The Bone Tree Read online

  THE BONE TREE

  by Christopher Fulbright

  This book was previously published in ebook and paperback editions by Bad Moon Books in 2010

  Entire contents of this edition copyright © 2015 by Christopher Fulbright

  Cover illustration by Jill Bauman

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

  Published by ND3 Press

  Printed in the USA

  Second edition: October 2015

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2

  Dedication

  For my son, Daniel, with love.

  THE BONE TREE

  PROLOGUE

  I patted the girls into bed. Tucked the covers around them. Turned off the light and gave them hugs and kisses. They wanted their little ladybug nightlight on, so I turned it on and left the hallway door open. Soft shadows joined me in the hall as I stood in their doorway, and my passing thought was, Is this how they’ll remember me? The shadow in their doorway?

  “Daddy?”

  “Yes, Lindsey.”

  “Are you and Mommy going to die?”

  I stood there for a minute. You get used to getting sideswiped by kids. You learn to keep your composure and carefully ponder the answers to hard questions like this.

  “Not for a long, long time, sweetie.”

  There was quiet for a moment. I could see their two shadowy forms in the bed, hands squeezing the covers up around their necks, those eyes, full of bedtime story magic only moments before, now shone with fear.

  Lindsey sniffled.

  I went in and sat on the end of the bed.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “You’re going to die.”

  “Not anytime soon, honey,” and there I’d done it again, but it suddenly became necessary. I managed to backpedal a bit. “Even if I did die soon, I would wait for you in Heaven. And I would make sure that God sent all of his best angels to watch over you both.”

  “When you die, you get to see God?”

  “Yes, ma’am. All of us do.”

  “Does everyone go to Heaven?”

  “Well...everyone gets to see God. And when you get older, and when Mommy and I are gone to be with God, then we’ll both be waiting for you there.”

  “We’ll all be in Heaven?” Abby suddenly asked.

  “Yes, honey.”

  Then Abby started to cry.

  I reached over and patted her.

  “Don’t be sad about that, Abby-bear. It’s a happy place. There’s no more crying. No more sadness or tough stuff. No more cleaning your room or—”

  “I don’t want you to die.” She sniffled.

  I hugged them both.

  “We’re going to be around for a while longer,” I promised them. “And probably longer than either one of you want us to be after a time.” I smiled and gave them each a little tickle. Lindsey wouldn’t be deterred.

  “Daddy, is there such thing as ghosts?”

  And the standard No honey, there are no such thing as ghosts was on the tip of my tongue. But I didn’t say it. I didn’t say it because I knew better.

  “There are no ghosts here. Jesus is watching over us.”

  I patted her little hand, less than half the size of mine, and rose from the end of the bed.

  “I love you guys.”

  “G’night, Daddy.”

  “Good night, sweets.”

  I walked down the hall for the last time that night.

  The fire was crackling softly in the living room, one small spotlight on above the hearth. It cast a warm yellow glow, and I sat on the end of the couch closest to the fire, smelling the scent of burning wood. I stared into the flames and looked back into the past.

  I saw the Bone Tree. A twisted hulk of wood, smashed by lightning, reaching like the bleached white bones of a hand clawing forth from the deepest grave. And the figures circling it, faceless shadows in darkness, faded by the years.

  I saw them again. In the comfort of my living room, almost thirty years distant.

  I shuddered and reached for my Bible.

  All in the past.

  I turned to where I’d left off in the book of Joshua, but he was busy dividing up the land and it didn’t keep my interest. I closed the Bible again on my lap and looked down at the bonded black cover, my name embossed in gold for last year’s Christmas gift. I thought about Jesus, and the day he died on the cross. How the skies went black, the earth shuddered, and the dead came back to life.

  “Daddy, is there such thing as ghosts?”

  * * *

  Whatever it was we saw that spring came from someplace beyond the realms of known existence. The Darkside, the Twilight Zone, or Hell itself—we never did know for sure. I have my theories, but I’ve never mentioned them. And whenever people tell ghost stories on the rare occasions when they come up—usually where alcohol and late nights or funerals for distant family members are concerned—I always keep my mouth shut and try to be polite. I tell my part of the old Grandma Rickert story, where we all heard someone walking up the stairs from the basement the day after she died, and the dogs were gathered ‘round the head of the stairwell with their hackles raised, but no one was there. But I never mention the Bone Tree.

  No one would believe what happened to Bobby and I all those years ago. So I’ve never said a damn thing.

  Until now, anyway.

  The girls got me thinking about it, and now it’s haunting me again—the memories, the questions—so maybe it would be good to get it off my chest. If not to tell someone, then maybe just to jot it down like this, to have it out.

  Maybe.

  Or maybe it’ll bring them back. I guess that’s the real reason why I’ve never said anything.

  I don’t want them to hear me.

  CHAPTER 1

  I grew up in the wooded hills between Waxahachie and Maypearl. There weren’t too many houses out that way back then, and Greathouse was just a knobby dirt road with washboard ruts like the ribs of a dead man’s chest. The old road crossed a plank bridge, ran through a hollow of trees thick and green in the springtime, crowding the road on both sides. When twilight came, hoots and howls and chitters echoed out from the forest to give us kids a good scare. I can still remember running home at dusk, the woodsy scents filling my lungs, clothes speckled with sap.

  The house where we used to live was just up the hill from that hollow of trees and wood plank bridge. Once you got past the bridge there was a driveway that’d been carved out of the denser forest, and back there was my good friend Bobby Nolan’s house. They were the only African-American family that lived in our neck of the woods. Of course, back then, in 1978, everybody in our part of rural north Texas had different names for them, but for us being kids that stuff didn’t start to matter till we got a little wiser to the cruel ways of the world. I can say it didn’t matter to me, anyway, since I was white and didn’t have to deal with anything like they did on a regular basis. But right or wrong, that was the way things were, and it didn’t make a diddlysquat of difference to us, since we’d grown up together almost as long as we could remember.

  The bridge up the road from Bobby’s house and down the hill from mine spanned Sutter’s Creek, which had burrowed its way into the Earth over years and years of Texas rainstorms, doing most of its work about those times of year when the remnants of tropical storms drifted upstate from the Gulf. Bobby and I would wander down there and spend a lot of time in the creek bed, building swings from rotten old lengths of rope we’d find out back of his momma’s house. We had a kind of tree house, too, in a gnarly cottonwood that grew out over the creek. Mostly
it was a plank of plywood fastened with some rusty nails to a forked branch. It gave us a place to sit high in the forest and talk about stories we’d heard at school, what we read last, reminisce on the last baseball season, and discuss the occasional TV show we’d get to see.

  We were climbing up into the tree house one Friday after school with a bag full of comics. Bobby went up ahead of me and was kicking bark down into my face.

  “Hey!” I pulled one hand off the 2x4 ladder step to shield my eyes.

  “Heh...sorry.”

  It was about 4:00 in the evening. The bus had dropped us off up by my house, and we’d come down the road, racing across the plank bridge to the base of the tree. My mom would usually watch both of us till Bobby’s momma got home; his dad died a couple years before, so his momma had to work all the time.

  “C’mon slow poke!” He yelled down at me, scrambling like a squirrel up the side of the cottonwood.

  I put my head down and climbed like mad, trying to catch up, but there wasn’t much I could do—he made it up easy. He reached down a hand to help me up when I got close, and we scooted out onto the plywood floor. Probably our mothers would have been mortified had they known that we spent most of our after school time on a flimsy piece of plywood about twenty-five feet in the air, but boys are boys.

  Bobby had the bag of comics—a good collection of Detective Comics, Spider-Man, Black Lightning, Conan the Barbarian, Iron Man, and House of Secrets. He dumped them out and we started in on the goods.

  The sun shone through the thick trees in broken rays, dappling the woods with drops of golden light. A light wind blew, and the trees whispered. I still remember the smell of fresh ink on the pages, the scent of the creek and fresh grass and old leaves. Bobby was just talking about how he thought Black Vulcan on Super Friends was a cheap knock-off of Black Lightning when he paused in mid-sentence.

  I remember how we looked at each other when we heard the splashing through the creek far below.

  You didn’t hear a lot go on in that creek. It wasn’t like a stream that fish lived in because it dried up if we went too long without rain. We did hear a raccoon or maybe a stray dog from time to time, but it didn’t sound like that. This was one splash after another. Like somebody running through the water.

  “Hey look!” Bobby pointed down through the trees. He’d tossed aside the latest issue of Black Lightning and was hovering at the edge of our plywood floor. I lay down on my belly, scooting up to the edge, and looked where he was pointing.

  “Somebody running,” I whispered. “Who is it?”

  “I dunno. But boy he’s goin’ for it.”

  A little blond haired boy, a bit younger than we were, was running like mad up the creek, the resistance of the water making him swerve back and forth, now and then trying to get up the bank but falling back in. Then he’d pick himself up again, fast, like the devil was on his heels, and splash his way a little farther upstream.

  He passed under the plank bridge headed toward the bottom of our cottonwood tree.

  “Somebody chasin’ ‘im?” I asked.

  Then, “Hey!” Bobby yelled down to the other boy. “Hey...up here!”

  The blonde boy just about fell down again—we surely scared the tar out of him, and on top of whatever else, he would have been right to scream. He stumbled against the dirt wall of the creek bed and looked up, shielding his eyes.

  I grabbed the old rotten piece of rope that we used to swing across the gulch and handed it quickly to Bobby, who wrapped it around a stout branch twice and then gave me that end. He took the long end and dropped it down into the creek bed, dangling it near the boy.

  “Grab hold!” Bobby yelled. “Hang on!” he told me.

  I leaned back and anchored the wrapped end of the rope. The other end went taut.

  “Here he comes.” Bobby hung over the plywood deck again, hands cupped around his mouth. “Come on up!”

  My guts seized in my gullet.

  “What’s chasin’ him? Can you see anything?”

  Bobby looked hard through the trees, but the foliage was dense and he surely couldn’t see much. He shook his head: no.

  Soon there were the scrambling sounds of the blond haired boy as he made his way up the tree. He was smaller than us, so it wasn’t easy for him, but Bobby and I reached down and grabbed him as soon as he was close enough to help up.

  “What’s the matter?” I asked. “Someone chasin’ you?”

  Bobby looked down the creek again, but still couldn’t see anything.

  We both recognized him now: Tom Plecker. He was in fourth grade at our school, family just moved out here from the city a couple months ago. You couldn’t sneak into our school without getting noticed—he’d taken a lot of ribbing from some of the other kids. Poor suckers didn’t stop to think they were the country bumpkins. But then, kids don’t stop to think about much. Ol’ Tom looked a bit rougher now than he had today at school. His jeans were wet and muddy up to the knees. His hair hung in sweaty ringlets about the edge of his face. His blue eyes were wide and full of fear. He was breathing so hard that when he tried to swallow and talk to us, he just coughed and almost started to cry.

  “It’s all right,” Bobby patted him on the shoulder.

  “Yeah,” I chimed in. “Nothing can get us up here.”

  His eyes stayed big and wet and looked between us and the edge of the plywood deck that overhung the creek as if he expected a hand to appear there and something hideous to pull itself up.

  After a minute he was able to talk. Neither one of us had anything to drink, but Bobby had some butterscotch candy, so he broke out a few pieces and we all shared.

  “What the heck were you runnin’ from?” Bobby asked him.

  “I-I...” Tom shook his head and looked at both of us. “I was walking through the cemetery back to my house when...something...a big shadow...came at me through the woods! I don’t know who it was...like a man, but—”

  “A shadow?”

  “Yeah,” Tom said, “it-it was running, and making this-this s-s-sound... ” At the recounting of this part of his tale he started to want to cry again, so we comforted him some more and waited.

  “A big man came after you?” I asked, picking up where he left off.

  “A shadow,” Tom emphasized. “H-he, it, was just a dark shape like a man.”

  A cold realization suddenly settled over both Bobby and I at the same time. Tom had to walk through the cemetery to get to his house. The Greathouse Cemetery had been there since the mid-1800s, and nobody’d been buried there in probably the last 70 years or more. There was a story we’d heard from Pete who worked the counter at Grady’s Drugs about an old Civil War soldier, Private Isaac Aaron of the Confederate States Army who’d lost both his arms in combat, who had been seen drifting among the graves on nights with no moon, his limbless torso moaning the name of his long-dead lover.

  Bobby and I had gone down that way a few times, but it gave us the willies, and we never hung around for long. Neither one of us said anything, but it probably scared him as bad as it had me.

  So the thought occurred to both of us, and we knew each other well enough to know, Had Tom seen a ghost? The ghost of old Isaac Aaron? Our eyes asked the question, but neither one of us voiced the answer. We looked back at Tom.

  “I-I gotta get home,” he stammered, and acted like he wanted to cry again. “My mom’s gonna have a hissy fit!” Tom looked down at his clothes—a muddy ruin—and tears dropped into his lap.

  Bobby’s dark eyes narrowed with determination. He nodded to himself, gathered up the comics and stuck them back in the brown paper bag.

  I patted Tom on the back and smiled at him the best I knew how. Meanwhile, my eyes wanted to stray back down to the creek and check the branches for the shadow man.

  “We’ll walk you home, Tom.” Bobby said.

  My eyebrows shot up to about the middle of my forehead.

  “Huh?”

  Bobby looked at me hard and even scowled a bi
t. He put his hands on his hips when he stood up and looked down at me like his momma looked at us sometimes when we’d sneaked into the house before she was home and got into the ice cream.

  I nodded. We had to do it. It was our duty as the older boys. Not much older, and frankly not much less afraid on my part anyway, but it was safer in numbers, and we knew that.

  “All right then,” I said. I looked out into the trees. The sunlight that blazed through the roof of the forest was turning a burnt orange, signaling it was about time for us to head up to my house and wait for Bobby’s mom to come and pick him up. We had time, even though I was wishing that we didn’t. Still, an ache filled my heart when I looked at poor Tom. He was an all-right kid. Never done nothin’ to us.

  We climbed down from the tree and made our way back to the road.

  CHAPTER 2

  We walked together in solemn thought, each of us scanning the brush for the shadow man. As we came to the part of the road that ran by the old Greathouse Cemetery where the bus usually dropped Tom off, the trees closed over a hollow in the road, and there was a clearing on the left where more very old trees surrounded the plush green lawn that made up the little graveyard. The bus dropped him off here because the bridge on the main road had washed out the month before, and they were still working on it. He usually walked through the graveyard and down through the woods to his house, which lay on the other side of the windbreak atop a hill of green grass that grew waist high.

  Before we left the road, each of us took a long hard look at the span of graves. There were a hundred or so graves in all. Most of the headstones were of the small gray-white sort that they used to use, but a few crumbling statues and crosses stood high on pinnacles here and there. A wire fence surrounded the graveyard, and a large iron gate marked the entrance. An old rusty chain held the gates nearly closed. A dirt pull-off served as a parking space, but nobody’d ever seen anyone there.