Caitlin R. Kiernan - The Red Tree

While I’ve been sitting here, writing all my nothings in-particular, the mist has thinned a bit, but it has also drifted out across the nearer end of Ramswool Pond. I can no longer clearly make out the wavelets rippling across the surface of the flooded quarry. But, I see the wind rustling the leaves and the weeds, so know that they’re still there, those small waves. And now, I think, I know what I am going to write here, instead of the bad dream. I’ll write the bad dream after its next inevitable permutation, possibly. It can wait. The pond has reminded me of something I don’t think I’ve thought about in a very long time, and that’s what I’m going to write. After I get my third cup of coffee.

I suffered through the better part of my childhood and my teenage years in a stunted little town about fifteen miles east of Birmingham, Alabama. Back in the seventies, that place was still clinging rather resolutely to the forties and fifties, I suspect. Hanging on for dear fucking life as the world rushed forward without it. I’ve given interviews where I made jokes about The Andy Griffith Show and such, calling my “hometown” things like Hooterville or Dog-patch or Mayberry on crack. Not so very far off the mark, no matter how snarky it might sound. I’m told that the town’s public library removed my books from its shelves after I said something to that effect in an interview with the Atlanta Journal-Constitution . Whatever. Fuck them if they can’t take a joke. or face the truth. But, I digress. Always, I digress. It’s my superpower. Some asshole at the New York Times Book Review once said that my novels would benefit tremendously from “an editor willing to rein in my unfortunate propensity for digression.” Or something along those lines. I suppose I shouldn’t use quotation marks when paraphrasing from an unreliable memory.

Anyway, a couple of miles from my house, there was an old chert pit, long since abandoned and flooded, just like Ramswool Pond out there. I used to go to that old pit — which had no name that I was ever aware of. Most often, I went alone, sometimes to hunt the trilobite and crinoid fossils you could find there, sometimes to chuck rocks into the water or sneak cigarettes or shoot BB guns, sometimes just to get the hell away from my mother and father and my kid sister for a while. There were all sorts of local stories and folktales about the place. Supposedly, bootleggers had run a still out there during Prohibition, and it had ended badly with a shoot-out between the moonshiners and Revenue men. Careless swimmers were said to have drowned in the greenish, murky waters. Some claimed that the pit was connected to an underground river, and that giant, man-eating salamanders and bullhead catfish and fuck knows what else were swimming around down there. Car thieves were reputed to dump the carcasses of the automobiles they stripped into the pit, and I tended to believe that part, because here and there you could spot the rusted hood of a pickup truck or the roof of a car just below the water. I don’t recollect all of the stories. There were so many, but this is, I think, the first time that I have ever told my own.

It was the end of the summer of 1977, and in a couple weeks more I’d be starting high school. Wait. I have to find a knife and sharpen this damn pencil again. Okay, pencil sharpened. So, summer of ’77, and the radio was awash with the Eagles’ “Hotel California” and the Bee Gees “How Deep Is Your Love” and “Blinded by the Light” by Man-fred Mann’s Earth Band. all that crap, though mostly I was listening to Pink Floyd and David Bowie back then. Carter was president. The Bionic Woman and The Rockford Files were my favorite TV shows. I knew I was going to hell, because I had a bitch of a crush on Lindsay Wagner.

And here I go, digressing again. Regardless, I’m pretty sure that on the August day in question, I was out looking for trilobites, because I’d sent some of mine off to the state geological survey in Tuscaloosa, and I’d gotten back a letter asking if I could please send more. Which meant I had to find more. Years later, a paleontologist in Birmingham described my trilobites as a new species, and I hope I spell this right— Griffithidesc roweii, naming them after me. That was my first brush with fame, I suppose, though I doubt anyone at “home” even knew. By then, I’d left Mayberry and was living with a girlfriend up in Nashville, but the paleontologist tracked me down, and she sent me a copy of the scientific paper. Her name was Matthews, Esther Matthews, I think. I still have it somewhere, that paper. I still have one of the trilobites, too. It’s about as big as my thumbnail, a shiny copper-tinted bug stretched out on a bit of brownish-orange chert. As I have admitted, in two or three interviews now, I’d have gone into geology or paleontology, instead of becoming an author, if only I’d been any good with math. If I ever had a “calling,” that was it. I took a few courses in college, and, to this day, a sizable portion of the nonfiction I read is books on paleontology and earth history. I often dream of fossil hunting, which, I suppose, is my subconscious mind working through regret. But, hey, at least I have the trilobite.

The rain is starting again. I suppose this may keep up all damn day.

So, that particular August afternoon in 1977, thirty-one years ago, it must have been about a hundred and two in the shade. I was clambering about the steep, crumbly edges of the quarry, turning over chunks of the hard stone, cracking it open with a brick hammer that had once belonged to my grandfather, but not finding much of interest — seashells, corals, crinoid stems, no trilobites — and probably wishing I had a cold Coca-Cola or a Mountain Dew or something. I might have been thinking about stripping off my jeans and risking the giant catfish of legend for a swim or perhaps giving up, calling it a day, and walking back through the kudzu to the place where I’d left my bicycle.

My bicycle, by the way, was a lot like that town. It had actually belonged to my mother when she was a girl, back in the fifties. It was a mottle of rust and flaking blue paint, and the seat tended to fall off anytime you hit a pothole or went over a curb. I have no idea whatever became of it.

But, anyway, there I was, crouched right down at the waterline, on this narrow, mossy ledge surrounded by cattails and whatnot, sweating like a pig and trying to keep a weather eye out for copperheads and trilobite fossils at the same time. I must have heard something, maybe the sudden splash of a frightened, fleeing bullfrog that I’d disturbed, or maybe something else, and I looked up. And way over on the other side of the pit, directly across from me, which would have been at least a good forty or fifty feet away, I saw this girl standing in the rushes, naked as the day she was born, the muddy water up to her knees. She was staring back at me, and I just froze, the way the deer around here freeze when they get spooked, just before they dash back into the woods. I remember that she had the blackest hair I think I’d ever seen, hair like ink, and I wasn’t so far away that I couldn’t tell she was pretty. I mean, fucking unearthly pretty, beautiful, not what passed for pretty in that little Alabama town. There I was, fourteen years old and just beginning to suspect I might be a dyke, and there she was, and all I could do was stay very, very still and watch. I was thinking, Why don’t I know you? Why haven’t I ever seen you before? because everyone in that town knew everyone else, at least by sight. And if I’d ever seen her, I sure as shit would not have forgotten her. She might have been smiling at me, but I couldn’t be sure. My mouth was so dry, I still recall that, the dry mouth and parched throat, and my heart pounding like a goddamn kettledrum in my chest. And then she took a step or two towards me, the water rising up to her waist, hiding the ebony thatch of her sex, and she held her arms up and out like maybe she wanted to give me a hug or something.