Devil Tree

Chapter One

Chapter One

THE CURRENT WAS A SNEAKY one. The flow crept in slow-growing strength, gathering speed until the raft had as much say about where she went as a bit of windblown seed.

Lucas Sawyer leaned his weight against the shaft of the hickory steerage oar. He felt the wood quiver in his hands as he fought the deep seething drive of the current.

The fact was, the Greensnake River did not care to be taken lightly.

“Down with all hands,” Lucas muttered, echoing the fear that whispered deep in his skull. He was scared and he knew it. He tried to laugh away his worry. He was being a damn fool and he knew it. The river was hundreds of leagues from the ocean.

It did not matter.

Old fears ran deep and were long in dying.

“Push on,” he told himself, leaning hard against the tiller. “Time is a wasting.”

Lucas was a stick of a man with a great beak of nose pushed front-wise like a ship’s prow. He forearmed his forehead sweat, streaking his own salt and spit across his eyes. It was hot, and him dressing in black did not help all that much.

This is one hell of a spot for a crow-clad ex-preacher to find himself in, he thought to himself.

He tugged at the ringlet of hemp about his throat – a charm against hanging. The twisted hemp hid a goiter he bore on his neck, about the size and color of a small plum. His doctor warned him that the goiter would be his death but that was a load of old hooraw, horse feathers and hogwash.

“I will wear this rope as a charm against death,” he had told the doctor.

“Charms are foolishness,” the doctor replied. “A man of faith ought to listen to a man of learning. Don’t put so much stock in an old wives’ tale. The truth lies in books, not in fancy.”

“One yoke is as good as another,” Lucas answered back.

Lucas had read his share of books. His hands always seemed to be cupping at the air, as if he did not feel right without some other man’s words riding in his palms. He had accepted more than a few from booksellers, teachers and his fellow seminarians.

And, of course, his father.

Of them all, only his father was responsible for the removal of just as many books. His father believed in one book only.

“The Lord is a balm and shadow in hard places,” Lucas’s father had preached.

One yoke was as good as another.

Lucas had turned and walked.

He walked to the water and never looked back.

“The Lord is my shepherd,” Lucas whispered. “I shall not want.”

I am losing her, he thought.

He struggled fruitlessly to hold the raft true to her course. Wind-coaxed tears pooled up in the corners of his eyes. He tried to read the surface flow but he might as well have been staring blind. Three years to sea and he was no more a sailor than the captain’s cat.

He had served as a ship’s carpenter. Picked up what he could but no one offered any help. The other sailors left him alone.

“Failure,” he whispered. “Half-a-man.”

The only one who believed in him was his wife, Tamsen. She knelt by the sheep, her knees bent on a pillow of rough woven rope, trying to calm the sheep just by being there.

“Tamsen,” Lucas called out, raising his voice over the rush of the river. “Can you see anything?”

She shook her head.

“Trees,” she said with a grin. “All I see are trees. I believe we’re out in the woods.”

He had to laugh. She was a brave and self reliant woman with a heart as hard as stout oak. She hid things, not in a mean way. Hid them behind her grin so well that Lucas never knew what she might be struggling with.

“Are the trees moving?” he asked, grinning back.

“Back and forth,” Tamsen said. “They wave back and forth.”

“Might be they’re just being friendly,” he said.

“Maybe,” she replied.

She was a proud woman and she always kept her spirit high.

Pride goeth before destruction, his father often warned – and a haughty spirit before a fall.

Lucas spit.

He wasn’t his father. He liked watching Tamsen wrestle with trouble, biting her lip and holding her tongue in silent, willful determination to deal with what ever bedeviled her.

She was as strong and Lucas liked her that way just fine.

“Keep a weather eye open,” he warned. “We are not out of these woods yet.”

“Can you land this thing?”

“That is the third time you have asked me that question.”

“Three times without an answer.”

“I can land...”

The oar twisted in his grip like an angry snake. It threw him to his knees on the wooden deck.

“Lucas!” Tamsen reached for him. The twist of their course sprawled her. She rolled towards the edge of the raft, catching hold of the safety lines Lucas laid about the craft’s perimeter.

While he was reaching for her the raft began to drift.

“Damn,” Lucas struggled to straighten their course. He fought the current for every inch, praying that the creaking oar would not snap.

Tamsen crawled towards him, wanting to help.

“Stay down,” Lucas warned.

She dragged herself forward but a rope had snagged about her ankle.

The raft yawed into a slow current-bound cartwheel.

“Lucas,” Tamsen called.

Lucas stared past her, towards the long thing that rose, Dagonesque, from the depths before them.

“Sea serpent!” Lucas shouted.

Tamsen looked back over her shoulder and screamed. Looming over her was the blunted tip of a mud-bound log, rising from its riverbed grave. Its slime slicked surface slid up and over the raft, looming higher as the current drove both raft and log hard together.

The raft tipped forward as the weight of the log began to tell. Lucas let go of the oar and grabbed Tamsen in a run for the side, hoping his momentum coupled with a well timed leap would carry them to safety.

“Jump,” he shouted.

At the brink of the leap the raft chose to yield to her assaulter. The sheer mass of the log bore down upon her deck. The raft tipped upwards and broke. The sudden upward lift catapulted both Lucas and Tamsen out over the river, airborne like a pair of winged angels.

In the height of his arc Lucas glanced at the shoreline.

A great black antlered deer calmly watched his approach.

And then he was under. The shock of total immersion slapped him into chilling reality. The river seemed deeper by fathoms than his last sounding had showed. He felt confused, not knowing top from bottom, looking for the light and hanging onto his breath and the small white hand of his wife.

She wasn’t swimming. Perhaps from the shock or perhaps she did not know how.

He felt her sink.

He held on to her. His breath beat upon the walls of his lungs, begging to be freed. He saw the glimmer of daylight through the water overhead, taunting him. The river seemed bottomless. He continued to sink, his attempts at swimming thwarted by his wife’s dead weight.

Was she breathing?

He could not tell.

He spared a glance, catching sight of the rope trailing behind her.

Let her go, an unseen voice whispered.

He would not listen. He kicked and struggled. The blood throbbed and beat in his temples, pounding him downward. His mind raved in panic. He heard singing – his father’s low dirge-like voice tolling “Washed in the Blood” as the old man held children beneath the sacred still waters of his pine barrel baptistery.

“Let her go,” the unseen voice whispered deeper.

The Lord is my shepherd, Lucas wordlessly recited, counter-spelling the river’s deep terrified commandment.

Let her go.

Lucas forced himself to relax. He tried to float. He felt no comforting upward pull. He remembered the summer his father threw him into the lake below their house.

“Sink or swim, Lucas, sink or swim,” the old man had gaily called.

“Let her go,” the voice shouted.

Lucas remembered his father’s final shame-filled walk into that same cold lake.

Father, forgive me, Lucas told himself.

Tiny spots of light danced like frightened fish before his eyes.

He maketh me lie, Lucas mentally chanted.

He reached out a hand towards the dark shapeless mass that hung close beside him.

Beside still waters.

He felt what seemed to be the slimy surface of a tree, leading upwards. An underwater root? He caught hold of the root. He steadied himself for a moment. He swallowed water, gritting his teeth against the impulse to cough out. He kicked upwards and began to swim. His hands slid from the rotted surface.

Let go, let go, let go.

In a moment of panic Lucas almost surrendered.

Tamsen nearly slipped away.

Lucas swam steadily, paddling with one hand while clinging to Tamsen’s still form with the other. When he weakened he reached for the root’s dead wooden meat. He drew vigor from somewhere within the wood’s murky heart, working his way upwards, humping along like some bizarre form of water bug.

He had been holding his breath for a while.

How long?

Seconds?

Minutes?

Hours?

Days?

He watched the glimmering daylight filtered through God only knew how many fathoms, taunting and laughing at him, wishing him dead.

Yea though I walk through the valley...

Goddamn, goddamn, God-be-damned I want to live!

At that last thought he emerged from the depths, laughing and gasping and choking, his left hand firmly entwined within a clot of rotted tree root.

“Praise God,” he croaked.

It was only then he remembered Tamsen, still hanging limply from his right hand. Her head bobbed serenely - face down in the dirty silent water.

Lucas released his grip on the root, turned to grab for her and slid inexorably backwards into the river’s eager grasp. He stretched his hand outwards and upwards.

“I have you,” a deep timbered voice said.

*2*

Wet dreams, dreams of drowning, dreams of death.

Tamsen’s dying mind was awash with the raucous laughter of the river gurgling within her ears. Whispering lurid suggestions as she floated and felt herself lifted upwards, heaven bound, a darkling vision of godhood hanging over her mouthing words she dared not hear.

Up, down, up, down.

Her head bobbed helplessly, choking and swallowing. The log reared over her like the great dripping member of some dark forgotten sea god. Poseidon, Neptune, Triton—names dredged from the pages of a childhood classical primer and other names she hadn’t read. Names she could not speak. Names she dared not utter.

Jacob? Are you there Jacob?

The raft shattered like a broken vow beneath the log’s blind implacable thrust. She saw another river, another woman and another time. In the storybook of memory she felt the ropes, tough and twisted, cutting livid tattoos into her flesh. She felt her body bound to the unforgiving dunking stool. She felt herself moving within another woman, feet dancing in midair, old Delta.

Up, down, confess, confess.

She felt a hand like chilled iron clenched around her wrist while the raft and her belongings and her life drifted past, moving down to something cold and hungry that waited far below.

She heard a voice, loud and distorted in the echo-echo of the water, (Lucas, is that you?), a woman’s voice, loud like thunder, shrieking LET-HER-GO.

Up, down.

She saw Lucas’s ship, the ship she had never seen and yet she knew it. She knew the creak and groan of each ice-locked member, threatening to give way. She knew there was death all about, pushing at each bulkhead, seeking some means of entry, of relief.

She knew that as dark as death outside of the ship was, darker still was the darkness of the belly, hidden deep below. She felt cold bitter hands and cold bitter flesh, cold upon each other, weeping cold bitter tears.

Up, down, up.

She felt herself being lifted and carried through the valley with his voice dark above her. His words dripped like sweet thick molasses, filling her up, drowning her and leaving her for dead by the warmth of a slow crackling fire that whispered ashy secrets and spoke of smoke and release.

*3*

Through the drowning span of darkness Lucas remembered a conversation, long ago and a lifetime away.

“We must go,” he had said to Tamsen.

“But why?” she had asked.

“My father....”

“Your father is dead.”

“The townsfolk?”

“People will talk but their memories are short. Give them time. They will forget the shame that has passed.”

He had sounded so confident.

He had sounded so very sure.

Had he ever really listened?

“We carry the cross of shame,” he told her. “Some memories will never die.”

“Are you so certain?” she had asked.

“We must go,” he had replied. “There can be no alternative.”

And so they left.

*4*

“Are you going to sleep forever?” a voice graveled close as death to Lucas’s ear.

Lucas raised himself up. He opened his eyes, attempting to clear his vision with several great sandy blinks. He shook his head and groaned aloud.

The other man kept talking, far too loudly. “Alive, by God, alive. I yanked two fish from Lady River’s arms today.”

Lucas remembered a strong hand grasping his. The hand of the Lord, he had thought, raising him up onto Jordan’s rocky shore. Then a voice, strong and deep, I have you. From there he began a blissful descent into oblivion, blacking out while barely halfway on to the shore.

“Can you sit? Can you speak?” the voice again, loud but farther away as if the speaker had straightened up. “Holy Christ man, are you helpless?”

Lucas winced as much at the blasphemy as his discomfort. He felt cargo shifting within the hold of his skull. He touched his cheek, found a sticky wetness and reflexively touched his fingers to his lips. He tasted blood and spat it out as if it were a poison.

“Tastes good, don’t it? I had to drag you out and you cut your cheek upon the wood. You and that woman were too damned heavy to lift but there was no way in Hell I could make you let go of her hand.”

Lucas’s right hand squeezed reflexively upon thin air, cramping slightly with the effort. “Tamsen! Is she...?”

“The woman? Sure, she is fine. SHe is just taken on a little river water. I guess she swallowed when she should have spat. How the hell did that rope get around her anyway? SHe is up with Jezebel now, in the cabin, drying off.”

Lucas’s eyes focused upon a large blackened pair of boots – the left solidly planted, the right c****d upon its heel. A large cross was carved into the boot’s wooden sole. Lucas coughed violently, both to clear his lungs and to conceal his shock. His efforts at diplomacy sadly failed.

“I am no godsman, if that is what you think,” The strange man said. “I put the cross down there to walk upon, grinding it into the dirt wherever I go.”

Lucas raised his eyes. From his perspective the stranger seemed huge, a barrel of a man as tall as a tree, coarsely featured and roughly hewn. His heavy arms crossed about his trunk in a manner that spoke of a hunter’s patience. A scraggly beard played about his cheeks like a forgotten smile and a savage scar furrowed a path down and across his left cheek.

The stranger grinned fiercely, exposing a set of huge yellow teeth that contrasted sharply with his darkling features. He bore a strong hint of mulatto. One of Cain’s own, Lucas’s father would have said.

The stranger would not stop talking.

“A couple of sheep came ashore. One was dead. I saw a couple of crates as well. I will send the boy to look but the rest is gone for sure. Lady River don’t give back much, once sHe is took.”

“You have got my thanks, sir. And my hand as well,” Lucas said.

Lucas raised his arm, surprised at the effort it took. The dark man’s grasp swallowed Lucas’s – a working man’s palm; thickened and horny with calluses and as dry as a piece of sun-bleached driftwood.

“Call me Duvall, Jonah Duvall, for I am no man’s sir.” He gave Lucas a snaggle-toothed grin. “Maybe I ought to call you Jonah or Lazarus, the way you rose up from the deep.”

“Moses would be just as apt, for he too was raised from the river but Lucas Sawyer is my given name.”

Duvall nodded and tightened his grip. When Lucas realized the man meant to raise him to his feet he put as much effort into the act as he could manage. A wave of blackness washed over him. His knees turned to water but Duvall held him easily.

“I think, Lucas Sawyer, that we had best take this easy and slow.”

Lucas nodded weakly and stood, leaning against Duvall like a man against a mast. Duvall wasn’t as tall as Lucas had thought. The man was a good hand and a half shorter than Lucas but built as sturdy as an oaken stump. Hesitantly, like two drunkards tottering home, they made their way along a twisted trail, back-tracking the ramble of a tributary creek branching down into the Greensnake below.

Lucas saw the cabin from the top of a small ridge.

The smoke caught his eye, a thin trail slithering from the gullet of a blackened mud-stick chimney. The building, like its owner, was a low, squatty thing. The only aperture was a door, hanging halfway open like the jaw of an old man, fallen asleep over evening conversation.

“Come on,” Duvall said. “It’s cold outside today. Not summer yet, not yet at all. I’ve got a fire inside, nice and hot, hey?”

A small goat pen sprouted from the cabin’s left side and within the pen’s confines Lucas spotted one of his sheep standing stock still while a largish billy goat mounted from behind. He hoped she was enjoying herself.

“Is that my sheep?”

“That is one of them,” Duvall replied.

“Thank God the goat’s seed will not take hold,” Lucas noted.

“God has nothing to do with the making of the two-back beast,” Duvall said. “And seed will root in the damndest of fields.”

In the far corner of the pen Lucas noticed a second sheep trembling noticeably from the cold or the wet. Beyond the pen, close enough for the easy transport of dung, a shapeless patch of garden sprawled.

To the right of the doorway a young man squatted in the dirt, working industriously at some task Lucas could not see. A black dog of undeterminable pedigree sat beside the boy, its long red tongue lolling patiently.

“I saved two of the sheep,” Duvall said. “They washed up, or maybe swam. Can sheep swim? The third one sure could not. He floated in wrong side up. At least there is mutton.”

“Yes, there is mutton,” Lucas answered dully, not quite grasping what the man was talking about.

Then he realized the boy was stringing up one of his sheep; the younger one with the blackish spot about its right eye. He moved closer. The boy hauled on a line hung over a convenient peg jutted high up the wall.

Lucas stared at the young man’s back, bent with effort, his shirttail loosened several inches above the belt line to expose a grimy patch of bare skin, slicked with sweat. He thought of Peter and he tried hard to keep his eyes from resting upon that patch.

“Up boy,” Duvall commanded. “Get it up there.”

In a half a heartbeat the sheep dangled several feet above the ground. The boy tied the line off and straightened upright. Lucas leaned against the roughened logs of the wall, sudden weakness swimming over him. The boy continued to work.

Lucas feared to break the silence that hung about the three of them, as chill and as heavy as the gunpowder clouds hanging overhead. A bit of sun broke through, warming Lucas in the winter-like chill. Sunlight glinted on the blade of a clasp knife the boy pulled from his trousers. The reflected light danced across the bits of reluctant down-sprouted upon the man-child’s face.

The boy was a savage, an Indian. This puzzled Lucas. As far as he knew, most red men lacked the capacity for growing facial hair.

The blade was keen, sliding with a wet hiss through the belly of the hanging sheep. Entrails sprung free like a bundle of wet red snakes. The young boy neatly snared them, dropping them into a waiting wooden tub. The bright red blood flew unheeded, spattering upon the heavily stained wooden wall, spilling to the dirt. The hound lapped up what it could.

Lucas’s legs buckled. He began a second slow tumble into the darkness. The last thing he remembered was barking his shin upon the door frame as he fell, tearing the trouser fabric and leaving the memory of his flesh imbedded in the hungry fibers of wood.