The young man had a strained look. The rum not gone down well.

He sat at a little table, another drinker with him. The stockier man put his forearm on the young patron’s shoulder, to steady him. ‘Primrose. Hey, Primrose. Don’t look so shocked, friend. I told you that’s the fierce stuff, the Santy Rosito.’ The young man held his face and nodded. He did not speak.

‘That’s right, the mean old Santy Rosito. Rosito. Where do they get those names from, anyway?’ The man examined the bottle. ‘Santy Rosito Extro Viejo. What is that? Do it mean anything? Do it stand for something? Is it a code? A Masonic word? I swear, in old Georgia they name their distilled spirits for what they are, with no mummery. When you choose a jug you choose among known quantities. White Lightning. Old Corn. Rapskull. Pizzle-Killer. Pennimann’s Hound Sweat. Henchard’s Hat-Lifter. Excelsior Varnish. Fantasia Dew. None of this Santy Rosito Extro Viejo mystery. Good, honest names with a touch o’ the fantastic to em. I know because I interviewed them all after my store failed.’ The man sipped.

‘But what about you, Primrose? Eh? Have you sampled what there is in Georgia? Or are you strictly a Florida rumshop man? Primrose?’

He had stepped outside. After the darkness of the house the glare off the sand road was terrific. He stood in the middle of the road, a pale line of illumination through the shadow of the woods. The young man swayed a little in his boots: he could not bear all that light.

He walked on. Across the road, into the trees, past ropes of catsbit and clumps of palmetto. He walked deep into the forest looking for a tree he knew. This man, Former Private First Class Jacob Primrose, was much like the others on the original road crew. A half-hearted conscript, a poor cracker lured from the Saint Mary’s dockside with promises of beef dinners and a few coins. But he had hated the work even more than most. When the time came he ran for everything he was worth, and this tall oak had been his hiding place. He returned now to the tree, drunk in the afternoon, conversing with himself, as drunk men do.

‘Hell, Jake, there ain’t no better place than this. Ain’t no better place, no. Not on this continent. What do a man lack here? You’ve got indian corn and persimmons for the picking and more good deermeat walking around than you can aim at. Cold cornpone at the roadhouse, and make up the difference with whortleberries. Throw in the rum—ah, that damned Santy Rosito—that’s the only part to give you trouble. If it weren’t for that we’d all be at peace, and live together as angels do. But it’s here, it comes with the territory. Sure as air comes with breath. Sure as bang comes with flash. Sure as fire and smoke. Sure as song and a memory. Sure as a Minorcan lady and and a red feather hat. No—a Caroliny girl with eyes of blue. Yes. A Caroliny girl with eyes of blue.’

He had come to a grand and ancient oak tree that had spread so wide that sixty feet away from the trunk it reached back down and rested its elbows on the earth. He stepped onto one of these earthbound limbs and began walking up it easier than up a flight of stairs. ‘A Caroliny girl. Eyes of blue. Oh, why’d you do it, Jake? Hey? Why’d you want to leave her? Why in hell’d you want to leave her be? So you could spend the rest of your life singing Peggy-O in rum shops? That it? Is a fiddle tune better than a woman in the flesh? But oh, you had your reasons, you had your reasons, sure.’ The oak limb he was walking on had meandered gently a short distance off the ground but as he drew closer to the trunk it began to arc upward. He bent over and started clambering on all fours. ‘You left her alone, by God. You let them drive you off. To love a girl less than you fear her pappy, that’s the mark of a sorry man. That’s a man ain’t worth the name. That’s a man for the rum shop and a cornhusk cot and low whores ‘til Judgement Day. I swear, that’s you, Jake Primrose.’ He had reached the place where the treelimb met the trunk, forty feet up in the air. It was so broad that you could have held a ladies’ tea there, or laid down lumberjacks four-abreast. But for now it was just him, and he threw himself down in the bed of ferns that grew on the tops of the branches. He took off his hat and set it on his stomach. He folded his army coat and put it behind his head. ‘Aw hell. Ech. Hum,’ he muttered, and scratched his chest. ‘Maybe you ain’t quite bad as all that, Primrose.’ He fell asleep.

He woke up because someone was cracking a whip. He opened his eyes and looked up, looked around himself. There was a second whipcrack and he flinched as if the blow were for him. It was not. It came from far down on the ground. He got up into a crouch, and moved to the edge of the limb. He craned his neck to spectate with the ferns.

There were three people down on the surface and two of them had whips. Those two were also the ones on horses. The third man was in the dirt at the base of the tree, horseless, hatless, whipless. He was silent while the other men talked lowly.

‘Your turn now, Case. Your turn. We’ll take turns til he understands. Go ahead, tech him.’

The second man rolled out his whip in the air and cracked it over the horseless man’s chest, with a wet sound. From forty feet up in the tree Primrose winced.

‘Hell, that weren’t bad, Case. But let me show you sting him on the neck.’ The whip cracked. The rider hooted and the whipped man clutched his throat.

‘You see it, Case? That’s accuracy! That’s skill! Hoo! I might’ve took his voice with thatun.’

‘To hell with both of you,’ said the man.

‘Oh, now! To hell with us, he says. Well what I say is,’ he fluttered his whip, ‘to hell with thieving bastards. Yes, to hell with all them first. Watch this, Case.’

Primrose cursed under his breath. He gritted his teeth. He clasped his hands, unclasped them. From down on the ground there came another pop and the added sound, this time, of a groan. At last he moved.

He stood up, feeling for his pistol. It was there, in the ratty leather holster. But he did not take it out. Instead he turned toward the trunk and began to climb. There was a branch jutting from the trunk a few yards up and he wrangled his way to it. It was a big healthy branch ending in a mass of leaves and acorns. He crept out, and straddled the branch with his feet touching underneath, looking past his knee at the people on the ground. They were almost directly below him. From that height he saw the small circles of two hats belonging to two men, and a head of dark hair on the man they whipped. There had been a half-dozen more whipcracks while he climbed. When the seventh one rang out he took a deep breath, and grabbed ahold of the mass of leaves.

He began bucking up and down on the branch as if it were an unbroken colt. The acorns shook loose by the hundreds upon hundreds and fell to earth with an incredible noise, roaring and pocking off the dry palmfronds, filling the forest with their din. Primrose knew a pretty good Seminole war cry and as he shook the oak branch he screamed it out for all he was worth.

‘Coop! Coop! Hee—e! Coop! Coop! Hee—e! Eep! Eep! Ee—ee—yah!’

As he lay into the branch and yowled Primrose also unholstered his U.S. service pistol and discharged it in the general direction of the ground. ‘Eep! Eep! E—e—ee—yah!’ he yelped, the gunsmoke pluming around his face.

It was calamity, cacophony. The horsemen nearly dropped their whips as they were yowled at, rained on, and shot at. ‘Shit!’ cried the one. ‘Tree Injuns!’

‘What the hell’s a Tree Inj—’ but the first man had already spun his horse and soon the other one was soon hot behind him, both spurred fast out of the clearing. Primrose kept it up for a while, raining the hard acorns down, and fired the second barrel. Down on the ground the horseless man watched the riders speed away, unmoved in the shower of acorns.

Eventually Primrose stopped and unwrapped himself from around the branch. Breathing hard, he moved along the staggered limbs and climbed down until he came to solid earth. The whipped man was standing still. His fair skin was of a color like Primrose’s but he had dark brown hair and black eyes. The shirt was nearly shredded off of his back and there was blood running prolific all down his torso yet he stood upright, arms by his sides, not tender or tending to himself or favoring any wound, looking dead at Primrose.

Primrose came and stood in front of the man. ‘Are you all right?’

This question only made sense because of how untroubled the man appeared to be. He had just gotten a dozen stripes from a dragwhip.

‘Yes,’ the man said.

Primrose stuck out his hand. ‘I’m Jake Primrose.’

The man took the grip. ‘Hadjo,’ he said.

There was silence for a moment but Primrose could bear it no longer. He fell out. The wind wheezed in his chest as he laughed, his face turned crimson.

‘Did you see them turn? Did you? Did you see it? Good God but they jumped. I tell you they are still running if they ain’t hit the river yet and maybe still then.’ The man with the black eyes smiled and Primrose kept wheezing.

‘Yessir, and maybe then, maybe then they’ll start to wonder what the hell’s a Tree Injun. Oh, oh hell.’ His knees wobbled. ‘Oh damme. Let me tell you two ways you’re lucky, friend. For one, it’s halfway dark, so they couldn’t see me up there hopping about. For two, I’m still halfway goddamn drunk.’ He swayed, wheezed. ‘To pull a jape like that.’

‘Yes,’ agreed the other man. ‘I am lucky.’

Primrose looked up again. ‘Do you think they believed it? Them war whoops?’

‘I don’t know. It looked like they did.’

‘Did you believe it, then?’

‘Not for a second did I believe those noises. My mother is Creek.’

That appeared to be true. ‘So what did you think it was?’

‘I thought it was a drunk white man.’

Primrose studied him. ‘But hell,’ Primrose said. ‘Look at you. You need to get cleaned up, and—’

‘No, I don’t,’ the man Hadjo said. ‘We need to go.’ And he turned and started for the edge of the hammock without another word. Jake Primrose watched for a moment before starting after him with a lurch.

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