The Tree Which Owns Itself ~ Part One

A Southern gothic-esque short story, for those who may (or may not) believe in ghosts.

It wasn’t much to look at, if Jules was being honest. 

He gave the twisted, crooked oak tree an appraising once-over. “They really hang people here?”

“Yup,” Seneca confirmed. “Every summer ‘n winter, for as long as my daddy and his daddy and even ‘afore that can remember.”

Her accent, thickly Southern, still sounded heavy and strange to Jules’ ears — “long” came out of Seneca’s mouth more like “lawn-guh” — and she tended toward having an overactive imagination. But she knew every grown-up and old story in this town, and plus, he could use a friend here, anyhow. His mother didn’t like for him to be alone, much less alone at the house, while his parents worked. So long as he didn’t get into any trouble and he was home before sunset, Jules could do whatever he wanted. Which, as it turns out, became spending time traipsing through the backwoods and secret hidey-holes of his new hometown with one Seneca Mason Moon, who hated her name, hated being a girl, and even more, hated when it rained.

It had only rained one afternoon so far in their friendship, and Jules didn’t care if he never saw water again after the way Seneca puddled into a wallowing pity party of despair. She was so bubbly otherwise, but Heaven forbid anyone mention a chance of showers coming up. Jules was glad it didn’t rain today, even though the hanging tree didn’t appear to be anything special. The way Seneca talked about it made it sound as though the tree would bleed or had teeth or something.

The actual Tree That Owns Itself // photographed September 2023

They — being the townsfolk — called it the hanging tree, but the official, on-the-map title was “The Tree Which Owns Itself”. According to Seneca’s encyclopedia of a brain, the tree was the only remnant of one of the first farms that white folks set up after forcing Native Americans off their ancestral lands. According to what Jules thought was likely Seneca’s creative embellishments, the Natives cursed the land so that it would never provide a fruitful harvest for these people.

He didn’t put much credence to that theory. Curses were a thing witches did, not Native Americans, and witches weren’t real, anyhow. 

“Why did they start hanging people?” Jules asked. He stared up again at the gnarled boughs. 

“‘Cuz it was the only way to trick the land into listenin’.”

“The land doesn’t listen, Seneca. It’s just dirt.”

Her scrawny face uglied itself into a frown. “Suit yourself, city boy.”

Jules watched for a second as she stomped off, tiny feet cussing up clouds of dry Georgia clay in her wake. He sighed, took another look at the inauspicious tree, and started jogging to catch up with her.

“Don’t be mad with me, please!” he pleaded. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to make you mad, Seneca.”

“It ain’t me you should be worried about! The hangin’ tree don’t like bein’ insulted. You should go tell him you’re sorry!”

He resisted the urge to roll his eyes, but at least she’d stopped running off. “I will, I promise.”

Pale yellow pigtails whirled as she whipped around and put her little fists on her hips. “Well go on, then. I’ll wait.”

Jules shuffled his feet uncomfortably. “You better come with me. Make sure I say the right stuff?”

He felt the energy of her glare as she considered. Seneca Mason Moon was a grand total of eleven years old, but had the build of a second grader and the attitude of an ornery old matron long-locked in a castle with naught but cats to keep her company. 

“Alright, fine.” She huffed past him back toward the tree.

Jules heaved a sigh of relief. He didn’t know what he’d do without her as a friend, now that he’d been at her side for months on end. 

“You said the tree was a him?” Jules asked, not sure how anybody could figure such a thing out. “Does that mean it doesn’t have flowers or something?”

Seneca let out a sound like a hiss of disapproval. “Cain’t you feel him? That’s man aura, cain’t you tell? You bein’ a man and all.”

Flattered as he was at being called a man — Jules wasn’t quite twelve yet — he had no idea what it meant for a plant to be able to tell anyone if it was a boy or girl or neither or both. 

“I guess I’m not very good at reading tree spirits,” he offered. “Sorry about that too, Mr. Hanging Tree.”

“You gotta mean it when you tell someone you’re sorry, Jules.”

“I do mean it!” he protested. “I just … never had to say I was sorry to a tree. It’s weird. What should I do then, hug it?”

Seneca considered this. “Why don’t you ask it first? Ain’t right to touch anythin’ without it sayin’ it’s okay. ‘Specially since it is the tree that owns hisself.”

They hadn’t quite gotten that far in the story yet, to the part where the tree owned itself, and what that had to do with the hanging tales. But Jules walked up to the waist-high wrought iron fence that surrounded the tree, then around the barrier until he found a padlocked gate. He put one foot in the chain and braced his hands to hoist himself up and over, landing deftly in the mulch and pine straw. 

“You coming?” he asked Seneca. She shook her head and crossed her arms in front of her chest.

Jules was resigned to this one all on his own. He looked up at the tree from where he stood at its roots, and felt perhaps an inkling of understanding as to why this tree got the reputation it had. Or he had. It was eerie, being this close to such a large and historical tree, which seemed now far too leering and oversized than it had when Jules stood on the other side of the fence. The boy scurried forward and in a voice he hoped sounded less fearful than his thoughts made it, said, “I didn’t mean to offend you, Mr. Hanging Tree. It’s not every day a kid learns about these things and I’m sorry that I said some mean stuff. Can we —“ he grimaced “— hug it out?”

Jules was out of the fenced area faster than a lightning flash.

“There!” he gasped out to Seneca, pausing to catch his breath. “There, I did it. Hugged the tree and said I was sorry. Even called it a him.”

“Good.”

“I still want to know why people got hung here.”

“I done told you that part, Jules.”

“Not really,” he said. “Tell me the whole thing from the beginning.”

Seneca tapped out a pattern in the clay dust with her feet. “Nope. That’s a question for Faulkes.”

“Faulkes? Who the heck is that?”

But Seneca was already skittering down the path toward downtown, leaving Jules with little choice except to follow.

Seneca didn’t mean to run; it was just how she moved. She didn’t often choose between fast or slow, she simply went. Jules, however, had never been one for sports, and lacked the effortless speed of the girl he shadowed. Where she flew back to town, flowered sundress and scraggly pigtails trailing behind her in a breeze she created herself, Jules huffed and puffed and kept having to slide his glasses up his sweaty nose. He knew Seneca would reach the Five Points Drugstore looking happily windblown, and he’d arrive minutes later looking the exact opposite.

He did.

“Who,” Jules managed to cough out again as he struggled to catch his breath, standing over a park bench, “is Faulkes?”

The girl only grabbed his hand and pulled him down the sidewalk.

Faulkes, as it turned out, was an unhoused man with a salt-and-pepper beard who wore a mustard-colored beanie rolled up above his ears, even though it was early July. Faulkes, as it also turned out, was unhoused at first by bad luck, but now by choice and sheer grit, and even so still taught history at the high school — though the principal frowned on his beanie-wearing in the building.

Faulkes told the principal it was for alopecia. 

It wasn’t.

When school wasn’t in session though, as Seneca now demonstrated, Faulkes liked to post up outside Kum’s Optical, an optometrist and eyeglass shop. The Kums’ storefront included a wide front porch with rocking chairs and board games like chess and checkers, and baskets overflowing with clumsy clods of sidewalk chalk. Mr. Kum wanted his wife’s patients to have a comfortable waiting room, and for his shop to be a community staple. Half the folks on the front porch most days were like Faulkes: killin’ time and shootin’ the breeze.

By the time Seneca and Jules sauntered up, the boy was sweaty and winded again, having not recovered from running back to town before being drug another handful of blocks. Seneca greeted Faulkes with a wide grin.

“This here’s my friend, Jules.”

Jules quickly wiped a damp palm on his equally damp T-shirt and stuck it out to the man, whose tan skin had a distinct leathery look and feel to it. “How do you do, sir.”

Faulkes shook the boy’s outstretched hand. “Nice to meet you, son. Y’all here to see the doctor?” He glanced at Jules’ glasses.

“Nope. We come to see you,” Seneca answered. “Jules has questions about the hangin’ tree. He ain’t from around here and he thinks the stories is all just stories.”

The man gave Jules a long look from head to toe, then took a lengthy swig from the glass bottled Coke next to the chess board in front of him. “What is it you want to know, Jules?”

“He wants to know all of it,” Seneca answered for him. 

“Anything you can share,” Jules agreed earnestly. He wasn’t sure why he was so invested in a tree, for goodness’ sake. A tree!

A special one — but a tree nonetheless.

“There’s plenty to share,” Faulkes said, considering.

He took another sip from his Coke as Jules’ jaw dropped open.

“Jasperse Faulkes was my” — Faulkes paused to count his fingers — “several generations of great-ago grandfather. He arrived on a ship from England and after trudgin’ up through hundreds of miles of mosquito-ridden wilderness, found himself right in this here town. It wasn’t a town yet though, so the Brits he was with gave him permission to start a farm village up here.”

Faulkes gave Jules a knowing smirk. “Only problem was, the land wasn’t the Brits’ to give.”

“So they chased the Native Americans away?” the boy surmised.

Seneca bounced on her heels. Faulkes’ smirk darkened. “That’s a kind way to put it. The sort of thing I reckon most historians would edit into a textbook, right over the parts where my ancestors and their Redcoat friends murdered dozens of Native Americans who already cared for this land and had done so for as long as the sun rose and set on the human species.”

It was a hard truth. 

“Most historians,” Jules repeated. “Most historians, but not you.”

“Nope. Not me.”

“Seneca said they cursed the land, the Native Americans.”

“They did,” Faulkes confirmed. 

“So were they witches?”

A raised eyebrow. “Witches? No, no, son. Witches are somethin’ else entirely. That’s another thing most historians like to do; muddy the waters of Native Americans’ spiritual practices instead of acknowledging other religions exist. It ain’t magic like wands and such, no rhyming hexes or dolls stuck with pins. Witches got nothin’ to do with that tree. Remember what I just said about the Native Americans caring for that land?”

Jules nodded. Seneca continued to bounce; she knew this story mostly by heart.

“Now, I’ll be honest with you, son. I may not be a cold-blooded ass like Jasperse Faulkes, but I’m still a white man who never dallied much into the specifics of each Native nation’s spiritual stuff. They keep it close, rightfully so, but that means I don’t know how that curse works, you hear? I just know they had more connection with that land than anybody else, and it listened to them,” Faulkes said. “That land lost the people who loved it, and it decided it wasn’t gonna never love these newcomers back. My ancestors tried for years to make that land work.”

A long swig of Coke. 

“But that’s the thing about land, son. You don’t look like you’ve ever farmed, have you?”

Jules shook his head. “A garden sometimes.”

Faulkes smiled in approval. “Well then, maybe you do know. When you nurture that land, love on it and give it what it needs, it grows for you. Shows you some love back, yeah?”

The boy nodded. 

“After so many failed seasons of nothin’ or not enough growin’ to keep my ancestors fed, things started to get real bad,” Faulkes went on. “People was dyin’ left and right, starvation and whatnot. Malnourishment. Now, what I’m ‘bout to tell you is gonna be graphic, you hear? Don’t go home squealing to your mama and daddy that I’m givin’ you nightmares. I ain’t a liar, but if you can’t handle hard stuff, I can soften it for you a bit. Just be honest and tell me what version I need to tell.”

Jules glanced at Seneca. “Which story did he tell you?”

“Both ‘em.”

“Is the hard one really hard? Is it scary?”

“You’re the one what wanted to know about the hangin’ tree.”

He squared his shoulders and pushed his glasses back up on his nose. “The whole truth, please, Mr. Faulkes.”

“Alright, then,” the historian replied, stoic. “Jasperse was gettin’ on up in age, and he was fit to be tied watchin’ most of his people — family, villagers — wither away. He wasn’t the type of man to fight his way out of a tough spot. More kind of the type of man who blames ever’body else for his problems. Now, he was right that this particular problem was because the Natives cursed the land, but he always conveniently forgot that it wouldn’t have been cursed if he hadn’t stolen it to begin with.”

Faulkes gave Jules one more long look. “You sure ‘bout this?”

Jules nodded. If Seneca was strong enough to hear it, so was he. 

“Well, Jasperse went and done the most cowardly thing he could do, which was wait until the dead of night, fashion himself a noose out of rope, and try to hang himself.”

“Try?” Jules asked.

“Try,” Faulkes nodded. “In true Jasperse fashion, he wasn’t successful.” The historian’s brows knotted. “Seems to be a genetic trait, I reckon, now I think about it. Anyhow, Jasperse tried to hang himself, but it didn’t work, and the next morning his son found him. He got the hangin’ part right, but didn’t tie the noose proper, so mostly he just made himself a harness that went around a tree limb and over his neck. When they got him cut down though and Jasperse got enough water to drink so’n his throat got to workin’ again, he started goin’ on about how in his dyin’ moments he had a vision of how to get the land to be fruitful.”

“They had to hang somebody?”

“What was his vision?” Jules wanted to know. 

Faulkes shrugged. “Don’t know. Never had the misfortune of havin’ it.”

“So what happened after Jasperse died?”

The historian leaned back in his chair, hooking his legs around the table leg to keep him from falling over. “Turned out that the land wanted more’n just him. He was hung on that tree in the summer and the next year, it was crazy what all grew on that farm. But come late spring the next year, things took a turn.”

Seneca piped up, “And er’body started havin’ the visions!”

“Well,” Faulkes corrected, “Not er’body. But it started that every summer, one man — usually a man — in the town woke up in the middle of the night. Cold sweat, done pissed hisself in the bed, had the worst kind of bad dream. The kind you don’t wake up from. The kind that haunts your wakin’ thoughts same as if you were sleepin’. That was the one, for that year, who had to hang to keep the fields of the village fertile ‘til the next.

“When a later descendent of Jasperse Faulkes, a boy by the name of Luther, got the hankerin’ to go be a lawyer ‘stead of a row crop farmer like the rest of his family — round about three greats or so ago, I reckon — he decided to sell his acreage of the farm, where the hangin’ tree was,” Faulkes went on. “From the way my grandaddy told it, y’all should’ve damn seen the way folks went crazy! Like all hell broke loose in this town. All people cared about was the stinkin’ tree. The old ones cared, anyways. Most of the younger folks thought it was superstition, but they ain’t seen the hangins.”

He paused to let out a stiff breath. “Those happened real quiet-like as the years gone on, not a spectacle like at first. And ‘cus most people knew, wasn’t like it made the newspaper. Just swept real quiet under the rug, that so-and-so died and weren’t it so sad. Real tragedy. But the tree! If Luther Faulkes, future esquire, was gonna sell the farm, and the tree got gunned down with it, what would happen to the family’s land? Hell, what’d happen to the city that growed up around it?”

Jules assumed that was a rhetorical question. He was correct.

“So Luther, bein’ that he was goin’ into lawyerin’ and all, figured out a way he could pacify the townsfolk and raise enough money to pay for law school at the same time,” Faulkes continued.

“Oh.” Jules connected the dots. “If he deeded the tree to itself, he could sell the rest of the land and it’d be protected.”

Faulkes snapped his fingers. “Precisely, son.”

Jules shifted uncomfortably. “And the hangings still happen?”

“Ever’ summer,” Seneca said.

Jules didn’t sleep well that night.

“The Tree Which Owns Itself” will continue in the April 10 issue of Underneath a Magic Moon. Thank you for reading! If you feel so inclined, please share this Substack to help grow our community.

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