by Lewis Nordan
A Hank of Hair, A Piece of Bone
THE SUMMER I turned eleven years old, I had a secret—it was a small collapsible military shovel, an entrenching tool, it was called.
I saw it in a junk store in Arrow Catcher, my little hometown in Mississippi, and something about the fold-up-and-tuck-away nature of the implement made it attractive to me. At the same time, I almost bought a metal canteen with a canvas cover—the metal dented and scratched, the canvas sun-faded and water-stained, ripe with authenticity. I envisioned filling it with Coca-Cola and, at night, secretly removing the cap and drinking lustily and privately in the dark. But when I unscrewed the lid and smelled inside, there was a hint of something that may have been urine, and so I passed on the canteen and paid my dollar for what was the real treasure anyway, the secret shovel.
There was no reason to hide the shovel; no one would have cared that I had it. And yet it was an instrument that begged to be hidden.
My bedroom was in the upstairs of my parents’ home. It was small and interesting, with drawers and bookcases built into the walls to conserve space. In one wall there was also a desk, with pigeonholes and an inkwell, that could be revealed by unhooking a metal hook and dropping the desktop into place. There was a nice privacy in the hidden quality of the furniture in the walls.
And as long as I’m describing the room, I might as well tell that on the ceiling above my bed my mother had pasted luminous decals of stars and a moon and the planets—Saturn was prominent with its rings—and a comet with a tail. For a while after I turned off the lights at night, the little lunar system above me glowed with whatever sweet magic there is in such novelties. Outside my window the vastness of the Delta sky and its bright million stars and peach-basket-size moon could not compete with the galaxies inside my tiny bedroom and all its hidden geographies.
What I’m really getting at, though, is that in the back of my clothes closet—behind the hangers with trousers and shirts, behind the winter coats in plastic bags—there was a panel that could be removed to allow entrance into an even more secret spot, a crawlspace in the rafters.
On the day I bought the shovel, I removed the panel in the back of the closet and slipped inside the crawlspace to sit.
I had a stash of kitchen matches, from which I chose one and struck it and lighted a stub of a candle and then, careful not to set a fire, extinguished the match and spat on the tip. I sat cross-legged and sweaty in my hideout, inhaling the bad air of insulation and candle smoke, and thrilled at the invisibility of things.
And that was how I lived with my shovel for a while, I’m not sure how long, a couple of weeks I think.
Every day, when there was time, I crept into the crawlspace and found the wooden matches and lighted the candle stub and extended the collapsed handle of the shovel and heard the extension snap into place. And then, in the broiling Mississippi afternoon, or mornings if I woke up early enough, or sometimes at night when I should have been in my bed beneath the fake stars, my life was filled with the joy of secret things in secret places.
Soldier, miner, escaping prisoner—these were the games I played with the entrenching tool.
I had not yet used the shovel out-of-doors.
THE SUMMER inched through its humid hours. The figs on the trees along the chickenyard fence swelled up (“swole up,” we said) and ripened and turned purple and fat. I played barefoot and barebacked in the shade of the broad fig leaves and sometimes picked the fruit from the limbs and watched the ooze of fig-milk from the stem as it covered my fingers. The figs were like soft wood on my tongue, and a sweet residue of poison hung in the Delta air, where the ditches had been sprayed for mosquitoes.
Some days my father brought home a watermelon, green-striped and big as a washtub, and the three of us, mother, father, and myself, cut it beneath the walnut tree and ate big seedy red wedges of melon in the metal lawnchairs.
Evenings my father fed the chickens—the Plymouth Rocks, the Rhode Island Reds, slow and fat and powdered with dust—and my mother made fig preserves and sealed the syrupy fruit in Mason jars with hot paraffin lids.
It is tempting to look back at this time and to remember only those images of ripeness and joy.
Many evenings my father was drinking whiskey. He never drank before he was bathed and clean at the end of a day’s work—he smelled of Lifebuoy soap and Fitch’s shampoo and Wildroot Cream Oil, and of course of the Four Roses bourbon, masculine and sweet as wooden barrels.
Sometimes my parents fought their strange fight. The day I am remembering was a Friday.
The three of us were in the kitchen. My mother said to my father, “I wish you wouldn’t do that, Gilbert.”
I was standing in front of the refrigerator with the door open, looking for nothing in particular.
My father was at the sink with the water running. He held a tall water glass beneath the spigot and allowed it to fill up, and then he poured the glass of water into the sink. He filled the glass again, and then poured it into the sink again. And as the water ran from the tap, he filled the glass and poured out its contents, over and over, glass after glass, maybe twenty times without speaking.
My mother could only say, “I wish you wouldn’t do that, Gilbert,” as she watched him, silent and withdrawn, filling and pouring, filling and pouring at the sink.
I closed the refrigerator door and watched my father pour out one final glass of water. Then he stopped. This was a thing he did every day, and it gave my mother distress. When he was finished, he did as always—he placed the glass on the sink and stood for a while longer and watched the water run from the pipe into the drain. Then slowly, deliberately, he turned the handle and shut off the flow.
That was the end of it. After the water-pouring episode, my father went to his room and closed the door and my mother went into her own room—she called it a guest bedroom, but it was her own, with her underwear in the drawers, her bobby pins on the dresser—and lay across her bed and cried.
I could hear her from the kitchen, and I could hear music from my father’s phonograph, and I knew that he was drinking from a bottle hidden in his chest-of-drawers and that he would not come out until morning.
I wanted to comfort my mother, but there was nothing to say. I stood by the kitchen sink and looked at the glass my father had been filling and emptying, and I believed for the one-millionth time that if I looked at it long enough, tried hard enough, I could understand what my parents’ strange fighting meant.
Tonight I went to my father’s room, a thing I ordinarily never did after they fought, or after he closed the door and started to drink in earnest.
I knocked at his door and waited. I knew he would not answer and he did not. I knocked again and said, “Daddy,” and waited again.
I heard movement inside his room, his chair, I supposed—a green-painted metal lawnchair, which he used as an easy chair—scraping against the hardwood floor. The chair sat on a rounded frame, which allowed it to rock back and forth.
After a silence the door opened and I could tell that my father was already very drunk. He looked at me and finally moved aside to let me in. He sat in his strange lawnchair and his record kept playing softly on the phonograph, a slow ballad sung by Elvis. The whiskey bottle was not in sight.
He said, “What is it, Sugar?”
My father was not a tall man, no more than five feet six inches, and his childlike shoes, with crepe soles and shiny uppers, were covered with tiny speckles of paint. His feet did not reach the floor except as the chair rocked forward. He was wearing Big Smith khakis and an open-necked shirt, and I noticed that the face of his watch was flecked with paint.
I said, “I bought a shovel.” I had not known I was going to say this.
My father let a few seconds pass and then he said, “Is that right.”
I said, “I’ve got it in my room.”
He said, “Do you want a peppermint puff?” My father reached across the top of the phonograph to a cellophane bag filled with peppermint
candy and brought out a small handful and put one piece of candy into his mouth. I held out my hand and received a piece.
I said, “I haven’t dug anything with it yet.” I put the candy in my mouth, the peppermint puff, and it was light and airy as magic. It seemed almost to float instead of melt inside my mouth.
And then, as unexpectedly as I had announced the existence of the shovel, my father said, “The Delta is filled up with death.”
Now that I look back on this moment I think that he meant nothing at all by this remark. Probably the mention of a shovel made him think of graves and that made him think of death, which was his favorite drunken subject anyway. Self-pity, self-dramatization—the boring death-haunted thoughts of an alcoholic, nothing more.
And yet, at the time, the words he spoke seemed directly related to my accidental, unintentional mention of the shovel, the way advice is related to a problem that needs to be solved.
I said, “It is?”
He said, “Yep. To the brim.”
The conversation was over. I stayed a little longer, but already my father was growing irritable and restless, and I knew he wished I would leave so that he could drink from the bottle in the chest-of-drawers.
THE DELTA was filled with death. The information came like a summons, a moral imperative to search.
And so that day, and for many days afterwards, I took the shovel outside and started to dig. In the front yard the shovel blade cut through the grass and scarred the lawn. I replaced the squares of sod before my mother could see the damage, but already I knew I was doing the right thing. Earthworms retreated to cooler, safer depths. Roly-polies curled up into little balls. The blade of the shovel shone at the edges, the dirt was fragrant and cool to my touch.
My first serious digging was a trench alongside the back of the chickenyard, near the fence. The earth there was loamy and soft and worm-rich and easy to dig. I threw spadefuls of loose dirt at the busy old hens and watched them scatter and puff out their feathers as large as beach balls.
What was I digging for? Indians had lived on this land, Chickasaws and Choctaws. Slaves had died here. There might be bones. A well-digger once dug up a Confederate mortar shell near the dog pen and it was still on display in the Plantation Museum in Leflore. Sometimes a kid would find an arrowhead or spear point. My father was right—the remains of other civilizations did still occasionally poke through into our own.
So there was a sense in which I was only following my father’s advice—I was digging for evidence of other worlds. And for a while the hard work of digging, and the work of hiding its consequences, were enough.
The trench by the fence was a mistake. A neighborhood dog crawled under and killed my father’s blue Andalusian rooster, and I had to fill the trench and get the dog out before anyone could figure out that I was responsible. I threw the dead rooster into some tall weeds near the trailer where the midgets lived, and so my father thought it had flown the coop and been killed as a result of its own restlessness and vanity. So that was good.
I kept on digging. All the holes I dug were in some way unsatisfactory.
Beneath the walnut tree the earth was rock-hard and root-congested, and I was afraid of breaking the shovel handle.
The last of several holes I dug on the lake bank, which was softer ground, finally yielded a few bones, but they were in a plastic garbage bag and, though it took me a while, I finally understood that they were the skeleton of a big tom cat that belonged to a neighbor-woman, Mavis Mitchum. The cat had been hit by a car last winter.
Along the ditch at the back of the house I dug up a nest of ground-hornets and was stung seven times. I dug each day and found a good deal of unpleasantness but little death in the Delta.
I have to ask the question again: What was I digging for?—skeletons?—Indians? Not really, not at first, though I thought of those things in a general way. I think I was only playing, only digging for fun. I was a child, and I enjoyed the child’s play, as I had enjoyed the games behind my closet, in the crawlspace.
And yet the more I dug—the greater number of holes I emptied and refilled, the more often I heard the shovel blade cut the soil and breathed the mold-and-mulch-rich fragrance of overturned earth and felt its heft in my hands, and watched the retreat of the earthworms and the vivid attack of the hornets and the other evidences of life beneath the surface of the earth—mole tunnels and rabbit holes—the more I feared and was driven to discover evidence of death.
And so by some process I became not the soldier or prisoner I had pretended to be in the crawlspace, not a child with a game, but a person driven by some need born of my father’s pain, my mother’s despair.
My occupation became not only more necessary but more real, more dark in character. I was no longer pretending to be a soldier or prisoner, but now, without the protection of fantasy at all, I was a real-life gravedigger, possessed and compulsive—and not merely a gravedigger but a hopeful graverobber, a sad innocent little ghoul spading my way through the Delta, looking for God knows what, some signal or symbol, I don’t know, whatever a child in need and fear is capable of looking for after talking to his drunken father about a shovel.
I don’t blame my father. What would be the point? There is a sense in which I blame the geography itself, though that, of course, is useless as well.
The more I dug in the Delta earth, the more it seemed to call me to dig, the more certain I became that it would finally yield up some evil treasure.
I turned over spadeful after spadeful. I dug all over our small property—back yard and front yard and chicken yard. I dug out by Roebuck Lake, and even in Mavis Mitchum’s yard, the neighbor-woman. Some of the holes were deep, some were long shallow trenches. I looked in each spadeful of earth for some sign—a toe, a tooth, some small thing, a knuckle. There was nothing.
I moved underneath the house—Delta houses have no basements—and here beneath the floorboards and waterpipes, in the slick, sun-untouched hard-packed earth, my digging took new meaning. No longer frantic, no longer directionless, my entire body slowed down, the way a body is slowed down by age. I was a strong child—thin but sturdy—and I had the will to dig, the iron will of a child’s burden of his parents’ unhappiness. I would dig to China if necessary. I was digging a hole beneath my house, and I knew I would find whatever I had been looking for.
THE UNDERSIDE of the house was a different world to me. Suddenly plumbing made sense—pipes going in and coming out. The light was filtered and cool. The dirt was slick and ungrassed for half a century. The outside world, glimpses of it, was allowed into my vision only through chinks in the brick foundation. Above me were the boards of the floor where my parents walked. Refuse had been thrown under here, a slick tire, a bald baby-doll, a wooden case of Coke bottles, an ice pick my daddy had once stabbed himself in the chest with. The house was an old structure, sixty or seventy years old, and other families had lived here before my own. Even in the refuse—the broken glass, a dog-food can, two cane poles—there was a sense that lives had been lived here, that death had defeated them.
I kept on digging. I could not stand up to dig—the floor was directly above me—so I lay on my side. I stabbed the blade into the earth and, with the strength of my arms, lifted out the dirt. The work was slow and laborious. Spadeful after spadeful, I dragged dirt out of the hole and piled it away from me in a mound.
Each day I was tired and filthy, the muscles of my arms were hot with strain. I worried that my mother would stop me from what I was doing.
She did not. She only knew that I was playing under the house. She warned me about broken bottles, she grouched at me about the dirt in my jeans. But our lives went on. I continued to dig.
There were happy days, with watermelon, and sad days of whiskey. The hole beneath the house grew deeper and wider, and the mound beside the hole grew taller. My father continued to pour glasses of water down the sink, my mother begged him not to. “I wish you wouldn’t do that, Gilbert.” I had a sense of doing someth
ing worthwhile, or at least necessary in the face of the many things I could not otherwise control.
I kept on, possessed I would say, and sometimes fear of what I was looking for would overtake me. I would sit beside the hole and cry—weep is a better word, since there was as much drama in this as there was sadness—and often I would wish that I had never heard of this hole, that I had never bought this shovel, that I had bought the wicked canteen instead.
I was afraid that whatever I found—joint, knuckle, or tooth—would be too personal to endure. Suddenly, or rather gradually, this became no abstraction I was searching for, not merely death. I believed now that whatever bone I found—and I had no doubt I would find something, however small—was not without a human history, that a single bone was a person, someone whose life was as filled with madness and loss as the lives of my father and mother.
I believed I could not endure knowing more about such sadness than I already suspected. My throat ached. I imagined that whatever relic I found would contain within it the power to reconstruct an entire self, a finger joint becoming a hand, the hand recreating an arm, the arm a torso, with chest hair and a head and knees. Dry bones becoming meat and, immediately, the meat reclaiming the right and capacity to rot and fall away, and bones to be scattered and lost.
So I continued to dig underneath the house. I dug long past the time when I enjoyed it. It was a job to me, this digging, it was medicine necessary in some way to my continued life, neither joyful nor joyless, a thing to be done, a hole to be dug.
The underside of my house became as familiar to me as the crawlspace behind my closet. I stopped digging sometimes and lay on my back beneath the house, beside the hole, which now was deep—two feet deep and two feet wide, and then wider and deeper. I dug down to three feet, and the hole was squared off, like the grave of a child. I kept on digging. I lay in exhaustion, down in the hole, and looked up at the floorboards of the house. I heard my mother’s footsteps above me in the kitchen. I heard the boards make their small complaint. Water ran through the pipes around me—surging up through pipes into the house and into the sink, or going the other way, out of the house through the larger pipes, down into the earth and away.
