Music of the Swamp

by Lewis Nordan

  I lay in the dirt and looked at the floorboards, as sweat drained out of me, my back and arms, and soaked down into the same earth. I imagined that my sweat flowed under the earth like a salty river, that it entered the water table and into a seepage of sand grains and clay and, from there, into Roebuck Lake, its dark still waters. Around me sunlight broke through the cracks in the foundation in points as brilliant as diamonds, and underneath my house was always twilight, never day and never dark.

  ONE DAY in my digging—who can remember which day, a Thursday, a Saturday?—all the summer days were the same—my shovel struck something and my heart stopped, seemed to stop, tried to stop. I had found whatever I had been destined to find. Directed to find: by the man at the junk store, by the canteen, which had whispered take the shovel not me, by my father at the sink. My shovel struck something—hard, solid, long, like a sheet of heavy glass, a table top—and my heart, stopped dead by fear and awe, cried out for this to be some innocent thing, a pirate’s chest, a sewer line.

  I took only one look, and never looked again, and so what I tell you is only what I saw, not what I know to have been there. I was lying in the hole I had dug, this grave, its dark dirt walls on four sides of me. I was comfortable with my entrenching tool. I touched the earth again with the shovel, and again heard the noise of its blade against a sheet of heavy glass.

  I thought, in that moment before I brushed away the dirt and took one brief look through a glass window into the past, or into my own troubled heart, whichever it really was, of a nursery rhyme my mother had said to me many times at night, beneath the fake stars.

  It was the tale of a woman who goes to the fair and falls asleep beneath a tree and, while she sleeps, has the hem of her petticoat cut off and stolen by a thief. Without her petticoat she doesn’t recognize herself when she wakes up, and she wonders who this strange woman with no petticoat can be. Even when she gets home and looks in the mirror, she is unfamiliar to herself. She says, “Dearie dearie me, is it really I?”

  I could not believe that I was the person with this shovel, on this brink.

  I brushed the dirt off the sheet of glass and allowed my eyes their one second of looking. Beneath the glass was a dead woman, beautiful, with auburn hair and fair skin. Her head was resting on a blanket of striped ticking.

  One second, less than a second, and I never looked again. I averted my eyes and put down the shovel and crawled up out of the hole. Without looking down into the hole again, I filled the hole with the dirt I had taken out. I pushed it with my hands until it spilled over the sides of the grave and covered the shovel and whatever else was there or not there.

  The dress she was wearing was red velvet, down to her ankles. Her shoes were tiny, with pointed toes. The slipper was leather and the boot was of some fabric, silk I thought. On one finger was a gold ring in the shape of a bent spoon.

  It is impossible that I saw all this in one glance—her whole length, her tiny feet and fingers. It is impossible that I brushed away a bit of dirt and saw her entirely, her fingers, her hair, an exposed calf that showed the fabric of her boot.

  And yet I know that I did see this, and that one second later I covered it up and did not look again.

  I sat there in the dirt, beneath the floorboards of my parents’ home, and I saw another thing, a gaggle of white geese being chased by a fox, but I knew even then that these were not real geese but only the erratic beating of my heart made visible. The woman in the glass coffin?—still I am not sure what was real and what my mind invented.

  The sound of my parents’ footsteps was above me, where I sat in the twilight of this cloistered world. In the dead woman’s face I had seen my mother’s beauty, the warm blood of her passion, as my father had once known her and had forgotten. I heard water running in the sink above me and imagined, whether it was true or not, that it was my father filling and emptying tumblers of water, and all around me I heard this poured-out water gurgling down through pipes, headed for sewers, the water table, the gills of gars in Roebuck Lake. Through the floorboards I could hear voices, the sound not the words, and I believed it was my mother’s voice begging my father not to pour his life down this sad drain, glass after glass, day after day, until she too was empty of life and hope.

  I kept sitting there, thinking of the dead woman, and I imagined her in a church pew with a songbook on her lap. I imagined her on a riverboat (if she was real she might have died a hundred years before and been buried here, pickled, perfectly preserved in alcohol or some other fluid, mightn’t she?—could she not have died on one of the riverboats that once floated from the Yazoo into the Roebuck harbor?), on the deck of a boat and holding a yellow parasol. I imagined her in a green back yard, hanging out sheets on a line. I saw her eat cantaloupe and spit out the seeds, secret and pretty, into a bed of bright flowers. I saw her leading a horse by a blue bridle from an unpainted barn.

  I named her pretty names. Kate and Molly and Celia, even Leda, and I called her none of these names for fear of changing something too fragile ever to be named, the same reason I did not look at her longer, for fear she could not exist in the strength of more than a second’s looking. In my mind, as I named her, my father’s name kept ringing, over and over, with a sound like wooden ducks in a carnival shooting gallery when they are knocked over, the ding and ding and ding, and the slap of their collapse.

  I left the underside of the house and never went back.

  I went inside and surprised my mother by bathing and washing my hair with Fitch’s shampoo in the middle of the afternoon, and without being told. I put my dirty clothes into the washer and set the dial, and while the machine made them clean, I dressed in fresh blue jeans and a button-up shirt and dug the dirt out from under my fingernails and cleaned the mud off my shoes.

  In my mind I gave the woman gifts. I gave her a candle stub. I gave her a box of wooden kitchen matches. I gave her a cake of Lifebuoy soap. I gave her a ceilingful of glow-in-the-dark planets. I gave her a bald baby doll. I gave her a ripe fig, sweet as new wood, and a milkdrop from its stem. I gave her a peppermint puff. I gave her a bouquet of four roses. I gave her fat earthworms for her grave. I gave her a fish from Roebuck Lake, a vial of my sweat for it to swim in.

  I combed my hair with Wildroot Cream Oil and ate an entire package of my father’s peppermint candy and puked in the toilet.

  My mother said, “Sugar, are you all right?”

  I said, “You bet,” and walked boldly into my father’s room and stole two rubbers from a box of Trojans in the drawer of his bedside table, and as long as I had the drawer open, took out his pistol and spun the cylinder and aimed it at the green lawn rocker and cocked the hammer with my thumb and then eased it back down. I stole two bullets from a box of cartridges in the drawer.

  Later I walked beside Roebuck Lake and threw away the rubbers and the bullets and hated my father and myself.

  THE SUMMER was long and its days were all the same. The poison in the ditches was sweet, the mosquitoes were as loud as violins, as large as owls. The cotton fields smelled of defoliant, and the cottonstalks were skeletons in white dresses. As summer deepened, the rain stopped, and so the irrigation pumps ran night and day in the rice paddies. My father took my mother dancing at the American Legion Hut, and I went with them and put a handful of nickels in the slot machine near the bar and won enough money to keep on playing for hours.

  The black man behind the bar—his name was Al, and he drove an Oldsmobile—took me to the piano and showed me an eight-beat measure with his left hand and said it was the boogie-woogie beat and if I listened right I could hear it behind every song ever written, every song that for a lifetime would ever make my toes feel like tap-tap-tapping.

  That night it was true, and I still listen for it. I could hear it, this under-music, like a heartbeat, in the tunes my parents were dancing to. I could hear it in the irrigation pumps in the rice paddies. I could hear it in the voice of the preacher at the Baptist church, and in the voice of a carny who bar
ked at the freak show. I heard it in the stories my mother told me at night. I heard it in the tractors in the fields and in the remembered music of my shovel, my entrenching tool, its blade cutting into the earth, and in the swarm of hornets, and in the bray of mules, and in the silence of earthworms.

  I watched my father and mother dance in the dim light of the dance floor, the only two dancers that night, and I fell in love with both of them, their despair and their fear and also their strange destructive love for each other and for some music I was growing old enough to hear, that I heard every day in the memory of the woman in her private grave. My father was Fred Astaire, he was so graceful, and my mother—though before this night I had seen her only as a creature in a frayed bathrobe standing in the unholy light of my father’s drinking—she was an angel on the dance floor. The simple cotton dress that she wore was flowing silk—or was it red velvet?—and her sensible shoes were pointy-toed leather slippers with a silk boot. I understood why the two of them had been attracted to each other. I understood, seeing them, why they continued in their mutual misery. Who can say it was not true love, no matter how terrible?

  In this dim barnlike room—the felt-covered poker tables, the dark bright wood of the dance floor, the upright piano, a lighted Miller’s sign turning slowly on the ceiling, a nickel slot by the bar—here I loved my parents and the Mississippi Delta, its poisoned air and rich fields, its sloughs and loblollies and coonhounds and soybeans. In everything, especially in the whisk-whisk-whisk of my parents’ feet on the sawdusty dance floor, I heard the sound of the boogie-woogie beat, eight notes—five up the scale and three down—I heard it in the clash and clatter of the great machines in the compress, where loose cotton, light as air, was smashed into heavy bales and wrapped in burlap and tied with steel bands. I held onto my secret, the dead woman under our house, and wished that I could have known these things about my parents and our geography and its music without first having looked into the dead woman’s face and held inside me her terrible secret.

  My father and mother danced and danced, they twirled, their bodies swayed to the music, their eyes for each other were bright. My father sang to my mother an old tune, sentimental and frightening, crooning his strange love to her, oh honeycomb won’t you be my baby oh honeycomb be my own, he sang, this small man enormous in his grace, a hank of hair and a piece of bone my honeycomb. My mother placed her head on his shoulder as they danced, and when she lifted her face he kissed her lips and they did not stop dancing.

  THERE IS one more thing to tell.

  Late in the summer, deep in August, when the swamps were steam baths, and beavers as big as collies could be seen swimming in Roebuck Lake from a canebrake to a willow shade, I passed my eleventh birthday.

  I still had told no one about the corpse, if it was a corpse and not something equally terrifying, a vision or hallucination born of heartbreak and loss, beneath our house. The shovel was a forgotten toy.

  My mother made me a birthday cake in the shape of a rabbit—she had a cake pan molded in that shape—and she decorated it with chocolate icing and stuck on carrot slices for the eyes. It was a difficult cake to make stand up straight, but with various props it would balance on its hind legs on the plate, so that when I came into the room it looked almost real standing there, its little front feet tucked up to its chest.

  At the sight of the rabbit I started to cry. My mother was startled by my tears. She had been standing in the doorway between the kitchen and the dining room. The table was set with a white tablecloth and linen napkins, three settings for my birthday dinner.

  I could not stop crying, looking at that rabbit cake. I knew that my mother loved me, I knew something of her grief—something in the desperate innocence of the rabbit, its little yellow carrot eyes. I thought of the hopelessness of all love, and that is why I was crying, I think.

  My mother came to me and held me to her and I felt her warmth and smelled her woman-smell. I wanted to dance with her at the Legion Hut. I wanted to give her a gift of earthworms.

  I kept crying.

  My mother said, “Oh, Sugar-man . . .”

  I kept on crying, sobbing, trying to talk between the sobs. I said, “There’s a woman under the house.”

  She said, “I know, Sugar-man, I know, hush now . . .”

  I said, “I don’t want to listen to the boogie-woogie beat.”

  She said, “I know, darling, I know . . .”

  She kept on holding me, rocking me where we stood.

  I said, “It’s a dead woman. Under our house.”

  She said, “I know, Sugar-man, I know . . .”

  I said, “In a grave.”

  She said, “I know, darling, you hush now . . .”

  I said, “I don’t want my toes to go tap-tap-tapping.”

  Train, Train, Coming round the Bend

  WHEN I was a child of eleven, there was a snail-slow freight train of a dozen cars or less that dragged its back legs through town each morning like a sorry dog and even stopped momentarily for God knows what reason at the Arrow Catcher depot and rested itself long enough to catch its breath and then, as if hopelessly, gathered its strength once again and set out on its asthmatic straining greasy little diesel motion towards the Mississippi River, some forty miles west of where I lived.

  This was the summer a man was executed in Greenville. And it was the year my grandfather lived with us—my blind, bitter grandfather, I need to say—and listened to St. Louis Cardinals baseball on a Philco radio as big as the Frigidaire.

  One day that summer, after a night when the Delta had been washed by a jungle rain, I hid in the ditch down by the track where I knew the last freight car would rest when the train made its daily stop, and I waited until the chuffy little sorry excuse for a train came to a stop and I pulled myself up the ditch bank by holding clumps of grass and wiped my hands on my pants and grabbed the ladder of a boxcar and swung myself up onto its first rung and held myself there as the train creaked forward out of the station.

  I only rode through town, hanging onto the ladder, past the Old Dixie Cafe, past Mr. Wooten’s Shoe Shop, which stood on a block of stores with a wooden sidewalk, past the Quong Chong Fancy Gro., and the Kingfisher Market. The train got scarcely above five miles an hour, and if I had at any point let go of the ladder and dropped to the ground, I could have easily outrun the train to the apple orchard two hundred yards down the track, where I could have jumped clear and walked back home as the slimy little worm of a diesel and its spineless freight cars continued with threats of speed down the Delta flatscape towards the river.

  I did this a half dozen times that summer. And then one day, for what reason I cannot say, something changed. I hooked the train, as I had done before. The Delta was what it had always been—endless blue sky, defoliated fields, small African villages peopled with princes and savages and their barebreasted sad women, washpots and collard greens. The train was what it had always been, so slow, so comfortable that it seemed to be stasis in motion. The poison heat of the diesel exhaust which swept back into my face was no different from the normal usual poisonous air that blew across the Mowdown in the paddies or the DDT in the ditches and made up the staple air of my comfort and ease. Everything was the same. The train wagged its reluctant head and heaved itself up like an old man and set out with a wonted resignation toward the orchard where I usually jumped clear. Bark from the pulpwood on a flatcar was blowing in my face when I realized that I was not going to jump off.

  I didn’t jump. The apples on the trees called me to jump, but I did not. The train kept on, down the track, slow as a cow. My body relaxed. I held on easily. I leaned out from the boxcar and looked ahead, down the track. The apple trees crept back behind me, their voices did not reach my ears, which were filled only with the bad-lung sounds of the train, which suddenly caused me to laugh like a happy person.

  I rode the train out of town. Someone might as well have been ringing Christmas bells inside my body, my insides were so alive with anxiety a
nd joy.

  The train eased into a bend and along a length of Panther Burn, a snaky stream with brakes of bamboo along the banks. It did not increase in speed, it only moved along the track.

  I saw a dead dog alongside the railroad track and knew that this animal had committed suicide, there was no other explanation for how it could have been struck by this train. Farther along, a flock of red-wing blackbirds stood pecking at something in the gravel one foot away from the track. I could have jumped into the middle of them, they were so unaffected by our comical huffing and commotion.

  I saw roadhouses I had never seen before, Leonard’s and Paradise Inn. I saw a woman beating a child. I saw an old man clogging on a bridge. I saw a horse with a blue bridle. I saw a jeep stuck in a field. I saw a yellow cat with a sparrow in its mouth. I saw lespedeza and wisteria. I saw cowbirds on a barbed wire fence. I saw empty wine bottles in the roadbed. My eyes could now suddenly see long distances.

  The train kept on down the track. It even gained a little speed. It rocked like a dangerous cradle. I climbed up the ladder to the top of the boxcar. I stood and spraddled my legs and let the train rock on. The train’s motion was my own motion. I walked a few steps along the moving car. At first I was stiff-legged and cautious and then I walked with confidence. I danced a country-boy jig. I laughed my damn head off. Git on down the road!

  The train slowed then, five miles outside of Arrow Catcher, and then it stopped at a little gray building, a tiny depot, with the word QUITO spelled out on its sign. The tired old train knelt down with its tongue hanging out and heaved deep breaths and nursed a stitch in its side. Whoo, shit! the little train seemed to say, a little too pleased with itself for its brief speed, as I scooted back down the ladder and headed out walking, back down the track five miles to my home in Arrow Catcher. Walking, walking, don’t give a flip!