​Kudzu Bones

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    It was late August, and the woods behind the Haskins’ place had gone wrong. Wrong in a way that people could not name, only feel. The air in the woods stayed moist and cool while the rest of the county baked and shimmered.
    People were not the only ones who could feel something was not right. Birds cut wide around the tree line. Dogs that would run feral hogs into a creek bed and hold them there refused to cross into the shade of the forest. They stopped with their hackles up and whined like something inside them remembered an older rule.
    Folks said things had always vanished in those woods. A calf now and then. A hound dog that did not come home. Once, a few years ago, a man from Comer by the name of Darryl Pruitt said he was going hunting. He was drunk, mean, and a suspect in two beatings no jury ever pinned on him. Someone saw him going into the woods, but he never came back out. Since he was a man with bad habits and worse debts, nobody except his mother really cared. The country people seldom spoke about these things, but when they did their eyes lowered and their tone became solemn. That summer, people began to speak up more because the disappearances had begun to stack up in a way that bothered even men who prided themselves on not being bothered.
    A herd of deer that had populated the area for years had disappeared. So had all of the squirrels and raccoons that had always been plentiful, now gone. Then two boys from Ila slipped into the woods after dark on a dare and came out pale and shaking, claiming they had heard someone calling their names from inside the vines. One of them had scratches on his neck that looked less like briars and more like fingernails.
    By the time the Haskins’ brindled hunting dog vanished in broad daylight, the county started calling Leon McMercer.
    Leon was fifty-three years old and the game warden out of Danielsville. His face was browned by years in the sun, and he knew the difference between rumor and spoor. He knew the smell of a bobcat den and the signs deer leave on the underbrush during their rutting season. He also knew how fear made honest people say foolish things. Most times, he could walk into a panic and come back out with the simple hard truth held by the tail.
    That Tuesday morning, he parked his truck at the edge of the Haskins field and stood looking at the woods. The kudzu had grown thick as a flood there, swallowing fence posts, low stumps, rusted farm junk, and whole young pines under its green drapery. What showed through looked like bones pushing up beneath skin. Cicadas screamed from the heat. Beyond that noise lay another kind of quiet, one too complete to be natural.
    Mrs. Haskins met him by the gate with her arms crossed over a faded apron. “I told Roy not to let that dog nose around in there.”
    “When did you last see him?” Leon asked.
    “Ten o’clock maybe. Heard him bark once. Not a fighting bark. More like he’d found something and wished he hadn’t.”
    Roy Haskins stood behind her, hat in both hands, turning the brim. “I went twenty yards in and come back out. Felt like walking into a closed mouth.”
    Leon might have smiled at another time, but Roy was not a man given to poetry. Leon took his radio, his sidearm, and a coil of orange survey tape. He also took a long skinning knife that he used more often for cutting rope and saplings than for using it on any creature with blood in it.
    “If I’m not back in an hour, you call it in,” he said.
    Mrs. Haskins frowned. “You talking like you believe us.”
    Leon looked at the wall of green again. “I’m talking like I respect what scares people.”
    The first steps in were a fight. Kudzu vines, hidden by leaves as broad as his hands, wrapped his shins and pulled at his boots. The smell changed as soon as the open field dropped from sight. Outside there had been sun on clay and cut hay. Inside there was leaf rot, old water, and a sweetish scent in the air that smelled like rotting fruit in a closed-up room.
    He tied survey tape to a low branch and went on.
    The vines swallowed light. Gnats moved in drifts where shafts of sun broke through. He found deer sign at first, then lost it all at once, as if the woods had stopped being woods and become something else.
    Twenty minutes in and still struggling to move forward, he found the dog collar.
    It lay on the ground unbroken, the leather was damp and warm as if taken off a living neck just moments before. The brass tag read REBEL. Around the spot where the collar lay, the kudzu leaves had browned at the edges, as if touched by heat.
    Leon crouched and reached for the collar. Just as his fingers wrapped around it, something spoke his name.
    Not loud. Not from far off. It came from all around him in a dry collective murmur, like leaves rubbed together by a wind he could not feel.
    Leon.
    He straightened too fast. “Who’s there?”
    No answer came. Only the sound of swamp frogs outside the woodlot, shrill and distant now, more like a memory of noise rather than noise itself.
    Then he saw the tree.
    It stood ahead in a pocket where the vines thinned; it looked like a vast oak or something that had once been oak, though no oak he had seen ever grew with a trunk so swollen and lumpy. The bark was ridged in folds that resembled muscle more than wood. Kudzu climbed it halfway and then seemed to recoil. The thick roots of the tree spread through the earth like buried serpents. In the trunk, amid knots and burls and cankers, shapes pressed outward.
    Leon took two steps nearer before his mind let itself understand what his eyes were seeing.
    A forehead under bark.
    The curve of a cheek.
    Something like a hand, all knuckle and fingers, worked into a root where it should not have been.
    He stood very still. The sickly sweet smell thickened. Flies moved lazily around a dark seam in the trunk.
    “No,” he said softly, though he could not have said what he was refusing.
    The seam opened.
    Not wide. Not cleanly. Just enough to suggest depth and wetness inside the tree, and in that wet dark, something shifted. He heard a low sound, not quite human and not quite animal, like breath passing through many throats at once.
    Then faces began to emerge in the bark as if waking.
    One was the brindled dog, or an impression of it, muzzle stretched and flattened in wood grain, mouth slightly open in a soundless pant. Another looked like a deer’s head with its antler buds twisted into limbs. Then higher up, almost at Leon’s eye level, was the face of a man he knew.
    It was the face of Darryl Pruitt, a face he remembered well from an unpleasant encounter when he had once caught Darryl throwing cherry bombs into the river and grabbing the stunned fish when that bobbed to the surface.
    Gone six years now. When Darryl didn’t come back from a hunting trip into the woods, the few folks who did talk about it said he had fled the county. His mother insisted it was not so until the day she died.
    Darryl’s face bulged outward from the wood with hideous patience. The lips did not part, but the voice came just the same.
    “Leon,” it said. “It hurts to stay.”
    Leon stumbled back, boots catching in vines. His hand went to the grip of his pistol, then stopped there. Shoot what. Where. The tree’s bark rippled. New shapes surfaced and sank. Birds. Racoons. Hogs. Faces of people he did not know. The thing was not digesting what it took. It was keeping them. Studying them. Trying on their forms the way a child might try on masks.
    He raised the radio with fingers gone clumsy. Static answered him. Beneath the static came another voice, thin and female.
   “Daddy.”
    The word hit him like a baseball bat to the chest.
    Not because he had a daughter. He did not. But because he knew that voice. Knew it from a winter twenty-two years ago, when he had listened to little Anna Bell Sutton give a holiday recital at a church potluck dinner. After her performance, he had talked to her and her parents. He remembered how proud and self-assured she was. Later in the evening, Anna, unnoticed by anyone, wandered out of the church and into the nearby woods. Leon had been younger then, a deputy, not a warden. He had joined the search for the little girl, and three days later, down by the creek, he found her coat tangled in a stand of river cane. Her body was never found. The memory of the sound the father made when Leon gave him the coat was a memory that Leon would never forget.
    Now that same child’s voice came from the bark.
    “Daddy, it’s dark.”
    Leon backed away until his shoulders hit a screen of vines. His chest had gone shallow. Sweat ran cold down his sides despite the heat. This was no trick of grief, because the tree could not know what he knew. It could not reach into old county sorrows and lift them by name unless it had taken more than flesh. It had taken the last shape of fear, the last cry, the final memory from each thing that touched it.
    A root moved near his boot.
    Leon looked down and saw it inch through the leaf mold, as slow and deliberate as a probing hand. Another shifted to his left. The tree cared nothing for the usual stillness of trees. It had only been patient when patience served it.
    He slashed with the knife. The blade bit root, and a fluid the color of black tea welled out, smelling of sap mixed with old blood. The woods answered with a sound like a congregation inhaling.
    The roots surged.
    Leon hacked and kicked, stumbling toward the orange tape. Vines clutched his legs. One vine looped around his wrist and tightened with a grip too intentional to be plant life. He cut free and plunged ahead. All around him the leaves had begun to whisper in overlapping voices.
    Stay.
    Hungry.
    Come back.
    Not words exactly. More the shape of desire pressing through stolen throats.
    He burst through a thicket, saw a flash of orange tape, then another. He could hear the sound of branches cracking, roots heaving up stones, and something heavy being dragged over the ground behind him. He did not turn to look. Overtaken by fear, everything else fell away until only breath, footing, and direction remained.
    When he broke out into the field, he fell to one knee in the red clay and sucked air that smelled of sun and dust and honest things. Roy Haskins shouted from the fence. Mrs. Haskins was already on the phone. Leon twisted and looked back.
    At the edge of the woods the kudzu shivered. Nothing emerged. After a few moments, even that movement stopped.
    But there, just within the shade, where the vine curtain hung thickest, he saw two pale shapes open and close.
    Eyes.
    When Leon told them what had happened, and they saw the marks on his wrist, marks that looked like green bruises that had been made by fingers, no one laughed at him.
    By evening, several neighbors with chainsaws, tractors, and fuel cans had arrived at Haskins’ farm. Three county deputies were also waiting at the gate. Leon stood with them and watched the woods darken.
    “I say we burn it,” Roy said.
    Leon stared at the tree line. “Fire might clear the vines.”
    “And the tree?” asked one of the deputies.
    Leon thought of faces in bark and voices stored like rainwater in rings of wood. He thought of roots already moving under house foundations throughout the county… maybe farther. He thought of a thing that did not merely kill, it learned.
    “No,” he said at last. “I don’t think fire will be the end of it.”
    The first stars came out. Somewhere in the dark woods, a sound rose, low and creaking, like timber in a storm or an old body turning in bed.
    Then, very softly, from beneath the porch of the Haskins house, the brindled dog began to howl.
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