The Tree

Happy Halloween!

In the spirit of the season, we must always remind ourselves that…

All work and no play makes George a dull boy. All work and no play makes George a dull boy. All work and no play makes George a dull boy. All work and no play makes George a dull boy. All work and no play makes George a dull boy. All work and no play makes George a dull boy…

And so, we’re going to take a seasonal break from all the ugly politics and nutty pop culture we usually cover here at The Continental Congress. As we do every year at this time, we’re going to celebrate American’s greatest holiday, with a good old fashioned southern gothic ghost story…

THE TREE

“There is unrest in the forest
There is trouble with the trees”

• Rush “The Trees”

I don’t know how to tell you about The Tree.

Or… perhaps it’s more accurate to say now that I’ve finally decided to tell the story of The Tree, I‘m not sure where to start.

How much do you need to know before you’ll be able to understand what I intend to do? I just don’t know. So, in the spirit of “wherever you go, there you are,” I guess I’ll start by telling you where I am.

Where I am, is in the driver’s seat of a rented Toyota Camry buzzing South on I-95 through what Paul Simon called “The Cradle of the Civil War.”

To my right is the angry scar that was left behind when the Army Corps of Engineers blasted this highway out of a mountainside in the late 1950’s, during one of the Federal Government’s periodic orgies of infrastructure spending… “a shovel-ready project” in the parlance of our strange times. I can see ancient rock strata crushed and squeezed and hardened over billions of years into perfectly symmetrical layers of improbable purples, pinks and reds.

On my left, stretching to the horizon, are the rolling hills of Virginia. And while “rolling hills” may be something of a cliché, man I’m here to tell you, that’s just exactly what they are. Sometimes the right word is just the right word. What I can tell you is that a lush blanket of every shade of green the universe has ever known is rolling away from me on my left like a long luxurious rug tumbling down an endless flight of stairs.

The front part of my brain can enjoy how beautiful it is. But the underside of my mind, the lizard part that knows what scares me… that part understands that all those brilliant shades of green that I can see fading and dissolving and dancing into one another are made up of thousands of individual trees… perhaps millions of them… and each time this realization sets in, the terror returns, carried on icy fingers.

To put it less elegantly, I’m fucking terrified. This is as frightened as I have ever been.

And I don’t say that lightly. I’m a man who survived a plane crash.

It wasn’t a famous crash… like the Concorde, or that 747 that blew up off the coast of New Jersey, or the Malaysian Jetliner that just kinda sorta winked out of existence on an otherwise unremarkable night, but you definitely heard about my crash when it happened.

For my trouble, I got an apology and a settlement from the airline that didn’t even come close to covering the cost of the nightmares. That was a butcher’s bill for which I am still very much in debt.

I used some of the settlement money to pay for counseling, but quit after three sessions. It wasn’t doing me any good. Turns out there are some things you just can’t talk about with someone who hasn’t lived through them. One of those things is crawling over a headless corpse, its suit coat still slicked with a thin scrim of jet fuel and blood, in order to escape through a three-by-two-foot escape hatch rimmed by burning fuel vapor.

In our final session, my therapist told me about a support group for plane crash survivors. It’s not quite therapy, but sometimes it helps to know that whatever horrors you might have slogged through, there’s someone else who’s maybe been forced to do something worse. That may not be very Christian of me, but it’s the best I can do.

This support group taught me there are two kinds of survivors, those who knew the plane was going to crash, and those who didn’t. I’ve always considered myself lucky to have been in the second group. For me, the first indication that something was wrong came when my 737 slammed into the commuter jet parked on our runway. And other than the headless corpse between me and the emergency exit, I don’t remember anything else. At least, not when I’m awake. In the dark of the night, sometimes the demons come, and they tell me about all the other things that happened in between that first impact and the moment when a paramedic put a fire blanket around my shoulders and told me I was going to be OK.

Easy for him to say.

A few weeks after I joined the support group, I met a guy who’d survived when a DC-10 crashed into a corn field. He was in that other group… the ones who knew. This poor bastard knew the plane was going to crash for almost an hour before it finally did.

One hour.

Sixty minutes.

Three thousand six hundred seconds.

An hour alone with your thoughts. Alone with the knowledge that the rest of your life might be measurable in minutes.

Can you imagine what that must be like?

I can. Because that’s how I feel right now. I’m driving South. My final destination is something an awful lot like a repeat of the crash that almost killed me. And I’m doing it on purpose.

Why?

That’s the question you want to ask. Isn’t it?

Well… that way lies a story. And it’s one you need to hear. I needed to hear it too, before I could believe. And you will too. You need to understand the way I came to understand. By hearing the whole goddamned horror, from beginning to end.

It all started with my Grandfather.

***

On second thought, that’s not exactly true. The truth is that it started much earlier… fifty years before my grandfather’s debut on Planet Earth, as a matter of fact. During the Civil War.

But we’ll get to that. You’ve gotta put your pants on before your shoes.

Norman Broussard – “Popie” to his family - was born in Houma, Louisiana exactly nine months to the day after his own father strapped on a doughboy helmet and went off the fight The Hun in the trenches of Ypres and Argonne. Popie was a Cajun in a region populated almost exclusively by other Cajuns, and much like the genetic simplicity of the place where he was born, the foundational aspects of Popie Broussard’s life and character were just as simple. He was a Southern gentleman all the way down to the soles of his feet.

“American by birth, Southern by the grace of God” as he liked to say.

Popie came from a large family. Large and loud. Six brothers and sisters, three on top and three underneath with Popie jammed in the middle like a lump of coal slowly being crushed into a diamond.

I can understand why he felt like he had to leave, why he had to escape all that noise and chaos. I only had one sibling and it crossed my mind on more than a few occasions. So, when the college recruiter pushed a brochure for Virginia Tech into his hand at the beginning of his final year at Catholic High (senior class size: 25 souls), he didn’t waste time thinking twice.

But I’ve already told you that Popie was the consummate Southern gentleman, so it shouldn’t surprise you, as it doesn’t surprise me, that he didn’t last in Virginia past the first year. I guess after three hundred and sixty-five days spent that close to the imaginary border that separates north and south, he decided, “this far and no further.” Popie came home, back to LSU for his sophomore year where he would eventually finish up with a B.A. in American Literature.

About the time he left Virginia, he started pecking away at a story about a hard-boiled detective who worked the swamps and marshes of Southern Louisiana. Popie was smart and literate and, they all say, quite remarkably driven.

He also knew how to tell a story. “Any story worth tellin’ is a story worth tellin’ well”, Popie liked to say.

By the time he graduated, he’d written three books in a series that would eventually span eight novels and a feature film.

You’ve probably seen the movie. Popie never liked it much. “There’s a good reason dey never made uh second ‘un…” was the only movie review I ever heard Popie deliver.

But the movie did OK, and the books sold like gangbusters. With the royalties from the books and the profit participation from the theatrical run, Popie was able to buy an old plantation house on fifteen acres near a small town on Bayou Teche, called New Iberia.

And that was where I saw him for the last time.

It was the summer after I turned thirteen and we had just arrived in New Iberia for what would turn out to be my last trip there for nearly two decades… not including the funeral.

***

My own dad followed in his father’s footsteps… well, sort of. He chose UVA over Tech, and Charlottesville is where he met my Mom. After college they settled in Virginia, still in “The South” of course, but as any Louisianan worth his salt would point out, only via a technicality. I suppose the pull of the “True South” weakens with each successive generation, like an old movie copied on VHS tape a couple thousand times. After I was born, Southern Louisiana was no longer their home, it had morphed into something more like a place they would always want to vist, rather than live.

At thirteen, I was just getting to that age where I thought I knew a whole hell of a lot more than I actually did. There weren't many people that I believed had anything to say worth listening to, except for Popie, and so my parents dragged me a thousand miles south every summer to see him.  I suppose they figured if they could get me to listen to someone – anyone - other than my own idiot self, well then the trip would’ve been worth the all the driving.

You’ve probably heard that it gets pretty hot in Louisiana during the summertime. But to say it gets “hot” fails to capture the true essence of the thing. It’s not just “hot”, it’s oppressively hot. “Goddamn hot an’ Christ almighty humid,” was another common Popie-ism. Like a country club steam room you can’t just get up and walk out of whenever you feel like you’re about to faint. And the heat doesn’t go away after the sun goes down. It lingers on you like an old wool coat draped wetly across your shoulders… one you cannot take off.

We'd driven for two days to get to Popie’s big plantation house three hours southwest of New Orleans. The combination of ten hours on the road and two or three bottles of Dixie Beer had long since retired my parents to a state of pleasant unconsciousness in front of the TV. I was in Popie's huge back yard chasing nocturnal wildlife and thinking I was completely alone when the old man suddenly appeared behind me and called my name in his booming Cajun patois. I just about jumped out of my shorts. I turned around and there he was, big and broad and bald. His deep brown eyes seemed to glow in the dark. His belt held his pants up over the top of his protruding Cajun belly, making him look a little like one of those moronic twins from the Disney version of Alice in Wonderland. The moon shown brightly on his scalp and there were frown lines around his mouth.

He was like an apparition.

“Y’all wanna come wit’ me”, he said. It was not a question.

He turned and walked away, his big strides carrying him so far so quickly I had to jog to catch up. Soon we were angling around his red 1952 Ford F1 pick-up truck. The ancient white walls, balding like Popie’s head, and sinking slowly into the crushed oyster shell surface of his driveway. It didn’t run much anymore, but I loved that old truck. It looked more like an alien spaceship than a vehicle for driving on earthly highways. Its wheel guards were so outlandishly big and bulbous that they looked like they’d been inflated with helium by a character in some insane animated feature. One spare tire hung on the side of the bed like a cyclops’ eye. It was ugly and it was beautiful. Whenever I thought of Popie, as often as not, it was that truck I thought of first.

He’d bought it new off the lot in fifty-three. And over the years, he’d spent a lot of his time and money keeping it in mint condition and running just like it did the day it came off the assembly line in Detroit. Until, at some point, he just ran out of time and money… or maybe it was heart he’d finally run out of. Either way, he’d finally started to let the old champ go to seed.

Rot on an old car is like a wasting disease. Leprosy maybe, or gangrene. Once the flesh turns necrotic, it begins to spread. Eventually the rot becomes so widespread that only a constant rear-guard action can keep the damned thing on the road and moving in the right direction, much less cherry. And even with that kind of sustained effort, it’s really only a matter of time…

Steel to rust, ashes to ashes, and dust to dust.

As with men, so it is with all things, eventually.

Even cars. Maybe especially, cars.

I walked around to the passenger side, following behind Popie and expecting he would open that old door, the rusted hinges screeching like protesting banshees as he did. I thought we were going to get in the old truck and take a ride, and I found myself getting excited. But Popie just passed it by and kept on walking out towards the street. I was confused now, and more than a little scared, but still I followed.

The biggest fixture in Popie's yard, the very first thing every new visitor notices, is an old oak tree. The tree is so large that there is no spot within one hundred yards of its trunk that is not at least partially affected by the massive shadow it casts at high noon. More than a hundred feet high, it has lived at least a year for every foot of height it has achieved, and probably more. A lot more.

And this tree… well, the first thing you need to know is that I’ve never liked it. Not ever.

It’s alive in more than just the most basic arboreal meaning of the word.  It grows, it produces leaves every spring which color and darken and die every fall. It photosynthesizes sunlight into food and processes carbon dioxide into oxygen yes, but there’s more to it than that. It is a presence in the yard, almost a sentience. It sounds crazy to say when you’re a thousand miles away, but when you’re standing in the shadow of that ancient oak, a fierce intelligence seems to pour off it in nauseating waves of energy. When you turn your back on it, you can almost feel it watching you.

That night we circled the tree in a series of long nervous strides. Popie gave the tree a wide berth, and I followed suit, an involuntary shiver worming its way down my back. Popie felt the ominous presence that guarded this yard like a silent soldier, just as I did. And I noticed another thing about the way he walked. Never, not once in the entire time it was in sight, did his eyes leave that tree.

When we reached the street, and the tree was finally out of earshot (earshot?), Popie pointed in the tree’s general direction and said, “Ah seen that tree kill three people. I believe it’s killed a lot more’n that, but ah only seen the three.’

***

I know… it’s crazy. Maybe more than crazy. But you gotta hear it the way I heard it. It’s the only way this works.

I’m only a hundred miles or so from the Georgia border now. Getting close. Too damned close. Every mile that passes beneath the undercarriage of my rented Camry is like another step on the long walk between a death row cell and the execution chamber.

I made it as far south as Knoxville last night before exhaustion and stress got the better of me. I checked into a Motel 6 just off the Interstate and if you’d told me I wouldn’t be able to fall asleep as soon as my head hit the pillow of my cheap no-tell motel bed, I’d have said you were crazier than Renfield. But they put me in a room with a large elm right outside the window, and as the moonlight shone through the limbs and onto the heavily patterned curtains, the shadows had looked too damned much like arms reaching for my window. And sleep would not come.

In the end, I asked them to move me to a room on the other side of the hotel, but I shouldn’t have wasted my time.

The tree came anyway.

Except this time, it did so in my dreams. And the tree didn’t just scratch at the window, it crashed right through it. Its branches long and searching, like fingers. Its leaves twisted into claws that pulled hungrily at my blankets, then hooked themselves into the sweatpants and UVA T-Shirt I’d worn to bed. They dragged me, screaming, towards the low window, which was now broken and gleaming with shards of shattered safety glass.

Outside was the tree, waiting. Hungry. Its trunk split horizontally and opened wide, an ugly gaping maw filled with wooden fangs carved to lethal points. Golden sap ran like venom… or maybe it was the drool of a creature too ravenous for my imagination to comprehend. Dark red light spilled out of the crack (mouth?) and my mind froze solid, like a hung-up computer, the same thought repeating over and over again like a disaster beacon.

It’s not a tree at all, it’s a portal to hell, oh god, oh god!

I woke up drenched in sweat, the blankets twisted around me like a strait jacket, my mouth as dry as a tight bundle of cotton swabs. A heavy greasy feeling had settled in my stomach and for a moment I thought I might puke. I closed my eyes and waited for the nausea to pass. When it finally did, I opened my eyes and looked at the window. The dull glow of a dreary morning that was still two hours away leaked through the small gap in the curtains… curtains which had not been shredded by a giant carnivorous tree after all.

***

Anyway, where was I?

Oh right…

My Grandfather had just told me that he’d watched a tree kill three people.

A goddamned tree.

But you know something? It never even occurred to me to wonder if he was putting me on. Not once. Because I could see the truth of it on his face.

We began walking down his poorly lit street. The bayou gurgled serenely somewhere off to our left, its heavy brackish smell scenting the leaden summer air with mud and fish and eons of rotten vegetation. We'd gone almost a quarter mile before he spoke again, almost as if he’d been building up his courage as we walked.

"The first was Bobby Tremaine. He was your Daddy’s best friend. Bobby's pop was in the Army, on deployment, an' he an’ his momma were livin’ down the street from me jus' 'til the Army could find space for them on the base. ‘Cept they never did, and Bobby’s family wound up living there permanent. Weren’t a lot of houses ‘round here back in those days so you couldn’t really pick your friends. You had ta do with what you got, and so they just kinda lucked into bein' friends, he an’ your Daddy. Bobby was from Boston, and he didn't know bunk 'bout country livin'. But he an’ yer Daddy got along jus' fine."

Popie’s accent made “fine” sound like “fahn.”

The wind kicked up and Popie risked a glance back over his shoulder toward his yard.  I don’t know what he expected to see.  That tree lumbering down the road, its trunk split into two pistoning legs, its roots pounding the asphalt like alien feet as it came for us, I suppose. But we didn’t see that. The night was just as dark and as quiet and as motionless as ever. That’s the best word I can come up with to describe it… “motionless.” It wasn’t just still, it was frozen in place… like a graveyard at one minute to midnight. Like the whole world was waiting for something to happen.

Popie said, "well baw, that there tree was jus' 'bout the only place yer Daddy used ta play 'fore Bobby showed up. But once he did, well… I don't know how to explain it, 'cept that after Bobby come along, I jus' felt like the tree did'n want those boys 'round it no more. But how do you tell a kid not to play on a damned tree without comin’ off like a lunatic?” Popie shook his head in frustration, his eyes watery.

“Yeah… The Tree got him real easy”, he said.

A low howl split the night and I felt my body go stiff from a jolt of fear.

And then something landed in my lap, round and heavy and black. I felt my heart fly out of my throat. My hand flew to my chest, panicked. At first, I didn't feel anything, and I was about to dive in the bushes, sure I’d find it there, bloody and pulsating in the muddy ditch just on the other side of the road from the bayou. But then I felt it, trip-hammering away right where it was supposed to be, and I relaxed.

But only a little.

The thing in my lap began to purr. It was Popie’s fat old tomcat Johnson. The cat gave us a pitiful mew and waddled away. Popie watched him go with mild disgust. "That damn thing's too fat by half," he said. Johnson turned and mewed again over his shoulder, as if to deliver a feline parting shot, something like “up yours, old man.”

Popie continued his story, "when the Tree took Bobby, well at first I kinda thought it mighta actually been uh accident like the poh-lice said it was. I'd heard the thing snap an’ I saw Bobby and his branch land so hard the goddamn ground shook. Branch handled the fall all right, but Bobby didn't. Snapped his neck like rotten wood in a hurricane. Heard that sound in my sleep fuh weeks. Except, when I climbed up the tree to take a look at the branch Bobby'd been on when his number come up, the spot where it broke was just as smooth as your newborn ass. Not all pointy an' frayed like if it had jus' rotted off, but glassy smooth. A course, by the time the poh-lice showed up, that glassy surface had grown out some and looked like any other rotten branch that had picked the wrong damned time to give way.”

We'd come to the center of a small park set back from the road a bit and Popie and I sat down on a couple of swings for the rest of the tale. Popie sat in a swing to my right and although it was five sizes too small for his southern ass, and his long legs bunched-up uncomfortably beneath him, I said not one word about any of it.

"Bobby dyin’ was bad ‘nuff, but it was my nephew that really made me sit up an' take notice. My Pop's brother moved away to Connecticut as soon as he was able. Never was much on the Southern way a' life, your great Uncle. An' he had kids alright, whole great bunch of ‘em too. But only one was your Daddy’s age, Henry's his name. Henry sorta took over best friend duties after Bobby died and for a while, I was sure glad of it. Yer Daddy took Bobby’s dyin’ pretty hard, an’ he needed a friend. Anyway, after Henry, I was sure."

"Sure about what?" I asked.

Popie didn't answer right away, He just stared off into the woods. Remembering. I guessed he was going to get to it when he was good and ready, and not before, so I leaned back in the black rubber swing and watched the stars peak through the spaces between the cypress leaves above my head. The park was a good two hundred yards from the edge of Popie’s property, but the tree was so tall that it still seemed to loom over us, even from that distance. A bright heavy moon hung low in the sky, high gossamer clouds stealing across it here and there, like thieves. A bat whickered across the moon and for a minute, the scene looked a little too much like a horror movie poster. The hair on my arms stood up. The story was already getting to me, I won’t lie to you about that.

"It was a year or so after Bobby…” Popie paused,  “…died… that Henry's parents sent him down for a visit.”

He stopped and looked at me pointedly. For a minute, I thought he was going to quiz me on what he'd said so far.  Instead, he thrust an angry finger at the tree.

"But they didn’t play in that yard. Not once. After Bobby, no way in hell was I gonna let Henry get anywhere near that cursed thing. Course, I hadn't figured on Henry takin' matters into his own hands."

The wind blew through the tree, caught its branches like a sail, and caused it to lean toward us. I jumped, badly startled, until I realized that the tree wasn't really coming for me, it had only been a breeze after all.

"Henry was a great kid, but he wasn’t real smart ya unnerstand? An’ ‘dat night, we got a thunderstorm come in. Not anything to worry y'self  'bout, but then there weren't no reason to run around in it neither. But Henry… well, dat boy snuck out the window of yer daddy’s room, middle of the night. I heard your daddy shout shout his name. Took a minute to shake the cobwebs loose, but when I saw Henry headin' for that tree, I woke up real quick."

Popie stopped for a minute and just stared off into space.

"He'd got about twenty feet up the tree when it happened. I looked up and saw a branch near the top start to grow, right there 'fore my eyes. It stretched until it was twenty feet above all the other branches. But the more I looked at it, the less it looked like wood. Maybe it was the lightning, or the rain, but 'dat branch shone like it was made of metal. Like some kinda… lighting rod."

I looked up towards the top of the tree, trying to pick out the very branch that Popie might’ve been talking about.

"Next thing I saw was a bolt of lightning. It turned in mid-air, like that tree was a-callin’ it, an’ it streaked across the sky, stretching out for 'dat branch. When it hit, the tree swelled up fulla electricity, then every last bit a’ current from 'dat bolt went right into poor Henry. He jerked around like a fish on a dock for a second, and then flew off that tree like it was swattin’ a mosquito. I found 'im m'self, 'bout a hunnert feet away. 'An what I found looked more like charcoal than my Brother’s kid. His folks couldn't even identify him for sure, hadda use his dental charts, ya unnerstand?"

I nodded dumbly, but is it really possible to understand the grizzly image of a poor distant cousin's charred body lying in a pool of mush underneath the flashing light show of a Louisiana lightning storm? Popie lightly slapped me on my left cheek and looked right in my eyes, like he knew exactly what I was thinking. He said, “Don’t dwell on it baw, you can’t make sense of a thing like that and ya shouldn’t even try.”

He came back into focus before my wet eyes and I could see the breeze beginning to dry the sweat that still glistened on his bald head from our walk.  "We best be gettin' back nah. Story's almost done, and that beer I fed your folks is gonna be wearin' off soon. But ‘fore we do, there’s one more thing, I gotta tell ya. I’m a year past the deadline on a new novel for my publisher. Y’all wanna know why?”

I nodded dully.

“Ah been busy… researchin’ stuff.”

“What kinda stuff?” I almost whispered.

“This very land we’re standin’ on, for one thing. There’s been twenty-six accidental deaths on this property goin’ all the way back to when they started keepin’ track a’ such things. Far as I can tell, at least half of them happened within spittin’ distance of that tree. And I’ll bet half mah own ass that all the rest of ‘em did too.” He looked over his shoulder nervously.

“And I’ll show y’all somthin’ else too.” He handed me a piece of paper folded into fours. I slowly unfolded it until I was looking at a photocopy of a very old photograph. There were white tents in the foreground smeared with dark stains that could have been dirt or blood. And there were soldiers everywhere, some standing, some sitting, all in grey wool uniforms with distinctive kepis on their heads.

And something else…

“You see it, dontcha?” Popie asked.

And suddenly I did. In the background, much smaller and younger for sure, but the shape was exactly right. It was…

“The Tree…” I hissed.

“Look at the trunk,” he instructed.

Sitting against the base of the oak tree were a half dozen badly wounded men. Several of them looked like they were either dead or dying. Even in this ancient photograph I could see that the ground was wet and tacky with their blood.

Popie said, “This land was a Confederate Army Field Hospital during the Civil War. Now, I’ll tell you what, I always believed that tree was a killer, but I could never figure out the why of it… why does it kill? Welp, when I saw that picture, I remembered a story I got from mah momma. She told me about how the Civil War ended at different times, dependin' upon where you was from. Y’all understand what I mean by that?"

I shook my head. I didn't, not really.

"See there weren't no telephones or Tee Vees or whatchoocallem’… Interwebs I guess, in 1865. Just cuz a bunch a folks in Washington said the war was over didn't necessarily make it so in every single holler and backwater bayou. There was small two and three-man rebel units operatin' all over the rural South that never got word the war was over 'till years later. They just went on fightin'."

He looked over his land with haunted eyes and I thought I saw him shiver a little bit, even though the evening was warm enough for shirtsleeves and heavy with humidity.

"Way I figure, on real bad days, they musta had to lean some of the wounded up against that tree, fer lack a’ space.  Seems to me, that tree probably soaked up as much Confederate blood into its roots as water during the war. You see what I’m getting’ at?"

“No…” I said. I guess on some level I did know what he was trying to tell me, but my head was shaking back and forth. It was just too crazy, these things he was suggesting.

“We pass a lot of things through our blood… diseases for one thing. But immunity too. Pregnant mothers transfer their own immunity to their unborn children through their blood, don’t they? So… why not hate? Ain’t it possible we can pass hate through our blood?” he asked me.

And there’s some truth in that, isn’t there? Human beings are tribal by nature. And we all carry hatreds with us, some so ancient that they can’t possibly be based on any real lived experience. Some kinds of hatred really are inherited somehow, father to son and mother to daughter. Racial, religious, and political hatred, for instance. The hatred of city folk for country folk, and vice versa. All the categories of hate that social scientists collect under the sterile heading “Hatred of the Other.” I think most of us assume hate gets passed on socially… we are told who and what to hate. And most of the time that’s the way it goes. But what if that’s not always true? What if there are some hatreds that run deeper… maybe all the way down into our blood?

“Hell, I’ll go ya one better,” Popie said. “You think it's hard to get word of the Confederate surrender to folks that are holed up in 'em swamps?  Well, I bet it's damn near impossible to let a feller know he's done fightin' after he's passed on, y’all think?"

Suddenly, I knew I was going to laugh and there was nothing I could do to stop it. What came out of me was the lunatic sound of someone left alone to go slowly mad in a dark windowless room. Sometimes the world just doesn’t make a lick of sense. And sometimes you can’t help but go a little crazy because of it.

On the other hand…

When I was a kid, I saw an experiment on some PBS documentary or another where a scientist hooked a plant up to a beaker of live shrimp with some sort of EKG device. After a while, a computer decided, at random, when to kill the shrimp by dumping them into boiling water. The theory was that if the plant was able to sense the shrimp's death, or feel their death if you prefer, then maybe that emotion would register on the EKG as some sort of change in the plant’s electromagnetic field.

The way I remember it is that when those Shrimp went for their final swim, the monitors measuring that plant's electromagnetic output spiked off the scale. I thought it was bullshit at the time, but now that I know what I know, I'm thinking maybe there was something to that experiment after all.

Popie tapped me on the cheek and brought me back to the world. “So, it comes to this”, he said. “What if that tree watched so many men die that finally, it had enough, and it decided to keep the war going in the only way it could? Or maybe it goes deeper’n that. Maybe it ain’t the tree doing the killing at all. Maybe blood wasn't all those roots sucked up. Maybe a little bit of each dead man’s soul got up into that tree. Maybe those men are using that tree as a way of keeping themselves tethered to this Earth even after the death of their human bodies. And as long as that tree is alive, there they'll be, still consumed by their hatreds. Still fighting a lost cause that ended over a hunnert an’ fifty years ago.”

***

I know what you’re thinking. And I couldn’t believe it at first either.

But a tree is a living thing, same as we are.  Is it really that difficult to believe that a tree could take sides? 

***

We got back to the yard, the safety and sanity of the house and its warm lights close enough now to touch, and I was moving fast, hurried along by a fear I could feel in my bones. Popie stopped me with a strong hand on my left shoulder. He pulled out a flashlight that he'd hidden in his pockets and shined it on the ground at our feet. In the dirt, I could see a dark stain. It covered an area roughly the size of a hula hoop, and the stain had the tacky consistency and mottled brown color of used motor oil.

"Thas’ where the tree took the last one. Happened jus' two night ago, just a'fore you an' your folks got here. Poh-lice don't even know 'bout it yet. Harvey Andiman was his name, local mailman. Not really local though, of course, he was from…"

But before the words even came out of his mouth, I knew what he was going to say.  I think even then, I was convinced. Yeah, I'm sure of that, now.

"… New York”, Popie said, delivering history’s least funny punchline.

Bobby Tremaine was from Boston. Cousin Henry was from Connecticut, one of only three members of Popie’s family to leave the South… traitors, if you choose to look at it that way. I think the tree did. And old Harvey was from New York City. Manhattan of all places, the very symbol of everything hated by the Confederacy. Deep in the heart of the Northern Union. A blinking, flashing, decadent beacon of everything the South had seceded from. The tree must have taken Harvey with great relish.

"Did you see him die too?" I asked.

"Not this time. Usually, I do. And not by accident, neither. It’s as if the damn thing calls to me, 'fore it does it, ya know? But not this time. It didn’t want me to know this one was comin’."

I wasn't sure what he meant by that, and said so, but it turned out that Popie was hiding a lot of things from me that night. Truth is, there wouldn't have been anything I could've done anyway. 

Popie said, "I woke early the mornin' after Harvey's murder. Much earlier than usual. Don’t know how or why… all I know is that if I’d been even five minutes later, you'd not be hearin' this tale from me in my own back yard.  I’d be telling you from jail… or maybe not at all. Maybe I’d be all the way in mah grave.”

He poked a bony finger right at that horrible stain, the one I’d been trying really hard not to look at, because to look at it would have been to acknowledge the reality of what it was.

“I walked out into the yard, and found the body, right there where I’m pointin’. His skull had been caved in.  Not just split, mind ya, but caved right the hell in. Where his eye sockets shoulda met his nose, there was nothin' but a great big hole, like a pirogue. As soon as I found 'im, I knew what was happening, so I dragged Harvey's body into the shed an' covered it with an ole tarp. Weren't five minutes later that the cops showed up. Harvey an' I'd gotten into a fight down at the bar that night.  Now wouldn't that a been a funny sight, two eighty-year-old men fixin' to beat the livin' shit outta each other? But we didn't fight. He bought me a drink an' that was the end of it."

“But it wasn’t the end. Not really. Was it?” I asked.

He leaned forward. "Nope. Harvey got a call at home later that evening. His wife told the police that it was me on t’other end of the line, when they come callin’ the next day to investigate. Only I never made that call…”

The implications of that hung in the air along with the humidity. If Popie hadn’t called Harvey, then who, or what, had?       

I had no idea what to say to all this. I guess like any kid faced with a situation like this one, I made an appeal to authority. “Have you told my dad this story?”

“Hell no!” Popie said. “Your dad is a good man… and smart… but he’s got no…” Popie paused for a minute. He seemed to be searching for the right word. The diplomatic word. “…He’s got no imagination.”

I knew exactly what he meant. My dad is a coldly rational man. If he had been present at the resurrection, as Jesus rolled aside the stone and walked into the sunlight, his hands and feet still oozing from all the places where the nails had pierced them, his first reaction would’ve been to shove past the newly resurrected Christ so that he could search for the hidden lever that opened the secret door and the empty bottle of novelty blood.

I looked at Popie and said, “but why is it coming after you… and why now?”

Popie shook his head. “I dunno baw. Maybe it got suspicious and found out what I’d been up to. Maybe another tree saw me down at the Hall of Records and another one saw me up to the library and they somehow… tattled on me? And maybe that Tree finally decided that I was a traitor to the cause and that it was time for me to have an ‘accident.’ Is it so crazy to think that trees can communicate with one another? That they could even… plan revenge?”

As it turns out, he was right about that too. It wasn’t crazy at all. It’s just that he was twenty some-odd years ahead of his time.

***

I’ve stopped for one final night at a hotel in Houma, maybe an hour from Popie’s house, now. Can’t quite bring myself to sleep in his house tonight. I’m not ready to be that close to the tree yet.

You know what I think? I think it knows I’m coming. I don’t know how that could be, but it is. I know it the same way I know that the tree is the reason my memories of that summer are becoming clearer the closer I get to my Grandfather’s house. It’s almost as if the tree is broadcasting the whole story right into my brain. Taunting me, maybe.

It wants me to know how much danger I’m in. It wants me to be afraid.

And I am.

I am so afraid.

So, I’ll take one more night for myself. Maybe it’s the only one I got left. And anyway, I’ve still got a little bit of story to tell, God help me.

If you’ve come this far, I’m sure you won’t be surprised to find that I couldn’t sleep here in Houma either. Lying in bed, thinking about all that’s happened and all that’s to come, I remembered that conversation Popie and I had about trees communicating with each other for the first time since we had it twenty years ago. So, I got up out of a bed that wasn’t doing me any good anyway and I Googled “can trees talk to each other?” What I got back was a link to a magazine article about a scientist who proved that they can indeed do that… and maybe a whole lot more.

They’re called Mycorrhizal Networks. At the end of every tree root are tiny hair like filaments that join with fungi to create vast underground communication networks. The way this scientist figured it, trees send each other messages through these networks… warnings about diseases, drought, insect attacks… god knows what else.

It’s even possible that trees use these networks to make economic exchanges, like trading photosynthesized sugar to the fungi in exchange for other nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorous. But most incredibly, and here’s where I had to stop reading because I found I had become literally frozen by fear, as if my muscles had been turned to iron by some ancient alchemy… trees are communal, like bee colonies, and they form alliances with trees from other species.

I think Popie was right. I think he decided to sneak around behind the old tree’s back thinking no one was watching. But something, or some things, caught him doing it.

I’m stalling now. I know it. It’s time to finish Norman Broussard’s story, and I will. But I should warn you, it gets worse before it never gets any better.

***

It was past midnight by the time Popie spoke again. The sky was as dark as it was ever going to get. A few stars still twinkled in the indigo sky. They were our only audience as Popie got right down to the heart of the matter. He turned me to face him and put a hand on both of my shoulders. His eyes met mine, willing me to believe him. He must’ve known this would be his last chance to convince me and he was building an ally, someone to continue his work if he should fail. 

"You're gonna hear a lot a shit about me over the rest of your life. You're gonna learn that people are apt to believe whatever fits in with what folks say about a man, rather than what they know in they hearts to be the truth. Don't believe a word of it. You just remember that when you last saw your Grandpa, he was absolutely sane. You remember that I was as straight as a fuckin’ arrow.  You don't have to defend me, don't matter a damn what other folks think, you just remember it for yourself, ya hear me?"

It was the first time I'd ever heard an adult say… that word… and it had its intended affect. I don’t think I needed to hear anything else.

I nodded.  I was in.

My parents and I left the next morning in our dusty station wagon. Later that same night as I slept in a hotel room in Knoxville, I had the most vivid dream of my life before or since.

That’s how I know what happened to Popie.

The tree killed him, and it made me watch while it did the job.

***

I saw it happen, just as clearly as if I'd been there live and in person. I think the tree made sure of that. I don't know how that could be, but it is. The tree knows, it sees, it makes things happen. Just as Popie knew it had killed Bobby Tremaine, Henry Broussard, and Harvey Andiman, I know that it wanted me to see what it did to Popie at the end. Every last intimate detail. I think it really enjoyed that.

Because I’ve had the same dream againa and again, many times since. Had it just last night, in fact. I’m beginning to think I may have it every night for as many nights as are left to me on this Earth.

And it will always play out the same awful way.

In the dream, I see myself climbing into a white station wagon next to my folks and driving away. Then I see Popie. He waves until we're out of sight, and then he turns and heads for his old Ford truck. 

And now I see there’s a tarp covering the bed of the truck, and under the tarp are two lumps, one longer than the other, narrow at one end, broader at the other… and as Popie’s hand reaches for the tarp I try to scream “No! Don’t pull back the tarp, I don’t want to see what’s under there, I don’t want to see!”

But I have no power over this dream. I can only watch.

Popie throws the tarp aside, and I finally see Harvey. I’ve got no choice. You can’t close your eyes in a dream, and this one is pure nightmare fuel. The top of his head is… well, it’s gone. It's as if someone held him down on a table and ran the business end of a circular saw right across his forehead.  Everything above the eyes is an exposed cranial cavity. Inside that cavity, a glistening mass of pinkish gray goo the color of raw shrimp leaks bright red blood into the bed of the truck.

But the worst part is his face. One look at his eyes and I know that when it happened, he knew it. Every second of pain and terror is well documented on what remains of that face.

Next to the body of the former postal carrier who once got into a very ill-advised fight with my Grandfather, is a box of dynamite. Popie takes one stick out of the box and shoves it into his pocket. Then, mercifully, he throws the tarp back over the body and climbs into the cab of his truck. 

He drops the truck into gear and there’s an ugly mechanical grinding sound followed by two rifle shot backfires. The truck lurches to life and he pulls it around the yard in a wide circle that ends with the truck facing the tree, about fifty yards away from the base of the trunk.  He stops and climbs out of the truck, leaving the engine running. And now he looks up into the maze of ancient branches spread above him like a giant spider web that can grab and kill without any help from the spider.  He pulls a thin cigar out of his breast pocket and stuffs it into his mouth, lighting it with a match he strikes on the bottom of his boot.

As he stands there sucking on his cheroot, I get a crazy flashback to any one of a million westerns I've seen over the course of my life. It's ten minutes from the end of the film. The White Hat and the Black Hat stand twenty feet apart on Main Street, adrenaline coursing through their veins as their fingers dance over the handles of their six shooters. Popie doesn't say "draw!" before he turns back to the truck, but I tell you, I wouldn't have been a bit surprised if he had.

There’s a brick on the passenger seat. Popie picks it up and puts it on the accelerator, and suddenly I understand what he intends to do. He’s going to light the box of dynamite, drop the truck into gear and send it on one final glorious suicide run into the trunk of that awful tree.

I feel a surge of excitement now… it’s a good plan. This is going to work.

And then a series of very bad things happens very quickly.

I think that, in the end, what killed Popie was that he underestimated the tree. It’s really as sad and as simple as that. At our core, human beings are essentially optimistic creatures, and Popie chose to believe that he had a fighting chance.

All around him, roots burst out of the ground with frightening speed. In those first moments, as they shoot straight up towards the sky, it looks like someone has just turned on a decorative fountain outside a very expensive hotel in Las Vegas. Then the roots suddenly turn in a dozen different directions and streak for Popie and his truck. Some coil around the Ford while others slither between Popie’s feet and up across his chest. A large root as thick as a Louisville Slugger slips around his upper body as if it were the tentacle of some giant kraken straight out of an eighteenth-century seaman's worst nightmare.  It wraps him up with his arms pinned to his sides and shoves him back into the driver’s seat of the old pickup.

It’s already over at this point, but the tree has been waiting for this moment a long time and it has no plans to sprint for the finish line.

A smaller root crawls into the bed of the truck, grasps one of the sticks of dynamite like a hand, and wedges it between Popie's pinned knees.  More roots pop out of the ground and grab even more sticks, placing them right next to the first in a series. The roots continue their devil’s work until every stick of dynamite is wedged against his body with the fuses tied together in a hellish daisy chain.

The expression on Popie’s face is not fear, just anger at having let the tree get the better of him this way. To his credit, he doesn't scream or beg for mercy, he knows he'll get none anyway. It’s as if he’s concentrating on something else as he prepares to die. He’s thinking about me I suppose, because in few more seconds there’ll be no one else left to finish it.

Even while the roots (hands?) are placing the dynamite, one final root, this one larger than all the others, moves right up to his face, hangs there a moment, and then rips the cigar right out of his mouth. And now I swear I can hear that tree laughing at him… laughing at me.

Then it touches the burning tip of the cigar to the fuse. 

As the fuse bursts angrily to life, the roots begin to grow thicker and denser. They wrap themselves around the truck like a caterpillar cocooning itself in its chrysalis. In a few seconds, the entire truck is encased in a hard shell of root matter. And seconds after that, the single daisy chain fuse branches off into a dozen individual fuses, all racing each other towards an inevitable conclusion.

Popie can only sit there, resigned to his fate.  The twelve sticks of dynamite detonate simultaneously, and then he’s gone, leaving only a cloud of pink mist behind which dissipates slowly as it settles into the charred crater beneath the explosion.

That's always where I wake up.

The police were there a few minutes later, or so the story goes. The town just wasn't, isn’t, very big… and an explosion as huge as the one that killed Popie didn't go unnoticed. Fully a dozen different people called to report the “big bang” in the minute and a half immediately following the detonation, but they probably needn't have bothered. Popie lived a couple blocks from the police station. I've read newspaper accounts of the incident that say windows were broken as far away as a half mile from ground zero, and the engine block of Popie’s old Ford landed in the middle of the town square and buried itself in the ground three feet deep.

Body parts were found, but not many. An index finger, and most of a palm. The finger was positively identified as Norman Broussard’s. The palm belonged to Harvey Andiman.

The official explanation goes something like this:

Popie, still angry over the fight they'd had in the bar that night, called Harvey after he got home and invited him over to “patch things up.” At some point, Popie snuck up behind him, caved in the mailman’s skull with a sledge-hammer, then dragged the body to his truck. His plan was to dispose of Harvey’s remains by blowing them up, thereby making the body unidentifiable.

Yeah, I know, it sounds ridiculous. But then, what does the truth sound like?

Popie was a known and well-documented cigar smoker, and the rest of what happened that day was an easy leap of logic for the local law. Popie loaded his crate of dynamite into the truck alongside the mailman’s body, and his cigar ash fell into the crate. The rest was just high school physics.

***

It's three in the morning now, and I've been sitting here in room #237 of the Bayou View Hotel in Houma, Louisiana most of the night, typing all of this into my battered laptop. When I’m finished, I’ll paste it into an email and send it to you. I guess I'm leaving this as a testimony in case I fail. 

Four days ago, I turned thirty and I got a surprise visit from my folks, along with that trained monkey with a switchblade they like to call their lawyer. Turns out there was a clause in Popie’s will which states that the on the occasion of my thirtieth birthday, all property rights to the Broussard ancestral home revert to me.

As of the day before yesterday, I own it all, including the tree. And whatever you own becomes your responsibility. Isn’t that what they say?

The news of my inheritance also came with a sealed package. Inside was the elaborate brass key that opens the front door of Popie’s plantation house, which I guess is now my plantation house, along with a copy of Popie’s first book. I opened the book to the title page, expecting an inscription, “Dear Grandson, never stop chasing your dreams…” or some such. But Popie hadn’t gone for inspirational, at all… rather, two words were written there in my Grandfather’s blocky scrawl.

“End this.”

***

Back home in Northern Virginia, I have an old picture of my parents standing on the rooftop observation deck of the World Trade Center. It was probably taken sometime in the late 70’s. New York spreads out behind them covered in that noxious brown haze that was a staple of the Big Apple back in the days before we “got serious” about pollution. Sometimes when I look at their smiling faces in that photo, I think about the 9/11 attacks and how so much of our lives depends not just on where you are, but when you are. The deadly history of that tree, my tree now, goes back through at least a hundred and fifty years and hundreds of people, and yet the world, or the fates, or whatever, have seen fit to deliver me here to this place, in this moment.

I could complain to you that it’s not fair… that none of it, is fair… but I’m pretty sure the Universe doesn’t give a rip.

A few thousand words ago, I told you that the question you really wanted to ask me was, why? Well, I’m finally ready to tell you.

There are three reasons, one from the heart, one from the head and one from that dark and terrifying place deep in our lizard brains where all our worst fears live.

The first reason is that I’m a Broussard, and that fucking thing killed Popie.

The second is that the property is mine now… which means the tree is mine… which means the responsibility is mine. I will not let this fall to the next generation. Either this evil stops here, or I do.

“End This”, he told me. And I will… if I can.

And the third? The third is why I do not expect to succeed. It’s why I’m leaving this record behind, so you’ll know what really happened to me… in case this goes badly.

When my mother was seven months pregnant with me, my dad was called away on business. My mom wanted to go with him, one last vacation before the baby, right? I think they call it a “Babymoon”, these days. Her OB okayed the trip, too, signed off on it with a smile and a wave and a “bring me something Irish.” I guess he figured anything before the final four weeks ought to be OK. And it probably would’ve been too, if she hadn’t tripped on the curb trying to get into a cab outside the hotel. Her labor contractions began a few minutes later, and after a frantic ambulance ride to a local hospital, I was born…

Six weeks early.

In Boston, Massachusetts.

…I’m a goddamned Yankee.

Gene Broussard

Houma, Louisiana. October 31, 2023