bobbing with the music she can't hear. On the back of his cart is pasted a bumper sticker dirty with oil, but even this far away she can read what it says: MAKE A FRIEND, BUY A HOT TUB, with a picture of two alligators relaxing in a tub. Garrett always said how her gray eyes were sharp as baling hooks. She thinks of a time in the Chrysler on the road toward Biloxi when out the window, twenty feet off, she saw two dragonflies hooked, flying together blue and silver, keeping up with the car while she tried to point them out to Garrett. Now she watches the boy toss his shovel back among the pile of tools and push off down the road with his cart, one of its wheels wobbly on the packed dirt. She can see the sound it would make.

“That's
my
fire,” she says after him. “I got a good mind to call the police.” She follows him with her eye until he disappears back up on the main road.

Later she lifts the lace curtains again and finds the trees in the evening light, swaying with the wind. The five biggest are black up their trunks in shapes like fingernails. She thinks of the couple who was married inside the trees and wonders how they get along now, how their kids turned out. And she thinks of Madam Velda, who stood in the trees wearing her blond wig, her eyes closed, the police with her because she had promised the trees would tell her where a missing boy was buried, and how later the police had found him in a swamp grave clutching a basketball, his legs gone. Of scientists from the state school on the nightly news, explaining the voices in the trees as “audiological illusion,” a phrase she held onto and used for herself, not knowing its meaning. Of Garrett dying before the trees found their voice, before the kudzu and honeysuckle wove a room to occupy the side yard. She thinks of his hands yellow with the crabapples crushed in his fists.

For weeks Garrett had watched the blossoms and then the fruit, thinking something had discolored and stunted them, some disease or blight. He'd already built the press for apple cider and apple butter, bolted it together from her dining room table and the parts off old lawn mowers and bicycles. He bought the peacocks and let them roost in the trees—to eat the bark beetles, he told her, when she knew he really bought them for her. When they cried at night he came to bed and slept, as if their sounds of helplessness gave him peace. He bought farmer clothes from Sears & Roebuck and a kit with which to make apple wine, and he gave up looking for the pistol she'd hidden, the way a child will suddenly give up needing a stuffed bear.

Etta walks out at night into the deeper dark of the trees, the air ripe with humidity and the sound of frogs. When the frogs move under her feet she imagines the crabapples alive, hopping around the yard, struggling to return to the tree, to their blossoms, to fold themselves into their becoming and work back out again as the McIntoshes they were meant to be—juice-filled, shiny-red, weighing down the branches and Garrett there in his Sears & Roebuck clothes to harvest them.

A wind starts with the smell of storm in it and quiets the frogs. The trees say
he is, he isn't
, arguing some point among themselves. Then come the voices and no sense in them, like ten radios playing in ten different rooms.
There's more
, she hears, pushing down in herself the urge to ask anything of them, like the Atlanta Catholics asking guidance, asking grace. She shouted through her screen door at the ones that came: “Those're
trees
you're talking to. No account crabapple trees, trash trees.” She became a local character, filler on the wire services, wanting nothing but for everyone to leave her yard. Her picture ran in the back
of Life
magazine; “Miz Cayce,” as they called her, smirking at the crabapples through her shiny glasses, quoted as saying “I don't see what all the fuss is about,” words she never said, words that only sounded like what someone who looked like her in the grainy picture, someone named Miz Cayce, would say. The neighbors dropped off extra copies for her to keep, which she burned in the fireplace, praying with the gassy green flames curling the shiny pages that she was not really how she saw herself—as the punchline to the joke that had put the gun in Garrett's mouth.

If the trees would only tell her something she could understand. She listens, not singing her song, the one that comes without her thinking it when she steps outside. She touches the trees, the smooth bark. She is listening now, her song put aside, hoping to hear the name of the man who sold to Garrett for a dollar and a half each the trash trees he must have dug up out of some roadside ditch. Garrett stands in the narrow shade of the man's truck while she is home trying again to hide his pistol. Garrett has stopped to buy apples, a sack to eat and a sack to cook, and is eating one he has paid for, the juice drawing the chill of the October breeze to his chin. The man rests his foot on the truck gate, tips his hat (he is wearing one, she knows this, wrapping her arms around the tree, the bark pulling holes in the silk of her housecoat).
Ain't hard to grow ‘em
, he says. If the trees know anything, they know his name. Garrett nods and bites while she buries the gun in a shoebox of old letters under the bed and the man figures a price on trees that in six years will bear fruit even the birds won't eat. Garrett sees plans form, feels his mind reverse and begin to look forward to the time of apple pies and fresh cider and apple butter put up in Mason jars, and he takes out his money clip while she places a pair of shoes on top of the box of letters containing the gun on the floor beneath the bed. He loads the spindly saplings wrapped in burlap into the trunk of his Chrysler, already not needing the gun so much or the nights in the dark kitchen of the house. The gun's hid for good this time, she thinks, away from his not needing it for six years until the day came and he found it as if he'd known it was there all along.

She rubs the burnt part of the tree, feels the black rubbing off on her hand. The trees align their voices to ask,
Where?
—not so much a whisper this time as a moan, the wind stronger now. Always it's nonsense she hears, always these questions not tied to anything, like the ones asked by the reporters who came for those months when the trees first started up, when the boys in the neighborhood playing hide-and-seek first heard them and ran home to tell their mamas and daddies. For that whole first year she couldn't hear them, really
didn't
know what all the fuss was about, and just wanted everyone to leave her to Garrett's memory. Now the wind comes heavier and then the rain sounding in thumps on the roof of leaves and branches. She says “audi-ological illusion” out loud, the words empty, just something she says back to the trees. The thumps sound louder and mushy, a hailstorm outside, the ground inside the trees still dry.
Etta
, the trees whisper, then
Garrett
, twining their names like kudzu vines. She is scared, hearing the names, hearing them as clearly as words whispered over her shoulder when she sits in the church pew. She tries to find the words of her song but has mislaid them, the way she mislays potholders and letter openers. She notices she is cold and draws the housecoat tighter around her, the belt another thing long since lost. The balls of ice punch through the branches above her and make a short hop at her feet, as big as the crabapples, faintly blue in the dark. The rain finds its way in behind the hail and wets her, and she stands up next to the trunk of the tree to let it shield her. She remembers the peacocks shrilling in the lowest branches of the trees, their tails sweeping patterns in the dust at the base of the trunks.
Soon
, the trees say, and Etta finds her song and fills up her ears with it, lets her housecoat drag in the mush of rotted crabapples around her feet.

By morning she has dried off, sleeping on the porch. Waking, she laughs at herself: an old woman without enough sense to put herself to bed, without enough to come in out of the rain. After a while the boy comes along the narrow blacktop, smoking a cigarette, wearing his headphones and bandanna, pushing the cart loaded with a lawn mower and a red gas can sitting on top, his shoestrings tangled around his feet.

“Garrett, you tie up those strings right off before you crack your head,” Etta shouts, startled at the sound of her voice, how like someone else she sounds. The boy slows and looks at her, still walking. She thinks of Garrett Junior all grown in the city with its sirens over the phone, and this one just a boy yet, not war age even. Sleeping in wet clothes in the out-of-doors, not eating the food the county woman brings. She is cutting right through her good sense. When she waves, the boy pushes the cart into her drive. He is all in black, his T-shirt and dungarees, a hat turned around the wrong way on his head. Boys not knowing how to wear clothes proper! Garrett Junior is wearing his old wool suit, pulling at the starched collar while the preacher says his words over Garrett. The police are at the house, still trying to find fragments of bullet, shaking their heads over the peacocks in the absence of their cries while Etta cries at the graveside not feeling it, looking the way she is expected to look, as she will do for the
Life
photographer at a time still twelve years off from this graveside, a time of not-apples, she thinks, watching the boy crush out his cigarette away from the gas can, a time of not-cider, of not-Garrett. Garrett Junior turning away finally when the first shovelfuls fall on the copper and the old Negro men are talking baseball scores while they work, after he has seen her pay the preacher five dollars, and already in his mind are the seeds of his leaving—not to college or vo-tech as she and Garrett had always hoped, but away in the night seven years later in his daddy's car, its tires gone soft from parking so long. She never blamed him for leaving behind any of it, but he must have always thought she did. And now this boy the age he must have been then, that night he left or the day at the graveside tugging his collar in the suit that needed the sleeves let out a little. But everything runs together and she can't remember.