The chickens began to creep on a steamy day in June. They were used to walking and pecking. But on that day, they learned the same thing that I had. You have to creep around the silence to survive it.

My grandfather, Father Heron, sat and stared out the front-room window. His black eyes searched the gravel road that wound around Crooked Top Mountain, Crooktop to the locals. It was a twisted road that cut through squirrel-filled trees, blackberry hollers, and past his house, the one he was born in. The one that I was born behind.

I had studied his silence many times. And learned that people speak the loudest when they’re quiet. They create words, even conversations, just with the twitch of their brow or the grit of their teeth. Sometimes his silence screamed so loud I wanted to cover my ears. “Be quiet!” I wanted to shout at his unmoving mouth. But I didn’t, because I knew that he was telling me things. About locked doors, blood, and murder.

I spent my time waiting for a look, a sign, that would tell me what to do to survive. I was born waiting on him. My momma didn’t live long enough to teach me anything herself, so I had to soak up my lessons from her in the womb. And she taught me that her daddy, my grandfather, was a man that women should dance around, but never with.

“She say when she’s coming back?” he asked without looking at me. His words were simple. But the dance wasn’t.

“Yes sir. Not ’til you promise not to kill any more of her chickens.”

“Her chickens?” he asked, leaning forward.

“Your chickens, sir, ’til you promise not to kill any more of your chickens.” Around... dance around, not with.

“And why? Why does that crazy woman think I shouldn’t kill my own chickens?”

“ ’Cause she’s sick and tired of making your chickens happy just to have to chop off their heads and fry ’em,” I whispered, my eyes lowered to the ground.

“God gave man dominion over every creeping thing on the earth,” he hissed.

I nodded my head.

“Mercy, does a chicken creep?”

I knew that chickens could walk, strut, peck, and scurry. But from that day on, they would creep too. Because the silence told them to.

“Yes sir, I reckon it does,” I said with perfect rhythm. I knew his dance.

He jerked his eyes off of me and turned them back to the road, daring the sun that squinted them to tell him that chickens don’t creep. I hurried outside of the house that rose defiantly on the side of the mountain. It was a crooked mountain. Like its top was broken. Not its peak, there weren’t any mountain peaks in the Appalachians. Just slopes that rose rounded and wide. Like giant hills really.

But the people there didn’t mind. It didn’t bother them to live on a broken mountain. Most of them were born there. Some left in their youth, but most returned. Not for the jobs. When the boom of coal left Crooktop, so did most of its jobs. There was still a little for truckers to haul away to other sites. Just enough to cover the town with its dust. Coal was the god we could all see. It had built our little town in the valley. And it’s why the most fundamental rule of Crooktop etiquette was to take your shoes off before you walked on carpet. Otherwise, all the rugs of Crooktop would quickly turn black.

People didn’t stay on Crooktop for its entertainment either. Its valley had two clothing stores, Ima’s Boutique and the Discount Family Shopper. The nearest shopping center was over the mountain, at the Magic Mart. And Crooktop only had three restaurants. A hamburger joint, a meat and three, and a barbecue diner. Only the diner served beer. There was no theater. No swimming pool. No skating rink. And if you bought a radio you wasted your money. The mountains blocked reception so the only stations that could be picked up were ones from nearby mountains. And those were only AM bluegrass or gospel stations. If you wanted to listen to FM music, then you had to buy tapes. You had to guess at what music was new and cool, because the radio couldn’t tell you. So young people stuck with the safe bets. Lynyrd Skynyrd and Aerosmith were always new and cool on Crooktop.

People stayed on Crooktop because it was a way of life that couldn’t be found outside the mountains. And it was protected. Hidden by the giant hills from the eyes of the world. Hidden by its poverty from the interest of the world. Outsiders never knew of the love or wars that festered on the side of that crooked mountain.

And in the middle of all the festering rose the Heron house. It was a small two-bedroom-one-bath house, painted white and topped with dingy green shingles. Built in a nearly perfect square, it seemed to say, “Every angle of the Heron family fi ts neatly together.” But it was a lying house. It was his house. And though I spent all my days and nights there, it never felt like mine.

Sometimes to escape it all I would go to Mamma Rutha’s tomato patch, touch the prickly leaves, and breathe the heavy scent --- an earthy mix of moist dirt, sweet ripeness, and green, green, green. It was a smell that soothed me nearly as much as the smell of seng on Mamma Rutha’s hands made me ache. At age six, when I learned Mamma Rutha was crazy, I saw her standing fierce-eyed and naked in the garden, with the stain and mystery of ginseng on her hands. Hair as thick and shiny brown as molasses spilled down her back in wild tangles. Small breasts, shaped like fists, barely rose away from the ribs that jutted from her chest. Her legs were scraped and scarred from running through thorn-filled woods. Her small wiry frame burned such an image in my mind that when I think about that night I have to remind myself that she was a speck of a woman and not the tower I remember. Why I consider that the day I learned about Mamma Rutha, I really don’t know. Looking back, it seems she had always been crazy. Planting her peonies haphazardly through the yard, like some sort of random connect-the-peony-dot game. Or religiously watching the early spring moon to know when to plant her garden, carefully sowing the seeds and then refusing to harvest it. When I was little she poured a dizzy, heated sort of love on me, crowning me with honeysuckle headbands and then forgetting to feed me supper. She was a woman who talked to the moon, who took her clothes off and stood naked amidst her pile of seng, who forgot to make sure that I had clean clothes for the first day of school, who never noticed when I went barefoot well past Indian summer. But she loved me breathlessly. Clung to me. Cradled my head and sang to me, strange songs about dragonflies and june bugs. Cried when I cried. Scoured the mountainside for a soothing remedy for my every complaint. My crazy Mamma Rutha, a woman who fell in love with her chickens and couldn’t kill them anymore.

Folks down in the valley whispered that Mamma Rutha hadn’t always been crazy. Father Heron, though, he had never changed. He was raised on Crooktop, graduated high school down in the valley, took a wife, and began establishing himself as a hardworking, levelheaded man. He was the sort of man that made a list of the things he must accomplish in life and then set about to check them off. Graduate --- check. Wife --- check. Deacon in church --- check. Raise granddaughter --- check. He felt humiliated by Mamma Rutha, until he realized that staying with his crazy wife made him look like a martyr in the eyes of the valley. His fellow deacons muttered their sympathies and called him loyal for staying with her, and brave for trying to raise me. So it was stay with crazy wife --- check, and continue raising granddaughter --- check.

But raising is different than loving. So different that it sent me running to my mirror searching for a sign that I belonged to another family, even though the whole valley still talked about how my momma had died and my daddy ran off. But my eyes were always there staring back at me with the same black of Father Heron’s. I could avoid my lips, that twisted into the same slightly crooked smile of Mamma Rutha. Or my nose that was a little too round --- like my momma’s, Mamma Rutha always said. But I could never avoid my eyes. Proof that I belonged, even when I didn’t want to.

Excerpted from The Killing Tree © Copyright 2012 by Rachel Keener. Reprinted with permission by Center Street. All rights reserved.