The Bone Tree
BY LUCIANA DE LUCA TRANS. BY KIT MAUDE
No mirages here: it’s just flat, not a shadow to be seen. No shadows at all? A few, cast by the odd cloud, one in the sky and one on the ground. You were seventeen. You didn’t know whether you wanted to be there, you and your comrades. But you didn’t have a choice.
You were sent out to patrol the plains, ordered to stand guard at the worst possible times. At midday, when even the bugs run for cover. Two, three in the afternoon. First, they riled you up nicely, like lions drooling over the scent of raw meat. Sheer cruelty, broiling your mouths and spirit. The corporals sat you in a row and made you clean their rifles, telling scary stories that spread around the barracks, stories they unsheathed like knives concealed in their uniforms. Stories of the swamp fiends that follow you, showing the patience that comes with a diet of rotting meat, for your whole patrol route, staying hidden until you fall asleep; easy prey. “If the thirst or the sun don’t get you, the dogs will,” they warned, their smiles full of gaps where their teeth should be. Stories of the ghost bandits that pounced on guards and left the conscripts mute, their hair white, hollowed out forever more. Skeletal. They were sent back home ruined, good for nothing, not even as spies. They spat the stories out at you, hollering and teasing. The same every week. To make you shit yourselves. To mess you up, the way their superiors had messed them up.
They always chose you and the other two. Always the same group, the three of you from remote villages, already half-dead from thirst. They ordered you to stand guard all day and night. They gave you ridiculous jobs: to make sure no one stole the swamp water. To put your ears to the ground every five minutes, listening for riders on the plain.
The three of you worked out a structure. Organization was life, it was asserting free will. It was keeping busy to stall the fear. At night you lay down on the packs you kept your food in and shared out crackers so old and dry they cut the top of your mouth. You shared lukewarm mate heated in a tin in the sun, until the leaves softened.
At night the plain became a pit, a chasm full of growls and howls. The teasels poked you in the ass and back. The stars pricked your eyes. Everything chafed in one way or another.
Relief never came. It was white-hot. The night was the gaping maw of a jaguar. You couldn’t hear a thing. Time didn’t pass because nothing changed. You did, but not much. You changed without a sound. Your skin began to crack. You didn’t say much. You stayed there, where you were left, rationing your water and food, meekly praying to yourselves, which doesn’t show so much.
One night, it was your turn to stand guard.
The others snored, spoke in their sleep, slapped with poor aim at the bugs swirling around, trying to sneak into their nostrils.
At night you put out the lamps so you wouldn’t be spotted while you were asleep. Who would see you? The enemy? Maybe. The dogs? They didn’t say.
There was a full moon. A wolf moon. You know they don’t exist, but you also know that no one knows anything. That if you pray quietly to God for your military service to be over quickly, one of your comrades might just rise up with a roar, his back sprouting hair, and rip out the throat of the man sleeping next to him.
The moon casts some light. It doesn’t happen often. You can see the wings of the insects in the air. The bodies of your two comrades on the ground, floating in the desert. And the Ombú ahead of you. The oldest Ombú in the area, people say. Here before the raids, before the militia. Before Columbus and the ships? Maybe. Before the dinosaurs? I don’t think so. A little closer. Stop asking stupid questions.
It doesn’t look like a tree. It looks like a fort. Something made by man, not nature. And certainly not by God. By the Devil? Perhaps, yes. Something made to scare you, because what other point could there be in growing out here in the middle of nowhere, on this scorched earth? So far from the other trees.
You listen to the plains, the scratching of the earth as it swirls up and settles down again. The muffled squeals of the black birds asleep in the branches.
You’d like to sleep, but you can’t. Insomnia has set up camp in your head, keeping you awake and irritable. You hear everything, see everything, smell everything. A punishment, a penance.
Then you hear the noise.
A noise like hooves. But it’s not hooves. It’s not made by legs. Clack, clack, clack. Something falling and knocking against something else, rising back up and knocking against it again. And something else above it. Clack. Ear to the ground, louder now. Clack. Like rain on tin. A vicious hail storm, the kind that kills crops and livestock. Clack.
The moonlight is gray by the time it hits the earth, dyeing everything the same color. You stand up, trembling. You speak to God again, pleading for firm legs. For help to keep from pissing yourself in fear. It might happen to anyone. But just the same, help me to hold it.
If it’s an animal, it’s coming for you. Fast. You press your legs together. Your hands reach for your crotch instead of your rifle. Jesus, stay with me, don’t leave me alone, covered in piss. Where is that sound coming from? From ahead.
Where before there was nothing but night, now lights appear. From among the branches of the Ombú. What are you thinking? You’re thinking about how scared you are. Nothing else.
Clack. Again. Clack, clack. It goes on like that for a while. Without a watch, you can’t tell for how long. A long time, too long. And suddenly, it stops, the same way it started. It goes out.
So what do you do? Nothing. You stand in the middle of the night, waiting for something to happen, but it doesn’t. No animals, no Indian raiding party, no rain. There’s no Devil, and God hasn’t answered your call because you give in and piss yourself. You don’t have a change of clothes, you’ll have to stay like that, on your feet, covered in piss. Left alone in the middle of nowhere with the two others fast asleep, because it’s better to drop to the ground and black out to keep yourself from hearing, seeing, thinking.
The moon is still up there. Every now and again you hear a howl, something growling in the distance. Then a branch snaps to give you something else to listen to.
You sit back down, damp, and fall asleep. You don’t know how.
You’re woken up by a kick to the ribs. “Get up,” says your fellow soldier. “There’s something out there.”
“Someone,” says the other. They can’t stand the dark: they light their lamps and hold them out, swaying, throwing light on your three undead faces.
“The enemy maybe?” you ask.
You’re going to find out.
“Fuck the enemy,” they say. “This isn’t human.”
You hear the clack, clack, again. Louder than before.
“It’s coming from the Ombú,” says one.
“So what should we do?”
“Let’s go have a look.”
“Are you sure?”
“What else are we doing here? There are three of us. We have rifles and lamps.”
You walk in single file. It’s not very far.
The Ombú gets bigger and bigger. Taller. Darker. The branches mass. You can’t see where it begins or ends.
You walk toward the source of the noise. With your lamps raised high, your ourfathers on your tongues, your rifles cocked.
Louder.
The watery aura of the lamplight gets there first. You follow behind, shrinking back, terrified. You’re in the middle. The cry comes from the man in front.
What did he say?
Hard to tell.
Clack.
He cries out again.
“What did you say?” you ask.
You see him pointing.
The man behind you is too scared to breathe.
At the foot of the Ombú, which is black as death, is a pile of something, glowing yellow. It looks like pieces of wood. Dried branches. Clack. Fallen on top of one another, clack. Like someone has thrown them away, clack. Like someone has been tidying up, or doing an inventory.
But the lights. Those lights. Brighter than the moon. Brighter than the lamps.
It can’t be. Clack. You walk past the man in front and get closer.
“What are you doing?” howls the other man.
“Stop!” barks the one behind with the last air left in his body.
Clack. It’s big, hard. Clack. The tree is so big. The ground is barren, abandoned. Clack.
These aren’t branches. It’s not wood. These are bones. You’re holding a phosphorescent femur, long and bare. You don’t cry out and you don’t let go.
You keep the bone in your hand, crouched in the middle of the plain. The awful tree, clack.
The femur glows while other bones fall down around you, on top of you, piling up in a heap, glowing skulls, jawbones, tibias, and clavicles.
Stripped clean.
Bones.
And more bones.
You can’t hear your comrades any more. You can barely make out the light from the lamps behind you. You feel something cold in your other hand, the one hanging limp by your terrified body. Something wet brushes your palm and the back of your hand. Something sharp. Soft. Alive.
