Up a Tree
By: Judy Mclain
Tags: Fiction, Bravery, Trust, Parenting, Short Story

Photo by Tadeu Jnr on Unsplash

Frannie is six and she walks with two neighbor kids down a long dirt road heading towards the bayou. She tells her companions there’s a swing there, one that goes over the water. There is dust on her Keds, mosquitoes are humming and biting in the thick summer air. A long black snake crosses the road ahead of her, too fast to worry about. Before she can think of fear it’s disappeared into the weeds at the side.

In the woods she spots a tall tree, the tallest for miles. Its branches are arranged like a ladder and she climbs up to get a better view.

“Hey, Frannie, you see the bayou?”

“Not yet. I’ll go higher.”

She pulls herself up, a branch at a time, thinking of nothing except the next one before her. The trunk begins to thin. A wind picks up and the tree shifts slightly in the breeze. It groans and sways as the cooler air hits her face and lifts her hair.

“There. I see the bayou. We’re almost there. I see the swing. Hangin over the water.”

She lies. She cannot see a swing. The trek to the bayou is her idea. The only way she can talk the other two into going is the promise of a rope swing.

Maybe there will be a swing. There could be a swing.

The other kids start walking without her and Frannie calls down.

“Wait!”

She looks down to the ground. As she climbed she didn’t know how high she was. The distance to the ground fills her with panic. The kids, gone from where they can hear her speaking to them, look like walking dollies. One steals the hat the other is wearing.

When she tries her voice it is pinched and small but somehow she makes her scream sound loud enough to be heard over the cicadas. The scream fills her head and she feels her heart pounding but not in her chest. She feels her heart pounding in her ears.

“Come Back! Help Me! Cooter!”

She watches Cooter turn. He puts his hand up to his face, making a visor out of it to shade his eyes so he can see her. He starts walking but picks up speed and by the time he is under the tree he has to pause, bent at the waist with his hands on his knees.

“What’s the matter, Fran? Come on down. ”

“I caint. Go get my Daddy, Cooter. Run and get my Daddy.”

“Aw, shoot. You sure? Just come on down. I don’t want to get your Daddy mad at me.”

Frannie knows Cooter and every other neighborhood kid fears her Daddy. He has big forearms and is blind in one eye which makes him look half-way mean when he looks at you. Her Daddy has a clean, flat-top hair cut. Flat enough to rest a book on. He never drinks a beer standing outside with the other Dads. He doesn’t talk football. On Saturday morning he has Frannie and her four siblings out in the front yard doing chores. Even her baby sister, Martha, has a job to do.

Once Cooter ran up on her while she was raking leaves from the Sweet Gum. It was November and the air smelled like smoke from the metal can where they were burning their yard waste. Cooter fell backwards, with his arms and legs stretched out like a scarecrow. The raked up leaves flew to both sides.

Frannie flew into the pile after him to wrestle. They both rolled around making a bigger mess of her leaf pile when they realized her Daddy was standing next to them with his rake in his hand.

“Frannie, back to work now. Tell Cooter to come back after lunch.”

Her Daddy’s voice was raspy from where he got hit in the neck by some shrapnel during World War II. Surgery took out the piece of metal and he had it wrapped in a shoe shine cloth in the top drawer of his dresser. She had shown it to Cooter a few times. Cooter wanted to see it whenever Frannie’s Mom let them play inside. He didn’t care about the risk.

“Cooter, I’m scared. Go get em. Please Cooter.”

She watches as Cooter runs with dust from the road kicking up behind his feet. She watches as Cooter slows down and bends at the waist again. Asthma.

She watches until he is out of sight. The tree groans again and she starts to cry and holds the trunk of the tree tight. When she closes her eyes it makes her feel dizzy so she opens them again. There is a place on the small of her back where sweat is dripping down.

She hears Spencer barking from a mile off. She knows the sound of her dog’s bark. Her legs feel like someone else’s legs. Her mouth is dry.

She hears Spencer’s dog tags clinking against each other.

“Spence.”

She hears running and looks down at Cooter. He is gasping for air at the base of the tree. Spence is wagging his tail and takes advantage of Cooter’s face being at the same level as his head. He licks Cooter right in the eye.

“Frannie. I got your Daddy. He’s still coming. Hold on tight.”

She sees her father out of the corner of her field of vision. She can’t see much because she is afraid to move her neck.

“Frances.”

“Daddy. I’m stuck.”

“Frances, you’re not stuck. You got yourself into a pickle by not thinking ahead. You’re gonna be careful and take your time but now you’ve got to get yourself down.”

“I caint.”

She tries to tell him how afraid she is. Snot mixes with the tears running down her face next to her nose. She rubs her nose on the shoulder of her shirt. Her Mother won’t like it.

“Ease one foot down and find the lower branch with your toes. Keep holding on until you’ve got that foot on the branch real good.”

“I caint.”

“Frannie, I’m right here but that’s as good as I can do. I can’t come and fetch you down. You see that, right?”

“Daddy, you could come up here and get me and carry me down.”’

“Think about that for one minute. Would that be safe? If I was holding you how would I climb back down?”

“I could wrap my legs around you. I could put my arms around your neck.”

“That’s a decent idea but wouldn’t that make it harder for me to climb? Sounds pretty dangerous for both of us. We’ve got to make sure we’re doing things as safe as possible or your Momma will kill me. I’m not sure every one of those branches would hold me, let alone me and you combined. Now, do like I said. One foot at a time.”

“I caint. Daddy, I’m scared. Come and get me.”

“Frannie, you got yourself all the way up there. Probably not another kid in Evangeline Parish could get all the way up such a tall tree. Now it’s time to get yourself down. What’re we going to do if you get too tired to climb down because you stay up there too long? OK, now let’s get you started. One foot down, feel around while you’re holding on until you find the lower branch.”

He clears his throat. Sometimes his voice gets so raspy he has to cough, which he does now. He takes a white hankie out of his pocket and wipes the sweat from his blind eye. His eye went blind from another, tinier piece of shrapnel that the surgery couldn’t remove without risking a bigger problem.

“Daddy, I caint. I’m too scared.”

“There’s that word again. Did you climb up that tree by yourself?”

“Yessir.”

“If I wasn’t home, if me and Momma were out for the day, if Butch and Porter were out too, what would you do?”

“I don’t know.”

“You going to let yourself get so wore out you’ll fall?”

“Nosir.”

“You going to sleep up there, Frances? I don’t see no pillow.”

She giggles and the giggling makes her aware of her predicament again. She grabs the tree tighter.

She moves one foot down but puts it back on the same branch again.

“That’s my girl. Give it another try.”

“I caint, Please Daddy. Please.”

“Frances. Go again. You can do it.”

She trembles and blinks away a few stray tears.

Slowly she eases herself to the bottom branches of the tree. Her father has his arms crossed and he whistles like a warbler, awaiting her final descent.

She jumps from the last branch into his arms. He hugs her and sets her down onto the carpet of pine needles that are gathered at the base of the tree.

She looks around for Cooter but there’s no sign of him.

“What are ya’ll doing down here anyway?” her father asks her as they start down the road towards home.

“Goin to the bayou is all. Some boy told me about a rope swing down there. You know, Daddy, Cooter’s afraid of you.”

“Well, I don’t know why. I never bit him.”

They laugh together. She holds her father’s hand and they swing their arms as they walk. She feels a little tremor from his hand in hers. Once she asked him about it and he told her it was from the War and not to worry about it.

“Daddy, there wasn’t no boy who told me about a swing. I just wanted to see the bayou but I didn’t want to go by myself. So I told Cooter and William I heard about a rope swing.”

“That bayou is deep and it runs fast. Even as good a swimmer as you are, if you fell in you might not be able to get yourself back to the bank. And even if you could, the banks are steep. I don’t want you going down to the bayou. Understand?”

“Yessir.”

Frannie’s father takes one step ahead of her and swings her onto his back. She rides there the rest of the way home. She reaches up and puts her hand right on the flattest part of his crew cut. His hair is soft like the hair on Spence’s chest.

“I love you, Daddy.”

“Not too scary?”

“Nope.”

Spence walks ahead of them and his tail wags low because he’s hot and tired. Once they are back home she turns on the outside water spigot and lets the hose run for a minute before she fills up the dented metal dog bowl on the concrete floor of the carport. She takes a drink too.

At the edge of the driveway she sees her father standing with the men from the two houses across the street. One of the men is Cooter’s Dad. The two neighbor men hold sweating bottles of gold colored beer.

Frannie’s Dad drinks a glass of tea with ice cubes.