By Cristie Armstrong
When I was little, my grandmother’s blue hydrangeas grew along the front porch. One bloom was as big as my head. She gave me railroad spikes to push into the ground with my little sandaled foot. When I didn’t have enough umph, I went and got my grandfather’s hammer from his shop. Distracted, I played in the sawdust there on the floor. Drawing in it with my fingertip.
“Don’t run with that hammer, child,” he said.
“Yes, Sir,” I held tight with two hands and walked purposefully. I walked past my magnolia tree. My tree, each limb a blank canvas that I perched upon, scrawny legs swinging back and forth as I dreamed wild. The hammer lay on the ground as I dangled upside down, arms outstretched, flying the only way I knew how. I swung back and forth hard, one…two…three. A cherry-drop. Landed firmly, two feet and snatched up the hammer. I marched to the front yard, high knees, but I did not run.
I squatted, knobby knees and held the hammer too high but still got the job done. Each spike driven into the soft soil.
“The rust will make the flowers blue,” Grandma said. I nodded.
“I’m going to go find treasure,” I said with dirt on the tips of my toes.
“Put the hammer up first, dear,” she said.
I marched back around the house and did just that.
I don’t know when the story was told, it was just always known. My mother buried a jar of jewelry that a boy gave her when she was a teenager. She buried it in the backyard. That was what started it. I dug with a stick, a ten-penny nail and a bent fork. I sat and carefully dug away the soil, always finding some little something in the back alley.
“Honey, you know they used to burn trash back there don’t you?” my grandmother explained again.
“Yes Ma’am, but look what I found, what’s that word?” I asked, holding up a tiny cobalt blue bottle.
She put on her glasses and still squinted, nodding, “Vicks,” she read out.
“What’s that?” I asked, curious about my find.
“Drops to help you breathe when you're sick, child, that bottle is as old as me,” she laughed.
I handed it to her and ran off to dig again. I heard her laughing in the distance calling me a little crow, always bringing her shiny things.
Spending much of my childhood digging in the alley. I dug up a porcelain doll’s arm and her head. I tried to find the rest of her. I dug up a metal compact with a mirror and a metal lipstick tube, disappointed there was no makeup inside for me to play with. I dug up a locket. I dug up a skeleton key. I gave each find to my grandmother.
She got onto me for whistling. “A whistling girl and a crowing hen, never came to no good end,” she would say as I ran, whistling through my little teeth, running to my tree.
I hung upside down until I heard a chainsaw. I pulled myself up and sat on my limb. My cousin came around the side of the house and motioned for me to get down as he revved the saw. I shook my head and wrapped my arms and legs around the trunk. Screaming for him to turn it off. My mother pulled me down from the magnolia. I cried hot tears in the summer heat. I screamed until there was no sound left in me. He cut off the four lowest limbs.
That year, I learned the word “bastard” and said it out loud. It was the last word I said for a long time. I rocked back and forth in the rain, holding my knees and crying up at my butchered tree. My dreams floated away on magnolia leaf boats down the street.
“Come inside honey,” my grandmother tried to console the inconsolable child that I was.
It was the first and most bitter betrayal. One that would last a lifetime. No explanation about my safety would justify the malicious act. I had seen the smirk on his face. I don’t hate him now, but in my child mind he was a cousin no more.
I was never one to be kept down long. I scavenged the scrap wood in the shop. I stole three nails. I borrowed the hammer. It took everything my thin muscles had to drive in those three nails. Hammer in the dirt and I was back in my grand tree. It took a while for me to fly again, it was so much higher up. My tree missed me, and I was sorry about the three nails. I told it so. It didn’t rain for days and we were happy. My armpits hurt from hanging. The skin behind my knees was raw and the lace at the bottom of my dress rubbed against the pew on Sunday.
A small price to pay for those three nails I thought. Worse was when they all tried to make me talk. I wouldn’t, not for a long time. I heard them; they had all agreed to have him cut the limbs I could reach. Scared I would fall and break my neck. It was always that, me breaking my neck. I rode all the way to Texarkana with my head upside down and my feet up in the back window — didn’t break my neck. I rode my bike and crashed it — didn’t break my neck. I got bit by two dogs at one time, right on the left cheek, nowhere near my neck, but still, didn’t break it then either.
They cut my tree. I refused to speak.
The smell of magnolia blooms hugged me, the large white petals were soft on my face and tiny fingers. I dreamed of a land with nothing but magnolia trees with low, low limbs, ones any child could climb. Waxy smooth, hard leaves I never plucked. The smoothest bark, now with four marred belly buttons.
When the top scrap of wood cracked, my grandfather replaced all three without a word. I told him, “Thank you,” and it was the first two words that I had spoken in months. It wasn’t hard to be quiet. Eventually, I forgot about talking all together. I just dreamed up in my tree. I snuck out and climbed it in my pajamas. I tiptoed across the creaking floor and slipped back between cotton sheets that were cold on my bare feet; I never could sleep with socks on. The big clock in the parlor bonged me to sleep. My grandfather kept it wound with a key. One he couldn’t hide. He hid the Victrola crank when I was four. They never could find it after he went to heaven.
Elvis sang “How Great thou Art” on Saturday on that record player, and then they sang it in church on Sunday. I heard the rolling thunde,r but did not sing. I would fling open the back door to the Grenada and run stripping my dress over my head as my feet pounded the wooden porch. My grandfather laughing as I stood half-naked tapping my Mary Jane on the grey planks. Key in the door and Sunday’s best on the floor, I was dressed and running, barefoot and up my tree. Home at last.
I climbed my tree with a drumstick in my teeth and a cold biscuit in my pocket. I climbed it with a ball of yarn under my arm and old spoons under my chin. They didn’t sound as pretty as I imagined as I tied knots with my tongue sticking out in concentration. I climbed my tree with a book tucked in my shorts and sounded out the words so slowly. I sat, I laid, I hung like a sloth. I dangled by one arm, then the other when the first began to burn. Upside down until my head pounded, the first time I heard a heartbeat.
I balanced stones on the limbs. I fell asleep, falling out. I landed hard on my back; the air wouldn’t go back in me for a long time. I laid there just knowing I had finally done it. I had broken my neck after all. Tears raced down my cheeks as I rolled over and I sucked in a breath at last. I looked around fast and felt my neck. It felt alright to me. I climbed back up slowly, and we agreed that I best go in when I started getting tired. I started talking again after that.
I grew up in that tree. I was ten years old. I no longer sounded out the words but comprehended their meaning. My aunt would visit and motion me down from my tree. She would take me to the bookstore in town. The small, but dream-like town of Arkadelphia, Arkansas. She bought me a book called Tracks of a Unicorn by a lady named Kitty Yeager. She wrote poems, and I read one about a wolf and a maiden named Shatoca until I no longer needed the book. To this day, I can still recite the words. I used to whisper them to my tree.
“When the wind is on blue mountain, where its caverns cry the most and the moon is inching upward like a floating yellow ghost…”. I would whisper these words so quietly and tell the entire story of Shatoca and her pet wolf to a tree that held all my secrets. Yeager was the first author I ever met. Holding my aunt’s hand and hiding behind her skirt. Kitty Yeager signed my book in the small, local bookstore. My English-teacher-aunt proud, years later as she taped the binding of the book back together for me. She performed this operation twice. She promised to get me another one. I later held her hand in Texas and told her I didn’t need a new book. I knew that one by heart. She smiled at me before she too went to heaven.
I was in my tree at thirteen. I kissed a boy against it at seventeen. It never told and neither did I. The lower limbs never grew back, but the scars would be there forever, on the both of us. I stopped climbing my tree but parked my car next to it at eighteen. When they sold the house, I climbed it one last time at twenty-two. I rested my head against the trunk and cried to my best friend, a keeper of secrets and dreams. We had grown together, both much bigger now. I said goodbye.
I held my grandmother’s hand as she died. I sang her “How Great Thou Art.”
Weeks later, I sat in a lawyer’s office as they read the last will and testament. I was given a small box. An old Mary Jane shoebox from my childhood. One of my long hair ribbons tied tightly around it. I had never seen it before. Curious, I carefully opened it. I unwrapped small bundles of yellowed tissue paper. A blue bottle. A porcelain arm and head. A skeleton key and so much more. Everything was there, every single thing I so proudly gave her with dirty fingers and a toothy smile. In the box, a picture of me reading a book in my tree, my magnolia.
Cristie Armstrong is an English/creative writing major at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. She recently won the Arkansas Cornbread Festival's Writing Competition in the College Student category. Her work has been published in the Oxford American and is forthcoming in Quills & Pixels (Fall 2020). She is a retired police officer that now enjoys writing nonfiction stories about life, crime, food and family in the South. She aims to be a fictional romance writer and that will surely embarrass her mother once "those" are published. Her love of writing was inspired and motivated by her English teacher aunt, Joyce Allen.
