The White Oak (2 page)

It was a mistake to bury him under the tree. My mistake. I knew better than anyone else how close the caves were to the White Oak. I tried to talk them out of it. Cora had seen the sinkholes and had been in the caverns with me. She knew how unstable the ground was. But there was no way to convince her, or my grandmother. They loved that tree.

It had been dead as long as anyone could remember. I’d never seen a leaf on it. The bark had fallen off long ago and the trunk and branches were white, like driftwood. I called it the ghost tree, but Cora insisted that it wasn’t dead, and that with the right methods she could bring it back to life.

I dug the grave myself. It was my way of trying to keep them safe, but I didn’t anticipate the feelings it would stir up: anger, frustration, guilt—because I’d wished him dead so many times. Cora must have sensed how I was feeling. She insisted on digging with me, silently. Cora isn’t chatty. That’s one of the things I love about her.

My shovel hit what I thought was a rock, but when I tried to pry it out of the ground, I realized I’d hit a tree root. The shovel had made a deep cut and sap was oozing out. Cora rushed over to inspect it. She crouched next to it, her hand on the wound, her white dress reflecting the moonlight like the tree’s pale trunk. There was life in that ancient oak, just as Cora had always insisted.

Just then, the ground creaked and shifted slightly. “We should get out of here,” I said, climbing out of the grave, but Cora wasn’t listening. She was staring at the bleeding root with a ferocious intensity that made me shiver. “He doesn’t deserve this, Cora,” I said, thinking of what we were doing for my father, burying him under this tree and putting ourselves at risk.

“Can you hear that?” she whispered. A moan was rising from the damp earth.

“What is it?” I asked, with a sense of foreboding. Local legend had it that the White Oak was enchanted, that it was a doorway to the underworld. Cora and I were the only ones in the family who believed it.

She climbed out of the grave and sat down next to me. “Spirits,” she whispered, as we both listened intently. The sound was low and hollow, like breath blown across the rim of a glass bottle.

“Is it Redd?” I asked.

Cora shook her head. “It’s not Dad,” she said, lost in thought. The wind lifted her long black hair. As she gazed into the earth her dark eyes glittered. “I think it’s the ghosts Dad has to reckon with. I think the tree is bringing them up,” Cora said. “Grandfather is probably one of them.”

“And Mom,” I added, staring into the grave. When mother disappeared three years ago, no one in the family did anything. Grandmother, Grandfather, Cora, and Redd acted as if nothing was wrong, as if she’d never existed. I was the one who called the police to report her missing. The cops investigated for a few months but couldn’t turn up any leads.

“She must have run away,” I heard one of them say to another. The cop nodded as though the whole thing was obvious.

“She didn’t,” I said, and the officer turned to me.

“What do you know about it, kid? What happened to her?” At that moment, I wanted to tell them about all the times my dad had hit her, and me, but my dad would deny it and I had no way to prove it. Even if I could get the cops to believe me, what were they going to do about it? They needed evidence and I didn’t have it.

“Did you check the basement and the barn?” I said, hoping they might have found something I’d missed.

“We checked everything,” the cop said. “No sign of her.” They concluded that Blanche had left of her own free will and closed the case, but I still think Redd might have killed her.

“Mom quit on us,” Cora said bitterly, her shoulders hunched and her hands clenched into fists. I instantly regretted mentioning our mother. Cora didn’t get along with her. “She abandoned us long before she left,” Cora continued. This was true. Mom had a way of zoning out or sneaking away during Redd’s rampages, leaving us to deal with them ourselves. Once or twice she intervened on my behalf, but never for Cora.

Cora’s whole body had gone stiff with anger. Just the thought of our mother sent her to another place. “I don’t understand how she could be so cowardly. How could she not care about her own kids?” I knew what Cora meant, but I wondered why she focused so much on Blanche’s failings and not Redd’s. When I asked her once she said, “You just can’t expect anything of him. He’s like an animal, but Mom could be different.” I held out the same hope for our mother, and I tried to protect her, hoping that if she felt safe, she’d be different.

I watched Cora’s face as she struggled with motherlessness, ameliorating her sadness with rage. I put my arm around her tense shoulders and picked leaves out of her tangled hair. She leaned against me and heaved a sigh.

“We’re orphans now,” she said, as the music of the ghosts surrounded us.

“We’ve been orphans since mother left,” I said. “But now it’s official.”

Cora stared intently into the grave. “It feels like we’ve always been on our own,” she said. I squeezed her shoulder and wondered why I wasn’t sad, or angry, or scared—shouldn’t I be? The lonely song of the spirits drifted through the air, but instead of loss I felt a sense of anticipation.

When I come to, I’m lying on a black gravel beach. Water pools next to my cheek. I wonder if I can move. Maybe my neck has snapped and I’m paralyzed, or maybe I’m dead. I stare, unblinking, across the sharp gravel. How did I get here? When my head hit the rock, I lost consciousness, so how did I survive the waterfall? How did I make it to the shore? I’m barefoot, soaked to the skin, cut, bruised, and dazed from the impact, but miraculously I’m still alive. I flex my cold, stiff fingers, relieved that I can move.

This is the underground river Lucas and I heard but never found when we explored the caves. I think back on our adventures; in each cavern we heard rushing water. At times it sounded so loud and so near that we were sure the tunnel would flood at any moment, but we never found the river. It was as though we were crawling through the ever-narrowing twists of a nautilus shell in which the memory of the ocean echoes through the empty chambers.

“Cora, get up,” I hear the voice whisper. “You must move to higher ground.” I lift my head and try to sit up; pain shoots through my battered, half-frozen body. Groggy and shaken, I try to stand as the voice continues to encourage me. “Cora, stand up,” it whispers. I close my eyes to feel its soothing effect, but the image that appears is Lucas buried alive in the sinkhole. I squeeze my eyes shut tighter as if to banish the sight. He can’t be dead, I tell myself.

Water spills onto the shore. “Stand up!” The voice is suddenly yelling. I’ve never heard it yell before. “Get up, Cora. Get off the ground. Get away from the river!” I struggle to stand. Every muscle is stiff; movement is painful. When I try to walk, the weight of my numb, unresponsive limbs makes me stumble. The river is rushing by in a torrent.

“Run!” the voice screams. Alarmed by its panic, I stumble forward as best I can, making my way upstream along the riverbank. “Not that way,” it scolds, “away from the river—get away from the river!” Turning quickly, I make my way inland, as the water splashes over the banks and washes up behind me. “Don’t look back,” the voice warns, “and don’t slow down.” I run carefully across the sharp gravel, trying to minimize the damage to my feet. Up ahead is a wall of rock and mortar about twenty feet high. It looks as if it was built to hold the water back. “Climb the levee,” the voice insists. “You have to get off the floodplain. The water is coming after you.”

I stumble a bit when I hear this last warning. “What do you the mean, the water is coming after me?” I ask. As if in answer, the dark river curls around my feet and tugs at my ankles in an eerily deliberate way. I run to the levee and start to climb.

It’s easy for me to scale the levee because it’s built of large boulders that are dry and free of mold. There’s no evidence that the river has ever reached this height, so I wonder why there is a levee at all. When I’ve climbed halfway up, I turn around to get a look at the river. It’s been rising, but as I watch, it suddenly recedes, and the floodplain empties out.

Thinking the danger is over, I slacken my pace. Then I hear the voice begging, “Quickly, Cora—you must get to the top now or be drowned.” I hear a roar and look back over my shoulder. “Don’t look!” the voice warns, but it’s too late. I am frozen in place and cannot stop staring at the tsunami that has gathered up out of the river and is coming toward me. It’s spectacular and terrifying, and it takes all my willpower to look away and keep climbing. I reach the top of the levee just as the water hits, pulling the rock I’m standing on from under me. I fall forward and claw the ground, crawling away from the edge as the water tries to pull me in. When I am safely on dry land, I lie still for a moment to catch my breath. The dirt is powdery and pitch-black. It’s not soil; it’s ash. “Where am I?” I whisper, hoping the voice is still with me. I notice that I’m shaking a little. My hands close into fists as I try to pull myself together.

I stand up and look around. I’m on a flat, featureless plain carpeted with volcanic ash. It’s twilight up here, and I can see all along the wall, which extends for miles. The water has risen to the top of the levee. I stand very close to the edge, catching my breath and marveling at the way the waves flow toward me even though the river’s current should be pulling them downstream. The crests look like claws. Droplets of water fall from the breakers and evaporate on the black ground with a hiss and a puff of steam. As I stand there, I can almost feel the frustration of the water. I watch in amazement as the breakers gather together and build into one tall wave shaped like a crooked arm reaching out for me. I stumble backward as it arches up, poised to crash down and pull me back into the river, but as soon as the wave passes over the levee, the very instant it crosses into the territory of black ash, it turns into vapor. After this final attempt, the water seems to give up. It becomes smooth as a mirror and slides down the levee, off the floodplain, and back into the riverbed.

To calm myself, I close my eyes for a moment and take deep breaths. The river came after me, as the voice said it would, but how could it? A river doesn’t have consciousness. It can’t decide to drown someone, can it? I start to feel overwhelmed by the strangeness of the place. “Hello,” I call out. “River, can you talk? Who was speaking to me before?” No answer comes. “River!” I yell again, this time angry. “Why were you trying to kill me?” The river flows along placidly, ignoring my questions. I stare at it for a long time.

I have no idea where I am, and it’s impossible to go back the way I came. I want the voice to tell me what to do next, but it’s not talking. Everything has gone quiet; even the river moves soundlessly. “Where am I?” I yell, to test my ears, half hoping there is someone within shouting distance. I get no response, but the sound of my own voice is reassuring.

Not knowing what else to do, I turn around and start walking, across the barren landscape toward the slate-colored horizon. The ashen floor is velvet smooth. At first I’m grateful for the softness underfoot, but slowly I begin to notice something strange. The ground is completely dead.

I can sense whether topsoil is fertile just by touching it. It’s a talent Grandfather helped me develop, and my garden has always been healthy because of it. When I sift dirt with my fingers or toes, and examine its color and taste, I can figure out exactly what it needs. But I’ve never felt anything like this before, every vibration of life extinguished and nothing remaining but chalky dust. No wonder it’s a wasteland, not a single living thing in sight. As I walk, plumes of fine powder swirl around my legs like smoke. The black ash sticks to my wet feet. When water falls from my dripping hair, the droplets lie on top of the soot. Unabsorbed, they roll in the volcanic powder like miniature crystal globes.

The rocky cavern ceiling rises precipitously until it disappears entirely. I am walking in open air, under a pale, moonless sky. The volcanic desert is dimly lit by a gray twilight that emanates from the horizon. There are no stars, but in the distance a cluster of electric blue lights glimmers just above the ground. As I get closer, I see a grid of white lines drawn like parking-lot dividers on the flat surface. Inside the lines, the blue lights dart back and forth like fireflies trapped in a jar. They bump up against the edges of their designated spaces but are unable to leave them.

The transparent creatures look like gas flames but are the size of people. As they shift shape, human features appear, then pass away like shadows. It’s as though the vaporous bodies are unable to sustain a real identity for more than a few seconds. The color of the flames flickers on and off as well. Sometimes their light glows fluorescent blue, but most of the time they are pale white and colorless, like everything else in this landscape.

As I walk past the parking spaces, I notice that each one has a different pattern, a maze, etched into the ground. The flames trace them over and over. Their movements are choppy as they dance around the objects that litter their cells. They buzz and crackle, muttering to themselves as they follow their well-worn circuits. Some argue, others weep, but most are silent, staring out across the ashy plain as they submit to their routine. A dreary mood hangs over the place, infusing everything with a sense of loneliness and futility. I try to push the desperate feelings away, but there is no way to keep them out. They seep into me like the chill in the air or the dampness in my dress. “Stay calm,” I whisper, trying to tamp down the nervous energy that is flickering inside me.