The Killing Tree by Rachel Keener Read Free Book Online Page A

held them to their stakes, letting their fuzzy leaves prickle my skin.
    We never talked much while we worked, other than “hand me that hoe” and “have you seen the size of those turnips?” But it
     was as close as the three of us ever came to complete harmony. Once the need for words was gone, the clank of the hoe and
     shovel said it all.
    That night I lingered over the tomatoes. Wondered if the plant called to the mater migrants, the way it did me. If I were
     going to be a crop worker, I’d want to be a mater migrant, I thought. I watched Mamma Rutha and Father Heron. One working
     passionately, the other fiercely.
This is how it will always be,
I told myself. Pig-filled weeks, church and dirt-filled Sundays. Holding my breath around Father Heron, and over Mamma Rutha.
     I wanted something more. Something that stayed silent and unnamed in my heart. And without a name to call it, I knew it would
     never come.

Chapter V
    I was eager for fall, when everything would smell better and feel more alive even as it started to die. Kind of like the mountain’s
     last hurrah, before a long gray winter. But the coming season change also filled me with dread, or maybe desperation. For
     as long as I could remember, fall signaled not only the end of heat, but a change of pace and scenery as a new school year
     began. But that year my routine would stay the exact same. All the days of my life seemed to stretch out before me in one
     long, straight path. I was only eighteen years old, but that path made my feet ache.
    I was grateful when the last August weekend brought rain, a sneak peak of the coming cooler weather. It wasn’t an afternoon
     cloudburst or an evening storm, but a good steady rain. A potato-making rain, Mamma Rutha would call it. And though I hadn’t
     brought an umbrella to work, I was still determined to walk to the Miners’ Credit Union before five. I was almost a rich woman.
     My jelly jar was crammed with over a hundred dollars, and I was going to celebrate my wealth. Perhaps buy some new jeans.
     Some nice ones, maybe even Calvins. I wanted jeans that would hug my hips in the right places, making me seem like I had more
     curves than a straight sapling. Girls with money used to wear those kinds of jeans to school, driving the boys mad. The rest
     of us wore the cheap kind. Jeans made straight and square that made our bodies look straight and square, or even worse, straight,
     square, and wide. But I was close to buying some jelly jar jeans, so close that I could almost feel them cinching in my waist
     and shaping my hips as I headed out the diner door.
    The rain surprised me. It was colder and wetter than I had expected. The drops more forceful. Sane people hid indoors. And
     I wondered about the sight I must have made.
Mercy Heron’s as crazy as her grandma Rutha
, they would say.
Must run in the family
, they would laugh. They were probably right too. But if that August rain was what crazy felt like, then I was learning what
     Mamma Rutha had always known. Sometimes crazy is just the best choice.
    And then there was someone else
.
Walking slowly toward me, head down, clothes soaked. I blinked hard in the rain, trying to see through the water. But the
     gray and silver masked everything, until I saw the red. Stubborn stains that even a heavy rain couldn’t cleanse. I knew then
     that it was him.
    I peered through the rain. Liking his hair twisting into wet loose ringlets. His unshaven face. The water that dripped off
     the tips of his ears. Liking the way he walked so slowly, as though it were a sunny spring morning.
    “Excuse me, miss?” a lady called to me as I followed him into the Credit Union. “Miss, you’re dripping all over our floors,”
     she whined.
    “Oh. Sorry. I forgot my umbrella today,” I replied, wondering if he had noticed me, or if he even remembered me.
    “Mhmm,” she clucked. “Well, if you got business here, hurry it up before you water-spot the new rug.”
    As I watched