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The tree became famous after Caleb Johnson found a body hanging from a branch.

In the South that typically meant another young black man swinging from a rope. Lynching season was not so distant a memory for some, but that morning it was not a black man hanging from a tree, but a white girl.

Lucky for him he wasn’t alone. In his boat sat two other men—white men, all the better—who had paid for his help in scouting out a camp they wanted to build as a base for hunting, fishing, and serious drinking beyond the frowns of wives and Baptist preachers.

“Damn,” said the banker perched on the bow. “Look, there’s a body.”

Although Caleb had spotted it when they rounded the bend, he knew enough to let the others stake claim. He eased them closer to find a pretty girl with blonde hair, her cotton dress as smooth as if her momma just had ironed it for Sunday service. He listened as the two white men argued over what to do next, though personally he wanted to cut the child down. But the banker went on about “preserving a crime scene” like he was J. Edgar Hoover, said they should leave her there until the sheriff had a look, then he pulled out a bulky camera and snapped pictures. It was an ugly tree, leafless with roots grabbing at a muddy bank, and the groan of the rope against the tree bark made Caleb’s skin crawl.

It was an hour to the county seat of Jessup and an hour back with the sheriff following in his own boat. Caleb guided them on as straight a path as was possible in the maze that was Hatchie Bottom. When they found the tree again, the body was gone.

Sheriff Joe Kramer gave them a sour look. “You sure this is the place?”

The banker glanced around. “I’m sure. No mistaking that tree, Joe. I saw her with my own two eyes. So did Bob and even old Caleb, a girl hanging from a rope, from that big old tree.”

Kramer scratched his chin as he eyed the bark for rope burns, for any sign that one end of a rope had been wrapped around a limb and the other around a girl’s neck. He asked questions, nodded at the answers; mostly he talked to the other men, but when he got to Caleb he leaned close and lowered his voice. “That sound right to you?” as if Caleb would contradict two rich white men from Jessup. If they said they saw a pink elephant dancing across the Bottom he would have agreed.

“Caleb, just tell me if they’ve been drinking,” the sheriff pressed. “That’s all I want to know.”

“No sir, not even a beer. We had some in the cooler but it didn’t seem right after we saw that little girl. We got to you as fast as we could.”

“Uh huh.”

Back in Jessup the sheriff sent the camera film to be developed while a deputy took their statements. Caleb read the words. Of his brothers and sisters he was the only one who learned to read or write worth a damn, and he was proud of how his name looked when he took pen to paper. Mary had called him vain, half joking about his neat handwriting and how organized he kept their little house in Fishhook, the little all-black town across the river from Jessup. Then she up and died, them without a single child. After putting her in the ground he sold that little house and moved out to the Bottom, never looking back.

His business with the sheriff done, a deputy escorted him to the Jessup dock and watched with arms crossed as he pushed off, his outboard chugging against the choppy river current. Someone had died, or so they thought. He looked longingly in the direction of the Bottom and his cabin, then across the river at Fishhook.

He goosed his engine and pointed the bow toward the opposite bank.

A white girl was dead. People in Fishhook needed to know.

Caleb didn’t give the body much thought until the sheriff tracked him down a few days later. He sat drinking a Coke outside Eddie’s Store, about the only black business in Fishhook that made any real money except for the juke joint down by the crossroads. He mostly stuck close to his cabin, a place close enough to the Bottom to hear the frogs at night but just far enough that the mosquitoes got a little exercise before they settled in for a meal.

As the patrol car pulled into town the men on the porch grew silent as each judged whether the other might be in line for a long, hard ride. Kramer stepped out of the car, a rare sight without one of his fat deputies wearing a gun and a sneer. Kramer himself was short and wiry as a rooster; he had mellowed over the years from a loud mean youngster to a quiet mean sheriff, a man smart enough to let his deputies do the dirty work when he thought it necessary.

“Caleb Johnson,” he called. “You get on over here.”

Caleb glanced at the others. They shrank into near invisibility.

“Get in,” was all the sheriff said.

About the only thing worse than the sheriff looking for you was the sheriff ordering you into his car. That meant a ride, and Caleb didn’t think they were going courting.

“Sheriff, sir? Did I do something wrong?”

Kramer didn’t answer. In his eyes Caleb saw a flash of something—confusion maybe, which made no sense from a white sheriff in the middle of Fishhook. Caleb sat in the passenger seat. In a swirl of dust they rode out of town and along the river until it disappeared behind a bog. Kramer pulled up an old logging road and cut the engine. Bugs sang in the bushes. The car motor tinkled as it cooled.

“Here,” the sheriff said. “Look at these pictures.”

He shoved them into Caleb’s hand.

Each was as iron gray as a summer thunderstorm with nothing else visible, just plain simple gray. Caleb flipped through them, guessing maybe the banker’s film had gone bad, until he saw the last picture.

It was Mary. His Mary. Hanging from a rope.

“Oh Lord.” The pictures spilled to the floorboard, all except the one.

He lost track of time, staring at it. She’d died of the cancer, her body shriveled and face pinched in pain as it ate her up inside. She wouldn’t touch medicine or even a drink of whiskey to dull the ache, just slept on the back porch under the shade of the great old mulberry tree where they liked to picnic or gather fruit for jam. “You have it,” she said, handing him the offered whiskey. “It’s God’s will I suffer, just like Jesus suffered. I’ll be seeing the Lord soon and he would expect no less from me.”

He drank the whiskey, and another, then fell asleep in the chair by her bed as the moon crept through the mulberry leaves.

As he slept, she died. Everything died.

“What do you see?” the sheriff asked. “Tell me.”

What did he see? He felt sick and angry, not caring if it was a white man sitting next to him, not caring if he was the sheriff or the governor or the president. He looked at Kramer.

“Who did this to my Mary?”

Kramer glanced at the photo and then back at him. If he was shocked at hearing a black man talk to him in that manner, he didn’t show it.

“Look again. That’s a white boy in that photograph.” Caleb turned the picture over in his fingers.

“It’s Mary, sheriff. My wife. She’s dead, so how come she’s in this picture?” Then he remembered. “It was a white girl we found that day.”

Kramer closed his eyes and leaned back, rubbed his head with one hand. Caleb didn’t know what to do with himself. Outside the car a breeze stirred the muggy air and he smelled the river. A sob drew him back. Kramer sat with hands over his face. He wiped his eyes and sucked in a sharp breath, seemed to right himself, or to realize where he sat, and with whom.

“You’re getting old, Caleb Johnson,” Kramer said, “old and blind. That’s not your wife, not a black woman at all. That’s a boy in that photograph.” He put out a hand. “Give it back.” There was steel in his voice.

Caleb forced himself to return the picture.

“I’m sorry, sheriff. Maybe I am getting old, but that sure looks like Mary to me.” Kramer slipped the photograph into his shirt pocket. The rest he left scattered on the floorboard.

“You’re wrong. That’s my son. He died two years ago, and not at the end of no rope.” He turned the key and the car engine leapt to life. “And the worst part is, you’re not the only one to be so mistaken.”

Caleb tried sleep. Instead he found himself on the porch staring into the night and hoping for answers in a jar of whiskey. The picture of Mary weighed heavy: her hanging from a rope, arms limp, fingers lifeless. In a strange way the fingers bothered him most. She had loved to sew and stitch, her nimble fingers making the work into a song. Her quilts and bonnets were famous in Fishhook and even in Jessup.

“Damn whoever did this,” he told the night. He saw Mary in that picture. The sheriff said he saw his son. A few others apparently saw different people, the sheriff had told him. Dead people all, family mostly, and not a single one of them who died at the end of a rope. Some wanted to dig up their loved ones to make sure they were still buried but so far the sheriff had talked them out of it. No doubt he didn’t want a bunch of people rooting around the Jessup Memorial Cemetery with shovels, upsetting all the old ladies in town.

Nearby, Caleb’s own shovel leaned against the porch.

The Bottom was oddly quiet. Some nights were like that, when even the birds and bugs held their breath. His father had said such nights meant the spirits were passing through, and once or twice as a young man Caleb had seen lights out where no lights should be, like fireflies dancing in the darkness. Mary would laugh at his stories and then put on a face that demanded an end to such un-Christian conversation, but Caleb knew not everything in the world was spoken of in The Good Book. He gulped his whiskey, thankful for its numbing.

Since Mary’s death he’d settled into a life of quiet acceptance, or so he thought. That picture brought it back.

He’d accepted nothing.

He rolled the empty jar between his hands, torn between pouring another drink or taking a stroll down to a certain Fishhook cemetery where old white ladies wouldn’t give a damn if he dug up a grave in the middle of the night.

He voted for both.

Town wasn’t so far away if you knew the grassy ridges where a man could walk without soaking his boots or getting snake bit. The buzz in his head gave the shovel an unreal feel, every grain in the wood almost alive in his hand. Ahead he saw the scattered lights of Fishhook and, once or twice across the river, Jessup burned like an unreachable beacon. Caleb skirted town, shovel in one hand, whiskey in the other.

Her grave had a modest but well-carved stone. The rose bush he’d planted was in need of pruning.

Was she down there? He drank down the last of his whiskey and tossed the jar aside, grabbed the shovel and let its metal bite into the earth. The muggy night closed in as he worked, his pile of dirt growing larger. As he worked, the picture of Mary forced into his thoughts. He saw her hanging as he dug, saw her looking at him. Saw her eyes.

He was a foot deep now, maybe two.

The image stayed in his mind. The picture, her eyes. Her face.

He saw her mouth move, as if she was trying to speak—

The shovel slipped from his fingers. He dropped to his knees.

Around him the air hung heavy with the smell of fresh-turned earth, with the sweet promise of honeysuckle, with the sense that he was in the wrong place doing the wrong thing. Her body lay beneath him, of that much he was sure. He could feel her down there. She didn’t deserve this, not the image of her from a rope and sure as hell not being disturbed in the middle of the night by a husband drunk on grief and whiskey.

He climbed out and refilled the hole.

The local newspaper ran the picture a few days later, the one that made the tree famous.

A photograph of someone hanging from a rope wasn’t all that unusual. Copies of The Chicago Defender had found their way into Caleb’s childhood home with their grainy lynching photographs and criticism of southern whites for not arresting those who took injustice into their own hands. When white officials began confiscating the newspapers, black railroad porters quietly tossed bundles off trains where they couldn’t find them, but blacks could.

But this picture in his local newspaper was something different.

He saw Mary again, hanging from a rope.

According to the article, a handful of people saw someone else, usually a loved one. Most people saw nothing but gray. The article didn’t try to explain the why and how of it all, maybe because the reporter didn’t believe anyone saw anything but was afraid to come out and say so. The story was straightforward and, to Caleb, dull to the point of being meaningless, any mystery washed away in journalistic jargon.

He figured that was the end of the story, just another unsolved mystery and, for some, a wound reopened, nothing that time and strong drink wouldn’t heal. Yet the picture nagged at him for days.

Finally it came, as is often the case, in a dream.

It wasn’t her grave he needed to visit, it was the tree.

As he fueled his boat in the pre-dawn light he heard the unmistakable growl of the sheriff’s car as it stopped and began nosing its way down the track to his cabin. Caleb kept working, not at all surprised. Maybe the same whisper nagged at the sheriff. Maybe it nagged at all those who saw something other than plain empty gray in those photographs.

Without a word, Kramer stepped out of his car with a shotgun and duffel bag, dropped both into the boat. The gun didn’t make Caleb nervous; his own lay in the stern.

The sheriff lit a cigarette and, after two puffs, flicked it into the dark water and stepped into the boat. He sat at the bow.

“Well, Johnson?”

Caleb realized he’d been standing there, rope in hand, lost in thought. He tossed it into the boat. On the third crank the engine coughed to life.

Hatchie Bottom that morning was a sheet of black glass with no snakes gliding through the water, no snowy egrets poking for minnows and frogs. Mists hung in places for no good reason other than that’s where they wanted to be. Caleb used a direct route through a cypress maze, aiming for what appeared to be a wall of grass but was really a watery passage only he and the fish knew existed. Through that and the engine began to miss every fourth beat, so he eased back on the throttle, finally deciding it needed time a rest. The boat cut a crease through the green film. While Caleb cleaned the propeller of any loose grass, Kramer pulled a thermos from his bag and poured himself a steaming cup of coffee.

Caleb had a question. At first he was afraid to ask, but he decided it was a fair charge for the ride.

“Sheriff, how’d your boy die?”

Kramer looked up in surprise. Caleb half expected him to lash out, maybe even take up his gun. Instead, the man stared at the silent bog.

“We were staying in a borrowed cabin, hunting,” he finally said. “Before sunrise we took different deer stands, platforms built halfway up pine trees about a half-mile apart.” He stopped and watched a kingfisher cross the water, then turned to face Caleb. “I heard a shot, just a single shot. I figured he got himself a buck, so I headed his way to congratulate him.” He took a sip of coffee. “It would have been his first deer.”

Caleb nodded. A rite of passage, a father and son. He could guess the rest, but waited.

“I found him on the ground. He’d shot himself but was still alive.” He sighed. “You understand, it wasn’t the wound in the foot that was the problem, it was the fall.” He put a hand to his shirt pocket but didn’t remove what Caleb guessed was the picture. The outboard was cool enough to restart. Caleb ignored it.

“I didn’t dare move him because of his neck and back. He was so twisted up. We were miles from anything and anyone who could help. I stopped the bleeding and made him as comfortable as I could, but it didn’t matter. I could see he was dying.”

“Did you go for help?”

He looked up sharply. “You got children?”

Kramer must have read it in his face.

“He begged me not to leave. What could I do, him busted and bleeding in places I couldn’t see? And the pain, there was nothing I could do for the pain. It had to be hell. I saw it in his eyes, but he was always a tough boy.” He looked away. “When he lost consciousness I ran back to my own tree for a canteen and other gear. He was dead when I got back.”

The boat nudged against a cypress knee with a hollow metallic sound. Caleb heard the gentle kiss of filmy water against the boat’s side. Without a word, he turned and yanked the cord to the outboard. It started on the first pull.

Soon they were making that same slow bend. Even without knowing the Bottom the sheriff must have felt it coming; he leaned forward, almost willing the boat on. As they rounded the bend the tree came into view.

“Dear lord,” Caleb whispered.

A silhouette of thread led from the tree to a body, the head bowed as if in prayer. It was the girl, the same white girl Caleb has seen before. He cut the engine and coasted, using an oar to stop them short from where she hung. Kramer fished the picture from his shirt pocket.

“That the same girl as before?”

“Yes sir.”

Above her the tree spread its naked limbs to the sky. The rope creaked as she rotated in the gentle breeze.

“I didn’t believe any of you,” Kramer said. “But just because I see it, that doesn’t mean I understand it.” He dragged his eyes from the girl and looked at Caleb. “Do you?”

Caleb couldn’t answer. The girl had rotated on the rope to face them. She looked at him with eyes dead and alive. Kramer followed his gaze.

The girl gave a faint smile.

“Damn!” Kramer grabbed his gun.

“No,” Caleb cried. “Don’t!”

He felt Kramer’s finger on the trigger as he pointed the gun. Maybe the law training kept him from blasting the body apart; Caleb didn’t care just as long as he didn’t shoot. White people knew a lot of things, but Caleb Johnson had long ago come to the conclusion they didn’t know much about death and the places in-between. Even black preachers knew that certain beliefs were best left alone unless you wanted to find yourself a few dollars short in the Sunday collection plate.

Her smile faltered.

“Only two?”

It was a voice hoarse and high, a croak pulled tight by the rope around her neck. She shouldn’t have been able to speak at all. Neither of them answered. It seemed less a question than an observation.

She looked at Caleb. “You’ve seen me before.”

He nodded.

A flash of pain crossed her eyes. Caleb reached for his knife. He would cut the rope and they might save her. Maybe that was why they were here, why they were at this place at this time, to save her. It made sense at first, like digging up Mary had made sense, until he realized it was the wrong answer to the wrong question.

She closed her eyes and absorbed a spasm of pain.

Kramer kept his gun pointed at the girl.

“What the hell is she?” he asked over his shoulder. “A witch?”

Caleb didn’t think so. He paddled closer. Kramer stiffened but Caleb ignored him and looked up at her face. Something in her eyes, he had seen that look before, and that familiar spasm.

He licked his lips but could manage only a whisper.

“Do you want something for the pain?”

A smile, weak yet firm, the barest shake of her head.

“I’m sorry,” Caleb whispered. He cleared his throat. Kramer was looking at him, at the girl, at him again, but Caleb focused on the girl.

“I’m sorry I fell asleep,” he said, louder, feeling his way through the words. “I’m sorry I didn’t get a chance to say goodbye.” Tears blurred his vision. He dipped his hand in the river and wiped his face with the tepid water, looked up again.

“I love you, Mary. Goodbye.”

A hint of a smile. She turned ever so slightly to look at Kramer.

He turned away. “Get me the hell out of here, Johnson.”

“Sheriff, wait. If you—”

Kramer pointed the shotgun at Caleb’s chest. “I said go, Johnson. Now.”

He wanted to explain it to the man but Kramer’s eyes were wild, his heart unwilling to listen. With a tug of the cord the engine came to life and he backed the boat away, hoping maybe the sheriff would look back at the girl and change his mind, that maybe his heart would understand what his eyes failed to see. He made a slow arc, buying time. Kramer swiveled his head to avoid looking at the tree.

At the bend, Caleb glanced one final time over his shoulder.

The tree was empty.