Arbutus Don’t Bleed

by Leonnard Menifee

2033

Mester, Kentucky is just an outpost, but if you asked Vaunce Countians to draw a map of their home, they’d allot way too much space to it. It’s not much more than a post office, a shed bar and a few outfitting stores plopped among knobs so close-set that locals say a crow can’t fly between; and it’s remote. There are no hippy kids from the western cities camping and climbing and eating pizza, like at the Pherryville Gorge or Nome Gap. Around Mester it’s pure. And it carries weight around Vaunce County. 

I was hiking there when I found it.

The trailer on the mountaintop had a tree, which my book, Flora of Appalachia, could not identify, growing from its belly through its piecemeal roof. My phone said it was a madrone – arbutus menziesii – something that’s only supposed to grow in Mexico, California, Japan. I surveyed the trailer without disturbing it – a Sterling beer can probably from the 70s, an Igloo cooler just as old. I left out, and hiked across this odd mountaintop clearing into the woods on the other side, where I found a stream that felt familiar. I followed it.

It took me a few minutes to realize this was the Little Posquette, the snaky river that runs down the ridge from where I live with Denzel and S, now that D’s off to college. I followed my old friend until its susurrus purr burst into hydraulic pour. 

When I reached the waterfall, I climbed down the jagged limestone rock to its modest pool; staring up, I spied a little grotto behind the falls, so I scrambled back up.

The breezy mist behind the waterfall and the thunderous, god-rhythm of its falling, when I peered outward from behind the water, tingles spread over me like ink blot.

Inside, muted thunder from the constant explosion outside coursed through me like an electric blanket. It was heavy and airy at once, still and pregnant. 

When my eyes adjusted to the dark, I saw a trunk in the corner. It was full of woodsy tools – a compass, a flint, a canteen, a blanket – and some books stacked in one corner. The first one I found must have been 20 to 30 years old. “Qate Oates'' was scrawled on the cover like punk graffiti. 

I started reading. Qate was clearly a writer. There were starts and stops and strikethroughs, notes to herself, three versions of the same poem. I fell into her journal, both feet, the falling water drowning out anything beyond the walls of my little cave, until one entry exposed the mystical, violent underbelly of my Appalachian home. This is her story that still gives me goosebumps – it’s why I won’t return to that madrone on the mountaintop or the waterfall grotto. You just never know who you might meet there.

Madrone Keepers and the Man of Blood

My Granny Peacock always said, “If you peel back my brain, you’re bound to find a few fibs, but if you open my heart I’ll tell you what God knows.” Reckon I ain’t too different. If anyone ever reads this, you ought to know I did my best to piece together a story about the folks in this county who plunge their wickets into its soul. At least the ones in my time. They sometimes fight – they sure do in this story – and Lord knows why. According to Annie, who you’ll meet below, there are two sides to these shamanic folk, one hermetic and still, the other mixed up in the world and bent on blood. They sometimes go after each other. Jealous or territorial, I guess.

All this is based on fragments I found or stole, things eye witnesses told me or things I saw with my own eyes, hidden in some topiary or shale-bound passage. These are fragments of a story no one talks about because no one ever put it together; these are the pieces and this is my attempt. 

- Qate Oates 

May 1, 1993

Fragment 1 – Overheard while hiding behind a rock

“You high yet, son?” said Duane, his ropers hanging off the pickup on the edge of the Pherryville Gorge.

“Nooooooooooooooooo,” said Bart, “It’s unfortunate, but I reckon I ain’t.”

“Unfortunate? Mighty unfortunate, son … Well, by God, why ain’t you?”

“Don’t know. El Rottweiler swore this was good shit.” 

Yet, Dämmerung come all the sudden, seemed to color in the spaces between the boys – purple, orange, blue – and it was like Zeus cast lightning, transmuting them high and teenage-tender.

“You hear Yael’s the man haunted Randy Worthington ‘fore he got killed?” said Duane.

“I ain’t.” The twilit gorge on the other side beyond his hanging ropers, blue cigarette smoke collecting between him and his friend. “But did you know Annie fought him once? Whooped his goddamn ass, too, son.”

Fragment 2

This is the story of Yael. Yael was a seer, or medicine man of sorts, but in Vaunce County, which he considered his protectorate but was more like his child, they call such people a “see-er.” He trained many students in his time, those who would come visit him in his hut on the hillock to learn that all time is one. For most of his time with roots affixed in Vaunce County soil, there was no challenge to his dominion; but then, in a time he did not perceive, the Man of Blood arose out of nothing, a poorboy indentured to the great drug baron, he materialized like a viking sailing down one of Hell’s blood rivers.

Fragment 3: A recording I taped of Annie Southern

I’s out in the woods first time we killed a man. Walking in complete dark with a flashlight, Terry carrying a torch, man a-begging, smelling like the shit that done run down his pant legs. We drug him to a sacrificing stone on top of the Pherryville Gorge. 

“Why you strapping me down, Terry, I swear I ain’t run my mouth,” panting so fast he can’t get the words out, face down, his greasy hair splayed out on the stone.

Terry pulled out his bowie knife, and cut a deep slit down his back; pulled out his lungs, man just a-wailing and hollering, Terry’s eyes gleaming brighter than his torch with each dying gasp. It was beautiful.

Fragment 4

Yael communes with the madrone, a specimen not native to Appalachia but one that’s taken root in spots across the county since the old man appeared. There is always one tree which lives as he lives, unstuck in time, slipping into different ages, easy as a zephyr; and which dies as he dies. He seeks kinship with other see-ers, for eventually he will pass his dear County Vaunce into another’s keeping; and of the two best pupils he ever counseled, one got plucked, purloined by the Man of Blood, or at least that’s what they say, but the other passed in the opposite direction, from blood to madrone.

Fragment 5: Annie Southern recording continued

It was like I’s wearing new skin  – my girlfriend Y and Terry and the secrets he taught us ‘bout time and blood and fighting. Summer of 1988’s when we met; I’s a freshman, and the demons was on my tail real bad on account of, well … but after meeting them two, them demons a-chasing me bounced off that new skin like gnats. That sort of peace don’t come from this world.

He’d take us into the No Thinking Place and the Blood Woods, where there was always snow between the trees and fresh gore splattered across the stone altars – them things you seen there kept you glowing a long time after, even in this world, like you had the most beautiful secret shining in your chest. 

Fragment 6: Yael’s history 

Yael’s mother died as he was pulled from her womb. 

“Full of blood! Bathed in blood, blood everywhere!” cried Midwife Margot. She grabbed the baby; the 11 others, faces blanched, knelt before the red bed in the homesteader’s cabin outside Hogtown. She walked into the room’s center, her heaving chest rocking little Yael and her tears bathing his naked body outside the rampart of his father and siblings, heads bowed in a circle over Mother, mumbling prayers. His father’s baritone was loudest, a stygian undertone its passenger.

Yael’s father was a traveling preacher, who ministered to sinners in West Virginia, Kentucky and Tennessee. After their fifth child, his wife swayed the gentle preacher to forsake the roving holy tent and settle in her native Hogtown, Kentucky. 

His older siblings feared Hell, and prayed to God, never idling away more hours than they spent tending the small farm. 

Yael was more curious.

When he was 14, he left the house for a week, tasting heaven in the blood he shed in Hogtown bar fights and in the rotgut whiskey he guzzled in the woods. And when he’d pass out on a blanket of leaves in the forest, crusty, bloody, drunk, the crickets and spring peepers sang slumber into him.

At 15, he took up with a crew in the Boister Wars, joining in the final year, 1919. Marching through the Boister woods one sodden fall day, a burst of muskets and a shrill howl bellowed from on high, and the Clan of Claincy thundered down on them, invisible in the downpour and darkness. Shadows streaked by; Yael and his company stood as if prostrate, helpless, blind – and out of the murk, a muzzle-loader’s handle proffered him to ground. 

When he awoke, a man sat there, smoking a pipe in the sun. “Well, get up,” said the man.

Yael followed him, residing in his cabin for two weeks. They fucked endlessly, Yael’s first time outside the Hogtown brothel, and when they would emerge, spent but endless, the man, Wakandaho, showed Yael the epoch-less expanse inside the inside of things: the rings of the madrone, a squirrel’s heart so fresh it was still gyrating between his teeth, the hawkeye and the lammergeier stomach – Wakandaho showed him everything there was and is. 

At first Wakandaho’s revelations in what he called the No Thinking Place fascinated Yael, and he looked upon each new day there like a baby. They would sit together, and with Wakandaho’s help, leave the familiar astral plane for this new limitless one.

A year passed, maybe two, and Yael, often left to solitary mental perambulations, progressed deeper and higher, surprising his teacher. 

“Damn, baby,” said Wakandaho one day at a chance meeting in a deep corner of the No Thinking Place, “how’d you get here so fast? Let’s go fuck.” 

Fragment 7: Annie Southern recording continued

I loved my old partner Y when I first seen her at that party three years ago, but we never was no real item. We’d sleep together every time we took a notion, but that was it. Mainly, it was Terry and his teachings in the No Thinking Place kept us friends; reckon that ain’t nothing piddly though.

She left out one morning about a year back; just took what she could fit in her Jeep. Said she was going to Mexico to take peyote for a few months, maybe longer. Terry didn’t try to keep her, but I knowed she thought he couldn’t teach her no more, and I knowed he knowed “longer” meant “forever.” 

After that it was just me, him and the Blood Woods, the corner of the No Thinking Place the old man wouldn’t go to. That’s when we started hunting him and his tree.

Fragment 8: Yael’s history continued 

Wakandaho was born into irons in Skaggstown on the Ohio. Every slave along the river, and most throughout the South shuttered at the whimsied cruelty of his Master and Mistress Wreed. When he was seven, Mistress Wreed found his father’s look “disagreeable and disconcerting”; but, she said, “I shall tarry with your punishment.” 

When the boy was 12, after Mistress Wreed found Wakandaho’s mother’s pudding stiff, she marched into the fields, brought his father to the river and administered the tardy punishment. He watched other slaves “dock-dangle” his father, lowering his bound, upside-down body again and again into the icy river until the gulps and spasms ceased. 

When the war finally came, wreaking chaos, he escaped, finding sanctuary with a Cherokee medicine man southeast in Appalachia.

Yael, often shiftless, wandered into Hogtown drinks and bosoms, but never missed his and Wakandaho’s Sunday meditation, where he’d haul a whiskey jug from town. 

One Sunday, on a sandstone ridge, Wakandaho, whiskey warming his throat, said: “Your vices won’t prevent you from journeying deeper into the other place. You assume I care, this whiskey your penance; I don’t. 

“But your mind will never flay itself and become new until you cinch the hope that you’ll spy Father, siblings, Margot? – those who shunned you – on a chance visit to town. Abandon them to save them.”

Yael didn’t listen, but spied on his family. Few of his brothers and sisters remained, so he imagined their children and spouses arranged in smaller cabins, maybe here, maybe anywhere. He saw the remaining ones at night, peering from the inky woods at the muted play in the lantern-lit den: Father, taciturn, rocking in his chair, sisters and brothers and sassafras tea. 

Fragment 9: Annie Southern recording continued

Didn’t take long. At first we packed weapons and tents, went hiking. Seen parts I ain’t never seen, killed a few squirrels with Terry’s crossbow and made stew, pitched camp. Found nothing. 

Turned out it could’ve been easy. One of the boys in Terry’s crew seen him at the Estranged Horsie pool hall, so we just picked him up there one night, led him up to that same sacrificing stone; didn’t even need to push.

“Yes to wild, yes to death, yes, I accept it – however it comes,” he said before we strapped him down.

“Okay,” said Terry, and right quick his blade sang in the air and sliced across the old man’s back. There wasn’t no blood though. Terry swiped and stabbed, but it  just bounced off the old man’s skin.

“It don’t cut … don’t bleed,” Terry said.

“You just ain’t hurting him right.”

Fragment 10: When Annie Southern made me turn off the tape recorder; paraphrased from her account

Annie freed Yael, and sat before the altar. “Don’t run, or we’ll catch you,” she said. “Sit for a spell.” Yael sat. “You too, Terry.”

All closed their eyes … In the No Thinking Place, she led them into the snowy gloom of the Blood Woods. 

He heard her agony before they arrived at the tattooed altar. There, Yael saw … siblings’ faces in the bright lantern light in their homesteader’s cabin, Margot and Father and finally her. Her stomach, still distended with him, was a white hump amid a sea of bright red gore. She stopped screaming eventually, turned her face toward the window, wan and endless, and she saw him through the void – her son now an old man. 

“That’s you in there, old man,” said Annie.

“It isn’t,” said Yael. “I am yet unborn upon this four-cornered world.”

The tiny head popped out … Mother screamed, ringing within him interminably. 

“Here you come,” said Annie. 

He saw his tiny head, his mother gasping three times, his onlooking family, like medical students unwrapped and helpless in a surgical amphitheater, and he looked away – at the frozen Blood Woods, at his unwanted hosts. 

When he looked back, Midwife Margot cut the umbilical cord, cradling him over his dead mother.

Back beside the altar overlooking the Pherryville Gorge, all three opened their eyes.

“Now you’ve seen it,” said Annie. “Don’t that tickle your froze-up heart?”

Yael looked down at the stone floor, then at Terry and Annie, and brought forth tears.

Annie unsheathed Terry’s bowie knife from the holster on his waist, and slashed the weeping man’s chest, whereupon he sprang back with a gasp and a shocked, open mouth. 

“He bleeds!” thundered Terry, his voice echoing over the gorge. “He bleeds!”

Annie struck him with the butt end of the bowie knife, and Yael pedaled backwards to the edge.

“Won’t you fight? All these years of yours, scattered across time, denying your own self, your own bloody start. It’s beautiful, you fool. I’ve felt it. And he’s felt you longer than you now feel him,” she said, pointing at Terry, standing like a cacodemon at her side. “Now that you’ve seen the mama you killed, you feel yourself again and see that pile of wasted years. You see the beauty of you, of blood, of ragefulness. Don’t even need that holier-than-thou shit no more, do you? Madrone neither.” She blinked and Yael spied the smallest lilt in her smile. 

“Your daydream’s done lost,” she said, her eyes soft now, staring at his, “in them woods …”  

The old man sneezed, wiped blood with his flannel sleeve and staggered, almost falling.

“Aww,” said Terry, “hims.”

Yael suddenly bolted forward, jabbing her and hurling her backward against the piled stones of the hörgr like an expunged cork.

Her slight neck, her slight neck, her slight neck, he thought. He had witnessed it many times after this day, but right then the old man perceived her message, exposed as her neck surely was, as she launched herself at him. He dodged with a deft shuffle of his feet, and turned, running the few steps remaining to fling himself over the edge.

Fragment 11: When she let me turn it back on … 

Didn’t hear nothing, so I run over to the edge. He wasn’t there … but I knowed he was drawing breath.

“He dead?” said Terry. 

I’s kindly surprised Terry didn’t feel him still living like I done. Still don’t know what trick Yael concocted to pull that off.

“Kindly reckon he must be,” I said.

“Good. Let’s cut the tree, and dig up its roots … let its sappy blood flow over all four corners of County Vaunce.”

Leonnard Menifee is a writer and a fishing guide, who resides in Vaunce County, Kentucky. You can find more information about him at leonnardmenifee.com.