Music of the Swamp

by Lewis Nordan

  Music of the Swamp

  A NOVEL BY LEWIS NORDAN

  Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill

  For Alicia

  Take away the arrogance, the battery, and the alcohol, and down comes innocence.

  —Judy Grahn

  Contents

  PART I

  Music of the Swamp

  PART II

  Cabbage Opera

  A Hank of Hair, A Piece of Bone

  Train, Train, Coming round the Bend

  The Cellar of Runt Conroy

  Porpoises and Romance

  Field and Stream

  PART III

  How Bob Steele Broke My Father’s Heart

  Creatures with Shining Scales

  EPILOGUE

  Owls

  PART I

  Music of the Swamp

  THE INSTANT Sugar Mecklin opened his eyes on that Sunday morning, he believed that this was a special day and that something new and completely different from anything he had ever known before was about to jump out at him from somewhere unexpected, a willow shade, a beehive, a bird’s nest, the bream beds in Roebuck Lake, a watermelon patch, the bray of the iceman’s mule, the cry of herons in the swamp, he did not know from where, but wherever it came from he believed it would be transforming, it would open up worlds to him that before today had been closed. In fact, worlds seemed already to be opening to him.

  When he later came into the kitchen and sat down to his Sunday breakfast of chocolate milk and homemade bread, toasted and smeared with sweet butter and fresh cinnamon, his mother noticed a difference in Sugar and placed her hand against his forehead and said, “Are you running a fever?”

  And then when Sugar’s father came into the room, Sugar leaped up out of his chair and did what he had never done before, he grabbed his father suddenly around the neck and hugged him and said, “I love you, Daddy.”

  This is the kind of day it was. This is the way Sugar Mecklin’s summer morning started out.

  First there were the mice. Sugar was still asleep when he heard them singing. Sugar was dreaming that he was standing alone in the shade of tupelo gums and cypress and chinaberry and weeping willow and mimosa and that the water of Roebuck Lake was exactly as it was in real life, slick and opaque as a black mirror, with the trees and high clouds reflected perfectly in the surface. He dreamed that he walked out to the end of a short pier, the one that in real life he had built, and saw a beautiful creature of some kind, a mermaid maybe, rise up from the water. Her breasts were bare, and she was singing directly to him as she combed her long hair with a comb the color of bone, and in the other hand held a mirror as dark and fathomless as the mirror-surface of Roebuck Lake.

  He believed that this creature could foretell his future, or endow him with power and knowledge. There seemed little wonder to Sugar Mecklin, waking up to such thoughts, that this day should turn out to be special.

  And then once he was awake, there was Elvis. Until this very morning Sugar Mecklin had never before heard the name of Elvis Presley. And now here he was, this Elvis person, in full uh-huh complaint on Sugar’s Philco radio, and he seemed truly to be singing about the dream that Sugar Mecklin had just dreamed. Elvis told Sugar you’ll be so lonely you could die.

  It was as if the mermaid’s song had come to him first through the sweet voices of the mice in his mattress and then from WMC in Memphis.

  These were the reasons Sugar Mecklin astonished his father at the breakfast table by grabbing him suddenly and holding onto him for all he was worth and almost actually saying, pleading, Don’t ever leave me, Daddy, I’ll be so lonely I will die.

  He did not actually say these words, he said only, “I love you, Daddy!” in a bright voice, and his father struggled and finally muttered, “Good luck on your travels through life,” and then went out to the garage to get paint buckets and brushes and dropcloths and a stepladder to paint the bathroom, which had needed painting for a long time, probably.

  And then after breakfast, while Sugar Mecklin’s father spread paint and Sugar Mecklin’s mother ran cold water through a colander full of figs to be put up in paraffin-sealed Mason jars as purpley preserves, Sugar Mecklin thought it might not be a bad idea at all to comb his hair with Wildroot Cream Oil and put on his hightop tennies and take a walk right down the middle of Lonely Street and stand along the shore of dark, wooded Roebuck Lake and look across its waters in search of barebreasted women. It was a day in which such a thing might happen, he believed.

  His mother said, “Are you going to Sunday school this morning, Sugar?”

  Sugar Mecklin said, “Haven’t decided.”

  His mother said, “I wish you would put on a clean shirt and go to Sunday school once in a while.”

  Not today. Today was a Sunday, this was a whole summer, in fact, in which magic might prove once and for all to be true. It was a summer in which Sugar Mecklin noticed many things, as if they had not been there before, like the mice in his mattress, like Elvis Presley on the Philco. This summer Sugar Mecklin heard the high soothing music of the swamp, the irrigation pumps in the rice paddies, the long whine and complaint, he heard the wheezy, breathy asthma of the compress, the suck and bump and clatter like great lungs as the air was squashed out and the cotton was wrapped in burlap and bound with steel bands into six-hundred-pound bales, he heard the operatic voice of the cotton gin separating fibers from seeds, he heard a rat bark, he heard a child singing arias in a cabbage patch, he heard a parrot make a sound like a cash register, he heard the jungle rains fill up the Delta outside his window, he heard the wump-wump-wump-wump-wump of biplanes strafing the fields with poison and defoliants, he read a road sign that said WALNUT GROVE IS RADAR PATROLLED and heard poetry in the language, he heard mourning doves in the walnut trees.

  And for a moment, when he arrived at the edge of the water, Sugar Mecklin almost believed that he had found whatever magical thing he had come looking for.

  When he looked across the water to the spot where in his dream he had seen the woman admiring her own reflection in a black mirror, he heard clear sweet tuneful voices raised in plaintive anthems to God in heaven.

  There was a cow, a brown-and-white heifer with horns, standing chest-deep in the water directly across the lake. The cow was not supposed to be there, it had only wandered there and could not be coaxed out of the water in time, and so it only stood and once or twice flicked its tail against invisible insects that may have been flying in the morning air.

  All about the cow were men and women in white robes—black persons, colored people, Negroes, whatever they were called—and they too, like the cow, were standing chest-deep in the water, and it was their voices that Sugar Mecklin heard in song.

  It was a baptizing. I come to the garden alone the voices said, in complaint as profound as Elvis Presley’s uh-huh and the voice I hear falling on my ear the singers sang, speaking of Jesus, who would take away loneliness.

  The song went on, and then when it finished there were other songs, questions—shall we gather at the river, the singers wanted to know the beautiful, the beautiful river—and in a way all of the songs were about loneliness, and the defeat of loneliness, and the heartbreak if it could not be defeated, as probably it never could you’ll be so lonely you could die

  And so this was the happiest moment Sugar Mecklin had ever felt in his life. He was almost delirious with strong feeling. His face was flushed and even in the Mississippi heat he was almost cold, almost shivering with emotion. The sweat beads on his arms were like a thin film of ice.

  And then another child showed up.

  Sugar Mecklin was startled. It was Sweet Austin. Where had Sweet Austin come from, so unexpectedly? Sugar Mecklin thought Sweet Austin looked a little like he had seen a ghos
t.

  Sweet said, “Hey, Sugar Mecklin.”

  Sugar said, “Hey, Sweet Austin.”

  Sweet Austin walked out onto the narrow pier and stood behind Sugar, and for a minute or two neither of them said anything. Sugar and Sweet were the only two completely white-haired, blue-eyed, freckle-faced, skinny-assed boys in their whole class. People thought it was funny that they looked so much alike and their names were almost the same, Sugar and Sweet.

  They only stood and watched the baptizing, oh what needless pain we bear sang the choir on the other side of the lake.

  Sugar Mecklin said, “You know about a singer name of Elvis Presley?”

  Sweet Austin said, “Hey, Sugar . . .”

  Sugar Mecklin said, “He sings this song about Heartbreak Hotel.”

  Sweet Austin said, “Hey, Sugar, listen . . .”

  Sugar Mecklin said, “His voice, this guy Elvis Presley’s voice . . .” Sugar didn’t know exactly what he was going to say about Elvis Presley’s voice. That it made you visible to yourself and invisible to others.

  Sweet Austin said, “I’ve got to show you something. Something bad.”

  Something was definitely wrong with Sweet Austin. Sweet Austin had definitely seen a ghost.

  Across the lake the choir had a friend in Jesus. God’s grace was amazing, they said, and sweet. There was a church in the wildwood, they said, and their voices floated across the lake to the pier where Sugar and Sweet were standing and the voices reached them like angels’ voices and invited them to come to the church in the wildwood, come to the church in the dell, whatever a dell was, it might be like a swamp, mightn’t it, or a bog, or a quicksand pit, what the hell was a dell, anyway?

  Just then the brown-and-white cow decided it was time to leave the water and, as the choir sang a final song—oh I’m tired and so weary but I must travel on—the cow, as if it had been waiting for just this moment in the music, opened its amazing and sweet old cow-mouth and hollered one long heartbreaking bellow and moan, one incredible tenor note in perfect tune and time with the rest of the choir, as if to impart some message about hope, or maybe hopelessness and loneliness, who could tell the difference, or maybe just to say goodbye I’ve had enough of this, these horseflies and this sentimental music are driving me crazy, and then turned and slogged its way past the robed communicants and out of the water and up the muddy bank and into the pasture towards a barn.

  there’ll be no sadness, the choir sang, no sorrow, no trouble . . . and Sugar knew that when you say these things what you really mean is that sadness and sorrow are all there is and all there ever will be. And then somebody, a young woman in a white robe, waded forth, chest-deep in the black water, and allowed herself to be dunked backwards, out of sight, by a white-haired Negro woman, who held her hand over the young woman’s face in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost and held that young woman beneath the water for a long time while catfish and cottonmouths and snapping turtles joined with Christ Our Lord to wash away all her sins in the dear sweet magical blood of the Lamb while the choir sang songs.

  Sweet Austin said, “I was running trotlines and found it. You’ve got to come with me.”

  SWEET AUSTIN had come here in a boat. That was how he had appeared so unexpectedly behind Sugar Mecklin on the pier. When they had walked down the lake bank for a few yards, Sugar saw the boat pulled up in the weeds in a clear spot between the cypress knees. They crawled into the boat, first Sugar Mecklin, up front, and then Sweet Austin in back. Sugar looked out across the lake at the shanties and pulpwood along the ridge on Runnymeade plantation, where the Negroes lived.

  Sweet Austin stuck a Feather paddle into the gummy leaf-moldy bottom of the lake and used the paddle like a raft pole to shove the boat away from the bank and to ease them out into the deeper water.

  Sweet Austin said to Sugar Mecklin, “I don’t know what to do, tell me what to do, Sugar. If I had a daddy I would know what to do.”

  For one second, when Sugar Mecklin spotted the bare feet and legs sticking up out of the water, he managed to believe that Sweet Austin had brought him here to see the mermaid. He knew better, of course. He knew this was a dead person.

  They were far down the lake now. White cranes stood in small gossipy groups along the shallow water near the Runnymeade side of the shore. Turkey vultures sailed like hopeful prayers above them in the wide blue sky and then settled into the empty branches of white-trunked leafless trees. Deep in the water there were fish everywhere, invisible to Sugar Mecklin, no one could know how many of them, bream and perch and bass, silver and gold and blue, and for the first time in his life the thought of hidden fish and all their familiar coloration and feathery gills and lidless eyes terrified Sugar, he could not say why.

  It was a body, of course, snagged upside down in a drift of brush.

  Now here is the oddest thing. When Sugar Mecklin saw the naked legs poking up out of the water, he thought first of his daddy in speckled overalls back at the house, standing on the fourth rung of a stepladder and holding a bucket and brush and smearing paint over the bathroom ceiling.

  Sugar Mecklin said, “Turn the boat around, Sweet Austin. We got to tell somebody. We got to call Big Boy Chisholm.”

  The body was an old man, it turned out, who may have had a seizure of some kind before he went into the water. Later on, his boat was found with a fishing rod and baited hooks in the floorboards. There were two catfish still alive on a stringer hooked to the side of the boat. The old man had been missing for a couple of days—he lived on Runnymeade with his daughter. The daughter, the Greenwood Commonwealth reported, had told her father not to go out on the lake by himself, because he had “spells.”

  Sweet Austin and Sugar Mecklin did not know all this yet. They only knew that there were legs and feet sticking up out of the drift, and so they did the only thing they could do. Sweet Austin dragged the paddle behind the boat in a sculling motion and turned them in the direction of a camp-landing a little farther on, near the town dump where the rats were as big as yellow dogs and howled all night at the moon. Sweet Austin dipped the paddle deep into Roebuck and caused the boat beneath them to move steadily across the lake to Raney’s fish camp, where somebody would let them use the telephone to call Big Boy Chisholm, the lawman.

  When they docked at the fish camp, Mr. Raney made the call for them, though it took him a while to find his glasses and even after he did find them he dialed the wrong number four times. Each time he said, “I. Godfrey,” and then dialed again. He said, “Y’all just get yourself a Co-Cola out of the icebox.” He said, “Are y’all boys all right now?”

  Sugar Mecklin and Sweet Austin said that they thought so, they thought they were all right. They looked at one another to decide whether this was true.

  Mr. Raney said, “Y’all boys look enough alike to be sisters.” This was Mr. Raney’s kind way of making a dead man in the swamp a little less horrible idea than it actually was.

  Mr. Raney was the last man in Arrow Catcher, Mississippi, who could spit into a brass spittoon from a long distance. He did this now. Ptooey! Pting! He did this as a way of thinking things out. Or maybe only to make a joke, nobody knew which. Ptooey! Pting!

  A young man named Hydro—it was Mr. Raney’s own son, his only child—who had a big head on his shoulders and a peach pie in his lap, sat down in Mr. Raney’s high-backed rocker and rocked so far backwards he turned the pie upside down and nearly turned himself over in the chair, and said, “Shit far and save matches!” Hydro often chased cars and howled when the firetruck turned on the siren and had to be given ice cream so that he would stop.

  Then several more times, Mr. Raney spat in rapid succession, ptooey pting! ptooey pting! ptooey pting! while Sugar Mecklin and Sweet Austin shifted from one foot to the other and listened to somebody pull the crank rope on an old Evinrude and start up the rattly little engine down by the dock, where it idled for now, smelling of gasoline and warm oil, and waiting for Big Boy Chisholm to show up so somebody c
ould help steady him while he got into the boat and then lead him down Roebuck Lake to the brush pile where he would collect the corpse.

  Mr. Raney said, “Hydro, get your lazy no-count ass out of my rocking chair, or I’ll pistol-whip you within an inch of your worthless life.”

  Hydro was eating his mama’s peach pie with a big steel spoon—he had gotten the deep dish turned upright again and had not lost much of the pie—and he did not hear his daddy just then, so Mr. Raney just blew his nose hard into a red bandana and said, “I. Godfrey,” and let the matter drop, what good did it do to argue, what difference did it make anyway.

  To Sugar Mecklin and Sweet Austin, Mr. Raney said, “We’re all going to be a little edgy for a while, it don’t mean nothing. It’s normal after you find a floater.”

  Sweet Austin did not go to his own home that night. He couldn’t do that. Sweet Austin’s mama would be working late behind the bar at the American Legion Hut. She would turn on the switch that caused the Miller High Life sign to revolve. She would scatter sawdust on the little hardwood dance floor for whoever might want to take a turn to the music. She would reach into the cooler for long-necked beers in dark bottles, maybe Pabst Blue Ribbon, or Falstaff, or Jax, or even Pearl, and crack them open with a church key and say to men wearing bunion pads on their feet and Vitalis in their hair, “You don’t want no glass with that, do you, loverboy?”

  She might take a shot of Early Times herself and chase it down with a swig from one of those men’s long-neck bottles, and then peel the label for him. She might belch real loud and make all the men in the Legion Hut laugh and make all the women think she was common. She might sing a song, too, if anybody asked her. She might sing “Honeycomb” if she felt like it, she might sing honeycomb won’t you be my baby oh honeycomb be my own just a hank of hair and a piece of bone my honeycomb Her arms would be tired and cold and maybe numb from the ice chest and from weariness and loneliness because her man was dead, or she hoped he was anyway, and her apron would smell like the stale beer and cigarettes and her fingers would be crinkly from being wet all night, when she got home and finally found the light switch in the hall and scared the cockroaches off the counters and back up into the kitchen cabinets where they belonged, and staggered a little in the hallway, where she finally propped herself up and took off her shoes.