Page 15 of The Snake in the Grass: The Prequel

None came. He radioed in again.

And again.

And again.

Until I reached out to stop his hand, shaking my head, frantic tears already spilling down my cheeks. “He must not have made it to the station.”

Wally blinked at me. “Where else would he be?”

I knew in that moment exactly where he was.

Chapter 9

There’s a tree in Wayborne that sits on top of a hill, in a clearing where only the dead speak.

It’s a beautiful old live oak tree with thick branches that reach up to worship the sky and dip down low at their ends. They hang so close to the ground that they would brush against the heads of children who might play in their shade if the tree weren’t a cursed and hallowed place.

The tree is a gorgeous thing. Tangled with moss and as thick as half a dozen men or more, it begs to be photographed and painted, to have picnics held beneath its curved dome and poems written about the first kisses that happen in its shelter.

But it’s not just any tree.

It’s the Hanging Tree.

When I was a child, Silas and I found the tree and climbed its branches, laughing and screaming, our knees scraped and hands coated in moss. Jade followed us, but being sensible chose to sit in the shade of the tree and read one of her paperback books.

A little while later her mother came up the hill and found us hanging from the tree like wild monkeys.

And she yelled at us so loud we nearly fell from its safety.

I don’t remember exactly what she said; I do remember that she told us toget down, to get down right now, right this instant, you wild Wilder kids, get down from that tree or I swear. By the time we made it to the ground she was calmer, but there were tear tracks down her cheeks, and Jade looked lost and alone.

As we stood before her, unsure what we had done, she asked, “Do you know what tree this is?”

I shook my head, but Silas piped up. “It’s the Hanging Tree.”

“Why do you think they call it that?”

“Because you hang from it,” he said, quite boastfully and sure of himself, like all little boys.

“No.” Grace got quiet; she looked at us the way you look at a grave. “They call it that because they used to hangpeoplefrom this tree until they were dead. Then they buried them here, right beneath the ground—if they bothered to bury them at all. Some of them they let rot, and the wild animals ate them until there was nothing left.”

I remember being disgusted and confused by this. I remember Jade asked what the people had done, why they were hung, if they were bad people. Grace didn’t answer right away. Instead she took us to her house in her sedan, with a stop in the middle to get ice cream bars from a truck, which we weren’t allowed to unwrap until we were safely sitting on her front porch, far from the leather interior of the car she saved up for years to buy.

Finally she told us, in a serious voice, “They were hung because of the color of their skin.”

We never asked again.

We never climbed the tree’s branches again.

But we did go there sometimes, Silas and me; Jade came every once and a while, but she said the place gave her the spooks. For us Wilder kids, it was a strangely peaceful place, one we knew we weren’t alone because the spirits of the dead still haunted it. Unlike the cheery inside of our home with its photos of happy family members on the mantel, the dripping boughs of the old tree knew what had been done beneath their shelter, and it seemed to weep with guilt over it. Even the crooked slant to its trunk was weighed down with memories of the dead. It felt truthful in its wretchedness.

At some point when we were in middle school the city council put a plaque in front of the tree, with the name of all the people who’d been hung there. The plaque calls inhumane capital punishment a “grave injustice,” without mentioning that the mobs who hung the victims were white men whose surnames are our street names, and there are old photos in attics on the north side of town of grinning mobs standing feet from the bodies that they lynched.

I wonder sometimes if I’ll ever find a photo like that with my Papa Edwin’s face in it. He would be a child, but there are children in some of those photos, sitting on the shoulders of their fathers to get a good look.

At a corpse.

A corpse.

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