Swamplandia!

by Karen Russell

  Thirst dragged me by my neck to the bottom creek and I was halfway to water before I noticed the clothesline. Clotheslines, I realized—there were half a dozen of them strung like a winking web in the high branches. Clothes were snapping all along both banks of the canal. The blouses nearest to me hung like cutouts against the sun, pinned and flapping. Sunshine turned them mild shades of gold or ghostly whites. The vaguest beiges made me think of photographs waiting to develop.

  Some of the clothes looked antique. I found a woman’s glove with a star-shaped wine stain over the palm. Each finger was bent against the wire by a clothespin. Many of the items looked burned and stained, moth-eaten. A gingham sundress had holes that I could have put my fist through. I thought again of photographs in the developing solution of the blue-violet air. Only the sky out here seemed like a deteriorating solution—it was erasing them.

  A black hat brim—just the brim—hung from two pins like a shocked O.

  Oh. I took a step toward the tree line, and for a second the maze of clotheslines looked as if they went on forever and ever. A line of billowing dresses that stretched to infinity, missing their women. All the silhouettes were wrinkling. Then I blinked and the image of an eternally twining line was gone. The clothes just looked like dirty old clothes strung from one branch to another again, mosquitoes shimmering vacantly around them. But where had all this clothing come from, in the middle of the swamp? Mama. The name came to me without warning out of the aching blue sky. Mama Weeds.

  There is a legend in our swamp about a lady, a laundress—or a ghost, or a female monster—named Mama Weeds. She was like an island bogeyman. Her story predated us. The Chief liked to tell it to tourists: he’d ham it up and do all the different drawling voices like a radio play.

  Mama Weeds started life as a real woman, Midnight Drouet, a light-skinned black seamstress descended from freed slaves who lived in the Ten Thousand Islands. A beautiful woman, so quiet that strangers assumed she was mute, with no real interest in rearing children or marrying a man. She moved to the deep interior of the swamp and worked there as a seamstress and a laundress; the pioneers could leave their clothing with her and she’d sew up holes and sew on faux gold buttons, a bottomless bucket of which she’d brought with her from the factory that once employed her in Troy, New York. People swore that she could get any stain out in the river by her house. Her few neighbors, moonshiners and gator skinners among them, were incensed by her presence.

  “You won’t make it,” they told her. “You won’t last the wet season. You’ll howl at all the mosquitoes, the snakes, the scalybacks that dig their holes beneath your floorboards.”

  But Midnight Drouet didn’t howl and she didn’t go mad—the way my dad told the story, her composure was like a gun she kept cocked and pointed at her door. Five years later the gator skinners were infuriated to discover that she had, in fact, made it and lasted. Midnight built her own buttonwood shack and never asked for anybody’s help. She refused to let her neighbors hunt on her property. One day she mentioned to the bird warden that she’d shot a ten-foot alligator with her .22—he had been going for her dog, she said, a huge smoky mongrel named Luke. No: she had not bothered to skin the alligator for the tanneries. No: she hadn’t tried to sell or cure its meat. Word of this failure to profit from slaughter got around and the glade crackers were appalled—the Depression was on and here she’d killed an alligator with a huge dollar value and refused to skin the damn thing? Unforgivable. Selfish. Evil. Any one of them would have been glad to turn the carcass into coins for their own families. Apparently the bull gator’s head had languished in the water behind her house until the scales slipped, its hide moon-permeated and worthless.

  And then it’s said that a man out there, or several men, rowed over to her island at night. “He” or “they” killed Miss Drouet, in cold blood. The decision was cold cognition, explained my brother, who liked to add a pinch of forensics to our gory swamp legends. Most people believe it was the work of several men, owing to the kind of damage that they reputedly did to her. For no other reason than that she’d killed that alligator and let it rot! A cardinal sin in those days, according to the Chief, back when people were killing the last snowy egrets for a buck five …

  This part always made me dart under the covers, because I couldn’t stop seeing poor Miss Drouet in my mind’s eye, gagged and dragged down to the water by her murderers, dead already and now drowning, too, her cloth dress opening like a flower on the swamp water in a mixed-up and evil chronology. Her dead body floating. Her dead face, the mask of it, rising and falling on the sea’s uneasy breath.

  Panthers found and finished her in the cattails. Wind unstitched her skeleton. Weeds sprayed outward from the heart-shaped wreck of her pelvis; a sinkhole opened beneath her and gave way with the suddenness of caved ice, swallowing her bones. Children who had never heard about Luke or Midnight Drouet began to report seeing a shadowy figure along rivers, beneath the dry fingers of palms. “Mama Weeds!” a little glade cracker boy called her: the woman he saw was standing in the Caloosahatchee with a quiet dog by her side, covered in pigweed. The first child who saw her hadn’t been frightened: she was doing laundry, he said, beating clothes against rocks, beating the dyes and patterns right out of them until colored oils ran downstream in twining browns and indigos and reds. The name stuck. If ever you saw a woman alone at the edge of the swamp at dusk, that lady was her, that was Mama.

  I touched my throat. Personally, I had always considered the story of Mama Weeds a little silly. I had rambled all over the islands and I never once saw a ghost dog or a weedy lady in a lake. Kiwi was always telling me that Chief Bigtree’s swamp lore was uniquely stupid and that I didn’t have to believe it—if the swamp boomers had killed Midnight, he said, assuming a woman named Midnight Drouet had indeed existed, then she was dead and that was that.

  But what if I was looking at an aerial cemetery? What if these clothes were Mama Weeds’s collection? In the vacant spots where no clothes were hanging, the line seemed to disappear against the blue sky. Your eyes could pick it up again further down the trees as tines of light. Far down in the west I could see five or six buzzards, spaced out on the clothesline like mainland pigeons on a telephone wire. Below them, some family’s checkered tablecloth made half a bubble on the wind.

  I nearly jumped out of my skin; I saw a jacket that I recognized. It was one of the articles closest to me, pinned a few feet from where I was standing. A jacket that was so old and sun-faded that it had gone cuticle white—a WPA jacket, Bigtree museum quality, the Chief would have gone berserk for it. The shirt beside it had checks running in a canary net over the fabric; the last time I saw this garment, Osceola had been wearing it in our kitchen. Initials were sewn in cursive on the pocket—L.T.—in fat raspberry thread. Then a brighter purple caught my eye, an amethyst, the same shade as the ribbon around my wrist, and I saw that Ossie’s favorite skirt was hanging one line over. It was the clothing she’d been wearing when she left to marry Louis T.

  I was pulling Ossie’s skirt from the line when a woman appeared around the side of the house. The occupant! I started to open my mouth to call for help, stopped.

  She was huge—not fat so much as absolutely solid. She might have seemed ugly in a run-of-the-mill way to me if she’d been a tourist on our boardwalk. I had seen plenty of out-of-the-way women who looked like her before; she wasn’t covered in pigweed, there was no panting hound named Luke beside her. She had big dimpled arms, a dizzying profusion of gray-and-black hair. She was wearing a dress that looked ready to burst off her. It was too delicate for her, with its short puffed sleeves and its color, a faded yellow with tiny heart-shaped white flowers. My mother used to wear a dress like that, with a very similar look. No, I thought with a slow and brain-penetrating chill, she used to wear this dress. I was certain now that I was staring at Mama Weeds.

  “What are you doing here, girl?”

  She looked like a woman but I wouldn’t be fooled. I saw my mother’s
dress hanging off her and I knew this creature was a thief, a monster.

  “How did you get these things?” I yelled. “What did you do with my sister?”

  “Your sister!”

  And then her big hand was on my shoulder and I ducked away from her. Her breath felt moist on my cheeks. She grabbed at me and I raked my nails down her arm; she screamed and I twisted away.

  “What on God’s earth are you talking about? Where’s your mother, girl? Are you out here alone? You got a sister with you?”

  At the mention of my mother I shuddered out of her grasp. This creature was teasing me. “You can’t have her!” I screamed. I tried to wrench the dress off her.

  Our eyes met. I looked up, still swaying from my fistfuls of the stolen dress. What I saw inside them was all landscape: no pupil or colored hoop of iris but the great swamp—the islands, the saw-grass prairies. Long grasses seemed to push onward for miles inside the depths of her eyes. Inside each oval I saw a world of saw grass and no people. Believe me—I know how that must sound. But I stood there and I watched as feathery clouds blew from her left eye behind the bridge of her nose and appeared again in her right socket. I saw a nothing that rolled forward forcefully forever. There was nobody in the ether of either white sky.

  I heard the wind on the pond all around us, a deep clay smell rising from her skin. When she blinked again, her eyes looked black and oily, ordinary. For years I’ve wondered if this person I met was only a woman.

  “You’re a monster,” I said quietly. “I wish you’d give me back my mother.”

  “Girl, you are not making a lick of sense now …”

  “Get away from me!” I screamed. “You can’t have these! My sister is alive.” I used the Bigtree maneuvers to get away from her, dodging the hand that snaked out for me as quickly as I’d leap away from a Seth’s thrashing tail, lunging at a spot above her calf where the dress hung loose. I had to get my family away from her.

  “What are you talking about, your sister? You need to calm down. My God, you look like some rabid animal! How old are you, girl? How did you get way out here?”

  Her voice made me think of the Bird Man’s voice, bright with a false kindness. I held Osceola’s and Louis’s clothing and began to back away from her, a snarl clawing its way up my throat. I had rescued their clothes and a two-inch triangle of my mother’s dress.

  “Hey, girl!” the monster shouted. “You need help! Girl, get back here!”

  When I got to a small drift slough I drank more of the water. I ate saw-grass buds, peeled sticks between my teeth. No longer did I think that drinking the water was a bad idea—I didn’t have any ideas left in my head, I was all clouds. A burning thirst was unraveling my stitching from the inside. I held the clothing to my chest and tried in a fuzzy way to figure out what this jumble of fabrics meant—that my sister was alive out here? That my sister was dead? I clutched what I’d managed to salvage: a small ball. After my battle with Mama Weeds I was tired, tired. Thinking felt like lifting spadefuls of heavy dirt.

  As I walked I kept seeing the monster’s face: the spheres of grass blown inward and split as easily as bubbles. Her eyes as pure holes. I felt I’d glimpsed then what would happen at the world’s end when the stars cracked open. It was not a picture of heaven this Mama Weeds fixed on me like a gaze but something much bigger: a breaking apart, a mindcrush, a red smear pulsing where two black tunnels met; I found I actually couldn’t think about it.

  I hadn’t traveled very far at all when I saw signs of a human presence. Cracked sticks, an empty plastic bottle still dewed with juice. This made sense, I thought, remembering the woman and her nearby shack. But then I saw a black feather, and another. Tiny feathers clinging to a gray net of moss on a trunk.

  It’s not him, I told myself. There are about a thousand species of birds in our swamp. I didn’t run now but pushed forward through the thickets very quickly. I was still hugging what I’d saved from the line. This little yellow triangle of flowers from Mom’s old dress. When I looked at it now I wasn’t so sure that it had belonged to her dress at all—anyhow, the scrap was so tiny that it just had half a flower on it, the pattern didn’t even get a chance to repeat itself. I slid it into one fist and held on to it, punched against the trunks.

  In the east the sky throbbed with recurring heat lightning. It was some o’clock. I put on Louis Thanksgiving’s jacket, which reached below the crusts of my knees; I unscrolled the old veil that I found in his pocket and tied it around my face. I did this for pragmatic reasons: an afternoon thundershower was sweeping the prairie and the bugs were all over. I figured the veil would work just as well for me as it had for the early Florida dredgemen to keep the bugs out of my nose and mouth. Out here the mosquitoes were after me for red gallons—you could see clouds of them hanging above the grassland. I’m sure they are still out there hovering like that, like tiny particles of an old, dissolved appetite, something prehistoric and very scary that saturates the air of that swamp. A force that could drain you in sips without ever knowing what you had been, or seeing your face.

  Ahead of me, through the tiny squares of the veil, I viewed saw grass for aeons, saw grass with no end in sight. These were the deadlands, the flatlands, I assumed now, the place that the Bird Man had been referring to all along. The plants grew razor-straight, and they were almost twice my height, nine feet tall and fingered with so many tiny knives. Ghost gray or yellowish gray or a dull waspy brown, the colors shifting subtly as clouds passed over them; there was no other variation in any direction on the monotone prairie. The stalks grew out of a calcareous marl, hidden under three feet of water, a soil that crumbles under your weight. My heart sank; my life wasn’t going to be long enough to reach the end of this place.

  But I walked anyways. I tried not to know that I wasn’t going to make it, to undo that knowledge like a knot.

  I buttoned Louis Thanksgiving’s shirt right up to the collar.

  I tightened Ossie’s ribbon and I double-knotted the mosquito veil.

  I squeezed my mom’s scraplet into my fist.

  As I walked I told myself a story—I imagined myself as Louis Thanksgiving. I mean I actually pictured myself inside of him. Black hair and swinging elbows. When I closed my eyes I pretended I was Louis, being carried. I could see him rising like a limp balloon into the clouds beneath the birds’ beating wings. Through Louis’s eyes I saw the dark green tops of the trees, the Argus eyes of the secret lakes and sloughs opening for us as we drifted up. Then Louis Thanksgiving was carried so high that he couldn’t see anything besides his own sun-freckled hands. They swung beneath him in two pale green cones of space. The trees vanished. Ice lands whispered up in sulfur curls. The world below him had no rocks, no terrestrial scars, it was fathoms of air and evening blue. The last lakes looked small as stars. Two sets of iron-gray talons dug like prongs into the meat of his shoulders. And I could feel them, under the jacket, eight points of pressure against my sternum.

  This wasn’t a real possession: I could also feel the mud squeeze into my sneakers, hear thunder. I could fold Louis’s thin collar under my fingers and inhale the chalky mosquito wire. I wasn’t Ossie, lost in my big trance—I was just myself telling myself a story. But I wouldn’t have made it very far without the Dredgeman’s Revelation, which distracted me from the pain of sunburn and thirst. If I looked up and saw the buzzards wheeling in the thermals like black motes in a blue eye, I forced myself to relocate my gaze to my sneakers and start again: The dredgeman had a name, Louis Thanksgiving … My own thoughts were like bad food, so instead I told myself the story of Louis Thanksgiving fishing for bowfin on the deck of the dredge barge, and Louis Thanksgiving lost and happy in the Black Woods, Louis swimming under the wheel with the captain’s knife in his mouth, until I became Louis, walking.

  Rain began and ended, I don’t know how many times. Light faded like water draining into a hole. Through the mosquito veil the endless prairie ordered itself into tiny squares and I kept moving through them. Who kn
ows how long I spent wading through those serrated grasses? I must have recited the Dredgeman’s Revelation at least a hundred times forward and backward. I added a new ending: in my version, the dredgeman escaped, and lived. The little hand of a clock sprung back, and Louis Thanksgiving drew breath. The engine room gasped its flames into the wood, and the explosion never happened. Birds shrank away into a fatal yellow moon. Everybody, all the dredgemen, they survived.

  At first I didn’t understand the scene in front of me: forty-odd yards from where I was standing the line of saw grass ended, and I could see beyond it to maple and bay trees and the brown water of an alligator hole. I was within sight of a sudden elevation—six or seven feet, a spectacular height in this part of the swamp—where the ten-foot-tall stalks sheared away quite suddenly and became dimpled rock. The eternity I’d seen ended as cleanly as if someone had run a scythe through it. I chanced a look at the sky: towering clouds were moving swiftly toward me, as big as white ships. The skies were beautiful here, and empty.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Kiwi Takes to the Skies

  Vijay and Kiwi were ripping Moo Cow creamers for their coffees at the Burger Burger. They kept tossing the crenellated pink containers onto the restaurant table until it looked like a Ken doll had gone on some unmanly daiquiri bender. They’d both ordered the A.M. Delicious! Dollar Breakfast Combo #2: cheddar, sausage, and egg sandwiches. You got what you paid for in this life, said Vijay through a nuclear yellow mouthful of fast-food cheese.

  “Sure hope you don’t crash today, Bigtree.”

  “Okay, are you serious? Can we talk about anything else? That is unduly ominous for daybreak.”