The Killing Tree (20 page)

“Still, Momma, I’d still rather be like you in that picture.”

“That’s because you’re just crazy. Waving around scissors. Ranting about some shadow that’s chasing you through the house,”
she said with a cruel laugh.

Della curled back up on the couch with her back to her momma. Her hands covered her head, like she was hiding.

Her momma stared at her back, and her ears listened to the silence. She listened to the sound of Della leaving her. Keys dropped
from her fingers as her mouth parted into an unheard gasp.

“Oh. Baby Della. I’m sorry. Momma’s sorry,” she whispered. She dropped to her knees by Della and laid her chest and arms over
her.

“Momma’s here. And it’s gonna be okay. Stay here, Della. Don’t you go away from Momma. Don’t you leave me too, Della.”

As they laid together like that I got up to go make some toast.

“See that?” her momma said when I handed her a piece of toast. “Mercy’s done made breakfast. You’ll feel better when you eat.
Come on, just a few bites for Momma.”

Della sat up and ate the toast.

“Momma?” Della said weakly.

“Yes baby?”

“All my pretty hair.”

“Now don’t you worry about that. Momma’s gonna fix you right up. I’ve got some new lipstick—Secret Crimson Crush, and some
new eyeshadow—Mountain Moss Green. By the time I get you fixed up, your eyes and mouth will be so gorgeous nobody will notice
your hair. Besides, I had been thinking you needed to try something new and short. All the magazines say short is what’s sexy
now. And all the movie stars got their heads nearly shaved. So you just give it a couple weeks, and I swear, Della, you’ll
be in style with the hottest, sexiest little hairdo.”

There was a knock at the door.

“Who is it?” her momma called out.

“Uh, ma’am? My name is Randy.”

Della’s hands started to shake.

“Who the hell is Randy?” Della’s momma whispered.

“C’mon, Della, let’s go back to your bedroom,” I said. “Don’t open the door.”

“You mean it’s that jerk from the Franklin?” her momma asked. I nodded my head as I grabbed Della’s hands and tried to pull
her up from the couch.

“I’ve got a thing or two to say to him,” her momma said, springing for the door.

“No!” I called out. But it was too late. The door was open and Della’s momma was a screaming, cursing, spitting woman. Randy
just stood there looking past her.

“Della,” he called. He hadn’t seen her yet.

“It’s okay, Momma,” Della said. “Why don’t you go out for a while.”

Her momma grabbed her keys and fled. Thankful for the chance to escape.

“Come in,” Della said. He stepped in, and stopped. He saw her, the gleam of her head. She took his breath.

“Della, what in the hell have you . . .” he began, but stopped. He stood there with a mouthful of words that wouldn’t be spoken.
Not to the bald woman that sat on the couch.

“Why are you here?” Della asked him.

“I just wanted to make sure you were okay.”

“I am.”

“You don’t look it.”

“Why did you come here? ’Cause you were afraid you’d killed me?”

“What? Of course not. Don’t talk like that, Della.”

“Then why are you here?” she said, her voice raising.

“I don’t know. I guess I wanted to apologize for ever . . . if I ever . . . led you to think that you and I . . . or that
me and my wife was . . .”

“That’s not why you came,” Della said, folding her hands to keep them from trembling.

“Soon as you’re feeling stronger I’d like to talk this out. Right now I just wanted to say that I’m sorry for ever making
you think—” he began.

“No,” she said, her voice angry. “You’re only sorry I wanted more than sex. And now you came here to make yourself seem right.
To make me understand why you did what you did. You came here to justify.”

“You think you’re blameless?” he said lowly. “I’m not saying I am. I know I’m not. But I’m just a man, and you know what you
are. You with your low-cut blouses and tight jeans. You come into my store and you prance around and offer it to me. And you
expect me to say no? ’Cause I got a wife at home? ’Cause I got a baby on the way? Truth is, you didn’t care whether I had
a wife or not. You gave it up without ever asking. You know what you do to men. And you like it. You do it on purpose, Della.
So don’t you sit there and act like it was all me. ’Cause we both know it wasn’t. We both know you wanted it and wouldn’t
stop ’til you got it, wife or not.”

“I guess it was the crazy whore in me,” Della whispered softly.

“You can’t help it,” he said, his voice softening a little. “You can’t stop it because you don’t know better. You ain’t ever
been taught right. I couldn’t resist your temptation and you couldn’t stop giving yourself away. You can’t help what you are,
I guess.”

“Go.”

“I’d like to talk to you sometime when you’re feeling stronger. I don’t want you to think I don’t care, I do.”

“Go,” she said.

“Maybe in the future we could talk this out and then you could see.”

“Leave,” she said. “Leave.” He walked out, shaking his head. I sat with her on the couch until her momma returned, and then
I went to her room to finally get some sleep. When I woke up, Della was watching TV while her momma and two men sat in the
kitchen passing around a joint.

“Let’s go outside,” I said to Della. “It’s nice out there tonight.”

She smiled and joined me at the door.

“That’s fine, girls. Me and the boys gonna stay inside where the fun’s at!” Her momma laughed.

We sat on the hood of her momma’s car. A car so dinged up it was hard to tell what its original body shape had been. She still
seemed sad, but calm.

“I see you gotta date,” I teased her.

She laughed. “Yep, it appears I do. A stoned forty-five-year-old man that can’t keep his eyes off my momma. Some date.”

“You look real good. I like your eyeshadow.”

“Thanks. You know he keeps looking at my head. Like when we talk or something. Most guys just stare at my boobs, but not him.
He just looks at my head, and I can see the disgust in his eyes. But you know what’s really funny? I kind of get a charge
out of it. Here this gross man came to my trailer looking for some loving for himself, and he don’t want it because of my
bald head.
He doesn’t want me!
All I have to do is just look at him, or touch it, just stick my hand up and start rubbing the baldness, and he looks like
he’s gonna get sick. Why, if I had my hair, I’d be beating him off with a stick! It’s a different feeling altogether, to be
unsexy. It almost feels powerful. I’m just Della. I ain’t a woman really, or a sex magician. Don’t know if I’ve ever been
just me. I had boobs by the time I was ten. And hips by the time I was eight. Men have always been after me. And now they
ain’t. I may keep it this way.”

“You’ve always been the standard for what’s sexy here in Crooktop. You wait, all the girls at the high school are gonna start
shaving their heads if you keep yours bald.” I laughed.

“You think they will?” She laughed too. “Wouldn’t that be wild? Men would have to learn to like it then, I guess. You gonna
go to church tomorrow?”

“I can’t go into town. Can’t risk seeing Father Heron.”

“Where you been? I looked for you at the diner and couldn’t find you.”

“Off with Trout,” I said, smiling. “We’re running off again on Monday.”

“What? Where to?”

“We been working the tomatoes at another camp. Now we’re leaving for the ocean. That’s why I come back to get you. I can’t
leave you behind.”

“So you’re leaving for good?”

“I have to. Father Heron found out about me and Trout. And I won’t let Father Heron kill him or me neither. So we’re running.”

“Maybe if you gave him a chance, Mercy. Maybe he’d come around to Trout.”

“He ever come around to you? You been my best friend for years now. He let you come to the house? Can I ever be honest and
tell him when we’re gonna hang out? No. I have to lie and say I’m working just to get to see you. And you ain’t a mater migrant.”

Della nodded her head slowly. “He’s a damn fool,” she whispered. “An old hateful bastard.”

I laughed. “If there’s one thing Father Heron would hate to be, it’s a bastard.”

“I can’t imagine you off this mountain,” she said. “It’s all you know.”

“I love him more than this mountain,” I whispered, remembering Mamma Rutha.
How can you leave your homeland?
her people had asked.
Because it’s easier to leave my home than it is my heart
.

“I love you more than this mountain too, Della. And I want to take you with me.”

She smiled, with tears in her eyes. “There ain’t nothing for me here anymore. If you’d asked me a few days ago, I wouldn’t
have been able to leave Randy. But I can now. I want to leave everything behind. That dirty trailer. My momma. That awful
shadow that chases me. I don’t want none of it anymore.”

“So you’ll come?” I asked.

“Yeah. I’ll come with you. When we leaving?”

“Early Monday morning. I’m meeting Trout by a stream. You can meet us by the river, in the old migrant camp.”

“I can’t believe we’re really gonna do it. We’re gonna leave this hellhole. After all our talk about one day escaping, we’re
gonna do it.”

“You bet we are.”

“What do you think Trout’s gonna say about my hair?”

“Same thing he always says about you,” I said, laughing. “ ‘That Della DeMar is one wild woman.’ ”

T
he hour before sunrise is an hour of tricks on the mountain. It may appear to be a cool October morning, filled with the whispers
of a coming winter, and turn out to be a hot Indian summer day. The black of night may fade into a cool purplish navy before
bursting into a warm butterscotch sky. It’s an hour of indecision. The first yawn and stretch of a new day, a Monday.

A bobwhite was awake. Singing his simple song to a sleepy world. Just three notes. Two the same, and then one a little higher.
Mamma Rutha said they were singing their names. Bob-by-White. I whistled it back to him. He answered, and waited for me to
repeat. Bob-by-White!

We played our game, singing to each other, as I walked down the valley. I looked up Crooktop, Mamma Rutha was out there somewhere.
Probably sleeping beneath a poplar tree. “Shhh,” she would have whispered to me if she had heard me singing ‘Bob-by-White.’
“Give the mountain some peace, some peace to draw its strength for a new day.” But I had too much strength myself to walk
quietly. I was taller than the mountain. Hotter than the coming sun. Happier than the song of the bobwhite. Because it was
Monday, the day of love.

I thought about him, walking up the mountain as I walked down. How he might already be there. Sitting on the rocks, looking
into the fire trout stream. “Don’t show nobody this place,” he had said. “It’s our secret place. Where the fire trout was
born.”

I had whispered vows of forever that night up on Thorny Ridge. And as I walked down the valley I was living them out.
Wherever you go, I’ll go.

When I was little, I never dreamed of my wedding the way that Della had. Della would cut clippings from magazines of flowers
and cakes and dresses. She had a whole shoe box stuffed with ideas. She wanted a princess dress. With lots of lace and pearls.
A long train that swept behind her. Flowers and flowers and flowers. Flowers everywhere. And her hair. Now that would be the
challenge. Highlighted, crimped, curled and fluffed, it would definitely be bridal hair. There would be an organist. A handbell
choir. A limo with champagne. Maybe even a honeymoon to the coast. I would be in the wedding of course. Wearing dusty rose,
the color she said I looked the best in. Her groom would be in a tux, looking like something out of a soap opera. With shiny
shoes and slicked-back hair. Della’s mom would be teary but composed. And everyone that didn’t like her would envy her, and
everyone that loved her would be
so proud.

My wedding had been different. A harvest midnight. A mountaintop for an altar. Moonlight for a veil. A gray tent with red
ropes for a honeymoon.
Oh, but the groom!
Just the thought of him had put white lilies in my hands, a wreath of baby’s breath in my hair, and white satin over my body.

I was close. My heart began to beat a searching rhythm, seeking its mate. My hands began to tremble, ever so slightly, knowing
that they would soon be covered by his. I pushed back the thick leaves. Breathing in the wet steam of the morning. I stumbled
over briars and pushed them back with my bare hands, never feeling the pain. I could see the rocks in the distance. The ones
that he had first held me on. My pace quickened, pushing me toward the stream.

“Trout?” I called out.

I was early. I had left while the mountain still slept, and he was still on his way. I sat down on the rocks and waited. I
smoothed my clothes and pulled my fingers through my messy hair. I used a small pebble to try and push back my cuticles. When
I had fixed myself as good as I was going to get, I looked around. Arched hickory and oak branches created a green cathedral
ceiling. The ground was covered by a lush moss carpet. All of it framed by stained glass as the first yellow rays of sun spilled
down on the silver stream. But where was my groom?

I waited until the dew was dry and the morning’s frisky creatures grew slow and lazy in the heat. Until my stomach began to
complain with hunger. Until the sun reached its peak. I kept my eye on the path that he would walk up.
Any minute
. When my feet grew numb from being dangled off rocks, I let them dangle as dead limbs. When my back knotted from a lack of
support, I just let the muscles twist and harden. I wasn’t moving without him. I told myself if I just waited long enough.
If I hoped hard enough. If I focused all of my energy, my very breath, on willing him there, it would happen.

As night fell, our secret place became nowhere. I was alone in the middle of nowhere.

But I was still waiting. Finally standing, my legs struggled to support new weight. Pacing. Back and forth in the moonlight.
I will wait forever
, I told myself.
Until I die from hunger, or sorrow. I will wait until he comes.