Free The Killing Tree by Rachel Keener

holler. Ever heard of it?”
    “Didn’t know the name. Just knew it ain’t like the rest of your mountain.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “Just feels like I’m on a whole new mountain. A wild one. It ain’t all carved up like yours. With roads and a shoppin’ valley.”
    “I’ve never been up here before,” I said.
    “Never knew you was neighbors with all this, huh?”
    We drove past a small boy, around five years old. He was standing on the side of the road, naked except for a pair of boots,
     holding a dead squirrel by its tail. His eyes curiously followed our truck as it climbed further up the holler.
    “Did you see him?” I asked. He nodded. “Poor little fella,” I said.
    He looked at me, and I could tell he didn’t understand or agree with my statement. It all seemed normal to him.
    “Where you from?” I asked, after we had driven for a while in silence.
    “Down the riverbottom,” he said, giving me the answer I already knew.
    “Have you been up here much?”
    “Been fishin’ all summer in these parts. They got trout streams better than any place in these mountains,” he said.
    “You met any of the people here?”
    “When they first seen me, they just looked at me like they couldn’t figure me. It wasn’t the same as the way your people look
     at me, though.”
    “My people?” I asked.
    “Crooktop. The people of your mountain.”
    “How do they look at you?”
    “Same as a skeeter, I reckon. I’m like a summer bug to y’all.”
    He had said “y’all.” He had lumped me together with the rest of Crooktop. He didn’t think that I looked at him like a summer
     mosquito, did he? I hadn’t, had I?
    I wanted to tell him that he was wrong. That I never knew how to be a part of the “y’all.” But I couldn’t decide which was
     worse, the assumption in his voice when he said “y’all” or telling him that I had never belonged anywhere, least of all Crooktop.
    “Ever fish before?” he asked me.
    I nodded. “I always bait my own hook too.”
    He smiled. “So you’re a bait fisher, huh? Well you gotta learn somethin’ new, ’cause I don’t bait fish.”
    “What do you do, then, just scoop ’em up in your hands?” I laughed.
    “Nah, I use a fly. More fair to ’em, rather than just sinkin’ a fat meal down in their home.”
    I had never been fly fishing. Father Heron occasionally fly fished. But I was not his chosen company, and I had never gone.
     I wished that I had. I wished that Trout would look at my skill with surprise and approval.
    “C’mon,” he said as he hopped out of the truck and disappeared into the woods.
    We walked far, but I don’t know how far because I couldn’t see anything but leaves and branches and briars. The air was thick
     and heavy with ripe moisture, and gnats bit at my ankles. I was still in my Sunday dress, cream with purple trim, since I
     left with him before changing. And my feet hurt as I shuffled through the undergrowth in my scuffed pumps, quickly turning
     black with dirt. Eventually, the thickness of the trees began to thin, and soon I heard the stream.
    “Down here,” he said as he walked over to a small clearing on the bank.
    He took off his shirt and laid it on the ground so that I could sit down without ruining my dress. I liked what that told
     me. That he knew I had on a pretty dress.
    I tried not to look at him, to stare at his nakedness. My eyes struggled to avoid the rise of his shoulders, the short little
     hairs around his belly button, the sweat covering his muscles. I watched the stream, the sun, the chain of ants marching onward,
     anything but that naked man in front of me. I had seen Father Heron without his shirt, an altogether different sight of sagging
     gray flesh. And I had seen other boys at the docks or at work without their shirts. But I had never been that close or that
alone
with a man. As he described to me how to hold the rod, how to stand, how to jerk my wrist forwards then backwards, I looked
     at his