by Rick Bass
“All we were going to do was live out on that boat and make love mostly all day,” she said. “Preacher wasn’t hurtin’ anybody. We had a garden, and we went fishing. We skimmed the river in our wood canoe. One day he caught a porpoise. It had come all the way up from the Gulf after a rainstorm and was confused by the fresh water. It pulled us all over the river for a whole afternoon.”
A whole afternoon. I could see the porpoise leaping, and I could see Daisy as she was then, with a straw hat low around her brow. I could see Preacher leaning forward, battling the big fish.
“It got away,” Daisy said. “It broke the line.” She was sitting on the porch, shelling peas from her garden, remembering. “Oh, we both cried,” she said. “Oh, we wanted that fish.”
Elizabeth and I live here quietly, smoothing things over, making the country tame again; but it is like walking on ice. Sometimes I imagine I can hear echoes, noises and sounds from a long time ago.
“This place isn’t on the map, right?” Elizabeth will ask. It’s a game we play. We’re frightened of cities, of other people.
“It might as well not even exist,” I’ll tell her.
She seems reassured.
The seasons mix and swirl. Except for the winter rains and the brutality of August, it’s easy to confuse one season with the next. Sometimes wild turkeys gobble and fan in the dust of the road, courting. Their lusty gobbles awaken us at daylight—a watery, rushing sound. That means it is April, and the floodwaters will not be coming back. Every sight, every small scent and sound, lies still, its own thing, as if there are no seasons. As if there is only one season.
I’m glad Elizabeth and I have found this place. We have not done well in other places. Cities—we can’t understand them. In a city everything seems as though it is over so fast: minutes, hours, days, lives.
Daisy keeps her yard very neat; she cuts it with the push mower weekly. Tulips and roses line the edges of it. She’s got two little beagle pups, and they roll and wrestle in the front yard and on her porch. Daisy conducts church services in the abandoned Mount Zion Baptist Church, and sometimes we go. Daisy’s a good preacher. The church used to be on the river bank, but now it looks out on a cotton field.
Daisy’s sister, Maggie, lives in Rodney too. She used to have a crush on Preacher when he was a little boy. She says he used to sleep, curled up in a blanket, in a big empty cardboard box at the top of a long playground slide in front of the church. The slide is still there, beneath some pecan trees. It’s a magnificent slide, the kind you find in big city parks. Mostly wood, it’s tall and steep, rubbed shiny and smooth. It’s got a little cabin or booth at the top, and that’s where Preacher used to sleep, Maggie says. He didn’t have any parents.
The cabin kept the rain off. Sometimes the two girls sat up there with him and played cards. They’d take turns sliding down in the cardboard box, and they’d watch as white chickens walked past, pecking at the dust and clucking.
“Maybe he always wanted one for a pet,” Maggie says, trying to figure it out.
Daisy says they can put you away in Whitfield for forty years for being a chicken chaser. That was what the social workers saw when they happened to pass through Rodney once: Preacher chasing chickens down the street like a crazy man. He was just doing it for fun—well, he might have been a little hungry, Daisy owns up—but they took him away.
Daisy says she’s been keeping track on her calendars. There are old ones tacked to every wall in her house, beginning with the year they hauled Preacher away. The forty years will be up this fall. She expects he’ll be back after that; he’ll be coming back any day.
Forty years—all for maybe what was just a mistake. Maybe he only wanted one for a pet.
Toward dark the mother pig lures dogs into the swamp. She runs down the middle of what used to be Main Street in a funny high-backed hobble, as if she’s wounded, with all the little runt piglets running ahead of her, protected. A foolish dog follows, slavering at the thought of fresh and easy meat.
When the pig reaches the woods, she disappears into the heavy leafiness and undergrowth, and the dog goes in after her. Then we hear the squalls and yelps of the dog being killed.
The sow sometimes kills dogs in the middle of the day. She simply tramples them, the way a horse would. I’d say she weighs about six or seven hundred pounds, maybe more. Elizabeth carries a rifle when we go for our walks, an old seven-millimeter Mauser, slung over her shoulder on a sling, a relic from the First World War, which never affected Rodney. If that pig charged us, it would rue the day. Elizabeth is a crack shot.
“Are the pigs really cursed people?” Elizabeth asks one evening. We’re over on Daisy’s porch. Maggie is there too, shelling peas. Fireflies are blinking, floating out in the field as if searching with lanterns for something.
“Oh my, yes,” Maggie says. “That big one is a general.”
“I want to see the river,” Elizabeth says for the one hundredth time, and Daisy and Maggie laugh.
Daisy leans forward and jabs Elizabeth’s leg. “How you know there even is a river?” she asks. “How you know we’re not foolin’ you?”
“I can smell it,” Elizabeth says. She places her hand over her heart and closes her eyes. “I can feel it.”
Elizabeth and I put fireflies in empty mayonnaise jars, screw the lids on tight, and punch holes in the tops. We decorate our porch with them at night, or we line the bed with them, and then laugh as we love, with their blinking green bellies going on and off like soft, harmless firecrackers, as if they are applauding. It’s as though we have become Preacher and Daisy. The firefly bottle-lights seem like the coal-oil lamps that lined the sides of their boat in the field. Sometimes we, too, shout out into the night.
The bed: buying it for this old house is one of the best things we’ve ever done. It’s huge, a four-poster, and looks as if it came straight off the set of The Bride of Frankenstein. It has a lace canopy and is sturdy enough to weather our shaking. We have to climb three wooden steps to get into it, and sleeping in it is like going off on some final voyage, so deep is our slumber, so quiet are the woods around us and what is left of the town. The birds will not scream until further into the night, so they are part of our dreams, but comforting. Nothing troubles our sleep, nothing.
Before falling into that exhausted, peaceful sleep, I slip over to the window and unscrew the lids of the jars, releasing the groggy, oxygen-deprived fireflies into the fresh night air. I shake each bottle to make sure I get them all out. They float feebly down into the bushes, blinking. Wounded paratroopers, they return to their world, looking for something, searching for the world they own and know. If you keep them in a bottle too long, they won’t blink anymore.
Elizabeth loves to read. She has books stacked on all the shelves in her sun room, and in all corners, books rise stacked to the ceiling. Sometimes I take iced tea up to her in a pitcher, with lemons and sugar. I don’t go in with it; I just peek through the keyhole. When she’s not near naked from the heat, she sometimes puts on a white dress with lace as she reads. Her hair’s dark, but there by the window it looks washed with light, and she becomes someone entirely different. She disappears when she goes into those books. She disappears and that strange, solitary light seals and bathes her escape. I knock on the door to let her know the iced tea is ready whenever she feels like getting it. Then I go back down the stairs.
After a while I hear the click of the door and the scrape of the tray as she picks it up and carries it to her table. She shuts the door with the back of her foot, or so I imagine, before she goes back to reading, holding the book in one hand while fanning herself with a cardboard fan in the other hand. I’ll go out and sit on the front steps and picture her drinking the tea, and think that I can taste its coolness and freshness.
In summer, even beneath the sweet olive tree, I sweat, but not the way she does in the oven of her upstairs room. There’s no air conditioner, no ceiling fan, and late in the afternoon each day, when she takes off the white
lacy dress, it is soaking wet. She rinses it out in the sink and hangs it on the porch to dry in the night breezes. The dress smells of sweet olive the next morning.
“We were going to have a baby,” Daisy says. “We were just about ready to start when they took him away. We were going to start that week so the baby would be born in the summer.”
The slow summer. The time when nothing moves forward, when everything pauses, and then stops. It’s a good idea.
In August men come from all over this part of the state to pick cotton. The men pick by hand. They do not leave much behind. It’s like a circus. Old white horses appear—perhaps they belong to the pickers, though perhaps they come from somewhere deep in the woods—and they stand out in the cotton and watch. Behind them, red tractor-trailers rise against blue sky, and behind them, the trees. Behind that is the river, which we cannot see but have been told is there.
Then the men are gone, almost all of the cotton is gone, and there are leaves on the roofs of the houses, leaves in our yards. They’re brown and dried up and curled, and the street is covered with them like a carpet. The sweet olive tree doesn’t lose its leaves, but the other trees do. You can hear the pigs rustling in the leaves at night, snuffling for acorns. In the daytime you can hear Daisy moving through them, her slow, heavy steps and the crunching of those leaves. Daisy and Maggie burn their leaves in wire baskets by the side of the old road.
Something about the fall makes us want to go to Daisy’s church services. They last about thirty minutes, and mostly she recites Bible verses, sometimes making a few up, but they sound right. Then she sings for a while. She’s got a good voice.
We sing too. In the early fall when everything is changing, the air takes on a stillness, and we feel like singing to liven things up.
They’re old slave songs that Daisy sings, and you just hum and sway. You can close your eyes and forget about leaving the town of Rodney.
The owl calls at night. He’s big and lives in our attic. There’s a hole in the bedroom ceiling, and we can hear him scrabbling around at ten or eleven o’clock each night. When the moon gets full, it lights the rooms, and the owl emerges from the trees, flies through one of our open windows. We hear him claw-scratch out to the banister, and with a grunt he launches himself. We hear the flapping of wings and then silence. He makes no sound as he flies.
He zooms through the house—third floor, second floor, first—looking for mice. He shrieks when he spots one. He nearly always catches them.
We have watched him from the corner in the big kitchen. Elizabeth was frightened at first, but she isn’t now. The longer we live down here, the less frightened she is of anything. She is growing braver with age, as if bravery is a thing she will be needing more of.
Elizabeth and I want to build something that won’t go away. We’re not sure how to go about it, but some nights we run naked in the moonlight. We catch the old white plugs, the horses, as they wander loose in the cotton fields. We ride them across the fields toward where we think the river is, riding through the fog amid the tracings of the fireflies. But when we get down into the swamp, we get turned around, lost, and we have to turn back.
Daisy’s standing out on her porch sometimes when we come galloping back. “You can’t go to it,” she says, laughing in the night. “It’s got to come to you!”
Afternoons, in the fall, we pick up pecans in front of the old church. We fix grilled cheese sandwiches for supper and share a bottle of wine. We sit on the porch in the frayed wicker swing and watch the moon crest the trees, watch it slide across and over the sky, and we can hear Maggie down the street, humming, weeding in her garden.
One night I awaken from sleep and Elizabeth isn’t in bed with me. I look all over the house for her, and a slight, illogical panic grows as I move through each empty room.
The moon is up and everything is bathed in hard silver. She is sitting on the back porch in her white dress, which is still damp from the wash. She’s barefoot, with her feet hanging over the edge. She’s swinging them back and forth. In the yard the pigs are feeding, the huge mother and the little ones, small dirigibles now, all around her. There’s a warm wind blowing from the south. I can taste the salt in it from the coast. Elizabeth has a book in her lap; she’s reading by the light of the moon.
A dog barks a long way off, and I feel that I should not be watching. So I climb back up the stairs and get into the big bed and try to sleep.
But I want to hold on to something.
Luther, an old blind man who lived down the street, and whom we hardly ever saw, has passed on. Elizabeth and I are the only ones with backs strong enough to dig the grave; we bury him in the cemetery on the bluff. There are toppled gravestones from the 1850s, gravestones from the war with C.S.A. cut in the stone. Some of the people buried there were named Emancipation—it was a common name then.
We dig the hole without much trouble. It’s soft, rich earth. Daisy says words as we fill the hole back up. That rain of earth, shovels of it, covering the box with him in it. I had to build the coffin out of old lumber. Sometimes in the spring, and in the fall too, rattlesnakes come out of the cane and lie on the flat gravestones for warmth. Because of the snakes, hardly anyone goes to the cemetery now.
A few years ago one of Daisy and Maggie’s half sisters died and they buried her up here. Her grave has since grown over with brambles and vines. Now there is the skeleton of a deer impaled high on the iron spikes of the fence that surrounds the graveyard. Dogs, maybe, had been chasing it, and the deer had tried to leap over the high fence. The skull seems to be opening its mouth in a scream.
I remember that we piled stones over the mound of fresh earth to keep the pigs from rooting.
Daisy has a salve, made from some sort of root, that she smears over her eyelids at night. It’s supposed to help her fading vision, maybe even bring it back, I don’t know. Whenever she comes over to read our mail, she just holds the letters and runs her hand over them, doesn’t really look at the words. I think she imagines what each letter is saying, what history lies behind it, what chain of circumstances.
Daisy and Preacher used to go up onto the bluffs overlooking Rodney and walk among the trees. Then they would climb one of the tallest trees so they could see the river. They’d sit on a branch, Daisy says, and have a picnic. They’d feel the river breezes and the tree swaying beneath them. They would watch the faraway river for the longest time.
Afterward they would climb down and move through the woods some more, looking for old battle things—rusted rifles, bayonets, canteens. They would sell these relics to the museum in Jackson for a dollar apiece, boxing them up for the mailman, tying the boxes shut with twine, and sending them COD. There was always enough money to get by on.
Those nights that they came down off the bluff, they might go out onto their tilted ship, out in the deep river grass, or they might go to the river itself and swim. Or sometimes they would sit on a sandbar and look up, listening to the sounds of the water. Once in a while a barge would go by. In the night, in the dark, its silhouette would look like a huge gunboat.
Wild grapes grew along the riverbank, tart purple grapes, cool in the night, and they would pick and eat those as they watched the river.
“It can go just like that,” Daisy says, snapping her fingers. “It can go that fast.”
The pigs are growing fat. They’re not piglets anymore; they are pigs. One morning a shot awakens us, and we sit up and look out the window.
Daisy is straddling one of the pigs and gutting it with a huge knife. She pulls out the pig’s entrails and feeds them to her beagles. The other pigs have run off into the woods, but they will be back. It’s a cool morning, almost cold, and steam is rising from the pig’s open chest. Later, in the afternoon, there’s the good smell of fresh meat cooking.
Maggie shoots a pig at dusk, for herself, and two of the old men from the other side of town get theirs the next day.
“I don’t want any,” Elizabeth says after she’s slid down t
he banister. Her eyes are magic, she’s shivering and holding herself, dancing up and down, goose-pimply. She’s happy to be so young. “I feel as if I’ll be jinxed,” she says. “I mean, those pigs lived under our house.”
The smell of pork, of frying bacon, hangs heavy over the town, like the blue haze from cannon fire.
Coyotes at night, and the peacocks howling. Pecans underfoot. A full moon and the gleam of night cotton. We mount an old white plug and ride in the cotton field. It’s mostly stripped, ragged and picked over, forgotten-looking. Only a few stray white bolls remain, perfect snowy blossoms, untouched by the pickers. The scraggly bushes scrape against the bottoms of our bare feet as we ride. It has been four years we’ve been down here in the town of Rodney.
“I’m happy,” Elizabeth says, squeezing my arm from behind on the horse. She taps the horse’s ribs with her heels. The smell of wood smoke, and overhead the nasal, far-off cries of geese going south. The horse plods along in the dust.
Daisy will be starting her church services again, and once more we’ll be going. I’m glad Elizabeth’s happy living in such a little one-horse shell of an ex-town. We’ll hold hands, carry our Bible, and walk slowly down the road to Daisy’s church. There will be a few lazy fireflies at dusk. We’ll go in and sit on the bench and listen to Daisy rant and howl.
Then the moaning songs will start, the ones about being slaves. I’ll shut my eyes and sway, and try not to think of other places and moving on.
And then this is what Elizabeth might say: “You’d better love me”—an order, an ultimatum. But she’ll be teasing, playful, as she knows that’s near all we can do here.
