by Mickey Hunt
“Where’s Mrs. Barefoot?”
Those were the first words
radio celebrity and paranormal investigator Jonathan T. Barron said when I
collected him at the Asheville
“Umm,” I said. “My wife
divorced me last year on my 27th birthday. No kids. Ahh… Oh, my aunt teaches at
the Cherokee reservation. She couldn’t find a substitute for her classes, so, I’m
your driver. I’m Carnley Barefoot. May I have your autograph?”
He pushed aside my notebook
and pen. “Carnley, later on, please. Help with my luggage, will you?”
“She ain’t never married.”
“Who?”
“My Aunt Ilana. Miss Ilana Barefoot.”
On our drive to my home turf
of Robbinsville, south of the Great
Smoky Mountains Park North Carolina
“Barefoot,” he said. “Is
your last name traditional Cherokee?”
“Everybody thinks so, but it’s
Scots.”
“Ms. Barefoot wrote to me
about the strange happenings at the Swan
Mountain Retreat
Center
“Holy Moley! The end of all
humanity?” I pulled off to the side and a car blared its horn as it flew by. “She
never told me. It’s worse than I
guessed.”
“You don’t think she
exaggerated?”
I shook my head. “Mr.
Barron. Be real careful there. My aunt never
exaggerates. The end of humanity. Whew.” I put the truck in gear and resumed
our drive.
“O-kay,” he said. “Trash
raided, dogs and cats eaten, mangled birds lying on the ground, the larder
broken into and food stolen. Wild screams in the darkness.” He removed a
photograph from his pocket and flashed it to me. “What do you think this is?”
“Well. I took that picture—I
work on the buildings and grounds at the retreat center. We thought it might be
bears, or maybe possums or a mountain lion, so I set up a game cam, a hunter
camera. I believe it’s a product of a government experiment, mixing humans with
animal genes.”
“Really? A chimera? You don’t
think it’s a cousin to Bigfoot, maybe a heretofore unknown native ape, an ape
with these large white eyes?”
“No sir. It’s a government
conspiracy—to breed human weapons, better fighters. Some escaped from the federal
compound in Andrews. The place is still down there, and fully operational.
Black helicopters flying in and out all the time. That whole Eric Rudolph
bomber deal? They made everyone believe their phones was tapped. But it was
cover for building their laboratories. It’s all on the shortwave broadcasts.
Did I tell you I’m a ham radio operator?”
Mr. Barron glanced at me
sideways and went dumb for a time. Later on I chanced, “I’ve got photographs of
the fed’s compound. I could take you there.”
“We’ll see,” he said, and I
heard skepticism. Dang. I thought he’d be different from other people.
On the curvy road along Fontana Lake
“Chief Fallen Rocks,
himself,” I said over Mr. Barron’s shoulder.
He looked back at me. “What are you talking about?”
“The road sign?”
Mr. Barron frowned and then
helped the man to his feet and asked how he did.
“Not bad, not bad,” the
Chief said. “It was a comfortable place to rest. The world feels empty.”
A smell of digested alcohol
wafted into our faces.
“Can I take you someplace?”
Mr. Barron asked.
“I live up the road a way.”
It’s forest and water
everywhere around there. We drove a short bit and turned up a dirt drive to a
well-kept double-wide, a nice Toyota Sequoia SUV parked beside it. Mr. Barron
and I walked him inside.
“I never got your name,” Mr.
Barron said.
“Chief Fallen Rocks.”
Mr. Barron turned cherry
red. “We’re sorry,” he said, glaring at me. “We thought you were unconscious.”
“My name is George
Mankiller, but falling rocks have killed men at those cliffs above the road. My
ancestors were hereditary chiefs.”
“You’re Cherokee?”
“Full-blood.”
“You don’t live on the
reservation.”
“I moved away a year ago.
The reservation—it’s private land called the Qualla Boundary—and the casino
money were stealing my initiative. I want to set a better example for our
people. Do you know about the epidemic suicide rate among Native American young
people?”
“I see. Well, Mr. Mankiller—”
“I’m George.”
“George, we must be going.”
“Wait, wait a minute.”
The Chief stepped to a rough
shelf piled with carvings and lifted one of them, it the size of a salad plate.
The carving was a turtle with a woman creature on its back. “I make these to
sell to tourist shops, decent shops that carry authentic Native American stuff,
not cheap China
“The detail and finish are
very fine,” Mr. Barron said. “It’s too rich to give away.” He took out his
wallet.
“No, no. You’ve already
paid.”
They argued around and
around. In the end, however, the Chief was stronger.
Back in Aunt Ilana’s Ford
pickup, Mr. Barron scowled. “Don’t ever
refer to him as Chief Fallen Rocks again. It’s degrading. Understood?”
“Yes, sir,” I said.
{
The Swan Mountain
Hipster Center
A woman with a long grey
ponytail stalked out of the office. “Hello Carnley,” she said. “Run over any
squirrels lately?”
“No ma’am, squirrels are-n’t
in season right now. It’s spring. They’re having their babies.” Ms. Haversham
doesn’t like country-boy rednecks like me, and I give her a hard time. “Miss
Haversham, this is Jonathan T. Barron.”
“Mr. Barron, I don’t know
what you’ll find here in the way of the supernatural, but you’re welcome to
enjoy our natural retreat center.
Carnley will give you a tour. Make sure he shows you the meditation pool
farther up the creek.”
“Yes, sir,” I said, “you don’t
want to miss that.”
“And Carnley, while you’re
there, remove the Clemson ball cap from the Buddha, and please be sure to haul
the recycling to the landfill, and finish the brush cutting. We have an Herbal
Healing Conference coming in for the weekend. Mr. Barron, we have you in Cabin
9 at the top. Please, please do not disturb our other visitors. Silence is powerful.”
And with that, she turned on a dime and retreated into her office.
“She’s really sweet,” I said
and stretched my back.
“I’m sure of it,” he said,
with that skeptical look of his. “A Clemson ball cap?”
“My alma
“What was your major?”
“Ummm… art. But I had to
quit my first semester. Partied too much.”
{
Someone was shaking me as I
slept on my cot at the old maintenance building. “Carnley… Carnley… wake up.”
I cracked open my eyes to
see Jonathan Barron looming over me in the pale smudge of early morning light.
“What do you want?” I asked
surly-like.
He flicked on the overhead,
and as groggy and blinded as I was, I saw that he weren’t afraid, but excited,
elated even, and wearing his jacket. I asked, “Did you find my jar of moonshine
in your cabin? I heard the ladies hid—”
“Get dressed,” he ordered. “We
need to see George Mankiller.”
For a man who makes his living
by talking, Mr. Barron was constipated as to words while we drove to the Chief’s
house. The sun remained hidden behind the ridge and pinked the springy clouds
to the west. He refused to answer my questions and asked if I had faked the
photograph of the mountain ape.
“Nope.”
He shook his head and
muttered, “She’s beautiful, so beautiful, but sad. A forlorn succubus.”
A what? He couldn’t have
meant Ms. Haversham. Had she been sleepwalking in her nightie?
The Chief was not at his
double-wide when we arrived, but an Indian in a police uniform pulled up in the
nice Toyota Sequoia as we were about to leave. When he got out of the vehicle,
I noticed the holstered gun at his side.
“Good morning Mr. Mankiller,”
Mr. Barron said, “Your carving. A turtle with a feminine form reclining on its
back. What can you tell me about the carving? Its meaning.”
I hadn’t recognized the
Chief—he’d been transformed. He saw me staring and gave a severe look and said,
“I’m an on-call security guard. Usually I work at a pawnshop in Murphy, but
last night I did an extra shift in Franklin Viet
Nam
The Chief now turned to Mr.
Barron. “There’s a reason you want to know about my carving.”
“Look at these photographs.
Carnley set up game cameras at the Swan
Mountain Retreat
Center
The Chief nodded wisely as
he shuffled between the pictures.
“And last night,” Mr. Barron
continued, “I took these other photographs of this ghost-like being. She bears
a resemblance to the creature on the back of your turtle.”
The Chief held the second
group of photos in his steady hands, and as I peered over his shoulder, my
knees quivered. For what I saw scared me. One of the new pictures showed a form,
like a dark-haired girl, clothed in a silky, shaggy nightgown. And then, as if
my eyes were playing tricks, or like them holographic anatomy posters at the
doctor’s office that change when you move your head, the figure turned into a
seven-foot hemlock tree. Then it transformed back into a girl again.
“Is there any relationship
between the girlish being in this photo and the monster with white eyes in the
first group of photos?” Mr. Barron asked.
The Chief walked up the
steps to his double-wide and sat on a rocker on the deck. He glanced up to
where sky showed through the trees on the ridge, which had no leaves out yet,
but I knew he wasn’t seeing. As I watched him, his mystery expression cleared
like a muddy, disturbed pool does when the fresh water pours in.
“Are you ready to understand
the turtle and its burden?” he said at last.
“I don’t know,” Mr. Barron
said.
“I didn’t think so.” After a
pause, Chief said, “The turtle is carved from hemlock wood, from the hemlock
tree.”
“Hemlock?”
I was fearful to utter a
word, and the Chief said, “You don’t know the hemlock tree? You drive and I’ll
give directions. I’ll buy you some coffee. You want coffee?”
The Chief fetched a duffel
bag and we drove in Aunt’s truck to Robbinsville and stopped for coffee. After
that, the road passed through brown forest tinged with red and gold of tree
buds, and the green of swelling leaves until we arrived at the Kilmer Memorial
Forest
“It’s dead,” he said about
the towering, bare-branchy column before us, its mahogany inner bark exposed,
outer bark lying in heaps around its base.
“It can’t be.” Mr. Barron
craned his neck up and down. He took a camera from his pocket and shot some
pictures. “How many people would it take to reach all the way around the trunk?”
“Five of your wingspan. But
look.” The Chief swept his arms in a panorama.
Mr. Barron and me turned and
saw dozens of red trunks.
“They’re all dead,” I said.
“The world feels empty. No
one thinks about how much we’ve lost. No one cares. This forest has never been
logged, and these trees were centuries old. I often come here to collect wood
for my carvings—the Forest Service downed a dead tree for me.”
Mr. Barron sat on a rock and
considered for a long while. The Chief pulled out a knife and began carving a
stick of ironwood he had in his pocket. I watched three squirrels playing tag
on a giant Tulip Poplar trunk. Finally Mr. Barron said, “Have you ever heard of
dryads? Spirits associated with living trees?”
“I’ve seen them,” the Chief
said. “We call trees ‘the Standing People’, but they are more. When I was a
child in the Qualla Boundary, our school teacher brought us here for a field
trip and I saw them. No one else did—they were like clouds of flower petals
swirling with the wind during a rainstorm. Not only hemlock spirits, but of the
other trees, too. This forest was full of life. In all my walks since then, in
the Smoky National Park
I worked up the courage to
ask, “What about them white-eyed monsters?”
The Chief glowered and said,
“Woolly adelgids are like white eyes. They’re an insect that covers the stems
of hemlocks with tiny cottony, woolly balls. They invaded from China
“We have live hemlocks at Swan Mountain
Mr. Barron and the Chief
looked at each other like they thought the same idea at the same time.
“Will you take me to the
retreat center?” the Chief asked.
“Why not?” I said. “My Aunt
Ilana told me you can grow medicinal mushrooms on hemlock wood. I should tell
Ms. Haversham. She’ll love hearing it.”
~
Back at Swan Mountain
Mr. Barron talked with Aunt
Ilana on the phone. It was a Friday and she planned to come over Saturday
morning and bring materials we might find helpful. In case you didn’t know, she
volunteers at the Cherokee museum. Mr. Barron set up more night video cameras
to catch another tree spirit or one of them monsters in action.
Later in the afternoon, the
guests began arriving for their Sing for Peace Rally, or whatever. Herbal
Healing. That’s it. The Chief woke from his nap and asked me for a ride home so
he could get ready for the pawn shop, but the shop called to say they were
locking up early—some kind of trouble there. They needed him right away.
When driving to the Chief’s
double-wide, two cars overtook us, a van and a sedan, actually, and passed us
on a curve at a high rate of speed, the van riding close to the sedan’s butt. I
shook my fist out the window and shouted unprintable remarks about inbred
livestock. When we rounded the curve, the van was in the ditch on its side, and
two jackasses from the sedan were popping at it with a rifle and a shotgun.
I stopped dead in the road
right there.
Someone clambered from the
van and started firing back at the other men, who dove for cover.
“Oh my Lord,” the Chief
exclaimed. “Let’s get out of here.” I noticed he had his pistol in hand. I
backed up 100 yards and we heard and felt an explosion.
“We’d have to drive clear
around Santeetlah
Lake
“I know,” he said, now calm.
(He’s a funny guy.) “I’m calling 911.” The phone to his ear, the Chief took on
a blank look.
“What’s happening?”
“A recording. It says there’s
civil unrest in progress in western North
Carolina
“You said that before.”
“You just called me ‘Chief’.”
“I did?”
“In Vietnam
For a second I thought he
might kill me, then he laughed. “Don’t worry, son. ‘Chief’ doesn’t bother me.
Have you got a gun and ammunition with you?”
I wobbled my head up and
down. “A shotgun. Why not? But don’t tell them hipster ladies.”
“Get it out.”
“It’s the end of all
humanity.”
{
We reached the center
without further trouble, meaning, at a stop sign when Mr. Mankiller brandished
my black tactical shotgun, a pair of likely fellows who might have robbed us,
reconsidered.
Ms. Haversham greeted us
with a worried, twitchy expression—she almost appeared human. “Your aunt
arrived a few minutes ago,” she said. “She’s quite upset. School let out early.
Apparently there was a riot in the town of Cherokee
The sky had taken on a
strange subdued glow, with thick lowering clouds overhead. “I believe we’ve
lost an hour of day,” I said.
“There’s a storm
approaching,” Ms. Haversham said. “A tornado watch is in effect. We’re serving
dinner in the dining hall for a few more minutes, so if you want to eat, you
should hurry. Carnley, you have your radio?” She meant my handheld, not my ham,
which is housed in my storage shack above the mental blankness pond. I have a
power generator, too, in case of a zombie apocalypse or whatever.
“Do you have your radio?”
she repeated.
“Yes sir, I mean ma’am.”
We loaded up carryout boxes
from the main kitchen and took them to Cabin 9—more a bunkhouse than a
cabin—sleeps 16, in fact. But it has a cooking stove. Aunt Ilana was lounging
in a cozy chair near the fireplace, with her eyes half-closed, a blanket over
her legs, a mug of tea beside her. Her dark hair, usually done in a bun, was
let down. Mr. Barron was bent over the big dining table with maps or charts,
and photographs spread before him.
He came up to us and spoke
in a low, exultant voice. “We know more about the connection between the dryads
and the white-eyed creatures. Your aunt brought rubbings from Jaducal… “
“Judaculla Rock,” she said
faintly from the chair.
“Judaculla Rock,” Mr. Barron
repeated, then whispered, “Your Aunt Ilana is so young, younger than you,
Carnley. Not yet 30, for sure. And pretty. Brown eyes. Is she married?”
“No, she’s not,” I breathed
out with true respect. “I told you already, but we’re not so certain of her
age. She eats a seed diet and ain’t nobody smart enough for her.”
“Where would she find an
intelligent man around here?” Mr. Mankiller whispered.
“Or, one with good manners,”
she said robustly.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “We
thought you was asleep. Aunt Barefoot, may I introduce Chief, I mean Mr. George
Mankiller—you’ve already traded names with your hero, Mr. Barron, I presume.”
She jumped from the chair
and shook the Chief’s hand. She was still wearing her teacher’s outfit—a skirt
and blouse topped by a green sweater and tailored for her slim figure—but not
too slim. “George and I are already acquainted. He’s helped out a great deal at
the museum, and we sell his carvings at the arts and crafts store.”
“From putting our heads
together about Jad— Judaculla Rock,” Mr. Barron said, “this is what we
concluded. Let’s sit down. Carnley, would you mind bringing us coffee? I made a
pot.”
When I appeared with full
coffee cups, Aunt was saying, “So, Judaculla is the name of a legendary monster
who leaps from mountain to mountain. The rock of talc stone supposedly marks
his territory. Possibly he is pure invention, or possibly he’s based on true
stories of a Sasquatch-like being. Stylized engravings on Judaculla Rock resemble
the monster in the photographs, but the fascinating part is, we also find
engravings showing the Standing People spirits transitioning into the monster.
In other words, the monsters are the tree spirits in another form.”
“Judaculla is the name
Sequoyah gave to the giant Goliath in the Cherokee translation of the Bible,”
the Chief said.
Everyone stared at the
confused carvings in the photos for a few moments, moments that stretched into
minutes of mental blankness. At last I said, “Would anyone like popcorn to go
with their coffee?”
When the storm fell on us
like a dam bursting, not only was I in the dark because the electric quit, the
racket was so loud I couldn’t hear the popcorn popping. We cook with profane
gas at the Center, so, I just kept shaking the pan and knew on instinct when it
was done. Turned out a fine batch.
Just as I handed bowls
around with the help of a flashlight, Ms. Haversham’s voice screeched over my
handheld radio.
“Carnley, get your rain clothes
on and walk our visitors to the Great Hall. One cabin at a time. We’re
distributing LED lamps down here. Nobody has power, and the ladies are scared.”
“All of them? Walk all them
ladies? How many?”
“We have 83 guests. A few
will need to be driven.”
“I’ll use the bus, for
everyone. It’s too wet for walking.”
If the ladies—and the men
guests, too—were scared by the dark, they were petrified by the lashing squalls
of rain and the torrents of muddy water running over the road as I drove them
load-by-load to the Great Hall. Even with umbrellas, many were soaked to the
bone. The Chief lit a fire in the yawning fireplace and I pulled out blankets
and old sleeping bags and mattresses from the basement. Aunt and Mr. Barron
settled into rockers, a thick blanket a piece.
Storms in the mountains
follow a pattern. Unless they’re hurricane fed, they kick up a fuss for a while
and they’re done. This storm started loud and heavy and grew worse. Thunder
exploded over our heads and crackled on and on. The ladies, and men too,
screamed and then after awhile only moaned in anguish. And I thought they loved
ole Mother Nature. The lightning strobed with the thunder, taking on a cadence
like a fire and brimstone preacher does, and I dozed off until new sounds
disturbed my suede unconsciousness, sounds from outside, like of battle. The
wind surged, thrashing the trees, and we heard roars, long shrieks, wailing,
and keening. Then came a colossal crash which jarred the whole building and
renewed the screaming from the guests.
“Carnley, see what hit us,”
Ms. Haversham said, shaking where she stood, though I didn’t know if it was her
or the floor. I threw on a poncho and, happening to see a bicycle helmet, I put
that on, too, and went outside. The whole universe seethed in motion, the air
full of flying water, unknown objects—leaves and branches, I guess. Raindrops
stung my eyes. I immediately slipped and fell. The ground was covered in slimy
things. Fish. Dead fish.
Holy Moley!
Hanging on to the shrubbery,
I worked around to the uphill side of the Great Hall, where the crash had been,
and found a gigantic rock braced against the wall, now partly caved in. The
rock had rolled or slid there. I breathed for a minute and was picking my way
back to the door when some running thing slammed into me, knocking me flat, my face
mashed into a fish. I rose up to hands and knees, and looking around I saw
animated shadows, hairy upright shadows with glowing white eyes stalking amidst
the chaos, rolling dumpsters, uprooting small trees, and tossing boulders.
Nearby, three of them was wrestling in a heap. They smelled like rotting
corpses. I crawled to the door and banged on it to be let back in.
When Ms. Haversham opened up
and saw me and the mayhem, she grew pale, then paler. She jerked me inside,
slammed the door, and ordered dry clothes and blankets. She put her arm around
my back and guided me to the fireplace and then brought some hot cider. When
the clothes arrived, I changed somehow, made it back to the hearth, and fell
asleep on the floor.
{
In the morning when I woke
up (a pillow under my head), I smelled coffee, bacon, and eggs. Well… if truth
be told, I only fantasized the bacon. Ms. Haversham and a few intrepid guests
had contrived to cook. She brought me a tray with the breakfast that I wolfed
down. About then Mr. Barron and Aunt promenaded into the Great Hall. Ms.
Haversham pulled open the curtains of the big windows and I recoiled at the
bright light. Except for threads of fog and scattered broken clouds, the sky
was as blue as blue. I put my tray down and stepped closer to the window. The
trees on the long slope up to the ridge had mangled and broken tops. The
ground—the planted areas and grass—as much as I could see though ripped leaves
and sticks, looked like it had been plowed by a herd of wild pigs—pigs which
had partly eaten the fish from the sky.
Aunt Ilana came and stood
next to me. “We can’t find Mr. Mankiller,” she said. “Nobody has seen him since
he built the fire last night.”
“Then, who’s that?” I asked.
A reddish male person
wearing leather leggings, a kind of loincloth, and no shirt was picking a path
across the flotsam toward the Great Hall. His skin was dyed bright red except
for a painted black band across his face like a raccoon. A couple wild turkey
feathers waved from the top of his head and he carried an odd knobby club.
Aunt, Mr. Barron, Ms. Haversham, me, and a few guests ran outside to meet him.
“Mr. Mankiller,” Ms.
Haversham said, “What are you wearing?”
“My clothes. What are you wearing?”
She looked down at herself,
at her ordinary blouse and pants, but she couldn’t think of nothing to answer.
“I talked to them,” he said.
“I talked to the Tsuga spirits… to the Tsul’Kalu’. The storm washed woolly
adelgids from the tree branches.”
Oh my. Brandishing his
wooden club and defying Goliaths in the middle of the storm? I was impressed.
{
But Chief wasn’t willing to
explain more, and besides we had other stuff to think about. Nobody was getting
cell phone reception and Rattlers Creek roared and tossed across the road, so
we couldn’t get out. One of the men guests was having chest pains, so Chief had
to see about him. Aunt went to help the Chief.
Me and Mr. Barron walked up
towards my quarters to crank the apocalypse generator and see what news we
could hear on my ham rig. As we neared the meditation pond, we heard the rap,
rap of helicopter rotors beating over the ridge, then one bird appeared and two
more. I looked at Mr. Barron feeling self-satisfied and vindicated.
“I told you,” I said. He took no notice.
The black choppers whistled
overhead and across the opposite ridge, and as the last one ranged nearly out
of view, it blew up in a ball of flame. We couldn’t believe it. Mr. Barron
staggered to a bench and eased himself down. I sat next to him and we stared
out over the pond full of floating branches. Clouds of lacy bugs hovered over
the water, a few dipping and touching the surface.
We both sighed at the same
time.
“Your aunt wrote that this
was about the end of humanity. I can see it happening, but I don’t understand
why.”
“No idea, myself. What do you and Aunt Ilana discuss, anyway?”
“Not this. She won’t
elaborate about what she meant in her warning. How did she know what would
happen? She’s been giving me a history of the region. Logging and the forced
exile of the Cherokee Nation. The early naturalist explorer, William Bartram.”
“When it’s the right time,
she’ll tell you.”
We went on up to my shack.
My antenna had been knocked down, so I strung up some wire and tried reaching
first one and then another of my radio buddies who lived in the area, but they
didn’t answer.
“Should I call Earl?” I
asked.
“Who’s Earl?”
“He’s my ex’s beau, her
fiancé. He’s in Robbinsville. He usually won’t talk with me.” I got on his
favorite radio frequency, or band. “Earl, are you out there? What going on?
Earl?”
I waited. Even when the
world was normal, it took a minute for Earl to stop being jealous.
“Hey Carnley,” Earl said
finally, but he was mumbling. “You still alive? I guess you’re in an isolated
area out there. How’s it goin’?”
“I’m well, considering. You?”
“Same. Did you know Susie is
havin’ her baby? We’ve set a date to get married, finally.”
“You better marry her, then,
you son of a bitch.”
“Carnley, please,” Mr.
Barron said and touched my arm. I don’t know why, but I had an impulse to blast
my ham set with a shotgun.
“Earl…” I said. “Earl, you
still there?” There was another minute of silence.
“Carnley, we’re here in my
bunker. Susie and me. She’s havin’ a baby—she’s havin’ it now. Right now. I
mean right now!” To make his point
stronger, Susie panted in the background and groaned.
Earl went on. “We’re scared
to make noise. I’m afraid to run my generator—and batteries won’t last. There’s
a war going on, Carnley, a damn war. People are runnin’ around with guns and
axes, lightin’ fires and lootin’. It’s a feud, or a massacre, one outrage
escalates to another far worse. It started at the casino, I heard. Breathe,
dear. Even police went berserk. There are foragin’ gangs. The governor
activated the National Guard and even they became involved. Units are fightin’
among themselves. Helicopters, Carnley, your spooky black helicopters. As far
as I can tell, war’s engulfed the western counties.”
“How’s your food and water,
Earl?”
“Good, good. I need better
ventilation. Hey Carnley, how’s it where you are? Susie just said we might join
you, if that’s okay. We can’t stay hunkered down here forever. We need to get
out of town. Maybe we’ll try at night.”
“Sure, Earl. Sure.”
“Wait,” Earl said. We could
hear muffled gunfire over the radio behind him. “Gotta go. If we show up, we’ll
wave a white flag from the edge of the woods. Don’t shoot us.”
“The creek is blocking the
road, Earl,” I said, but he was gone already.
We scanned through the
frequencies and heard narration after narration, and it pretty much confirmed
what Earl said. The only new thing was the feds had mobilized regular military
to invade, more or less, to restore order. But they wouldn’t arrive for a few
days.
“Which might make it all
worse,” Mr. Barron said, and I agreed.
“There’s one thing I wanted
to ask Earl,” he said. “I don’t understand why he and your ex aren’t affected
by this madness. And why aren’t we? Is it we’ve not been provoked? What kind of
person is Earl?”
“Just an ordinary mountain
redneck, like me. He does the same kind of work I do, sort of, and we used to
have a business together.”
“What kind of work?”
“Tree removal, firewood
cutting and sales.”
“Really?”
“Why not?” I said.
“What does he do now?”
“Same thing, only more
advanced. He’s got an Associates Degree in Horticulture. He does landscape
design and installation.”
“Does he treat hemlocks for
woolly adelgids?”
“Why not?”
“Does he have any healthy
hemlocks around his house?”
“The last I seen, why not?
Some big ones. He lives next to a park.”
“The city park has hemlocks?”
“Nope. It’s a memorial park,
a cemetery. He treated the hemlocks there.”
“Is your radio still on?”
“Nope,” I said.
“I’m still hearing gunfire.”
We both listened.
“Dang,” I said. “It’s below
the Great Hall.”
We ran outside and the noise
grew louder. Then I went back in and pulled out two gun bags, one with a
carbine—the Chief still had my tactical shotgun—and a pistol with high-capacity
magazines. I gave the carbine to Mr. Barron.
“What do I do with this?” he
said.
“Okay…” As we trotted along,
I gave him a 15-second shooting workshop. He looked at me with his trademarked
skepticism and I said, “Point in safe direction until needed. Squeeze trigger.
You’ll be fine.”
“I’m joking, Carnley. If you
listened to my program you’d know I saw combat in Afghanistan
“Oh yeah, sorry, I forgot in
the hurry.”
By the time we reached the
Great Hall, it was quiet and we saw the Chief walking up the hill from the
trees that are toward the entrance, club in hand, with a fierce face. Aunt
Ilana emerged from some bushes next to the Great Hall and she had my shotgun.
The Chief sat down on a
retaining wall along the sidewalk and said, “I snuck behind them.”
“Monsters?” I said.
“No. Human beings with
weapons. Two raiders.” He motioned to my carbine in Barron’s hands. “You heard
them. I think they were scouts.”
Ms. Haversham had by then
come out of hiding inside the Great Hall and joined us. “Anyone hurt? Will they
be bringing others?” she said anxiously, but then, “Mr. Barron, put that rifle
away! Ms. Barefoot, you too? What is this, a militia? We don’t allow them on
campus. I don’t approve of firearms. Carnley, is that a gun?”
“Miss Haversham,” I said. “I
don’t think you should worry about guns or about invading scouts, because I
believe Mr. Chief Mankiller knocked them guys on the head with his funny war
club.”
{
That was Saturday. More
storms was on the way, and they continued off and on with added intensity
overnight, peaking Sunday morning with a tornado which ripped by the edge of
campus and tore the roof off the Great Hall. Everyone had been hiding in the
basement, and the place was a grubby, smelly mess and we were all hungry, if
not thirsty. We did have water, more than we liked. Meanwhile, between the
tumultuous tempests I listened to outside broadcasts about battles everywhere
in the region. I never did raise Earl again. I hoped the baby was okay.
Mr. Barron and Aunt Ilana
got cozy—they huddled in a corner together much of the daytime and sort of
slept in their sleeping bags snugged up to each other… like everyone else did
all around, there being no floor space and no privacy. I heard her tell him
that she was adopted from a foster home, which I knew already.
So, by Monday morning we had
peace from the sky and we begun to hope the storms were done and they were. The
battles and riots ended, too.
We spent the week taking
care of people and cleaning up the campus. The flooded creek shrunk to normal
and the main roads out of the damaged area of the state got cleared, so by
Thursday we ran guests out to the Asheville
On Saturday afternoon, we
(Aunt, Mr. Mankiller, Mr. Barron, and me) drove to Franklin to a professional
radio studio to do Mr. Barron’s program live, his once-a-week program called
Strange Days Radio. I told him we could broadcast from Swan Mountain Retreat on
my ham rig and have it relayed to FM, but he said he needed more credibility
than that would afford. The guests each had a piece to contribute to the
program—I just sat in the engineer’s booth wearing headphones—and we took some
interesting calls from locals, but Mr. Mankiller’s words were most shocking of
all, to me, anyway.
Aunt Ilana’s indeed were
shocking, but not surprising for someone who knows her, if that makes sense.
I got the transcript later
on and this is what they said in the interview, the important parts. I’m
skipping the intro and the parts I’ve already told about—all the weird stuff
that had happened before.
MR. BARRON: Mr. Mankiller, George. When we first met, you offered me this carved
turtle as a thank you gift. The wood is hemlock. On its back rests a lovely
dryad. What’s the significance of the turtle in Cherokee tradition?
MR. MANKILLER: In the beginning, the world was covered by water, and the Creator
tended the Tree of Life in Heaven. He made a daughter for himself to keep him
company, and then he created a man for her. The woman talked a lot and liked to
play. She got rambunctious and fell through a hole at the base of the tree. She
fell and fell. The Creator asked all the creatures for a volunteer to catch her
and none stepped forward, none but the turtle. The birds and other creatures
brought mud from the sea bottom and piled it on the turtle’s back because it
was not wide enough for her, and so he caught and saved her. The turtle represents
the Earth, the Turtle
Island
MR. BARRON: Dryads, or by the Cherokee name, Standing People. What are they? Their
relationship to the trees.
AUNT:
Some believe that Standing People are spirits of trees and this is true, but
not entirely true. Standing People spirits are separate beings that are
associated with trees, living in symbiosis with them. They and the trees live
in dependency with one another. When a tree dies, a Standing Person may die.
That is, slowly fade into nonexistence—she blows away like dry leaves, or she
may connect with another tree. The tree spirits have the ability, not always
within their control, to alter their appearances, even taking on a human form,
but they must always be in relationship with their tree species, as for
example, by simply consuming the hemlock’s inner bark.
MR. MANKILLER: [clears throat] Oh, my word. I never knew the meaning of the
engravings on the Judaculla rock—not until now, until Miss Barefoot explained.
The Standing People turn into monsters when they are separated from their
trees, or when the trees die and no others are near, or when they consume human
chemicals, or garbage.
AUNT:
You had to learn this for yourselves.
MR. BARRON: Well, um… I don’t know what to say. So, do humans become monsters,
too? Is this the explanation for the violence?
MR. MANKILLER: I have felt the loss of the trees. It’s why I got dirty drunk the
other day. There’s a spiritual connection between us and the natural world.
Moral decline results in environment degradation when we lose touch with the
natural world. Our spiritual poverty pollutes nature, nature then abandons us
and we become poorer. It spirals down and down.
Chief Mankiller gathered
himself and spoke the next words as a tuneless chant: “There is no truth or
mercy or knowledge of God in the land. By swearing and lying, killing and
stealing and committing adultery, they break all restraint, with bloodshed upon
bloodshed. Therefore the land will mourn; and everyone who dwells there will
waste away with the beasts of the field and the birds of the air; even the fish
of the sea will be taken away.”
MR. BARRON: Is that a Cherokee prophecy?
MR. MANKILLER: It’s from the Bible. You know, I never said that the feminine figure
on the back of my carved turtle is a hemlock spirit. She’s not a Standing
Person at all. She’s human. She represents the human race that fell from the
tree of life.
Awkward silence followed.
The engineer in the booth
beside me leaned forward into his microphone. “Somebody say something. We are
live. I’m breaking in four, three, two—”
MR. BARRON: Um, you say it’s an environmental issue. It’s connected. What, what
can we do? Will these insane incidents continue or spread elsewhere? What can
we do to prevent them in the future?
AUNT:
There’s work in progress to preserve the eastern and Carolina Chile , South America, others in North Carolina
MR. BARRON: What a fascinating surprise. Our guest is not only expert on Cherokee
culture and history, but she’s a botanist as well.
AUNT:
Another idea is to harvest the dead giants before the lumber decays. You’d have
to create a non-profit organization to donate the proceeds to the hemlock
conservation bank and to the nursery program of growing resistant trees. The
organization would educate the public about the tragic loss of our trees, one
as significant as the loss of the American Chestnut. The lumber should be
stockpiled because with so many dead, it will take a century for new trees to
be replenished. Hemlock lumber from eastern trees will be a rarity, and when
people buy it, like in Mr. Mankiller’s suburb carving work, they’ll know they’re
contributing to the tree’s preservation.
MR. MANKILLER: This is all fine, but what can we do now? The storms and monsters
will return again, and soon. There will be more collapses. They’ll spread
throughout the whole Turtle
Island
AUNT:
The momentary suspension of human conscience was triggered by the rage of what
you call monsters, the Tsuga spirits. If they could be moved, moved to where
hemlocks are healthy, it would leave our region spiritually depleted, but it
might prevent violent outbreaks.
MR. BARRON: Where would that region be?
AUNT:
The Pacific Northwest . It’s a different
species there, but still in the genus Tsuga. Some Standing People could go to Japan
MR. BARRON: And how does one transport tree spirits? By train or airplane? Would
they ride in cargo, or would they insist on first class?
From here on the transcript
doesn’t catch the drama, so I drop it entirely. Mr. Barron had made his last
comment with that rude skepticism which so annoys, and he also wore a sarcastic
smirk on his face. I had warned him. He had not treated Aunt’s idea with
respect, something I learned to do long ago—after all, she lets me drive her
pickup truck.
And this is where things got
truly shocking. First, the humidity jumped and my bones begun to ache. I felt
oppressed, like when a storm nears. The glass between us and the studio steamed
over, so it was hard to see, but it seemed like I was looking into a greenhouse
stuffed with plants. I heard a deep rumble from outside the building. I jumped
up and peered through the glass. There was Aunt Ilana… and I’ll say it plainly…
she was fading in and out between her self, a tree spirit in a silky shaggy
gown, a conifer tree, and the white-eyed monster.
Holy Moley!
Seeing how no one had been
talking sense during this event—I heard a loud inhuman whisper mixed with my
aunt singing—the unfazed engineer cut to a commercial break.
We ran around to the studio,
and when we opened the door, a musty smell both rank and fresh hit us. Maybe of
decaying leaves and sweat, a mix of that and the perfume of Clammy Azaleas. Mr.
Barron, Aunt, and Mr. Mankiller was sitting around the table as they had been.
Mr. Mankiller looked shocked, but wise. Aunt appeared vibrant and seductive.
Mr. Barron looked bewildered, but happy. Mostly happy. In fact, he and Aunt was
holding hands until I said, “What’s going on here?”
The engineer said, “Whatever
just happened, we’re going back on air. Callers are waiting. Compose
yourselves.” He ran back to his booth. “In three, two, one…”
“Good evening, folks,” Mr.
Barron said, “Strange Days Radio is back.” (He’s a professional.) “We’ve been
talking about moving hemlock dryads from western North
Carolina to the Pacific Northwest .
Ms. Ilana Barefoot and Mr. George Mankiller are our guests tonight. Ms. Barefoot
has an idea she told me about during our break.”
“The wind, Jonathan,” she
said. “The prevailing winds, of course. We will sail from west to east around
our planet, the Turtle
Island
“Sailing ships on the ocean?”
“No, my dear sir, helium
windships in the air. What else could they be? Mr. Mankiller, will you carve
their decorations for us?”
He saluted. “It would be my
pleasure.”
Okay. So, I thought, that
solved the mysteries of my Aunt Ilana and the monsters. There was always something eccentric about her and now I knew why. I
suppose I’ll be collecting her tiny, winged hemlock seeds deep in the mountains.
And they’ll become… my what?
Cousins?
{{{
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