Bryan Gruley: The Hanging Tree

“Gus. I will call you later. OK?”

I watched her dress. She fixed her brass badge to her brown blouse, the tie clasp in the mitten shape of Michigan to her tie. When she moved to the dresser and reached around me for the hat, I put a hand on her shoulder. She looked up at me then. She looked like she couldn’t decide whether to scream or cry.

“What’s wrong?”

“I have to go,” she said. She grabbed the keys and cell phone out of her hat, picked it up, and started out of the room. I let her go. At the doorway she turned and pointed her hat at me.

“Go back to bed, OK? I’ll call you later.”

“Where are you going?”

“Don’t be following me.”

I waited a beat. “All right,” I said.

Darlene closed her eyes, took a breath. She pulled the thicket of her hair back on her head and stuffed her hat down around it.

“Please,” she said.

They found her hanging in the shoe tree at the edge of town.

Gracie McBride had started the shoe tree some twenty years before, when she was sixteen years old and in love or at least lust with a boy from Sandy Cove, the next town over. His name was Ricky and all I remember about him is that he played football, not hockey, and that he went through one hell of a pregnancy scare with Gracie. No one told him that, even if Gracie did have a baby in her belly, there was no way to be sure it was his.

When she finally let him know her period had come two days after it actually arrived-Gracie liked to have fun with boys that way-Ricky was so relieved that he drank half a quart of Jack Daniel’s and went out in his father’s enormous Chrysler something and backed it over every mailbox on Sunset Trail between Horvath Road and Walleye Lake. It actually wasn’t that many mailboxes, but enough for Ricky to spend a weekend in jail.

Gracie was so impressed that when he got out, she told him to bring his football cleats and drove him out to an old oak towering over Main Street about a mile east of Starvation. There in the summer midnight dark she took off her clothes and then Ricky’s and after they’d writhed in the tall grass at the base of the tree, she tied one lace of one of his cleats to one lace of one of her high-top sneakers-she had dyed it a bright pink so you could see it from afar-and threw the pair over her shoulder and clambered up into the tree. Ricky told her this was a stupid thing to do, especially naked, but Gracie giggled and kept climbing until she could find no more branches that would hold her ninety pounds. Then she reached over her head and looped the pink sneaker and black cleat over a bough.

Gracie wasn’t as good at climbing down, or at least she pretended not to be. Ricky put his pants on and tried to help her, but he was too heavy to climb as high as Gracie, and she insisted, giggling again, that she was too afraid to descend. He finally drove into town while Gracie sat on a high branch in the dark, wearing nothing, until a fire truck came and plucked her from the tree like a pussycat. When one of the Pine County sheriff’s deputies asked her what the hell she was thinking climbing fifty or sixty or seventy feet into a tree naked in the dark, she said, “I don’t know, officer. Didn’t you ever do anything for love?”

Soon more shoes began to appear in the tree. At the high school, hanging shoes became a spring ritual for graduating seniors, which naturally prompted a brief, futile attempt by the police to stop it, seeing as the kids’ hangings usually involved beer and sometimes ladders. But adults hung shoes in the tree, too, especially after a night at Enright’s Pub. Out-of-state tourists saw the tree and pulled over and hung their own shoes and flip-flops, their equivalent of writing in the guest book at a rental cottage. Sometimes when a romance soured, one of the two lovers would bother to shinny into the tree and slice a pair of shoes away.

But mostly the shoes multiplied, and over the years the oak took on the look of a matronly ghost dressed in a ragged nightgown. And somewhere in her highest branches dangled a single snow-covered football cleat tied to a high-top sneaker faded to a dirty gray, the pink but a memory.

And way below the sneaker now hung Gracie herself.

The headlights on my pickup truck pushed through the dark, my tires creaking through the fresh eight inches of snow left by the blizzard that had howled through Starvation between supper and sometime after midnight. Wind whistled into the cab through a twisting hairline crack in the window next to me. Twice I had to slow down and steer around branches the wind had severed from trees.

I saw the dim pulse of blue and red police lights about half a mile ahead. The silhouettes of the bare trees etched skeletons on the linen sky. I pulled onto what shoulder there was and parked, reached into my glove box and pulled out a notebook, my cell phone, a ballpoint pen, and a pencil, in case the pen didn’t work in the cold. I stuffed it all in my jacket and stepped out onto the road.

For the record, I did not follow Darlene. After I heard her clomp down her back stairs and roar away in her police cruiser, I dressed and hurried out across Main to the Pilot. The police scanner on the plywood shelf near my desk told me all I needed to know.

The tree stood in a clearing about twenty-five feet off the road, surrounded by a field buried in snow and ringed by woods. The cops hadn’t taken the body down, probably had barely touched it yet except to ascertain that it was dead, as they worked to encircle the clearing with yellow do-not-cross tape.

I veered to the shadows along the right shoulder across the road so the cops were less likely to see me. It wasn’t easy to see over the wall of snow piled high along the opposite shoulder, but it gave me a bit of cover. The sheriff generally didn’t appreciate me showing up before he’d had a chance to determine what had happened and what he would tell me and my friends at Channel Eight.

I spied Darlene unspooling police tape at the far end of the clearing, a duty she might have chosen so she would not have to face the body of her oldest and best friend up close in death. The area around the base of the tree was illuminated by headlights and the flashing lights of an ambulance, a fire truck, and three police cruisers parked at haphazard angles along the road.

Two paramedics bundled in parkas and wool caps stood behind the open double doors of the ambulance talking with the sheriff. The sheriff, a man built like an elm tree in a knee-length brown parka and a fur-lined earflap cap, pointed at the body. One paramedic nodded. The other climbed into the back of the ambulance. The sheriff held up a hand, as if telling them to wait a minute, then started toward the tree. He had to lift his knees high to get through the accumulated snow. We’d had a lot this winter, more than we’d seen since the 1980s. When the sheriff reached the hanging corpse, he stopped and played a flashlight slowly up the limp body. The light flashed white on her face.

“Jesus,” I said to myself.

The wind gusted near the tree and Gracie swayed back a few inches, then swayed forward again. Not much of her face was visible through the jagged scraps of ice and snow that clung to her forehead and cheeks. Patches of white covered much of the rest of her. She was wearing something dark beneath all the snow and ice. Maybe a black leather jacket, a pair of black jeans.

Her left foot appeared to be shoeless. She could have lost a boot as she kicked away whatever she had stood on. I couldn’t tell if the foot wore a sock. And whatever Gracie had climbed up on must have fallen into the snow. She hadn’t climbed nearly as high as she had all those years ago. Just enough to secure herself to one of the sturdy boughs eight or nine feet off the ground. She wasn’t ninety pounds anymore either.