Robert Busby
Exa Claygardner hunched over the dutch oven behind their cabin and pled for the men harvesting corn in the hollow to dissolve from view into the stalks that wound the bend. She needed to steal off unnoticed, get the herb that would incapacitate her husband, Cyrus, and keep him from making the trip to Gum Pond in the morning. She figured to disguise the herb in the pot of mustard grits she had stewed now into the tomato-braised reduction of several squirrels. The squirrels she had trapped where the still hid in a shed disguised by foliage, dug into the far hill that defined their eight acres. A monument to the memory of her first two born.
She had borne Dob and Rufus before Leon. Then six years ago, starved and frustrated at the scant return cotton yielded at the gin in Gum Pond, only half of their acreage having been carved from the red clay ridge into soil favorable enough for farming, Cyrus had declared he was making the switch to corn, figuring to set up distilling. The next morning Cyrus rode Dob and Rufus to Gum Pond and returned them to Exa two days later as the copper-lined kettle and coiled worm and the wagon carrying the equipment.
Now Exa turned her attention to the harvesters. There were Cyrus and their youngest, Leon, who would be fifteen soon. Also their enslaved: Mose Eutuban, and Mose’s only son, Beauregard. She watched them pluck ears from the pods and shuck what they could of the husks and deposit the ears into ragged sacks wrapped around necks and shoulders knitted with sweaty ropes of muscle. Tomorrow the week’s harvest would soak in water beneath the sun for five days in barrels covered with cheesecloth where they would sprout tails like tadpoles and ferment into mash. Meanwhile Cyrus would travel to Gum Pond to haul back the yeast and sugar to add to the mash once it had been ground into malt.
For six years Cyrus had taken Mose with him on that trip. But last night at the kitchen table Cyrus announced that Mose would stay behind this trip. That Leon would go with him to the gristmill. Boy’s on his way to being a man, Cyrus said. Said it was about time he was treated as such. Cyrus had gone on about how it was time to show Leon the trade proper but all Exa heard was that her last son would share the same fate as her other progeny, that he would be sold in Gum Pond tomorrow to some impotent or infertile couple like he was some damn enslaved worker himself. For eighteen years, Cyrus, now in his sixties, had toiled elbow-to-elbow with their enslaved. He could use the money Leon would bring to spend his last years no longer having to work the same land he owned.
The four men disappeared around the bend where the remaining acre of the property folded west. She had about an hour before dusk halted their work. Exa cranked the bubbles from the boiling broth and wiped her hands on her skirt and made for the dirt path leading to the Eutubans’ cabin across the hollow.
***
Eighteen years ago Cyrus arrived in North Mississippi by way of the Natchez Trace after a bout of middle-aged anxiety he couldn’t verbalize drove him from his banker job in Nashville. At Gum Pond he took an obscure Chickasaw road that had once been a buffalo trace and camped in the last of the gullies along the route. The next morning, he greeted daylight and looked for grub, which he thought he’d found in Exa’s father, who was draped in whitetail fur and bearing a five-point crown of antlers. At fifteen years, Exa had begun to fill out the cotton dresses she had inherited from her mother—the third daughter of a lesser Chickasaw chief, who had died in labor—in a manner so similar to the original that it pleased Exa’s father in ways he had not trusted himself to deny. He had taken to wearing the pelts his half-breed daughter had trapped and then wandering out in the woods each morning in the hopes that someone like Cyrus would shoulder a smoothbore musket and provide him death without that sin on his soul.
Later, Exa answered an unfamiliar knock and had known enough about the world to understand she was more likely to survive in this land with the help of a man such as the one who stood before her, red with clay and her father’s blood, hocking the chilled air from his lungs. She had gazed upon the long stretch of winter ahead with little food and no money and a husband who would suffer from gun shyness for the rest of his life and never take aim at any fur-covered thing for fear of it being another person. Who would fall into drunkenness every night to forget the thing ever happened. Who, even though it was late November, when nothing would grow and so no labor was needed, would steal away one night far southward into more fertile flatwoods region and acquire Mose Eutuban and Mose’s wife and a pair of young sibling mules that couldn’t breed on a loan with terms Cyrus didn’t worry waking the plantation owner to discuss.
All Exa saw was that her husband had brought back four more damn mouths to feed.
Exa froze through those first winter months hunting deer and trapping rabbit and squirrel without her coat, which Cyrus had buried with her father out of misplaced respect. One evening over a bowl of braised squirrel, Cyrus told her about some strange squat tree the Eutubans had built their cabin into. How the notching on the cabin planks was seamless, like the cabin had just been stretched from the tree. How the tree bore some kind of cobbled fruit.
“Asked Mose what was the kind of tree they built they’s cabin into,” Cyrus said. A thread of squirrel meat hung from the corner of his mouth.
“What he say?” Exa asked.
“Called it a bo-dock tree,” Cyrus said. “Ain’t never heard of it. Asked him where it come from.”
“What he say?”
“Just shrugged.”
Exa was familiar with the bois d’arc tree, which her people had named ayac, and knew the enslaved would’ve pronounced the tree bwo-dark, not bodock. But Exa carried their first child—who would be named Dob—in her belly by then and because he was the father of Dob she did not correct Cyrus. But she had also lived her whole life on that land and knew that no bois d’arc had inhabited any nook or cranny of the acreage. She grew suspicious of the Eutubans, how they conjured a tree to spring up full in less than a week.
Now the setting sun had sprawled an autumn chill into the hollow as the arcane bois d’arc came into view. Hanging from the bois d’arc was a cage with bars carved from thick twigs of the same wood. A mockingbird palpitated around the inside of the cage. Esther Eutuban was not to be found and Exa ducked the low-hanging branches, paying mind not to roll an ankle on the horseapples the bois d’arc had deposited on the ground. Some of the horseapples had already been trampled and exhaled the sweet rotted breath of their bitter, blackened fruit.
A garden should have been at the back of the cabin. Exa first discovered it while pregnant with Leon. That was seven or eight years ago—before Cyrus separated her from Dob and Rufus as if her boys were so little alcohol distilled from fermented mash, back when she still felt blessed and wanted to surprise Cyrus with a diversion from one of her usual gamy dishes. The Eutuban garden had been pregnant with aesthetics and smells completely foreign to her. She settled on a leafy plant similar to turnips in appearance but was more akin to the sorrel herb. The large quantity she served to Cyrus and the potlikker he drank like whiskey incapacitated his urinary tract. He went on a three-day binge of sour mash to pass the stones. His quick-triggered temperament turned violent just that once.
Exa had not been back to the garden until now and found it had been reduced in size and sat caged in twigs knitted into chicken wire and carried only familiar things: snap peas and butter beans, late-season tomatoes coiling their vines around tall stakes.
Footsteps snapped kindling behind her.
“What it be, ma’am?”
Exa jumped, saw Esther Eutuban kicking horseapples from her path. She was short and slender and spoke in a Creole accent, her second-generation Haitian skin diluted with her former master’s blood.
“What happened to the garden?”
“It be gone, ma’am.”
“Need something from it.”
“Burned,” Esther Eutuban said and gesticulated with one hand the smoke that had curled away from the small flat brush fire that day Cyrus had stormed down to the cabin, slashed and burned the garden from which his kidney stones had burgeoned, the gray exhaust that took with it remedies like the one that may have cured Esther Eutuban’s infertility, having only produced the one son, Beauregard.
Exa said, “Cyrus got the stones.”
Esther Eutuban nodded and Exa watched her enter the cabin. When she returned she carried in her apron only a handful of sorrel-like leaves. The Eutubans had found the seeds beneath the charred earth but had been too wary to plant them outside again for Cyrus to see.
“Need more than that.”
“Big stones,” Esther Eutuban whistled. “Small stones. This do for either.”
The mockingbird continued singing. The thick red freckles on Esther Eutuban’s face and neck glowed in the false-purple dusk beneath the bois d’arc. The men would soon conclude the harvest.
“He ain’t got stones,” Exa said. “Need him to not make a trip tomorrow.”
“Trip?”
“To Gum Pond. Taking Leon to do the same he did with Dob and Rufus.” Exa stared at Esther Eutuban but saw no sympathy there and fought back the compulsion to slap those purple freckles off her face. Exa conjured a lie and reasoned to her father’s God—who couldn’t be hers as well, not after all that had happened—that it was a necessary fib.
“Cyrus say he gone take Mose as well.”
“Don’t he usually?” Esther Eutuban asked.
“Reckon he figure he can get a couple slaves in exchange for him as well. Maybe a female for that young ‘un of y’all’s. Get us some more hands round here.”
Esther Eutuban seemed to buy the lie and stood quiet for a long stretch.
“Dammit, hurry,” Exa said. “We ain’t got much time.”
“How was you gonna administer the sorrel?”
“Having stew for supper.”
“What you flavor the squirrel with?”
“Little hickory.”
“Mustard in the broth?”
Exa nodded and Esther Eutuban told her there was another way. She walked through the house again and ground some hickory and mustard from a tin jar into a small seed bag. Outside the house she worked an axe out of a nearby stump, swung the blade down into one of the horseapples lying on the property. The horseapple lodged itself on the axe head. She swung once more and the horseapple split. She retrieved one half and told Exa to get the mockingbird and Exa cooed the bird from the cage into her hand. The bird pecked her flesh. Esther Eutuban handed her a paring knife wrapped in a swatch of burlap in her front apron and instructed Exa to slit the creature’s throat.
“Why?”
“You’ll see.”
Esther Eutuban held the halved horseapple under the bird and once the avian blood had drained into it Esther poured in the hickory and mustard, muddled the concoction with a thick squat stick smoothed and fashioned into a pestle. She dumped the concoction into a magnolia leaf and like a midwife gathering a newborn in swaddling clothes she wrapped and handed the package to Exa.
“Make sure only Cyrus eat it,” she said.
Exa contemplated the bundle in her palm. “This won’t kill him?”
“You want to keep your boy aight?”
“But I don’t aim to kill Cyrus.” This was gospel: Not once these last couple days had she entertained any of her inclinations to kill Cyrus. She did not fear solitude or the prospect of fending against nature itself or the nature of the men who would soon immigrate to the surrounding acreages in the wake of Indian Removal, men who would perhaps stumble upon her place to find a husbandless woman, equate hers with a loneliness only they could cure. That contentment that had first brought her to the Eutuban garden had in time transcended into a matrimonial devotion in which she placed her own absence of her father’s faith. “I just aim to make sure he don’t make the trip.”
The whites of Esther Eutuban’s eyes swelled there in the growing darkness. “You think cause he don’t make that trip one time it gone stop him from never tryin’ to make that trip ever again?”
“I don’t want him dead.”
“Use half then.”
“That won’t kill him?”
“Just make him bad sick again,” Esther Eutuban said. “Root him here for a long while.”
Exa pondered what the enslaved meant in the departing light in which she had no time to ponder.
***
The trail coughed dirt around Exa’s brogans. At the top of the knoll of their cabin she found Cyrus already up from the field, bent over into the barrel to reach the water at the bottom. The barrel was planked together with pine and the men had been too busy harvesting corn the last few days to refill it.
“Where you been?” he said and whipped water over his back. His shirt hung unbuttoned. The slight bulge of his liver above the waist of his pants.
“Checkin’ traps.”
Cyrus dipped the tin cup back in the water and rinsed his mouth and poured the rest of the cup over his head. It gathered in his long beard. He nodded in the direction opposite where she’d come. “Traps ain’t that way?”
“Set up some new ones.”
“Huh.” He looked down into the barrel. “Water needed replacing yesterday. Get Eutuban to do it for you tomorrow before they get working on the mash.”
She nodded. The weight of the bundle hung in her apron. Leon walked up from the barn where he had been directing the Eutuban men over the last of the day’s chores. He approached and addressed his mother, assumed a spot next to his father at the barrel, and massaged water into his face and through the crimson hair he inherited from Cyrus. Cyrus’s hair and beard were an off white now. Leon patted water into the back of his neck and armpits, the air gleaming like knives. Leon’s tan denim pants were slung low beneath his waist, his hip bones cavernous, a stream of peach fuzz between them. He was young but could run the place just fine. Why should Leon leave when Cyrus could, she thought.
While Leon and Cyrus went to study over the wagon, to inspect the ties and axle and wheels, Exa eased inside, took a tray and three wood bowls from the kitchen. She filled first Leon’s bowl and then her own before spreading half of the paste across the bottom of Cyrus’s bowl and as she filled the bowl her hand sloshed the ladle with nerve and conviction that what she was doing was neither right nor wrong but necessary.
***
At dinner the Eutubans’ singing spilled up to the Claygardner cabin earlier than usual. Cyrus allowed a few moments to pass before he pulled from the whiskey jug and excused himself from the table. Took the sling of tear-cartridges hanging by the door and the smoothbore flintlock leaned up against the frame and stepped out behind the cabin like any other night he got piss drunk and fired blank warning shots a safe distance over the Eutubans’ dwelling. He actually enjoyed their singing but felt beholden to some unspoken duty as master to establish some sort of pretense against what he assumed other masters might view as defiance. It was his first and only experience owning people and he felt he’d never gotten the hang of it.
Out of the corner of his eye as he stepped out the back door, he saw Exa nod at Leon to follow. Cyrus had the cartridge torn open and was pouring the powder into the barrel when he heard the chair squeak backward against the wood floor. He pinched the lead ball from the paper cartridge. Instead of inserting the ball down the barrel, he flicked it onto the ground and eased the rammer into the barrel. Pushed the powder home, drew the rammer out. The cool had come on suddenly and fireflies oblivious to the change in temperature navigated the ravine in patterns of erratic flight between their cabin and the soft faint glow from the Eutubans about eight acres away. Rings encircled the full moon. Would rain soon, he thought.
“Gone need to remind ’em to camp out with the barrels,” Cyrus said. “Eutuban and his boy. Keep that water warm at night while we gone. Would you know to do that?”
Leon said, “Bet Beau’s daddy already know to do it.”
“Ain’t asking what Beau’s daddy know. What would you do after that?”
In his own words Leon explained the distilling process.
“Good. When you plant the corn?”
“March.”
“Unless.”
“Unless the rains is late. Then wait till April.”
“Huh.” Cyrus cocked the flintlock hammer back. Pointed the smoothbore well above and to the right of the candlelight of the Eutubans’ house even though he was shooting a blank. “Know why I do this?”
“Cause you think you need to remind ’em what would happen if they was to run?”
“More ritual than anything else.”
“They ain’t gonna run.”
“Cover your ears anyway.”
Leon did. Cyrus pulled the trigger. The echo of the smoothbore’s report curled through the wooded hollow and bounced around the trees before losing itself in the blind maze. The spirituals or what have you halted a moment before the Eutubans resumed.
“Persistent tonight.”
“Or deaf.”
Cyrus chuckled, stretched his jaws, popped the ringing out of his own ears.
“Beau says they sing like that cause they singing their way into heaven.”
“That right?”
“What Beau said. Beau says you want to get to heaven cause you live there forever.”
“That’s the rumor,” Cyrus said.
“So why ain’t we just go straight there then stead of coming here first?”
“Coming where?”
“I dunno. Here.”
“You already believe life’s pointless?”
“What you mean?”
“Nothing,” Cyrus said. “Too young to understand.”
“Ain’t that young.”
“Ain’t too young to run this place?”
“Think I could.”
Cyrus reached out the smoothbore. “Here then.”
“Don’t know that it’s necessary.”
“You asserted that already.”
Cyrus raked his fingers through his beard and shuttered a wink at Leon as he handed off the smoothbore. Leon accepted it reluctantly. Cyrus tried to show him how to pinch the ball from the paper without losing control of the bearing even though they weren’t using it. Leon told him he already knew, that Beauregard showed him once.
“When?”
“Couple years ago,” Leon said. “When you and Beau’s daddy was headed to Gum Pond.”
“Didn’t know nothing about that.”
“Guess it was about three years maybe. Beau said best not to tell you.”
“You kill anything?”
“Got a rabbit.”
“You sure it was a rabbit?”
“What else would it’d been?”
Cyrus shrugged. He tried to recall how he’d ended up here, with visions of strange deer-men stuttering up his little knoll of earth every night toward the house, steam throbbing from their snouts. Two sons he’d likely never see again and a wife as likely to slit his throat tonight in bed as Cyrus was to piss out every ounce of blood in him like he’d been doing since summer heat had cut short spring. He wished he could explain to Exa that this trip wasn’t like the other one. But to claim there would never be a reason to indenture Leon would be to acknowledge that he had indentured the others. And he had only spoken of that once, to assure Exa that her boys were safe on some spread of tobacco farm way off in South Carolina. At least he hoped they were.
Leon lifted the musket and Cyrus covered his ears and waited for the second round to blast through the hollow. Once the resonance had fizzled, Cyrus listened for the spirituals to resume once more. Hoped they would. They reminded Cyrus of how Exa had told him that the Chickasaw, upon burying their dead, not only sang for two hours a day for three months but that they would fire three shots into the air to warn off evil spirits. The spirituals did not start back up tonight.
“Once more,” Cyrus said.
“But they ain’t singing no more.”
“Just shoot the damn thing. And something ever happens to me. I wake up dead tomorrow or die on the way back from Gum Pond, you be sure to come back here and do the same.”
“Do what?”
“Fire into the sky three times, boy.”
“Is that what we did for Dob and Rufus when they drown in the creek down there?”
The Eutubans sat with their hands held in a circle around the table a few feet from the silent potbelly and in the middle of the dinner prayer Esther Eutuban began her short, vulnerable hum. Grew that into an infectious timbre that sprawled like the bois d’arc that shaped the tapered wall of their cabin. Eutuban was not immune and joined in. When his wife sustained their song even after the first gun shot, Eutuban had to inquire why. She sang through his inquiry. He asked again and she sang and he banged his fist on the table and she hummed down the octaves to silence. Told him what she’d made for Exa.
“Why you done that?”
Esther sat silent.
A third gun shot rang down into the hollow.
“Don’t he know we quit?” Eutuban said.
Esther Eutuban told him then about how Cyrus had planned to sell him off tomorrow in Gum Pond.
“When was this gonna happen?”
“Tomorrow.”
Eutuban shook his head. “I ain’t even goin’ to Gum Pond tomorrow. The boy is.” He folded his cloth square on the table. “I gotta go fix this before I can eat. Keep my greens warm, momma. Boy,” he says.
“Yessuh.”
“You comin’ with me.”
“Nah.” Esther Eutuban grabbed at the back of her mister’s thin cotton-denim shirt. “What you fixin’ to tell Cyrus, huh? ‘Don’t eat whatever your wife fix you cause my damn wife be tryin to help her hex you’?”
Eutuban had already stood but what his wife said paused him. “Go on wait outside, Beau.”
“Please,” Esther Eutuban said before their son could get out the door good. She grabbed the front of Eutuban’s shirt. A button popped off.
When the boy had closed the door Eutuban said, “What did you do, woman?”
Esther Eutuban had been looking at the dirt floor where the button had landed but raised her eyes to her husband now. “Come morning he gonna be a tree. Just like I done our former master.”
The plantation owner Cyrus had stolen them from had eventually come looking. The same owner who had permanently allotted Esther Eutuban’s father to another master, never to be seen or heard from again. The same master that when Esther Eutuban’s mother hesitated to remarry took into his own hands the matter of rearing himself additional labor. Esther Eutuban had not wanted the same fate for her beloved or herself. Had taken Esther Eutuban two blows with a frying pan to lay that enslaver out before she transformed him into the bois d’arc their house stretched from now. All evidence hid. She did not regret the actions she took this afternoon either.
Eutuban said, “You think about what that half-grown white boy or his momma gone do to us?”
“She came to me.”
“She say specifically she want him to be a tree?”
“Of course not.”
“Dead then?” He waited for that to sink in and Esther shook her head. “There a way to reverse it?”
“No,” Esther Eutuban said. “Not unless he purge it quick.”
Eutuban looked across the table at the plates of food, at the potbelly digesting fire at the end of the table. Took his night-walking stick from the pot next to the door.
“What you gone tell ’im?”
“I’m gone tell ’im we need Leon for something. Then I’m gone stay up there and see if I can’t get him drunker than usual. Maybe he’ll toss that shit up then. We gonna be aight, momma,” Eutuban sighed and opened the door.
Exa watched as the fire pit still burning outside slung the light of its flames through the doorway and cast shadows of Eutuban and his son about the pine wood floor. They had still been eating and now that she knew she had done everything she could to keep Leon, her heart ached for her drunk quick-tempered near-incompetent husband who mistook her even more incompetent father for a deer and brokered their children for equipment. But that had been six years ago and out of a necessity for survival that they obviously were not encumbered to now. All through the meal she had wondered if there was still time for him to purge the bane. Had wondered if he would forgive her. Had wondered if she could ignore history and give her husband the chance to take Leon to Gum Pond tomorrow and then wait three days alone and a lifetime after that to see if Cyrus would always bring her last son back to her.
She did not think she possessed that kind of faith and her heart regretted having to choose between the two.
The door opened and the wind brought a draft of cold air behind the Eutubans and flakes of white ash into the cabin.
“Hey Beau,” Leon said. Beauregard nodded at him.
“Eutuban,” Cyrus said. “What you doing up here for?”
“Autumn done come, sir,” Eutuban said. “Smoked ourselves out. Need a extra pair of hands smaller’n my own to get our chimney cleaned.”
“Shit,” Cyrus said. “Needin’ ours cleaned too then I guess. Y’all need it done tonight though? Needin’ us rested for in the morning.”
Eutuban said something about his missus coming down with a cold. Feeling feverish. While the men spoke, Exa watched Leon. Saw a boy about the same age she had been when she was orphaned. But he would soon become a man if he had not already reached that age to fend for himself without his father’s or her help. A plan came to her. Under the table Exa unfolded the leaf from her apron, smeared the rest of the concoction into her hand and brought the bitter paste to her mouth behind the disguise of a napkin. In case that didn’t work she would get herself and Cyrus riproaring blackout drunk tonight. Would build their hearthfire high first. They would pass out from drink and lovemaking and the smoke would suffocate her and Cyrus before the fire burned their bodies and any evidence that might indict the Eutubans. Leon would stay in the Eutuban cabin and would have them to help him rebuild a house and a life of his own to prosper from or fuck up. Cyrus had given him the tools for either.
“Leon can go,” Exa said. “Got our chimney cleaned this afternoon.”
Cyrus looked at Exa. “When was that?”
“While y’all was harvesting,” Exa lied.
“How come your clothes ain’t dirty then?”
“Wasn’t wearing none when I cleaned it.” Exa reached for his hand. “Need someone to clean me up when Leon’s gone. Won’t see you till y’all get back.”
Exa hugged Leon for too long before he and Beauregard moved out the door. She watched as they made their way down the hill until their forms had moved beyond the summer kitchen fire into the swallowing darkness. She felt a tear hang in the corner of her eye and caught Eutuban still in the doorway, watching her.
“Needin’ something else?” Cyrus said.
“Well.”
“Can wait till morning,” Exa said.
Cyrus echoed his wife. Her hand still gripped his. “Morning, Eutuban.”
***
Eutuban stood outside after the door closed, realizing he had not thought of a strategy on the way here for why now, after seventeen some-odd-years of servitude, he would’ve been offering himself as a drinking buddy for the evening. Esther Eutuban had been right as she often was: To save Cyrus, Eutuban would’ve had to betray the very person he was indebted to him for.
Still Eutuban did not return to his own house. He sat cross-legged behind the shadow of a stand of trees just beyond the cabin and waited in the event another solution would reach him.
Sometime later the glow of the candles through the oilpaper window extinguished. Sometime after that Eutuban blushed when he heard them rooting around in the attic space of the cabin. Eutuban prayed that Exa had second thoughts at dinner and had never gone through with it. But then the moans became more audible, guttural, until Exa screamed in agony. Eutuban untangled his legs and made for the cabin.
In the loft the two of them were still attached Biblically. Both their skins shifted into long gray ridges of bark that melded and locked into the other. He got a good look at the side of his master’s wife’s pale tits before they became encased in stripy, orange-brown bark with thin ridges and fissures that would deepen with age. The couple’s skulls molded over into bark as well and their arms stretched past their normal reach and branched out into smaller limbs and branches and kindling. Their torsos infused into two boughs that drove through their marital bed to release the dried wrinkled corncobs shaping the mattress. The cobs rebounded off the wood floor, down the attic ladder. The couple’s now-singular torso reached the topsoil where Cyrus’s legs took root and anchored into the red clay earth.
One of Exa’s legs had splayed over the footboard of the bed, kicked out and then up into its own sort of skinny trunk that branched out into smaller limbs and branches and twigs.
From their limbs, horseapples would sprout and drop every fall for the next 159 years.