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voodoo dolls Mr. Sutton brought back for me from New Orleans. I don’t see Mama or Jack, so I climb Sweetie and wait for a sign.
    I count Sweetie’s new spring leaves like stars. Numbers too big, too great for anyone but God to really know. Jack doesn’t like Sweetie. Or much of anything else, now that I think about it.
    I’m sitting in the tree when Jack comes around the house, ax in his hand. “Tired of this nothing tree,” he mutters. His voice puts a taste in my throat like dirt. “Don’t want to pick up no more of these dead gum balls.” He throws one of Sweetie’s old prickly spheres across our yard. The pod is hard and brown and empty of seed. The new ones hang from the limbs. They are soft, green, and smell like Christmas.
    Jack must not notice I’m in the tree. I climb down from her branches and wrap my arms around the trunk. “Chop her, you got to chop me, too,” I threaten.
    He forgets that I turned ten while he was gone, my lucky number. I look at the wilted four-leaf clover on his hat. I am counting on having good luck.
    Jack doesn’t look twice at me before he adjusts his cowboy hat straight on his head and swings the ax. It hits only inches from my hands, taking a bitter bite out of my tree. I jump. Yell. Mama watches from the porch. Just stands there and watches, her arms crossed in front of her like a collapsed X .
    Jack raises the ax out past his right shoulder, both hands tight against its splintered handle, his dark leather skin tight against his square jaw. My arms tight against Sweetie’s rugged trunk.
    Jack swings again. Misses my hands by three inches at most. His breath makes me gag. It smells like nibbled pears the deer leave behind to rot in the pasture.
    “I’ll pick them up,” I yell, looking out into the yard where hundreds of brown sweet gum seedpods shoot their spikes out into the world like tiny daggers. Jack doesn’t listen. Instead, he pulls the ax back again and takes aim. His flannel shirt is soaked dark under his arms. His jeans are worn through at the hems, and his stubbled cheeks look like a fresh field at harvest. Beads of sweat line up between his brows. Heat from the sky, the soil, the sips of whiskey. All there, burning up his insides as he holds that ax, heavy above Sweetie and me.
    “I promise!” I yell again, refusing to move, even if that means he’s taking me down with her. “I’ll pick them up!”
    Jack stares hard. I stare right back. “Every last one of them,” he orders. Then he swings the ax into her trunk one last time and leaves it there. He turns his back and limps up the porch steps, right past Mama, like she’s not even there. Like she’s an invisible, unworthy, nothing mama.
    I spend a good ten minutes pulling and tugging on Jack’s ax, trying to work it back out of my tree. But once it finally gives free, I realize the scars are there for good.

     
    By the time I work the ax out of Sweetie’s trunk, Jack’s gone again. His truck is nothing more than a blurry ball of dust in the distance. I don’t say much to Mama. I’m mad at her for not taking up for me. When I think about it, I was mad at her even before Jack sliced into Sweetie. Mad because she didn’t hold my hand during Sloth’s funeral and because she let me spend two nights sleeping outside alone. Mad because she lets Jack treat her like a punching bag, leaving marks we call bangers and stamps. Mad because she never told Sloth thank you for taking care of me. Mad because she won’t take care of herself.
    Right now, Mama is ironing a basket of clothes for one of the rich ladies in town. She’s singing “Stormy Weather,” and I don’t want to be here. I want to be with Sloth, catching fish or hunting deer or cooking stew.
    “I’m going fishing,” I tell Mama. She nods and keeps right on singing, and by the time I hit the porch, Sloth is there to greet me with two cane poles and a can of worms.
    I can see him, plain as day. “You ready?” he asks.
    But Sloth is dead.