The Blue Bottle Tree

It's a "blue bottle tree". It's my blue bottle tree. I've been seeking images of bona fide blue bottle trees to go with a mystery story I've been working on. It has been so far impossible to find the "right" tree image. I may have to resort to having someone paint one from my memory.


You say, "what's wrong with your own blue bottle tree?" "What makes a 'bona fide' blue bottle tree?"


Good questions, those, and the same ones I've been trying to explain to my partner, Cat Dancing.
It's all a matter of attitude, and of course, my memory. The trees I remember from my youth are fairly different. And, since my story is set pretty much in that background, then it becomes important.


What are the elements of a "true" blue bottle tree? 
Bare soil, a bushy but dead fig tree, and lots of Milk of Magnesia bottles. Actually any blue bottles that were available. 
No, I said no, wine bottles. 
See the above picture. Almost all wine and mead bottles. 

I did risk three of my precious antique Milk of Magnesia bottles for the picture. 

At the time and place of my youth, most of the old timers took Milk of Magnesia and other OTC preparations. Cat says it's a statement of bad diet, and I suppose it is. That's a whole other subject. 
Hardly anyone would display a wine bottle in the yard. It just wasn't done.
We were in a dry county, to start with, and deeeeeeeeeep in the bible belt.


Few of the average people had grass in the yard, other than scraggly patches of bermuda grass or johnson grass. Enough people were worried about snakes, anyway, that they preferred bare dirt.

And, dead fig trees were common.

I was able to find one picture online of a Milk of Magnesia blue bottle tree. Getting closer!







True, a blue bottle tree is a blue bottle tree. But for the scene I'm setting, and the space I'm invoking, it needs to be right.


I suspect that all the original M.O.M. bottles were scavenged from the existing trees back in the '80's and sold to antique shops. That's why they are so rare today. 


One way or another I'll get that picture!

Scene Two of "The Azure Shade of the Blue Bottle Tree"

    Out here there were family cemeteries every couple of miles. Pioneer families liked to keep their dead close for a lot of reasons. The county historical commission had tracked down and  inventoried hundreds of old cemeteries not long ago and more had been missed. It was impossible for anyone to patrol them all. The next one was three miles away.
    The Insall/Gauss Cemetery was looking neat as Pen drove up. Lisa Garrison’s SUV was near the gate. Pen parked along the bar ditch and looked around as he walked up. Lisa and Mae Insall were standing in the shade. Pen ignored them for bit as he tried to examine the ground. Not much traffic there lately, that was good. The ground was rock hard, not so good. The thin grass showed something had passed. Pen opened the gate and walked over to Lisa. The damage was glaring. Broken headstones littered the ground and tire tracks crossed the softer earth on some of the graves.
    Pen looked at the two women. There was quite a contrast. Lisa's faded jeans, Grateful Dead t-shirt, and feed store cap next to Mae's ancient house dress and poke bonnet. Lisa was taller, but Pen had have bet on Mae in a fight, especially now. She looked mad enough to eat nails and spit tacks. Mae saw saving the old cemeteries, and especially this cemetery, as her personal crusade.
    “This is sickening!” was Lisa’s greeting. “Mae saw the headlights.” Mae snapped out the words. “It was near midnight, I couldn’t sleep."
 “Could you tell how many?”
“Don’t think it was more than two pickups”, she said, “the motor’s weren’t very loud. I came over this morning to see if they’d left any trash. You  know how those parkers are. They leave the most disgusting stuff, horrible. Anyway, I found it like this. I tell you I just saw red! That's Grandpa Isom's grave with the tire track on it, and his second sister's stone is broken. They left the gate open. I had to chase them cows out!”
    Lisa patted her shoulder. “Mae called me, and Sarah Beth both.” Mae shrugged off Lisa’s hand impatiently. “It’s them Satanists again, I keep telling you how bad they are.” Pen and Lisa looked at each other behind Mae’s back. Both of of them pagans, they weren’t aware of any Satanists practicing around Shin Oak.
    Their shared glance wasn't lost on Mae, she was still pretty sharp. “Penrod Sadler! You know they’re always desecrating cemeteries and such. You have to catch them! The Insalls and Gausses have been here since Sam Houston. Grandpa Isom fought at San Jacinto right alongside him! He deserves some respect!”
    Pen couldn't help but agree. Mae wasn't mollified. She refused Lisa’s offer of a lift home. She tugged her faded bonnet snug on her gray hair, took her cane and stalked back through the gate and across the field to her house. “She’s right about one thing,” Lisa told me. “They do need to be stopped. These limestone markers are almost impossible to repair, and some are over a hundred years old!”
    “Stay put, let me look around.”
    Pen knew he wouldn’t be able to get any sort of forensics team out for this, so he got out his camera and sketch book to record whatever he could. There was one clear track of a mud-grip tire on a grave, and a few brown streaks of paint on a broken stone. Small metallic pieces on the broken stone jumped to the magnet on his flashlight. Steel, maybe from a hammer, or a fender. Poor boy forensics.
    “Okay, I think I’ll recognize that tire, and the paint. Must be a brown pickup, with mud grips, carrying some dents. Sound familiar?"
Lisa said, “Can't be more than a hundred or so trucks like that out here, but I’ll put the word out.” Pen knew she would. Lisa knew everyone. Between her and Mae the news would spread faster than the radio and twice as effectively.
    They walked back toward Lisa's SUV, a worried look on her face.       “This is awful, and always bad for us!” Many of their friends were in the "broom closet". Lisa and Pen were both fairly openly Wiccan, and this sort of thing always seemed to focus suspicion on pagans.
    Pen told her goodbye, and went back to the car. Once again, the radio was calling his name.
    “Pen, better get over to Dolly Holt’s place. There's been a shooting.”
Pen told Karen he was on his way, and drove off through the dust devils.

Opening Scene of "The Azure Shade of the Blue Bottle Tree"

County road 217 was hard to see under the heat mirage. Bill Bailey on KSOR was promising another seven days of hundred degree-plus heat. There was no rain in sight, unless you counted the illusion of water on the pavement ahead. The San Martin River was already mostly dry, and the corn stalks in the field were rattling like so much dried paper.  July in Texas, yeah. Deputy Constable Pen Sadler was in a county car, fortunately the air conditioner worked. He would still have preferred his pickup, it wasn't his choice. Pen had just given a runaway teenager a ride home. Whatever she had to face back at the house was a lot better than whatever she'd find at the end of the bus ride Pen had gotten her off of. He hoped she'd come to understand that. Finding runaways is part of the job, so is driving the back roads. Part of the job if you're deputy constable in Copete County, Precinct 3 anyway.
There was more to look at on this hot Saturday than heat waves.
The road to Cedar Knob is paved with weird inventions. Along one side of 217 stood the strangest collection of machinery that anyone had ever seen. Newt Belmont and his descendents had been blacksmiths and inventors of farm equipment since back in the days of oxen. The pieces varied in elegance, but all worked, after a fashion. As each machine finished whatever seasonal chore it was designed to do, it was parked along the fence, sometimes never to be used again. By now, there were dozens of machines beside the road, most of unknown origin, slowly returning to the soil. A person could sort of trace out the progression from animal to machine power in the line of Rube Goldberg mechanisms. The actual purpose of each machine was more obscure.
Few Belmonts remained, but the neighbors swore that the number of machines was increasing. The current theory on the spit and whittle bench figured that Newt's grandson had put an old Farmall F-12 tractor out to stud before he passed on, and the machine was still roaming the cedar breaks, pop-popping in the moonlight. The tractor had joined the long dead Comanches and charcoal burners in haunting the hot summer nights.
Today the sight of the mechanical orchard gave him one of those weird shivers up the spine that had nothing to do with the car air conditioning. Today it seemed more surreal, as if it had recently featured in forgotten nightmares. Pen knew this road, suddenly he wasn't sure about what was around the turn.
Pen rounded the corner. A more conventionally haunting scene came into view, Mount Zion Cemetery. Mount Zion Baptist Chapel still stood in fair repair, a revival meeting was still held every year in the old tabernacle. The cemetery work day was still well attended, a couple dozen members of the oldest families in the area showed up to wield hoes and brush hogs to honor their dead. It was definitely lack of honor that prompted the call that brought Pen here today.
He parked the car and got out. The air conditioner was a mixed blessing. Comfortable, but insulating and unnatural. Outside, the heat hit him in the face like a wall. As soon as he had adjusted, it wasn't so bad. There was a good south breeze. The wonderful summer smells of cut grass, baked wildflowers, and just warm earth became evident. Pen walked in through the open lych gate.
The small group was eating their potluck lunches on plank tables in the shade of the only sizeable oak. Tom Linder waved him over. "Hey, Pen. Glad you're here."
Mabel Linder said, “It’s Uncle Euless’ family”, pointing to a group of stones a bit separate from the rest.
At first glance it was just stones, but then Pen saw the headstones that were newly toppled, rocky earth showing at their bases. A couple of them had been broken. They were, mostly, thin limestone slabs, their lettering weathered and almost unreadable. Someone had knocked several of them over intact. Others had been snapped off, the bases left like broken teeth. They talked about it while Pen looked around and made notes. He shared their aggravation but there was little to do. No witnesses, no clear evidence, everyone “knew” it was drunken kids up to meanness, but no one was sure which ones. The law was pretty clear. Vandalism and destruction in a cemetery could be prosecuted as either a misdemeanor or a felony, depending. Pen promised to work on it and headed back to the car.
The radio was already squawking. It was Karen, the dispatcher, there was more vandalism reported, just a few miles away. 

Copyright 2011 William C. Seward