Lightning Tree  by Rusty Van Reeves

Just east of the Big Black River is a flood plain that empties into a cypress swamp.  At the edge of this swamp is a peculiar slab of about twenty acres of earth, pasture and forest that juts high into the sky, forming a ridge that overlooks the small town of Clay, Mississippi. 

Long ago the Choctaw Indians named it Crow’s Ridge.  There is a long-needle pine tree on the second tier of Crow’s Ridge, sitting alone in a flat meadow of sage.  It is as old as anyone in Sisqua County can remember.  At some point in the past century or two it was struck by lightning.  From the looks of its ravaged exterior it has been struck several times, but the amazing thing is it’s still alive. 

No other trees surround it and it grows from the hardened Yazoo clay, a gummy unforgiving soil best suited for pottery and brick.  At sunrise and sunset the tree looks almost like a totem pole, majestic against the changing colors of the Mississippi skyline.  It is defiant in the face of insects, drought and the occasional wrath of God Himself—-a symbol that even alone it is possible to go against the tide, to face overwhelming odds and to survive in some form. 

The local Choctaw Indians call it the Lightning Tree.  It is a sacred monument to many, touched by the hand of The Maker. 

In the summer of 1959, two little boys, one colored and one white, discovered a body dangling from a rope looped on the highest branch of the Lightning Tree.  The rope was draped across one of the remaining deformed appendages and tied off at the base. 

The decomposing corpse rocked gently, swaying in the wind.  A noose was tied at the neck, the body slumped and deteriorating rapidly in the heat, the face disfigured beyond recognition, hands dangling at the side and covered in flies.  Then there was the eerie sound of the rope creaking against the bark with every twisting turn of the body. 

It was a chilling sight to behold, a disturbing reminder of man’s uncanny knack for cruelty.  The two boys stood there speechless in the morning light, gazing up in horror, each wondering if the poor departed was their father.