Devil Tree

Chapter Two

Chapter Two

FOR THE BETTER PART of an eternity the woman lay drowning in her own sweat. The fire’s breath was hot and close, the soaked garments hung nearby only added to the miasma that lay close about her. She lay in an ill-cured skin that stank of death. The man had wrapped her like he was bundling a present. She drew the hide close to her n***d skin. It was warm and it covered her.

She lay there, baking by the fire the man had laid.

Duvall. He had called himself Duvall in a deep harsh voice as abrasive as river gravel. Her name hadn’t yet come back to her. It lay somewhere beneath the winding murky depths of the river where she had died.

Died?

No, no dead. Not yet.

Not quite.

She stared blindly into the fire, watching the flame’s crimson tongue lapping the dead wood. She could see her name lurking there within the flame’s infernal heart and then all at once she remembered.

Her name was Tamsen.

A large black beetle crawled on her ankle and slowly up her leg. She did not feel it until the beetle had crawled up her back, over her neck and into her open mouth. She spat the bug into the fire. The carcass hissed for a single bright moment and then popped like a resin-ripe pine knot.

There were others in the cabin. A woman and a young boy sat sitting and watching her, saying nothing. The woman, large and ancient, was heavy with child. She was a savage by the looks of her and the boy her son. Tamsen envied the woman’s blatant fertility, wishing it upon herself in place of the empty cradle God gave her for a womb.

The woman was n***d save for the rotting blanket that clung to her flesh. Her heavy dugs lay exposed, ripely swollen with milk, flattened out upon her chest like a pair of beached jellyfish. A drop of the fluid dangled from one of her darkened n*****s like a bit of clouded dew. The young boy lay beside her, stretched upon the bare ground, occasionally reaching upwards to draw nourishment from his mother, if mother she was. Another part of Tamsen’s mind guessed the boy to be about thirteen years of age.

The mother spoke to the boy, both in gesture and in a tongue that fell strangely upon Tamsen’s ears. He nodded, drawing another slow swallow from her breast. She shivered and parted her lips like a dying fish. He arose and went outside, where Tamsen heard him working at some unseen task.

Tamsen dragged herself closer to the fire, trying to keep as much distance as possible between her and the savage.

A body fell into the cabin, impacting upon the earthen floor like a heavy sack of seed. The body was that of a man. Tamsen might have known him once but she was uncertain of his identity. That too lay drowned far beneath the swollen river.

Duvall entered from behind the fallen man, his thickish shoulders seeming to expand as they filled the doorway. In the flicker of the firelight he seemed to swell as if he drew stature from the darkness and would stretch the cabin walls into something that better suited his needs.

“Tend to his wounds, woman,” he ordered. “And dress yourself. We got company.”

The old squaw rose, allowing her blanket to fall. She stood, staring down at Tamsen along the high pitched ridge of her nose. Tamsen looked away in awe of this woman and her obvious fecundity. The woman paid no heed. With a roll of her hips she wriggled into a dirty sackcloth dress.

She brought a basinful of water to the man upon the floor, either unconscious or dead. No, not dead. Not yet. Tamsen watched his chest rise and fall. The savage bathed his face. She removed his wet clothing. Tamsen felt a strange pang of jealousy at this familiarity but said nothing.

“We should eat,” Duvall said, turning to the fireplace where a large iron cauldron hung. He ladled generous portions of stew into heavy wooden bowls. The boy reappeared for his helping and just as quickly disappeared. The savage took her serving into the shadows, squatting upon her haunches beside the unconscious man, loudly sucking up her bowlful. Duvall carried two more bowls over to Tamsen, who sat watching from the floor.

“You have rivered far,” he said. “And you’re hungry.”

Both were true.

“Let us eat,” he said.

The stew was greasy, thickened with coarse flour, chunked with potato and knots of stringy unknown flesh. She ate silently, furtively, as if her hunger were something to be ashamed of.

Duvall dangled a choice bit of meat before her lips. She accepted the offering wordlessly. The stew was bitter but it gave her a measure of strength. It was warm, although the warmth did not linger.

Duvall ate slowly, grinding each bit of flesh with infinite patience, never taking his gaze off her form. She stared in fascination, spellbound by a bead of sweat slowly crawling along the man’s great brow, caressing each craggy furrow with its salty touch. She blinked in empathetic pain as the sweat slid into the corner of his left eye.

He did not blink, continuing to chew thoughtfully upon a particularly gristled morsel of flesh. A large black rook landed upon his shoulder, having boldly flown in from the outside. Duvall chuckled softly deep within his throat. He crooked the corner of a grin towards his black feathered guest.

“Are you dressed, woman?” he repeated, not bothering to look into the shadows where the squaw lay. “I told you we had company.”

The old squaw giggled in a manner unsuited to her massive proportions. She finished her meal and drew the ragged trade blanket over herself and the fallen man. She remained silent, making furtive rooting movements beneath the blanket’s tattered camouflage.

Duvall gave his full attention to the bird upon his shoulder. With an artful movement he slid the too-tough bit of meat from between his lips. He dangled it before the bird, oblivious to its great hooked beak. The rook considered the offering for a moment before snatching it.

Duvall was quicker. His raised hand closed about the bird’s outstretched neck. Tamsen stared in horror as the bird dragged its scimitared beak into the fleshy web between Duvall’s thumb and index finger, carving a gory furrow which rapidly filled with blood. Her mouth ovaled in shock as the bright crimson dripped down the length of Duvall’s outstretched arm, flowing like slow sap from the limb of a tree.

Before the bird could inflict further damage, Duvall’s other hand snaked about, twisting and snapping the bird’s neck like a dried out twig. He cast the bird’s carcass up and over his shoulder to the floor. The squaw crawled from her blanket to retrieve it.

“Cook me a pie for tomorrow but use no salt mind you,” he ordered. “We will have it for supper. Mutton and crow, by the blessed bark we will feast.”

The old squaw rolled her eyes and made great rude smacking sounds with her tongue on her lips. She busied herself at a rude sort of a table, plucking the bird, hacking at it with a large hunting knife. After a while the boy brought the sheep meat in and dumped it in to a tub of water to soak the blood out of it.

Supper was a silent affair. Outside the cabin, patient night fell upon the valley. Duvall rose from his meal and circled about the room, counterclockwise, in a peculiar hopping step. His eyes fixed squarely upon Tamsen’s, holding her gaze as a great black snake holds a sparrow’s eyes. His booted feet resounded like muted drums upon the hard packed earth. He chuffed great rhythmic exhalations, providing his own rhythm and backbeat. He shuffled and swayed, coming to a halt directly before Tamsen.

He stood poised over her like a falcon before the stoop. For the briefest of instances she thought he planned to take her and lie with her in plain sight of the boy and the squaw who now bracketed the fallen man’s form like a pair of unwholesome bookends. She was unsure how she felt about any of this.

He stepped backwards from her, taking three distinct paces.

“Go to sleep,” he said. “You are tired.”

And suddenly, she was.

*2*

As he slept, Lucas walked through a dream of the ship. The Kronos, a three masted frigate, thirty-eight souls all bound for glory and far off Cathay. He walked alone upon her decks, ten years younger, feeling the grainy salted timber slick beneath his booted step.

The Northwest wind hissed through her sails, tightly bound with frozen line. The hoar frost thickened upon the masts, slithering down the ratlines and grew into icicles that glittered in the midnight sun like countless hungry fangs.

Duvall stood alone in the mouth of the hold, his feet braced wide in a sailor’s stance. His pelvis boldly thrust outward, his head swung back in laughter, his every gesture inviting Lucas down into the familiar darkness.

Lucas thought of Peter’s bones hidden below; all scaled with ice and there was Duvall’s laughter, loud and long and rolling like the shifting of the restless polar floes.

Lucas awoke in darkness with the taste of dead earth moldering in his mouth, staring helplessly down the maw of an ancient savage, drowning in her fetid night breath and behind, his skin twitched and danced eagerly to the touch of a young boy’s hands dead cold upon his flesh.

His scream echoed in the pit of his stomach, catching dryly in the back of his throat and holding there like a strangler’s curse, emerging finally as the husked out impotent croak of a dying reptile.

*3*

Cold Venus kept watch from her lofty perch as the evening fell. Dark night gods held their collective breath and the wind grew still in silent anticipation.

Life of a sort lurked within the bowels of the waiting valley. It stirred in gentle excitement, goaded by the sight of something approaching, something that walked on two broad feet.

Jonah Duvall left his darkened cabin shortly after the woman fell asleep. Jezebel would see to things while he was gone. Not that there was much that needed seeing to. It-self would take care of it-self.

Hadn’t it foretold of these visitors coming in a dream that he had dreamed these past three nights running? Hadn’t it sung to him and promised a long year’s feast?

The whippoorwill whistled its plaintive cry.

Duvall chuckled softly to himself.

“Go away, old soul-catcher. There are no souls here to catch.”

Each step took him deeper into the darkness. He crushed dead branches, dried pine needles and rotted leaves beneath his cross booted step. This place is more bone-yard than forest, he thought. Autumn surely was the killing season. Death moved closely with life, of a sort, here in the valley.

Soon he stood beneath the tree. His tree. Had he not named it the Duvall tree and there were none who had better claim to it than him.

The tree rose high above all other trees; the oldest and largest tree in the valley. It was a mighty jack pine as old as sin. It stood alone with only its children about it, shriveled little dwarflings swallowed by their father’s sprawling growth, choked within his heavy shadow.

Duvall looked from left to right. His nostrils flared like hungry caverns, sucking in the heavily rosined scent. He whistled a low, clear note in a strangish key, ringing on interminably until his wind yielded to the crushing silence.

From a nearby birch, a young sparrow, roused from its tree-bound slumber, drifted down and lit upon his open palm. It nestled deeply, warm within his hardened hand, its blind eyes still unseeing and lost within smallish bird dreams of swarming fields of insects and grain. He held the bird gently, cupped within its fleshy nest, feeling the throb of its tiny wild heart as it twittered and fluttered against his scar furrowed hand.

How frail, he thought. How delicate.

He smiled into the night, a hollow smile lost within the folds of ravenous darkness. He stared into the endless depths of the jack pine until he found a familiar sharpened limb. He raised his free hand to grasp the jut.

“God sees the little sparrow fall...” he began, and then with a single thrust, he impaled the tiny bird upon the branch.

The bird hung suspended like a bit of feathered leaf. Its eyes flew wide as it bled its life away within the space of a single softly warbled sigh. He wiped his sticky hands upon the tree’s thirsty bark in a futile attempt to cleanse them.

“Damn you,” he said to no one in particular. He spat upon the base of the tree. Afterwards he pissed upon the roots, kicked dirt upon them and spat again.

“Damn you,” he repeated.

Dead needles fell like clots of earth from a sexton’s spade as the jack pine shook itself in the windless night. Nearby trees rustled their branches in leafy applause as Duvall walked away in slow heavy silence.

The following morning Jonah and Duvall went down together into the valley to see Duvall’s Tree.