A Good High Place

Chapter 11

c H A P T e R e l e V e N ever since Uncle George started spending a night now and then over at Town Hall as a guest of Sheriff Kittle, no one seemed to want to talk abouthim,period.That’swhatthey’dsay:i’mnottalkingaboutGeorge, period. even before she died, my grandmother would not talk about him, even though he was the one who took care of her for weeks when she tripped carrying the scalding water that burned her face so bad. The night it all came apart was the night of the town musicale over at Town Hall. Which happened to be the same night that Uncle George was “visiting” out back (the building served both as Town Hall and jailhouse and came to the notice of a good portion of the townsfolk. Which was what got cap saying he didn’t want to talk aboutGeorge,period.Thatplusallthestuffabouthimneglectinghis horses. Which started when Marshall Greene had to shoot Jack the night the rig slid down in the ditch behind the saloon. only i knew what no one else did: Uncle George wasn’t driving the rig that night. Sammy Menkin, the hired hand who never was too responsible, was driving. He’d gone off to dinner and never bothered to tie Jack to the post first. When he saw what had happened, he disappeared. Uncle George never said anything because he said Jack was his responsibility, and it served him right for hiring Sammy when he knew he wasn’t good for much. A GOOD HIGH PLACE 63 Uncle George didn’t spend much time at the house in those days, and no one seemed to care about that. except maybe me. i never heard Uncle George say some of the nasty things i’d heard those ladiessaywhobelongtoSara’scircledownattheMethodistchurch. The ladies down at the library didn’t like Uncle George much either, and i’m sure they wondered why someone like him would bother with books. But that’s about all he did bother with. Books and whiskey. So cap had no use for Uncle George, but that hadn’t always been the case. Uncle George told me a tale about the two of them. i cAN See iT AS iT USed To be when we were kids, he said. All by itself at the top of Sanctuary Hill. We’d snowshoe to it. Or swim. Or sometimes we ascended to it out of the surplus of our father’s rage and our mother’s indifference. (Uncle George had that poetic side to him. Grandpa Sharp was a blacksmith, and i don’t remember any rage that wasn’t directed toward some recalcitrant animal.) There were plenty of ways to arrive at the Tree of Supreme and Ultimate Sacrifice. It was Ira (Cap) who named it, Uncle George said. You can’t name a tree that, I told Ira, but Ira said that he could, too. There was a tree named the Tree of the Sorrowful Night in Mexico City and, anyway, it was his tree. Then he’d say, Come on, George. Let’s do it. A good climbing tree. A maple with broad, full branches, a big expansive crotch where we’d sit and spit tobacco and think. That was paramount, the thinking about it, he said. We’d look at the stars or the sky or the intersecting tentacle-like branches or down at the bugs scurrying about under the tree, but no matter what, we couldn’t miss looking at the scars—the gaping purple wounds on the trunk of the tree, oozing bloody black sap where there once had been branches. It made for an extralong stretch of the legs if you were to make any headway. And that was part of the deal. If it hadn’t been for the gaping holes, the black oozing blood, and the missing branches, the tree would have been called the Tree of Supreme and Ultimate Happiness. Happiness instead of Sacrifice. And then there would have been nothing to it at all. Nothing. At all. Ira told me this over and over. It’s the scars, he’d say. Ira was younger than me but somehow seemed older, nearer to the edge than I could ever be. And that was because Ira could see it. And I couldn’t. Barefoot. We always climbed barefoot. Come on, George, climb. It’s a rehearsal...