as thin vines crawled over her hands, encasing them like gloves. And over her belly, touching her gently. Esther claimed the land and it claimed her.
* * *
* * *
The next morning I rocked back and forth on the porch swing, one toe controlling the movement, watching as Sam and the churchmen in his faction, including my daddy, discussed which trees to take first. They were gathered on the Vaughn farm’s downhill side of the road, visible from this vantage. There were a lot of shouted instructions and disagreements about where to drop the trees on the slanted road. There was even more fussing and discussing about how to get the cut logs onto the logging truck, to the construction site where they would be rough shaped, and then under the temporary shelter waiting for them. Further discussion followed about how long the logs would need to cure before they could be used for construction.
I had received the Vaughns’ wildly enthusiastic permission to thin the vampire trees that had encroached on their farm, despite Brother Vaughn’s antipathy to me personally. The tree, the creation of which had, thankfully, not been attributed to me, had a reputation on church lands as a devil tree. It was a well-deserved reputation, the tree having killed a rooster, a puppy, a full-grown dog, and a cat, as well as numerous squirrels. And a man, though no one had mentioned that in my hearing.
“Men take forever to do anything,” Esther commented from the rocking chair near the door. Her hands were scratching lazy circles on her rounded belly, her housedress stretched tightly across her. “If women were doing this, all that other stuff woulda been decided long afore we got here and we’da started cutting two hours past.”
I smiled, watching the arm waving, foot stomping, and general air of disagreeable excitement among the men. “That’s true. But they’re having fun. Look at Daddy.” Old Man Nicholson, as Daddy had begun to be called since he’d been shot and the subsequent surgeries, was perched in a lawn chair. He had one leg propped on a stump and was contributing to the conversation with much cane brandishing and general gesticulation.
Esther slid her hands to her lower spine and pushed, her eyes pensive, not meeting mine. “You’un sure that wasn’t witchcraft, what we done last night? Pricking my finger and bleeding all over tarnation felt a lot like devil stuff.”
“It wasn’t witchcraft,” I said placidly. “No witch circle, no spells. It was just sharing your blood-scent with the tree, so it would agree to become your house.”
“Tree smelling my blood. Strange things you do, Nellie. Humph.” The sound was a lot like Mama’s and my smile grew. Mama was planning her next grandbaby. To make sure there would be no baby-killings should Esther’s child be born with leaves, Mama had hired an outside midwife to be on-site when Esther went into labor.
“Get away from me, dog,’’ Esther grouched, nudging Cherry with a toe. The springer had become overly protective this morning, when Esther had hard contractions and the baby started kicking in seeming retaliation. I stopped the swing and patted the seat beside me. Cherry whined but leaped obediently up beside me and lay down, her chin hanging off the seat, her eyes on my sister’s belly.
Out front, the logging trailer had been leveled, the crane that lifted the logs to the trailer was in place, and the lumbermen secured goggles to protect their eyes. The roar of multiple chain saws commenced. Cherry whined louder and shoved her nose under my hand; I covered her ears. Sam had tied plastic ribbons around each tree to be taken: the four biggest were tied with blue, to be shaped and used as the floor girders. The red ones were the next size up, to be left whole and round for the outer walls. The odd-sized ones were to be cut into boards for inner walls, window casings, door casings, and such.
That is, if the blasted tree allowed the men to cut them without a fight and if the men didn’t run scared when the cut wood bled red. I had warned them about that, insinuating that the vampire tree was a new, fast-growing, invasive tree and they needed to get out in front of the infestation and find a use for it before it took over the world. Having seen all the invasive plants and animals from Asia and South America, they were in complete agreement about tree culling,