The Spirit Tree

64 FICTION The Spirit Tree Susan Lefler EARLY LIGHT BRUSHED THE RIM OF THE MOUNTAIN, but darkness still hovered over the valley where the child slept in her white metal bed. She dreamed her dolls were playing hopscotch on the porch in their hard little shoes. Outside her window, the dull thud of a shovel struck frozen earth. The immense beige cat stirred at the sound and stretched. Billy Ann felt the cat push against her feet and sat up. She looked for the familiar shape of the cradle in the corner, barely visible in the early dawn. Her dolls lay in the shadow of the cradle's curving sides just as she had arranged them the nightbefore. Reassured, she crossed to the window to find out where the sound was coming from. She saw her mama kneeling in the vivid glare of the neighbor's security light, a pointed shovel beside her bare feet. In her arms she held a pot of dead tulips. BillyAnn knew those tulips well. Their neighbor had brought them over at Easter and, for a little while, Mama came out of her shell. As golden petals unfolded to show off their scarlet linings, she carried the tulips with her from room to room and took pictures of them as if they were children. When the petals began to fall, she cried and collected them in a little jelly glass. "Why don't you plant them, Mama?" Billy Ann asked. There was no answer, and the tulip pot remained on the kitchen table until every stem drooped limp and pale onto the formica. Now Billy Ann watched Mama free the dead tulips from the pot, lower them tenderly into the shallow hole, and begin to fill it with dirt. "I wonder what else Mama will do today?" she asked the cat as she slung him across her shoulder. The cat did not answer, but she knew he understood. Before she left her room, Billy Ann inspected the cradle tenderly once again. "Good morning, children," she said to the dolls. "I hope you had a good night's sleep." She imagined them moving and talking in the night—assuming their original places before morning. Although she was eleven and did not admit it to her friends, Billy Ann maintained a close relationship with her family of dolls. Every single day, she set 65 them in a neat row along the wall beneath her window and told them everything that happened. There had been a time when her mama shared her devotion to the dolls. Lately, if Mama noticed them at all, she would say: "For heaven's sake, Billy Ann, you're too big to be playing with dolls." Billy Ann walked into the kitchen and saw Mama at the formica table drinking hot water from a chipped mug. Last night's dishes were piled in the sink, and the garbage can was spilling over. Mama's fingernails still had dirt beneath them, but her face was calm. "You need a tea bag, Mama," Billy Ann said. "No, I don't," said her mama, "they cost too much." Mama's voice sounded wooden, as if she didn't care what she said. Billy Ann sighed and poured Rice Krispies into her blue bowl. She often thought about how she and Mama used to tramp through the woods together, how they took wild orchids home in Mama's socks and planted them, how Mama braided Billy Ann's long, straight hair, helped her with homework, and came to tea parties with the dolls. Lately, Mama had been finding different ways to use her time. One day she wrapped newspaper round and round the pendulum of the grandfather clock and fastened it with masking tape. "Time is nothing but trouble," she said. "Who needs it?" The house echoed with emptiness after the clock was silenced. Billy Ann arrived home from school every afternoon wondering which relative Mama had decided was dead and buried in the back yard this time. Some days it was AuntJane; some days it was Mamaw; once it was the cat. Since Billy Ann knew they were all absolutely alive, she added this to the...