The Bottle Tree

It's been a rough couple of days at Grandpa's House.

As summer creeps across the land, the rains have been heavier than usual this season. It seems like the grass needs cutting every weekend, and this weekend it looked more like hay than grass. It was my own fault. Grandpa and I have been busy with the Flea Market stall lately, and the house looks pretty shabby because of it. One Sunday morning, I took it upon myself to get the house and the yard in order.

The grass in the yard was nearly as high as I was, and it seemed the best place to start.

When I came to live with Grandpa, he showed me the mower he had in the shed, and I remember rolling my eyes at the ancient old thing. It was a push mower, something Grandpa called a Flinstone, and after a few days of shoving it around, I begged him to buy something with a motor. Grandpa laughed about it, but there was a brand new push mower in the shed the next time I went to mow the grass.

As I set to work now, I kind of wished I'd asked for a riding mower.

I was pushing the hateful engine through the tall grass when I hit something and nearly fell over the front bar. Looking up, I wondered how I had missed the sparkling bottles that protruded from the scraggy grass. Grandpa's yard was full of such weird ornaments. Gnomes and bird baths and things like the tinkling sculpture I had run into.

It wasn't until I pulled the mower back and heard the cracking that I realized I had damaged it.

The grass around the sculpture may have been high, but the grass around it was short and freshly cut.

When the bottles collided with the ground, they burst in a small explosion of angry glass. I reached out a hand, meaning to right the thing, and was suddenly enveloped by the worst pain of my life. I looked down to see if I had stepped on glass, wobbling around as I slapped at my skin. It felt like glass shards were piercing me all over, and I worried for a moment that I had stirred up some ground wasps. It was as though every piece of glass from the broken bottles was making its way into my skin, and I wobbled towards the house before falling onto the freshly cut lawn.

When I came back to myself, Grandpa was standing over me.

"You okay, son?"

"Yeah," I groaned, my skin still burning as I sat up, "I guess the sun got to me or something."

I remembered the thing I had broken then and pointed at the remains of the shattered sculpture.

"Sorry, Grandpa, I think I broke your sculpture."

He looked over at the pile of glass and wood, and the color drained from his shriveled face.

"Oh no," came a whisper and it sounded as brittle as a dried leaf.

For a man his age, Grandpa gets around surprisingly well, and today he was nearly running as he went to the fallen thing. He went to the weird whatever it was and lifted it up so he could inspect the bottles. I got to my feet and came up behind him, and it was only then that I noticed the colors. Most were blue, but there seemed to be just as many green ones, brown ones, and clear ones. Grandpa sucked in a hissing breath, and I could see that the ends of many were jagged and smashed.

"This is bad, son," he said, and when he looked at me, his eyes were full of sorrow.

"What do you mean?" I asked, half laughing, "I see you break bottles almost every night of the week."

"Yeah," Grandpa hedged, lifting the thing and placing it back into the ground, "but not these bottles."

He began removing the broken bottles and putting them in a nearby wheelbarrow. I reached to help him, but he caught my wrist and pushed it politely away. I watched him go about his work, and when the wheelbarrow was full, he wheeled it beside the house and out of sight. He came back with a box that rattled a little as he walked and started replacing the bottles I had broken.

"Grandpa, what is going on?"

"Well, son, you broke a bottle tree."

"Your what?" I asked, unfamiliar with the word.

"Dear Lord, have you never heard of a bottle tree?" he asked, looking up at me as though scandalized.

"No. I don't believe I'd ever seen one until today."

This seemed to anger him even more, "Has my daughter forgotten everything? She doesn't teach you about bottle trees, crickets at Christmas, or anything!"

He put the last bottle on a little too hard, and when the neck broke and sent it spilling to the ground, he picked it up and threw it in the woods.

"I thought you said...."

"Doesn't matter. That was a clean bottle anyway."

Clean?" I asked, but Grandpa was in a hurry. He had already begun stomping off towards the house, muttering under his breath as he mounted the stairs. I started after him, catching him easily, but he put out a bony hand to stop me before I could take more than a single step up the stairs to the porch.

"Oh no, not yet. No way you're bringin spirits into the house. You wait here until I get my bag. Make yourself useful while you wait and bury those bottles you broke in the sideyard."

I asked him why but he just said there would be plenty of time for talk as we walked to the river.

With no answer forthcoming, I shrugged and set about burying the bottles in the wheelbarrow.

By the time they were all buried, Grandpa had returned with a satchel and a determined look on his face.

"Come on, best we get this started."

"Get what started?" I asked, feeling my frustration mounting. I had broken some weird piece of art that just sat out in the yard. What in the hell was going on? The way he sounded, it was like I had desecrated the altar at the baptist church.

"Your cleansing, and we need to do it before nightfall. Otherwise, things may get very bad for you."

He had turned to go, his heading taking us towards the woods, but when I threw the shovel down, he jumped a foot in the air.

"But why? Why do I need to be cleansed? What the hell did I do!"

Grandpa sighed, his eyes already judging the sun as he thought about how best to explain it.

"If you come with me, I'll tell you everything along the way. We have to hurry, though. What's waiting for you tonight would make the cricket I had in my head look like a fond memory."

I was left with very few options, and Grandpa had never steered me wrong before.

I followed him into the woods with only the slightest hesitation.

Once we were beneath the canopy of the Georgia woods, I felt safe enough to ask him what was so important about the bottle tree I had wrecked?

"You remember when I taught you about spirits and how to get them out of your house? Well, a bottle tree is a good way to do just that. Oftentimes, spirits travel from the place they were released, scared and angry, and that's how they become trapped in people's houses. The bottles confuse them, though, and give them somewhere else to go. They see the blue bottles and think they are going towards the sky or the green bottles and believe they are going towards the forest. Once inside, however, the spirit is trapped and cannot get out."

"How exactly are they dumb enough to get stuck in a bottle?"

Grandpa laughed, stepping under a branch that I was forced to shove aside.

"The spirit is confused after ejection from the body. Not all spirits become dark. Some are just good people trying to move on who get a little lost on the way. Whatever the case, the spirits get trapped in the bottles, and when the sun rises, they are burned up. Spirits cannot remain in the living world once the sun rises and must be safe within their graves or be cast aside."

We crossed the first stream we came to, but Grandpa waded through and kept going. Clearly, this was not the river he was looking for, so we plunged into the Appalachian wilderness. Grandad seemed to know where we were going, at least, and as the sun began to make its way in the other direction.

"So, if the sun dissipates them, what exactly do I have to worry about?"

"Well," Grandpa said, "the spirit's remains coat the inside of the bottle. They're gone but not quite forgotten. There is an old story about a woman whose husband made a bottle tree, and when she washed the bottles, she loosed vengeful spirits into their house. Lord knows why she wanted to wash old bottles, but for all intents and purposes, you have done something similar."

We came to another river, this one full of snow melt, but he only looked for a fallen tree so he could cross.

"What are we looking for out here, exactly?" I asked as Grandpa shoved over a small deadfall and shimmied across.

"We're going to a place that Grandma showed me. It was where she got the water that healed me of the cricket, and I feel it will be sufficient to draw the spirits out of you, too."

"And what makes you think there are spirits in me?"

"I found you in the yard, son. You can't tell me that you didn't feel something?"

I couldn't even deny it, and that was all the answer he needed.

"How do you know all this, anyway?" I asked him, my hands sticky with pine tar as I finished scurrying over the deadfall, "Don't tell me you broke a bottle tree in your youth?"

"Nope," Grandpa said, whipping his own hands on the grass, "but a cousin of mine did."

"Oh? What happened to him?"

"Well, he didn't die, but he probably wished he had."

I sighed, "I guess we'll need something to do till we get there. Let's have another story."

Grandpa chuckled, "You may regret that after you hear it."

As the sun sank lower and lower, my legs growing sorer and sorer, Grandpa began his tale.

"His name was Clint, and he was my mother's sister's son."

"Sorry," I said, "but how many cousins do you have exactly?"

"Well, your Great Grandmother had eight siblings, and your Great Grandfather had seven, so," he pretended to count on his fingers before saying, "way too damn many. May I continue?"

I told him to proceed, and he began.

Cousin Clint was visiting for a few weeks, and we were exploring the woods around where I lived. Clint was from the woods too, but his mother lived in Arkansas, and his woods were a little different than mine. He wasn't a fool, he knew his way around the woodlands, but his upbringing had lacked the spiritual nature that my grandmother had exposed me to.

So, when we came across the old Ruckman Cemetery, Clint merely saw a boneyard to explore.

We were tossing a ball between us, little more than the guts of a baseball, when the dirty stone perimeter of the family cemetery rose from the woods like old teeth. The Ruckmans were an old family that had once lived in that part of the holler. They were gone by the time I was born, their farmland reclaimed by the forest, but their headstones remained, as did the stone fence that marked their burial ground.

Aside from those crumbling stones, several bottle trees were also in attendance. Some of them were little more than crumbling relics from the farm days, but many still stood displaying their bottles proudly. Clint knew what they were; his mother had bottle trees in her garden, he said. It was clear, though, that he didn't believe in them. They were just something superstitious to him, and as we tossed the ball back and forth, he walked closer and closer to the low stone gates.

I told him not to get too close. I told him that all kinds of nasty things might attach themselves to him if he got too close, but he just laughed and said that was stupid. "Dead things stay dead. That's what they do." Before I could disagree, he told me to throw a long one and ran. I launched the ball in a high arc, but I saw what was about to happen before Clint did.

He was running backward, and he never saw the bottle tree he slammed into.

It shattered underneath him when he fell on it, and I ran to help him before he cut himself. When Clint screamed, I assumed he had gotten into the glass. When he started to shake, I knew it was something else. I pulled him off the bottle tree as best I could and was surprised to find that he didn't have a scratch on him. The way he had been flopping around, I thought he was probably hurt bad. When I saw no blood, though, I wondered what exactly had made him scream like that?

He came around soon enough, and when I asked him what had happened, he said he must have hit his head.

"God, it hurt so much, though. I don't know what it was, but it hurt like fire."

I checked him over, but we were losing the sun by then. It was late afternoon, and we needed to get home before super got cold. So we set out, Clint stumbling a little as we headed for home and me keeping an eye on him. He seemed a little woozy, but I didn’t think much of it as we made our way over the familiar hills and through the hollers.

It began as an itch. Clint began to scratch his arms, slapping at himself as though bugs were on him. I asked him if he were okay? He said it felt like something was biting him, and he wondered if maybe we hadn't blundered into poison ivy? The further we went, the more his itching became pain. Clint staggered as the sun rode lower, saying he must have gotten some glass in him when he fell. He said it felt like his insides were on fire, and I had to throw an arm over him to see if I could help him get home so someone could help him. He began to scream again the closer we got to home, and as we burst into the yard, I could already feel my shirt getting wet with something.

I looked down to find him oozing blood from dozens of wounds.

I let him drop to the ground, and as he fell, he began to scream and writhe again. It was as if he had fallen on a porcupine, and when I ran for my mother, I wasn't sure I would see him alive again. Momma came on the run, daddy too, and my aunt was right behind them as they all came to see what was wrong with Clint. His skin oozed blood, like small red rivulets, and we could do little but watch him bleed with no idea how to stop it.

Until that is, Momma told me to go get Grandma, and I went on the run.

The longer I listened to the story, the more scared I became. When he first spoke of the itch, the sun was still high in the west, but as it sank lower and lower, I started feeling like ants were crawling on me. I slapped and checked myself for bugs, but Grandpa just went right on with his story, if he noticed at all. I couldn't understand what was going on, but the longer we walked, the more I felt the itch becoming a burning under my skin.

At first, it was like a sunburn. It itched, burned, and irritated, but the feeling wasn't too bad. It made the feeling of my jeans rubbing against my legs truly irritating, and my shirt felt like it was made of twine instead of cotton. Was this how Clint had felt as he left the graveyard for home? When would I start to bleed from every pore? How long before I could no longer control my legs and Grandpa would have to carry me?

"Are you okay, son?" Grandpa asked, and I nodded as I told him to go on.

Grizzly as the story was, it was all that was keeping me distracted from the itch and the building burn.

Grandma met me at the door. I never thought of it as a kid, but Grandma always seemed to have some sort of sixth sense about these things. I thought then that it was just how old people were, but now I understand that it was her way. She knew when she was needed, and she was ready to help when the need arose.

She had a shoulder bag, this one, actually, and she told me to show her the way.

I led her back to the house and was glad to hear that Clint's screams hadn't abated.

Grandma looked at him and asked me what had happened today out in the woods?

"Nothing," I told her, "we were playing with a ball, exploring the woods, and then we," but that's when I remembered the bottle tree, "Clint fell on a bottle tree over by the Ruckman Cemetery."

Grandma was in her bag in an instant.

"Hold him down; he's not going to like this."

They held him down then, none of them asking questions, as she called me over and showed me a bottle of river water. I say a bottle, but it was more like a pitcher. It held a large wax seal at the top, and when she uncorked it, the water shimmered like a trout's scales.

"From a stream, I know of. I'll show you sometime," she promised before turning and dumping the water over Clint.

He stilled in his squirming for a moment, at least until the glass started breaking the skin.

He stopped then, and I realized we had arrived.

"It, uh, may be best if you not listen to this next part before we're done."

I had itched and burned for the last hour of the hike, but the sight of the river took my breath away. It was like looking at a fish as it wriggled on the ground, its gorgeous scales shimmering in the dying light. It called to me as I watched it flow, begging me to drown myself within it.

"Climb in," Grandpa said, his eyes straying to the burning line in the sky, "climb in while there is still light."

I started to take my shirt off, but Grandpa sighed, "No time for that."

For someone so old, his hands were oddly strong as he shoved me into the river.

Just like Clint, the water seemed to stop my burning and itching, but I could feel something else just below the skin.

Then, the pain that flashed across my body made the pain earlier that day seem like a daydream. It felt like knives were being born from my flesh. It felt like someone was pulling teeth out of my skin. I cannot properly explain what it felt like, but I watched as the shard of colored glass slid out of my skin. They came out like sewing needles, some of the slivers looked as long as my pinky finger, and as they came out, they dissolved into sparkling motes of colors. My breath felt trapped within me, my hands shaking as they fought against the currents that tried to drag me down. I felt stabbed a thousand times and was not aware when it finally ended.

I had passed out well before then.

I woke up by a fire, my clothes dryer, and my body no longer aching.

"I didn't think you were ever going to let go of the bank," Grandpa said, making me jump a little, "I'd wager you still have some soil under your nails."

I lay there, still trying to come to terms with what I had seen.

It appeared that Appalachia was full of more mysteries than I could imagine.

"You did well. I wasn't sure you would, but I don't think the spirits in my bottle tree were as bad as Clint's. The Graveyard had existed for a hundred years or more, and there was no telling what sort of hateful spirits he had gotten a hold of."

"Did he live?" I asked, a little afraid of how weak it sounded.

"He did, and thankfully he didn't remember any of it. I suspect that he blocked it all out, but he wouldn't go near a cemetery for the rest of his life. He was cremated when he died. He refused to let them put him in the family plot."

He looked up as a lock popped, watching the embers drift up as he smiled contentedly to himself.

"This reminds me of the night I met a sasquatch out here. I was out here drinking and....."

But I never even heard how it began.

I was snoring before he even got past the setup, hoping this was the longest day I would ever have in the Georgia Hills.