The Sycamore Tree
Jennie Miller Helderman
Prologue
Alabama. September, 2005.
My assignment: A magazine story about poverty in Alabama. Fifteen hundred words. Real people, real names. Due in two weeks.
High stepping, but I knew where to look. I had worked at walk-in helping agencies, taught school in rural Alabama, and clerked at debtors’ court. I cast a big net. Soon, the director of a women’s shelter suggested I meet someone on her staff.
That's how I came to know Ginger McNeil.
We met at a sandwich shop. A woman dressed in lime green and brown linen dashed through the door. I spotted her briefcase and guessed she was Ginger, hurrying from court in an adjacent county. Ginger didn't know me nor the shop I had suggested for lunch.
The woman stopped short. A tentative expression crossed her face as she scanned the room, a shyness, a vulnerability, which evaporated into a broad smile when she acknowledged me waving from a back corner. Her page boy bounced against her collar as she made her way toward me, hand out, half-way through an introduction even before she reached my table.
Conversation came easy between us. Ginger's eyes were as dark brown as her pants and they danced when she told a funny story on herself. She was animated and vibrant and her whole face registered whatever she was feeling. Even when she talked about her work as a court advocate for abused women, I could read in her face the satisfaction she found in her work.
But abuse isn't about poverty, I thought as I ate my chicken salad. I didn't know.
We talked through lunch and refills of iced tea, pleasant chatter, but the clock was ticking toward my deadline. I needed to find a source for my story. Just as I thought we were finished, Ginger leaned back in her chair and said, "I'm a former client of the shelter. I didn't have two dimes the day they took me in."
I settled back into my chair.
She began to confide in me a story she doesn't tell easily, about living in a cabin hidden in the woods, too poor to afford electricity, heat, or a telephone, too afraid of her husband to leave. She slaughtered, butchered and canned, shingled roofs and bush hogged land, whatever was necessary for survival for her and her two sons.
This woman with a briefcase. What I was hearing clashed hard against the image before me.
She drew a map to the cabin, twenty miles north up the Natchez Trace, left on one dirt road, right on the next. I promised to meet her there the following Saturday.
The first road I found quickly, then I topped a rise and looked for the second. Nothing but scrub oaks, piney woods and red dirt lay ahead. Three times I drove back and forth before I spotted tire ruts between two scrawny oaks. Then the open gate appeared against the undergrowth.
The road wasn't hidden. But nothing marked or announced it. Had I not known there was a road and a house and once a family living back in the trees…that thought played in my mind even after I returned home late that afternoon.
The road dipped, rose and circled through the trees to a small clearing in the midst of sheds and an outbuilding. Ginger had heard my car and she bounded toward me. No briefcase today. Instead she wore jeans and heavy boots. Behind her stood the cabin, a cracker box with a tin roof and board and batten walls. Leggy red geraniums strained out of a clay pot by its front door.
Ginger ushered me inside, past the black wall-to-wall wood stove which dominated the first room, and through the two bedrooms hardly larger than their beds. Three rooms, cozy and neat. We popped cans of Diet Coke and stepped out into a dry day with no breeze on this last weekend of September.
"I've made changes," Ginger said. "What you see as a clearing used to be so thick with vines and thorn bushes, someone could be within thirty yards of the cabin and never see it. That's how it was planned."
She described how they had lived while we strolled along the road and picked through tall grass. She had slaughtered hogs and hoisted them to cure with the winch that was still attached to a tree. At the fire pit nearby, she boiled their fat with lye to make soap. She and her husband dug the well with post hole diggers. They fished for catfish at the pond.
I had visualized the cabin tucked behind tall trees in a deep forest, solitary and haunting, not cluttered with sheds and tools. I hadn't taken into account the realities of living off nothing, the making-do with whatever could be caught, grown, or bartered. The tools and sheds were evidence Ginger had seized whatever the land offered or could be gleaned elsewhere for her family's survival.
We stopped beside what looked to me like a concrete block chimney. Ginger's face flashed with pride. "My boys built this smokehouse as pre-teens. It was their final exam in solid geometry, math, and physics."
The boys passed their test.
I failed mine. I tried to operate the chicken plucker but without a chicken, I didn't catch on. I got a red face while Ginger got a good laugh.
I was ready for shade. We opened more Cokes and settled into lawn chairs under hickory trees. "You lived like pioneers or survivalists," I said. "Did you choose this way of life? How did you get here?"
"How long do you have?" Ginger asked and she laughed. Then her face grew serious. "Was there a choice? Yes. I made my choice when I married my husband. He chose this way of life for us and I bowed to his decision. I never expected it to lead to such poverty."
She pushed her hair from her face and took a swallow of her Coke. "Strange as it may seem, poverty can be a choice, especially when it allows one person to control another."
We talked for more than an hour. When I stood up to leave, Ginger pointed to a path. "The root cellar is up there. You're welcome to see it. I don't go there."
"Not me. I'm claustrophobic."
I didn't question why Ginger shied away from the root cellar until I was in the car on my way home. I had an hour's drive, a full hour to marvel at her skills and the strength and energy they required. And to ponder why they had lived as they did in a place so hard to find.
I wrote fifteen hundred words, but the story begged for more. Much more.
When I approached Ginger about a book, she mulled it over for several weeks, talking with her family over the Thanksgiving holiday, exploring her feelings and theirs.
Ginger and I met again at the sandwich shop. She was somber and thoughtful. "When I sought safety at the shelter," she explained, "my bed was waiting, the sheets already turned down. I had my own kitchen with a refrigerator and gas stove, and food, shelves and shelves of food, canned goods and food in boxes. Everything I needed. Somebody had prepared all that just for me."
She paused, her eyes focused over my left shoulder, locked on something I would never see. A slight smile crossed her face. Then she said, "They didn’t know my name or when I would come, but they did this for me. They anticipated what I would need. I’m still overcome with gratitude for this person ... these people. I’ve wondered how to repay them."
She placed both palms on the table, and her eyes suddenly shone with tears. "Telling this story is what I can do. It’s worth whatever the cost is to me."
Whatever the cost. Those words had little meaning for me. I had no measure then of how great the risks would be for Ginger.
With that, we began regular conversations wherever we found a quiet private place, her house, a secluded corner at the public library, an artist friend’s studio. Sometimes we pored over photos, journals, letters written and received, some dating back to childhood, some from her children to her, including the son she lost.
Ginger was unflinchingly honest, even when probing scarlet pain and remorse. "All that I was taught and believed and have done, it’s all part of me. It’s what made me a sitting duck for a man like Mike. And it’s where I drew my strength in the end."
Long before the magazine article turned into a book, I knew I had to speak with Mike, Ginger's former husband. I had to allow him to tell his side of the story, or at least give him the chance to refute what Ginger had told me. So I phoned him, hoping he would meet with me.
I was apprehensive. I had no idea what to expect of him, especially when I’d have to confront him with questions about the physical abuse. Was I courting danger? I didn't know.
We met at a Waffle House in the late afternoon. His choice, his territory. He’s a regular there. But it’s a public place, which I hoped meant a safe place for me. As added insurance, my husband discreetly stationed himself close by, my rescuer if need be.
There was no need.
Mike fidgeted. He smoked nine Winston Reds to three cups of black coffee. But he spoke candidly, on tape, about his marriage to Ginger.
He acknowledged the physical abuse, matter-of-factly and without apology.
Two months later, with the article growing into a book, Mike emailed me that he wanted to participate in its writing. I didn’t know why and didn’t ask, afraid he’d reconsider and bolt.
We continued to meet at the Waffle House until its clatter chased us to quieter spots. By then I was less uneasy around him. Mike never denied any of the bad times. Men would understand, he said; men know what the program is. He wanted me to know there had been good times also, and that he had no remorse. He wouldn’t change a thing if he could go back. He’s happy with the outcome and, to his thinking, he and Ginger couldn’t be where they are now without having experienced it all.
Mike has a story also. It trickled out as if from a medicine dropper. He had announced early on he would have "his say," and one day he did just that. Whether it was my probing or the lightning-charged air of an isolated store where we waited out a pounding thunderstorm, Mike took me inside his skin. Or let me think he did.
Either way, I came to appreciate what it revealed of him. Even the parts that, to this day, I can’t fully comprehend.
This story has many voices. Ginger and Mike speak, as do their family, friends, coworkers, and court officials. They tell what they remember, or what they chose to divulge, of things that happened a long time back, and then comment on it in present time. I met with them from the corner where Alabama meets Tennessee to south Texas from 2005 to 2007. A few others I chased down by telephone.
2005. That's when I came in. Not that I intended to do more than listen, record, and tell. But my questions took people back to old places, sometimes dark places, and this time I was along when they relived the memory. Sometimes they uncovered something new.
Without realizing it, I began a journey with Ginger and Mike. None of us recognized in the beginning how much journey lay ahead. To tell about it, I have to step between the pages. Thus my voice will join the others who tell what they know.
This is Ginger’s story and Mike’s, yet it doesn’t begin with them and, despite Ginger’s prayers, it may not end with them.
Chapter 1: Escape
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A noise. Ginger awoke, listened. The hum of a motor, the scrunch of tires creeping along the road outside the cabin. She reached over to Mike’s side of the bed. Empty. Where he was heading this time in the thin light of dawn, she didn’t know. Mike McNeil, her husband, didn’t offer explanations for his comings and goings and she knew better than to ask. She rolled back onto her pillow, wide awake now. She could see the black handle of Mike's .38 at the edge of the closet shelf. Mike seldom strapped the gun to his belt anymore. He had made his point. She wouldn’t take it again and he knew it. She hardly gave it a thought any more. The light was still too dim to see the photos fastened with thumb tacks to the rough-sawn boards next to the closet. It didn't matter. She pictured them in her mind. She and Mike had squeezed into the metal kiosk at a truck stop that day and posed fast, before their quarter ran out. Mike had just trimmed his beard. A good memory. Birds chirped outside. Time to rise. She rolled out of bed. In the boys' room, she stood over her sons and smiled. Casey's feet hung off the foot of his bed. He had hit a growing spell the day he turned thirteen. She kissed his forehead, then his brother's. "Wake up, both of you. Casey, I'm going to put a brick on your head or you'll outgrow everything you own." She laughed, before giving Cody, the twelve-year-old, a playful nudge. In the next room, she built a fire in the woodstove to chase off the morning chill. Atop the stove, water for coffee heated in a blue enamel pot while the last of the oatmeal cooked in a dented stewer. The boys would have the oatmeal. She wasn't hungry. She laced up her boots and trudged up the hill to milk the cow while they ate breakfast. An ordinary morning at the cabin in the woods where she lived with Mike and their two sons. Nothing different or ominous, nothing to suggest that before noon on Friday, September 29, 2000, Ginger would make her escape. She forced a needle through pigskin for a rifle pad while each boy pulled on his one pair of jeans. Better pick beans today before the sun gets up in the sky, she said to herself. Summer didn't like to let go here at the bottom of Tennessee, and this day would be hot by noon. She twisted her hair through her fingers, wishing she could pull it up off her neck. Or cut it. Casey crossed the kitchen in two steps, gathered his homework under one arm, and dashed out the door. Knees, elbows and perpetual motion, Ginger thought, as Casey disappeared up the hill. Cody lumbered in from the bedroom and fumbled with his papers, a scowl on his face. Still my little boy, Ginger said to herself, looking at Cody's full round face and freckles. Cody and Casey had entered school for the first time this year, a small church school just across the state line in Alabama. She had hoped they would like a regular school but right now it was a split decision. It was early, just three weeks into the school year. Plenty of time yet to adjust. She gave Cody a quick squeeze before hurrying both boys toward her old Honda. They had ten miles to drive to school. *** Mike spotted the blue of Ginger’s car in the distance as he returned home. He checked his watch and calculated when she would be back. At the cabin, he opened his Bible to Revelations and read until time to go. He tromped down their dirt road to the blacktop where he ducked into the trees to watch for her car. Leaning against a pine, he lit a Winston Gold, and when it burned to the filter, lit another. The last time she left, he had watched her. He could see to the bottom of the hill where, that time, she had stopped for a few minutes, backed up the road and stopped again. She was trying to pick up a signal on that car phone, way out here. He was on to her. *** Ginger never looked Mike's way as she slowed to turn between two scrub oaks onto their road. The galvanized metal gate stood open. Mike didn't always padlock it now like he once did. He'd made that point, also. This time her tires crunched against the chert road as she headed the quarter mile toward the honeysuckle vines and briars which hid the cabin. Mike didn't want anybody in his business, he often said. If somehow somebody slipped past the padlock and wandered up the road, they could pass within thirty yards of the cabin and never imagine it was there, just as he planned. They built the cabin back in 1996, when they had to vacate the rental house in a hurry. She and Mike sawed and hammered while the boys, young as they were at eight and nine, toted and hauled. Five hundred square feet divided into two rooms, board and batten sides and a tin roof. No electricity, no phone, by design. Mike’s car sat in tall grass just off the road. She parked beside him and called his name. No answer. Backtracking down the road, Ginger stood before Trent's tree, a young sycamore she had named in memory of her oldest son. She had first planted an apple tree for Trent, but ants made a bed at its base. When she poisoned the ants, she killed the tree. The sycamore was second choice, a sapling that came up in the compost pile. A smile spread across her face. The sycamore was thriving. She had kept a close watch on it. Hurrying to the garden, she picked the beans. Later, listening to the beans simmer, she eased a thimble onto her sore thumb to resume stitching the rifle pad. Wayne, a neighbor from two miles up the blacktop, had hollered from the gate with an armload of corn a few weeks back. Mike didn’t encourage visitors, and Wayne respected his distance, which allowed them to be friends, if at arm’s length. Wayne was half Mike's age, clean shaven and buzz cut, and to him neighbors were next to kin. Mike had been oiling his rifle and their talk turned to guns. "You ever seen a pigskin rifle pad?" Wayne had asked, something to cradle his gun while sighting it. "That's what I want. Guess I’ll have to get it special made." "Tell me what you want and I’ll make it," Ginger offered, watching Mike’s face as she spoke. As much food as Wayne’s garden put on their table, she felt she owed it to him. For two weeks she had struggled with the rifle pad, from drying white sand in the woodstove to fill the cushions to forcing a needle in and out through three layers of leather. Her thumb and forefinger smarted at the touch, but as soon as she whipped the last seams together, the pad would be finished. She hummed a Yanni tune as she worked. Twigs snapped under stomping feet outside. Mike called out, "How about bringing me a cup of coffee?" Ginger spread the rifle pad across the kitchen table and took Mike his coffee, glad she’d picked the beans before the sun steamed into the day. Mike lolled in the swing under the hickory tree within earshot of the cabin door. His beard, blonde like his hair, reached to his belt. He tucked his Bible under a thigh so the loose pages wouldn’t fall out and reached for the cup. Ginger joined him in the swing, sweeping the skirt of her denim jumper to one side. She ran her arm under her hair, lifting it off her neck. "My hair’s making me hot. If I don’t get it cut, I’ll soon be sitting on it." She exaggerated, a joke to test Mike’s mood. Her hair fell below her shoulder blades, not below her waist. Mike leaned forward to scratch Samson, his blue heeler, cupping the dog’s snout in his hand. With his voice low but firm, he said, "You’re not cutting your hair." "If I cut it, Mike, it’ll still be long." They’d had this conversation before. "I said---you’re---not---cutting---your---hair." This time he spoke into her face, emphasizing each word with a downward thrust of his fist, index finger pointed. He still kept his voice low, because he didn’t need to yell. He had already made that point, just as he had made his point with wearing the pistol and locking people out of the gate. And inside the gate. He jutted his head forward and stared into Ginger's eyes. "You don't have the authority to determine what you want." What? She furrowed her brow. The authority? What are you saying to me? She clenched her jaw, holding tight inside what she dare not say aloud: Move over, God, Mike's in charge. He knows what's best, and I no longer exist apart from him. Mike's words tossed in her head, picking up energy with each tumble until they exploded like marbles fired from a pinball machine, her anger and indignation rising with each ricochet. She could sit still no longer. Stalking into the cabin, she let the screen door bang shut behind her. Mike planted his boots hard against the ground. The swing stopped. He froze in place. His temples throbbed, but nothing else moved. When he stood up, he marched straight toward the cabin, controlled, careful not to spill a drop of the steaming coffee. Ginger leaned against the kitchen table, her fingertips brushing against the rifle pad. Seeing his face, she dropped her arms to her sides. He eased the cup onto the table. Snatched up the pad. Pushed the screen door open with one hand, and slung the pad onto the ground outside. "I’m sick and tired of this crap." The pad hit with a splat. Its seams burst open and white sand spilled onto gray dirt. Samson skittered out of the way. Silent tears rolled down Ginger’s cheeks. Mike knew how many hours she had put into the pad, knew how hard she had worked. Wayne was his friend, and they owed him. Besides, Wayne had paid for the materials; they were his. She had to account for them. For a while, she busied herself about the cabin. When she thought Mike had turned his attention elsewhere, she carefully circled past him and slipped out to retrieve the pieces of the rifle pad. She sensed heavy steps behind her before she heard them, sensed the weight of his presence as his hands grabbed her arms and shoved her aside. "I said no more of this crap." He kicked the rifle pad. It slid like a deflated football six feet away, leaving a thin trail of the white sand. Facing Ginger, feet planted apart, he swiped his fist across his chin. "Now you get in the house." What's he going to do? Ginger asked herself. She dropped her head, her eyes avoiding Mike's glare. "I don't want to go into the house." Mike charged at Ginger. He grasped her by her arms, lifting her off her feet, and dragged her to the porch. He let go and she stumbled. Before she could catch her balance, he shoved her hard through the open door. She shuffle-stepped, her arms flailing like a rag doll, grasping for a handhold in the air. Her knees smacked against a wooden arm of the couch, and she fell onto its cushions. The screen door slammed shut. She lay still. She needed to catch her breath, yet not look his way. She had to steady herself, to think. To make up her mind. Mike positioned himself in the bedroom doorway next to the couch, one elbow propped against the doorframe and his hand against his head. Ginger pulled up. Five steps took her across the tiny room to the sink, her refuge. First she washed her hands, then the breakfast dishes, then her hands again, soaping to her elbows and rinsing, all the time wringing her fingers together, furrowing her brow. It was what she did when she needed to go to a private place, and she needed that now, to wash away her indecision. She needed to wash away Mike and everything else that bound her to this place. Behind her, she heard him pick up his coffee cup from the table. Heard him step toward her. She spun to face him. And gasped. With his arm crooked over her head, Mike dumped the coffee over her. She squeezed her eyes shut. The brown liquid rolled down her forehead and spilled over her cheeks. She felt it puddle in one ear and run down the back of her neck. It didn’t burn, it was lukewarm, but it scorched raw places in her heart. She shook her head, slinging droplets. Turning to the sink, she dipped her head under the faucet to rinse away the coffee. When she reached for a dishtowel, Mike grabbed her by the arms and pulled her face to his. He cocked his head to one side, his nose almost pressing her nose. She squeezed her eyes shut. If he looks into my eyes, she thought, he’ll see that it’s over, and I'm afraid to let him see that now. "Get the crap out of here," he yelled down her throat. "I don’t want you around me anymore." Warm spit sprayed onto her face. She picked up her purse—it held no money, nothing but her keys and driver’s license—and hurried to her car, the ten-year-old Honda that was wrecked when they bought it. She hoped the junker would start. It did. At first she inched forward; she had to be sure. She stopped at the sycamore tree. Trent’s tree. If I leave, she thought, I’ll abandon Trent again. She whispered a long goodbye, her heart aching. A rock hit the car. Mike was pelting the car with rocks. She heard him yell, "Go! Get out of here. Git!" She accelerated toward the open gate, its padlock hanging from a post, and raced to the highway, leaving behind her the hopes, dreams, prayers, hours, days, backaches, smashed fingers, fear, poverty, despair, all that had bound her in seventeen years of marriage. Cold water trickled between her shoulder blades, and she told herself that was why she was shivering so hard. She had left before, and those memories washed over her now. One day she drove two miles up the blacktop to a country cemetery. Hiding among the abandoned tombstones, she knitted a sock. Each clack of the needles measured the minutes until the toe shaped to its fit and she would go back. She had no money and nowhere else to go. This time, maybe it would be different. Months earlier, she had seen a billboard advertising a women’s shelter across the state line in Alabama. She had chiseled its phone number into her memory. Her mind screamed It has to be different this time! as she screeched up to the curb by the school playground. Her boys squatted outside, huddled together, not quite in the midst of the other children. Ginger called to them from the car, "Hurry, hurry!" She saw them sneak a glance at the other children, the school classmates they hardly knew, before they rushed to her. She gave them their choice. They could go with her or stay with their father. "I'm going with you," Casey said. "I don't know what happened this time but I know if we don't go with you, you'll come back. Just like you did when Trent died. You came back then to me and Cody." "Me, too. I'll go," said Cody. He flicked a wave to his classmates. While Ginger drove, she thought of the first time Mike threw coffee at her. She left then, too, her face bruised by a blow. That escape had started just like this one, with coffee poured on her by a man who swore to love and honor her, but never had. Or perhaps he did, but in a twisted way she would never be able to understand. This time couldn’t end the same way. It just couldn’t! She yanked her mind away from the memory and kept the Honda speeding toward the shelter thirty miles away, watching the rearview mirror for Mike’s brown Chevy Caprice. As she drove, her sons bombarded her with questions. |
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"Are we going to tell Dad where we are?" Casey wanted to know. "Are we going back to school?" Cody asked. "Will I ever see my class again?" She had no answers for them. She had no answers for herself. |
