T^{respasses
by John C. Erianne}

The tree house stood in the back yard of a house located in the neighborhood I liked to call, “The Lost City.” The family who lived in the house had been away for more than two weeks and I had been using the tree house as my own private clubhouse ever since.

I lived in a trailer on the other side of the dirt driveway, across from Granny Brown’s house. She wasn’t anyone’s grandmother and didn’t even have children of her own as far as I knew, but I’d always called her Granny for some reason. Granny owned the land our mobile home rested on. She owned all of the land west of Gene Carabin’s property, which included a fair portion of the wooded area beyond her yard where my sister and I often played.

It was summer, 1974, and I was seven. I had started out that afternoon with every intention of going alone, but my sister saw me leave and came chasing behind me. “Where you going?” I stopped and turned around. She stood there in her green shorts and an Enchanted Wonderland t-shirt, her big brown eyes peering hopefully at me through the lenses of her new glasses.

“Nowhere.”

“Can I go?”

“No.”

“I’ll tell mommy.”

“Alright.”

“Where we going?”

“To my castle.”

“Where’s your castle?”

“The lost city.”

My sister smiled. She liked our little adventures.

We ran across the meadow behind Dot Shepherd’s place and through Gunny Johnson’s yard.

I stopped when I saw Audra Capps outside with her brothers, Wade and Shay. I didn’t like Audra. She was stuck-up and bossy and had the most obnoxious red hair I’d ever seen on a girl. Audra’s grandparents lived next door to Gunny Johnson and his wife Casey. Audra and I often played together when she was there visiting with her brothers.

“Hi,” she said. “What’re you doin’?”

“Nothing.”

Then my sister had to open her big mouth.

“We’re gonna go to a castle.”

“Nuh-Uh!” said Audra. She called her brothers over.

“Shay, he says he’s going to a castle.” Shay was two years older then me and was supposed to be really smart. Mostly, I just saw a tall, skinny kid who was quiet most of the time and looked like Audra except his hair was blond and curly.

“There aren’t any castles around here.”

“Who said it was around here?”

“Where, then?”

“The lost city.”

“Can I go?” Audra’s little brother Wade said. He was about my sister’s age. He looked like Audra too, except his hair was blond like Shay’s and straight like Audra’s. All of them had freckles.

“Come on,” I said to my sister. We ran around Gunny Johnson’s garden to the edge to the woods. The three of them were trailing behind us.

“They’re following.” my sister said.

“Yeah, I know.” I slowed and let them catch up.

We walked around trees, their thick, knotty roots bulged up through the mossy soil. “. . .The birds in the sky and all the beasts in the jungle stood silent as the great adventurer returned to his kingdom in the Lost City.”

Audra and Shay snickered behind me, but I didn’t care. As far as I was concerned I was the great adventurer.

It seemed to take forever to reach the tree house. It wouldn’t have taken as long if I’d gone by myself.

“Wow!” my sister said. She had never seen a tree house, so I’m sure it probably looked like a castle to her. Audra and her brothers weren’t so easily impressed.

“That’s not a castle,” Shay said.

“You’re so stupid,” Audra said to me.

“Am not. You’re stupid.”

“You.”

“You shut up.”

“Why don’t you both shut up?” Shay said.

Wade just giggled like a little girl.

“You want to see what it looks like?” I asked.

“Sure, okay,” Shay replied.

I climbed the ladder first, then Shay. My sister climbed next and Audra and Wade brought up the rear. For a long time we sat there silently. I don’t know what pleased us more, that we were far away from any parental supervision, or that we were trespassing on private property.

“I gotta pee,” Wade announced.

“So,” Audra said.

“But I got to.”

“Just go in their yard.” Shay said.

“You’ll see me.”

“We don’t want to watch you pee!” I shouted.

“Go on,” Shay said, nudging him over to the trap door.

A few moments later, we heard Wade shout: “Hey! Somebody’s comin’!” I looked out the window and there was Wade standing there, pants around his ankles and a car pulling into the driveway. I knew the family would eventually return home, but I didn’t think it would be this day, this hour. “Geez,” I exclaimed laughing. “Let’s go.”

We got out of there quick and ran. We ran through the woods until we came out on the other side near a large open field. Open, except for a small patch of trees and bushes left untouched at the center of the field. I called this place, “Pirate Island.”

“Anybody follow us?” Audra asked.

“No,” Shay said.

“Want to see my island?” I asked, pointing to the lone patch of trees.

“That’s not an island,” Shay said.

“There’s buried treasure there.”

He raised an eyebrow and reminded me of Mr. Spock from Star Trek when he did it. “Come on,” I said to my sister.

“I’m tired.” she said.

“You wanted to come.”

I continued across the field to my “island.” The rest of them followed, reluctantly, behind me, their footsteps spurred on by the promise of a great treasure. The patch of mossy ground and trees was not as far away as it seemed, especially considering the ground we’d already covered.

“Okay,” Audra said, “Where’s the treasure?”

I dug it up with a stick, a small jar I’d swiped from Granny Brown’s garage. The “treasure” was just a few items I’d buried earlier that summer: a couple of buttons, a thimble, and a few pennies.

“That’s not a treasure,” Audra said.

I shrugged. Wade and my sister were running around in the field throwing dirt clods at each other. I didn’t see Shay. I turned around and a dirt clod smacked into my arm. Shay stood in front of me snickering. I picked up a dirt clod and threw it at him. It narrowly missed him. Audra joined us and soon we were all clobbering each other with dirt clods.

“Hold it,” I said, trying to catch my breath. “Maybe we should start back.” It was starting to get dark. My sister was afraid of the dark, and I was just afraid how my father would react if we were too late getting home.

“Okay — What, you afraid?” Shay mocked.

“No, but don’t you have to go home?”

“Okay, let’s go.”

We crossed the field and head toward the woods.

“You don’t know where we came out, do you?” Shay asked.

I didn’t — not exactly. But I knew the woods. I knew where all the trails were. We were farther away than I would have liked to have been, but there was still just enough light to make out the outline of the path. “Just follow me,” I said. My sister held my hand tightly. Audra and Wade bunched up close to Shay. It took me a few moments, but I recalled the trail we were on.

“Shay’s right,” Audra said. “You’re getting us lost.”

“I’m not lost.” The trail forked off into two directions. The right path would take us home. The left snaked off to a dead end at the center of the woods.

“I think we should go this way,” Shay said, pointing to the path on the left.

“That doesn’t go anywhere.”

“How do you know?” Audra said. “We live in the woods. Shay knows more than you.”

“You don’t live in these woods.” I said.

My sister’s grip tightened and she was shaking. “I wanna go home.”

“Let’s go.” I said. “You guys should come with me.”

“I’m going with Shay,” Audra said.

The three of them started off down the path. They faded out of my sight. I waited a few minutes to see if they would come back, but they didn’t. “Come on,” I said to my sister.

It seemed like we had been walking for a long time, and my sister was slowing down. “I’m tired,” she said.

“We’re almost there,” I said. And it was true. I could see the old, abandoned, rusted-out truck just ahead and knew we were close.

 

When we entered the trailer, my mother was sitting in the kitchen.

“Where have you two been? I was calling for you.”

“We were in the woods.”

“Well, you should’ve been home.”

“Dad’s not here?”

“No — and look at you two. You’re filthy. Go in there and clean yourselves up and get into you’re pajamas.”

Afterwards, my sister went to her room to play with her dolls and I went into the living room to watch Kung Fu. My father came home shortly after, smelling of cigars. He was carrying a pizza from Big John’s and set it down on the dining table.

“Well, I see you finally decided to join us,” my mother said to my father.

“What? I wasn’t gone that long.”

“Uhhuh, your watch must be broken — “Kids,” she shouted. “You want some pizza?” My sister came out of her room and we ran to the table. My mother got out plates and we each grabbed a slice of pepperoni pizza.

While we ate the phone rang. It was Audra’s mother.

“Well,no...no. They came home a while ago. I don’t know — John?”

“What?”

“Were you with the Capps kids?”

“Yeah.”

“You know where they are?”

“They didn’t come home yet?”

“No, Their father’s out looking for them.”

“They must still be in the woods. They didn’t want to come the way we went,” I said.

“Oh,” my mother said to Audra’s mother. “He said they were playing in the woods. They didn’t want to come back with him.

“Well, call back and let me know. Okay, ‘bye.”

My mother seemed mildly pleased by Mrs. Capps’ distress. “I don’t understand that,” she said. “She usually keeps those kids on a pretty short leash.”

“John and Joan were home, weren’t they?” My father asked.

“Oh, they were home a long time ago.”

My mother had completely forgotten that we were out past curfew. Either that, or she was just covering for us with my father. I thought of Audra and her brothers, lost in the woods. Cold, tired. Mosquito bites. Perfect Shay and spoiled princess Audra. That little brat, Wade. Me with my hot slice of pizza and warm bed waiting for me. I was feeling vindicated. I was feeling satisfied.

***

“Sissy,” Granny Brown said. “Go in the house.” My sister was five and wouldn’t understand. My sister didn’t move at first.

“What are you doing, Granny?”

“Nothing for you to concern yourself with. Go on, now.”

My sister went inside Granny’s house, finally.

“Johnny, you make sure she don’t come out.”

The six kittens rested on the towel. A metal bucket was sitting underneath the running spigot, filling with water. Granny Brown picked the kittens up one by one and looked at them for a moment with her one good eye, then tossed them – plop, plop, plop – into the cold water. Most didn’t put up much of a fight and died quickly, but a couple scratched and clawed at the side of the bucket.

I sat there on the porch petting one of Granny’s many cats, trying to pretend I didn’t notice what was happening. Granny had a lot of cats and had stopped naming them long ago. Of course, some of the cats had names. There were old

Tom and the six Georges (five Georges and a Georgette, actually). There was one white cat my sister named Snowball. Granny Brown must have had a hundred cats. We’d find them roaming in the woods, or sleeping underneath Granny’s shack at the edge of the woods. A few of her cats slept in the garage. Once in awhile I’d run across one of her cats lying dead on the ground with maggots feeding on its carcass.

Except for her many cats, Mattie “Granny” Brown lived alone in a tiny, unkempt little white house. My sister spent much of her play time at Granny’s house. I was over there quite a bit myself, but preferred to be outside in the woods. Granny didn’t have color TV and wouldn’t let me touch anything in her house.

My sister stood there inside the doorway, confused, scared. Her glasses were fogging up and she pressed her pixie-like face up against the screen door. “What’s going on?”

“Stay inside the house, Sissy,” Granny said.

“Where are the kitties? I want to see the kitties.”

Granny Brown removed the dead kittens from the bucket and tossed them in a paper shopping bag.

“I want to see the kitties.”

“You can’t,” I told my sister.

“Why not?”

“They’re dead. Granny drowned them.”

“No!”

Granny faced me, her mouth contorted into a toothless grimace. “Johnny, boy if you don’t have the devil in you!”

I just smiled.

“Granny put them in a bag. She’s gonna bury them.”

My sister was crying.

“Boy, you get on outta here. I’m gone tell your mammy on you.”

I set the cat I’d been holding down – one of the Georges – and went home.

Soon my father would be rolling home from work into the driveway in his big red Plymouth. I ran up on the porch and opened the door to the trailer. Inside, my mother was in the kitchen making meat loaf for dinner.

“Dinner’s almost ready. Where’s your sister?”

“Over at Granny’s. Granny’s mad at me.”

“What did you do this time?”

“I told sister about Granny drowning the kittens.”

My mother muttered something about Granny “fixing” the cats instead of drowning them and turned back to finishing dinner. My mother didn’t punish me, nor did I truly expect her to. Unlike my father, who was completely arbitrary and often needlessly excessive in dispelling discipline, my mother was very specific about what she would and would not punish us for. Embarrassing her in public was worth either a quick decisive spanking or she’d make me stand in the corner when we got home. For backtalk, I got three lashes with a hickory switch. For cursing, I had to suck on a bar of soap for five minutes. Teasing my sister outside of the home wasn’t a punishable offense unless my sister came crying to my mother.

 

I turned on the TV and watched Bugs Bunny. Several minutes later, my sister came walking through the door, no longer upset. “You two go wash your hands,” my mother ordered.

In the bathroom, at the sink, my sister called me a liar. “Granny wouldn’t do that,” she said.

“What happened to the kittens?”

“She said she gave them to God.”

I didn’t even bother trying to explain to her what Granny really meant by that. My father would be home any minute and I didn’t need him on my back.

Dinner in our house could often be a somber affair. My father didn’t like noise and conversation when he ate. My mother liked dinner conversation. In fact, she considered the dinner table to be the center of all family business. So, what would inevitably happen was my sister and I would start playing around. At three, my sister was already a good mimic and loved to make faces. By the time she was five, she was doing full-blown characters. One character she loved to do was this old woman, Dirty Sally, from the show Gunsmoke. For some reason, my sister’s impression could incite awful fits of laughter in me. This would get my father riled-up. “Will you goddamn kids, shut the hell up?”

“But it’s funny,” I’d explain, my eyes watery and snot running down my nose.

“You heard what I said. You want me to whale you, boy?”

My mother would shoot my father a look that said, “If you don’t cool it, I’m going to whale you.”

“Willie, they’re just having fun. You mind your own self.”

“Just too noisy is all,” my father grumbled under his breath. Scolded like a child, my father went back to stuffing large chunks of meat loaf in his mouth. I almost felt sorry for him. In truth, if given a choice between being whaled on by my father or being verbally scolded by my mother, I’d choose my father’s brand of abuse. At least, it was over quickly. My mother, on the other hand, could reduce you to vapor with a glance and her criticisms were a kind of poison that had a way of crawling inside you and setting up house.

After dinner my sister and I went back outside to play. I ran out the door as soon as I was excused from the table and my sister trailed behind me.

“Where you going?” she asked.

“Gunny’s,” I answered. Gunny was the nickname of Orville Johnson, who lived with his wife, Casey just beyond the meadow behind our back yard. Everyone called him Gunny because he was a Marine Raider in World War Two. I suppose I spent as much time at Gunny’s place as my sister spent at Granny Brown’s. He always seemed glad to see me. Both of his children were grown and starting their own families. Being around Gunny was like having a grandfather. I only had one living grandparent – my mother’s mother, but she lived in West Virginia and we only saw her once a year. To me, she was just a five-dollar bill in a Christmas card. I saw Gunny every day.

I always liked to take the back way to Gunny’s place, through the woods and down the path that emerged at the edge of his garden.

Gunny was there hoeing the weeds from around his zucchini plants. He had his back to us and I signaled at my sister to sneak around to the right, while I went left. We skirted around the edge of the garden, trying to be as quiet as we were able. We were about halfway to him when we heard his drill sergeant’s voice shout, “Who’s that in my garden?” He turned and smiled at us as we rushed up to him. “Could that be Master John and little Sissy?”

“Hey there, Gunny,” I said.

His skin was deeply tanned, wrinkled and looked rough. He had a small scar on his neck near the jaw-line, he said came from a Japanese bayonet wound. The beads of sweat on his forehead made him look like a wet rock.

“I was just trying to get some of these weeds out of here before the sun went down. Some days there’s just not enough time.”

“Where’s your dogs?” my sister asked.

Gunny had two big dogs – a German Shepherd called Sarge and a black Labrador named Shadow. “I’m afraid they’re sleeping in the garage. They’re old just like Gunny. Can’t play like they used to.”

My sister looked disappointed.

“Well, you know, I could use a break. Why don’t you kids have a drink with me.” We followed him into the garage. The two dogs were sleeping on an oil spot, on the cool, cement floor next to the blue Ford sedan. Gunny walked into his tool room and removed two orange sodas from the refrigerated cooler. With the bottle opener on his key ring, he removed the bottle caps and handed the bottles to us.

“Thank you.”

“Thank you.”

“You’re certainly welcome, kids,” he said, then took a gulp from his own bottle. “That hits the spot.”

For a moment all was peaceful. Then, suddenly, I spied Audra Capps’ freckled face scowling at us from the white rail fence lining Gunny’s property just beyond his apple tree.

“Your little girlfriend’s staring at us, Johnny,” Gunny said.

My sister giggled at the mention of “girlfriend.”

“She’s not my girlfriend.” We hadn’t spoken since she and her brothers got lost in the woods.

“Come on over here,” Gunny called to Audra. “It’s all right.”

“Oh brother,” I muttered.

“Why she have to be here,” my sister said.

Audra came walking across the yard. “What are you guys doin’?”

“Nothing,” I said. “Where’re your brothers?”

“Shay’s fishing with Daddy. Wade’s with my Mom shoppin’ for school clothes.”

“How come you’re not with her?”

Audra shrugged.

“You want some orange soda pop?” Gunny asked.

“I’m not allowed to drink that stuff after dinner.”

“Suit yourself.” Gunny finished his soda and set the empty down in a wooden crate of other deposit bottles.

“Well, kids,” he said, “break’s over. Time to get back to work.” Gunny grabbed his hoe and went back to his garden. After we finished our sodas, I placed the empty bottles in the crate. Audra and I walked toward the garden with my sister trailing behind us.

“Can we go home now?” my sister asked.

“Not yet.”

We walked around the garden. Audra spotted something in the grass at the edge of the woods. She rushed ahead of us. “Look,” she said. “Look, it’s a bunny.”

“It’s so cute,” my sister said.

“It’s hurt.” said Audra. The bunny was lying there, shaking. It was bleeding from a big gash in its side.

“It’s going to die,” I said.

“Not if we help it,” Audra said, and I could see she was starting to tear-up.

“What are we supposed to do?”

“We can get it a band-aid,” my sister said.

Audra bent down over it and started to pick it up.

“What’s going on here?” Gunny asked.

“It’s a hurt bunny,” I said.

“You kids need to leave that alone.”

Audra was bawling now. “We have to help it.”

“You can help it by letting it die.”

“Come on, Sis. Let’s go home.”

I started to walk away. Then Gunny did something, I never would have expected. He raised his hoe and brought it down, striking the bunny on its back.

“You kids get now. I’ll take care of this.”

Audra ran away crying. My sister, surprisingly, wasn’t that upset. We stepped into the woods together. The sun had set and soon my father would be calling for us. As we were walking home, she grabbed my arm. “What is it?”

“The kitties really are dead?”

“Yeah.”

We trudged through our back yard, past the swing set. Fireflies blinked in the air and I could hear crickets singing their strange love songs. As I rounded the rear of the trailer, holding my sister’s hand, I noticed my father standing on the porch, a blurry shadow waiting on our return like darkness itself as fearsome and as inviting.