Treeborne: A Novel - Hardcover

Johnson, Caleb

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1250169089 ISBN 13: 9781250169082

Verlag: Picador, 2018

Inhaltsangabe

"I can’t remember the last time I read a book I wish so much I’d written. Treeborne is beautiful, and mythic in ways I would never have been able to imagine...I can’t say enough about this book."―Daniel Wallace, national bestselling author of Extraordinary Adventures and Big Fish: A Novel of Mythic Proportions

An Honorable Mention for the Southern Book Prize

One of Southern Living's "Best New Books Coming Out Summer 2018" and one of Library Journal's "Books to Get Now"

Janie Treeborne lives on an orchard at the edge of Elberta, Alabama, and in time, she has become its keeper. A place where conquistadors once walked, and where the peaches they left behind now grow, Elberta has seen fierce battles, violent storms, and frantic change―and when the town is once again threatened from without, Janie realizes it won’t withstand much more. So she tells the story of its people: of Hugh, her granddaddy, determined to preserve Elberta’s legacy at any cost; of his wife, Maybelle, the postmaster, whose sudden death throws the town into chaos; of her lover, Lee Malone, a black orchardist harvesting from a land where he is less than welcome; of the time when Janie kidnapped her own Hollywood-obsessed aunt and tore the wrong people apart.

As the world closes in on Elberta, Caleb Johnson’s debut novel lifts the veil and offers one last glimpse. Treeborne is a celebration and a reminder: of how the past gets mixed up in thoughts of the future; of how home is a story as much as a place.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

CALEB JOHNSON is the author of the novel Treeborne. He grew up in Arley, AL, studied journalism at The University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa and earned an MFA from the University of Wyoming. Johnson has worked as a newspaper reporter, a janitor and a whole-animal butcher, among other jobs. He has been awarded a Jentel Writing Residency and a Walter E. Dakin Fellowship in fiction to the Sewanee Writers' Conference. He lives with his wife, Irina, and their dog, Hugo, in Valle Crucis, NC, where he teaches at Appalachian State University while working on his next novel.

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Treeborne

By Caleb Johnson

Picador

Copyright © 2018 Caleb Johnson
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-250-16908-2

Contents

Title Page, 
Copyright Notice, 
Dedication, 
Epigraphs, 
Stories We Tell: Today, 
Days Her Missing: 1958, 
The Peach Pit: 1958, 
Peach Days: 1958, 
Thicker than Blood: 1958, 
What Mine Eye Hath Seen: 1958, 
In the Beginning: 1929, 
Stories We Tell: Today, 
Seven Hundred Acres: 1958, 
The Artist at Work: 1929, 
To Dirt She Returneth: 1958, 
Signs to Show the Way: 1958, 
He Was, You Know, Thataway: 1929, 
This is How She Survived: 1958, 
Here's What Didn't Make the Paper: 1958, 
Stories We Tell: Today, 
His Masterpiece: 1929–1930, 
Bring Her Back to Elberta: 1958, 
The Last Last Conquistador: 1958, 
She Could of Done Worse: 1958, 
Till Death Do They Part: 1930, 
The Hole in Lee Malone's Guitar: 1958, 
Stories We Tell: Today, 
In the Eye of the Looker: 1958, 
This Didn't Make the Paper Either: 1958, 
Blood's All You Got Left: 1959, 
Stories We Tell: Today, 
Elberta Dawn: 1958, 
Acknowledgments, 
About the Author, 
Copyright, 

CHAPTER 1

Stories We Tell

TODAY

The water was coming, but Janie Treeborne would not leave. She'd lived alone in this house perched on the edge of a roadside peach orchard in Elberta, Alabama, ever since Lee Malone sold it to her. Sold maybe not the right word for the price she paid, the price he would take. But it was hers and she would not leave. Rather the water take her too.

She'd been telling her visitor exactly how she came to own the house, which once was Lee's office and, before that, his boyhood home. A complicated matter. To tell how this house and the surrounding property became hers she needed to tell how it became Lee's, and to do that she needed to first tell about a man named Mr. Prince.

"See, back then folks thought Mr. Prince wasn't but a rumor and a last name," she continued. "But he was real. Lived in one of them mansions down on the river. Anyhow, Lee started working at The Peach Pit not long after the storm.

"Worked here for years. Then one day Mr. Prince carried him to lunch out at Woodrow's. The Hills would of been about the only place they could eat together. They ordered and sat down and Mr. Prince said he was selling the orchard, the old cannery, and a little cottage he owned in town for whatever was in Lee's billfold right that moment. Can you imagine? Mr. Prince died not too long after. Most of my growing up, folks still thought Lee wasn't nothing but the orchard manager. Would of got to a certain kind of person. Not him, not to Lee Malone."

Janie Treeborne'd come to own the peach orchard — and the other properties once belonging to Mr. Prince — the same way as Lee Malone. She sat at a greasy tabletop inside Woodrow's Pit Cook Bar-B-Q where, years before, Lee'd counted out of his billfold two-dollar-five-cent and a receipt for a bag of dog food, and she searched for what money she had in the depths of a purse she felt foolish toting around. Lee's heart was weak by then. He had considered turning the land over to Janie for a long long time.

She thought she would of handed everything down to her visitor, this young man sitting with a tape recorder on his lap and a long microphone gripped in his hand. So why'd she not? Janie couldn't remember. Did it matter? He was here, he was home. Had her same big forehead and freckled nose, her granddaddy Hugh's thick black hair and high-cut cheeks. A Treeborne, she thought, through and through, right down to the bone.

"Do you remember how much it was you paid?" he asked.

"Foot yes, I do," she said. "You reckon your grandmomma'd up and forget something like that? It was sixteen dollar and a pack of chewing gum."

"Did you ever regret not paying him more?"

"Regret, foot," she said. No amount would of been sufficient. This place was priceless. But how to explain that? "Lee's body might of blunted," she went on, "but his mind stayed sharp till the end. I always tell that if mine ain't then somebody please shove a gun right here and fire that sucker twice. There's one right yonder in the dresser drawer. I don't give a rip if it sounds morbid! Life's morbid! Love sure enough is.

"Lee Malone taught me everything about the peach-growing business. Everything. Even helped run the fruit stand through his last good summer on earth. Could still sing his head off too. Them trees yonder, we planted them together. Look out thataway you'll see where the house he died in once stood. Wasn't much to the place itself, but it was in Elberta and belonged to him, and there was a time that meant something. See? Other side the road there, just below the water tower Ricky Birdsong fell off of."

"Are there any pictures of Mr. Malone?" the young man asked.

Janie got up from her recliner chair and took one of the dozens of photo albums shelved in the living room and stacked in cardboard boxes pushed against the wall. She opened to a picture of the old Elberta water tower. Pointed, turned the page. Black-and-whites of folks standing by water, with dogs, by log houses and woodpiles, next to pickup trucks and wagons, at school, at church, in decorated cemeteries, along fencelines and unidentifiable roadsides and hedgerows. Somehow not one picture of Lee Malone.

She turned the page again and pointed at a girl with straight black hair touching bony shoulders. "There's me," she said, squinting as if to be sure. "Would of been the year before MawMaw May died — if I'm right."

"Do you still think about it?" the young man asked.

She closed the album. "I try to keep a routine for the sake of my mind, but there's only so much you can do now."

Janie Treeborne first received a notice from The Authority, say, three years ago. Plenty warning. The Hernando de Soto Dam had served its purpose for nearly eighty years. Her granddaddy, Hugh Treeborne, helped build it. Her daddy, Ren Treeborne, an engineer. Janie understood that if The Authority didn't implode the dam then its concrete would give to time and further neglect. A disaster would sure enough occur. The notice claimed there'd be payment for her property, relocation services, the works. Miss Treeborne, the letter called her, just needed to fill out the accompanying forms and mail them back. Janie knew how this story went. She took the notice and she deposited it right in the trash.

"The Fencepost sure does miss its big-talkers and bullshitters," she said. "I still hear their voices rattling around and around ... Air here's always been full of voices to my mind. Pedro agrees and he abets with a daily dose of radio. Lets them dogs that's always running around sleep inside the station if it's cold or raining. When one comes up lame. He feeds them scraps. But, hellfire, I do too when they roam up here. Jon D. used to say one was going to give me rabies. Foot. I told you Pedro started reading out our names on the air. A roll call, I reckon. Lucky that us fourteen remaining can dial him in another day yet. For that much we're blessed. Pedro and me share a sense of humor. Laugh to keep from tears."

The young man wanted to know how Janie spent her days. What it was like living in Elberta now and what all she did.

"Sometimes after breakfast I'll drive out at The Seven and prowl around them woods for a spell — same way me and Crusoe did. You'll have to go by there. A Treeborne ain't lived on them seven hundred acres since Aunt Tammy moved...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Picador
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2018
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1250169089
• ISBN 13: 9781250169082
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 320
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar