Music of the Swamp

by Lewis Nordan

  I said, “That’s why you are a bad man?”

  He said, “Yes.”

  I said, “And that’s why Daddy is an idiot?”

  He said, “Yes.”

  I said, “And what about me?”

  He said, “I don’t know.”

  I thought of Holyghost burning alive. I thought of the soft fragrances of swamp water and wood rot. I thought of cypress and mimosa. I’m still thinking of those things today. I’m still asking the same question, though my father and grandfather are a long time dead: What about me?

  The Cellar of Runt Conroy

  THE ONLY house in the Mississippi Delta with a full basement was a rambling many-roomed tar-paper shack owned by Roy Dale’s daddy, a white-trash gentleman named Runt Conroy. Runt was weasely and drawn and he worked, when he was sober enough, as a backhoe driver, digging sewers and graves and ditches for pipelines. It was his own hands that had dug the basement of the Conroy shanty.

  There was a passel of Conroy children, all red-haired and sunken-cheeked. I was never really sure how many. There were the twin girls, Cloyce and Joyce, children who spoke in unison. There was a misfit child named Jeff Davis who believed his pillow was on fire. And, of course, there was the boy near my age, Roy Dale, and a very young child, about four, named Douglas, whose only ambition when he grew up was to become an apple. There were others who were grown and had moved away.

  Mrs. Conroy, the mother, was an angry woman. She seemed especially angry at Douglas, the child of low ambition. She berated him for it. She encouraged him to want to be something finer than an apple. She threatened to beat him if he did not change his mind. “You will always be white trash,” she said to this four-year-old child. “You will never amount to anything. Do you want to be a doctor?” “Apple,” Douglas replied. “Do you want to be a policeman? A fireman? A cowboy? A secretary?” “Apple,” he replied each time. With enough effort she could wear Douglas down. With enough nagging he would change. Once he upgraded his ambition to a level that almost satisfied her. “Do you want to be a bootlegger? A pimp? A computer scientist?” “All right,” Douglas said at last. “I don’t want to be an apple.” Mrs. Conroy was happy, she was a new woman, she was elated. She said, “I knew it! I was right after all, my darling boy, my own true son! You are not like the rest of the Conroys, you are not white trash. You are a wonderful child, the hope of our family.” Douglas said, “I want to grow up to be a dog.” It didn’t matter. Mrs. Conroy was not dejected. Dog was not good, but it was progress. Dog was better than apple. Other days were less joyous. Other days Douglas would slip backwards. Once he wanted to be a cork. That night his mother cried herself to sleep while Runt sat lovingly beside her bed and wrung his hands and said, “He could do worse, darling, he could do a lot worse.”

  Most of the Conroy children were filthy and ragged and had sores on their legs, and skin like alligator hide. One of them was different, Dora Ethel, a teenaged girl in perfect health who wore immaculate clothes and Woolworth makeup and made good grades in school, the freak of the family. She went out on dates.

  My own family was poor, but this did not keep us from looking down on the Conroys and sneering when they took canned goods from the Episcopal charity box at Christmas.

  Mrs. Conroy—Fortunata was her name—was a teacher’s aide in an elementary school some ten miles away. She was not an attractive woman. She had a horsey face and buck teeth and a voice like sheet metal. Most of the children she taught were poor blacks, scared little first graders with no telling what kinds of homes in the swamp. She was gentle but not warm to them. In the middle of a reading lesson, when any person on earth might least expect it, let alone a small peasant child faced with reading a language scarcely his own, Fortunata Conroy would suddenly look up at the small quivering sea of little black faces and she would say in her impossible voice, “God has denied me two gifts, beauty and a pleasing voice,” and without another word would turn back to the struggle of sounding out the meaningless words of the stories the children were pretending to read. Fortunata was jealous and believed that every other woman in town was sexually attracted to her weasely husband Runt.

  I had been inside the Conroy home a few times, but only briefly and never to take a meal or to spend a night. Roy Dale never invited me to sleep over. He had a million excuses—the small space, the lack of hot water and meals, his meddlesome sisters, the single bathroom, even the possibility of rats. Neither Roy Dale nor I ever mentioned the real concern, that Roy Dale was ashamed of his family.

  Finally I wore him down. When you can manipulate a person with nothing else, you give him your secrets. I told Roy Dale that my father drank and was often depressed and maybe even suicidal. Roy Dale did not believe me but he had sense enough to know that such an admission, even if it was false, required reciprocation.

  “My daddy wants to die,” I said.

  “Want to sleep over?” he replied.

  THE CONROY home was a shack, but it was not small. There was one impossible room after another. The floors were covered with yellow linoleum, some of the rooms were papered with newspaper. There were dangerous-looking space heaters in many rooms. The pictures on the walls were of Blue Boy and of a wolf standing on a snowy hillside looking at a house. They had been cut out of a magazine and stuck in cheap frames. I pretended to love the wolf picture. For effect I said, “Sometimes that’s the way I feel.” Roy Dale gave me a look, but he didn’t accuse me of lying.

  The real reason I wanted to visit here was that I was interested in the Conroys’ cellar. I had never seen a cellar before. The word itself impressed me. Cellar, root cellar, storm cellar. The cellar was the one detail of the Conroys’ lives that almost rescued them, in my mind at least, from the charge of white trash.

  Fortunata Conroy, Roy Dale’s mother, did not agree. She hated the cellar. It reminded her of Runt. Runt had dug it. It was a sewer, it was a ditch, it was a grave. It was an underground monument to white-trashery. Nobody should have a cellar. Having a cellar was proof positive to Fortunata Conroy that their genes and chromosomes were tainted. A billion dollars, a college education, and new teeth would not save a family from white-trash chromosomes if they were the only family in the Mississippi Delta with a cellar. Cellars stunk. Cats pissed in cellars. Potatoes rotted in them. Cellars were homes for rats.

  Each day when Fortunata came home from work she walked into the house in search of evidence against herself and Runt. Her nose twitched, her entire face vibrated with accusation. And each day when she arrived home she said the same thing: “This place stinks!”

  It was partly true. The incredible sea-level cellar could not be expected to hold out moisture. There was mildew built into the architecture. And the Conroys also had an old cat who sometimes peed in the basement, and especially on damp days a smell of urine could be detected in the air. “This place stinks!” Fortunata would say, and the cat and Runt and the whole gaggle and pride of viral and damaged children would leap for cover. At one time the Conroys had a parrot that could speak not a word but could make a sound like a cash register. It lived in the cellar until its feathers changed color and fell out. That, however, is another story.

  The effluvium of the cellar was not really related to mildew or the cat; it was an accusation of Runt for his alcoholism, his birthright, his genes, his occupation, his adulteries real or imagined, his very breath. “This place stinks!” The house rang with the bad music of that refrain. “This place stinks!” The smell, real or imagined, was Runt’s fault. Runt believed this as thoroughly as Fortunata.

  He sniffed the cellar daily for the place where the cat was doing her evil business.

  It was a day in April that I came to spend the night with Roy Dale and his family. It was this same day that Runt put forth his best effort to correct the smell in the basement.

  He filled a yellow plastic bucket with hot water from the laundry tub and poured in a dollup of Parson’s pine-scented ammonia. Roy Dale and I sat on the cellar steps and watched Runt the way
normal children watch television. Runt swished the foamy water around with his hand and breathed the chemical fragrance into his nostrils. He began his search for cat piss.

  He sniffed the fabric of a discarded chair near the useless hot water heater. He poked through a sad heap of linoleum scraps and cardboard boxes and cheap suitcases and round hat boxes containing veiled remnants of Fortunata’s millinery past—and through newspapers and cinder blocks and a cracked mirror and the rags-and-tags of children’s clothing, looking for the smell. He found nothing unusual, no cat piss, but he was not discouraged.

  He tilted the yellow bucket so that the chemical water flowed over the basement floor. He had a new brush with yellow plastic bristles.

  When he was finished his undershirt was sweaty and his knees were wet. He wiped sweat from his forehead with his scrawny scaly forearm. He looked satisfied.

  Roy Dale had said nothing at all during the whole time Runt had been working. Suddenly now he said, “It stinks!” He meant the pine-scented ammonia cleanser.

  Runt looked up. He forced a pained smile. He said, “It smells kind of refreshing though, don’t it? Kind of pine forest clean?”

  Roy Dale said, “It stinks! Ugh! It stinks!” Then he jumped up and ran up the stairs, holding his nose in an extravagant way. I leaped up and followed him. I held my nose also and said, “Ugh! Gag! It stinks!” I understood that there is something about seeing a wounded man that makes you want to hurt him.

  For that reason it is hard for me to think of Fortunata Conroy, for all her meanness, as an evil woman. In fact, I believe she loved Runt and all her strange children. I think her intentions were always better than her actions.

  Now when I look back on this day I think of Fortunata getting off work that afternoon at the elementary school in Leflore. I imagine that her classroom is neat and orderly, unlike her out-of-control tar-paper house and life. I imagine that the chalkboards are washed and the erasers are clean. I imagine that she puts an extra thumbtack in a colorful poster on the bulletin board. There are health charts and dental-hygiene reminders and smiling Dr. Seuss monsters with good advice. Stop Look Listen, Be A Friend, Don’t Talk To Strangers. I imagine Fortunata grading the last of the first-grade writing papers. She brings the hump of an f up to the top of a line; she extends the tail of a g to the line below. She checks the pregnant hamster for babies, she grieves the dying Gila monster in the terrarium.

  I imagine Fortunata driving home through the incredible flatscape of the Delta. She drives an ancient explosive Pinto beneath wide blue Mississippi skies. She smells the fragrance of cotton flowers on the breeze, she breathes the sweet swamp water of the rice paddies, she passes bean fields shrouded in dragonflies, a pasture with a white mule, the town dump where the rats are as big as collies, past a herd of deer in cornstalks, a dead armadillo on the berm, a flash and sudden clattering of swamp-elves through the brush and across a high-water bridge. The explosive Pinto is a spiritual thing. She is in love with her husband. Her children are normal children. She passes the local stick-fighting team, the high school arrow-catching team on a farther field. She watches old Mr. O’Kelly carve soap on his front porch, and she sees the ventriloquist’s dummy named Joseph of Arimethea that poor Mr. O’Kelly believes is his grandson. Mavis Mitchum, a neighbor woman, sucks her skirt. Joby Conroy, Roy Dale’s cousin, chases cars. Mr. Love’s goat walks across the mantelpiece in praise. Parrots ring out a wealth of good news. Fortunata is beautiful, her voice is a melody, and she is coming home to the man she loves.

  And then she pulls into her driveway and remembers that Runt is probably drunk, has probably already betrayed her today with another woman, or several, that Jeff Davis is trying to extinguish his pillow, and Douglas is a child of low ambition. Before she has set the emergency brake of the car, she can already smell the cellar. The cellar stinks.

  These are her first words as she enters the house. “This place stinks!” she says, as if the cotton flowers and the tidy schoolroom had never existed. “This place stinks to high heaven!” she says. Her voice is the wheels of a braking freight train, metal on metal, alarm and dangerous discord. God has denied Fortunata two gifts and Fortunata is here to prove it.

  Runt was already defeated. Even Fortunata’s voice and angry manner could not have made this more clear. Today of all days it was impossible to deny that the house stunk. It stunk worse than cat piss. It stunk worse than architectural mildew. It stunk as if an ammonia bomb had been exploded in a pine tree.

  “This place stinks!” Fortunata said once again for emphasis.

  She dropped her plastic briefcase onto a chair where the guiltless cat lay sleeping. The cat shot off the chair and down the cellar stairs, for what reason only God knows. Fortunata glared at Runt. Runt was responsible for the cat. It was a white-trash cat. This is what Fortunata’s look told me.

  Runt was glum. He said, “I scrubbed the basement floor.” It was an apology and an admission of guilt.

  Fortunata said, “My God, what did you use!”

  Runt was hidden inside his own head. His eyes peered out of a skull. He looked like a rat in a soup can.

  I was frightened of what might happen next. I said to Roy Dale, “Want to go outside?”

  I could hear Jeff Davis far away in his room. “Fire!” he called out. “Man the hoses!” Jeff Davis was a madman, but he was also a practical joker. It was never clear to me when he was in psychosis and when he was a comedian. Runt knew, though. Runt, even in terror of Fortunata’s wrath, could laugh a sweet and fatherly laugh at this dark joke of a little boy. Runt said, with sincerity, “We are a lucky family.”

  Fortunata was having none of it. She said again, “What did you use?” Speaking of the ammonia bomb.

  Jeff Davis called out, “Bucket brigade!”

  Fortunata said, “What did you use to make this house stink?”

  Runt said, “A good deal of time and energy.”

  I could look into Fortunata Conroy’s eyes and know that she hated herself for this scene. I knew that she heard the impossibly harsh, hard metallic grating of her voice. I knew that she believed it was scenes such as this that gave her this voice, not genetics or even bad luck but only bitterness and a heart too long hardened by fear and rage and outrage. She knew how thoroughly out of line with her vision of marriage and joy and hope this scene fell and also that she was responsible for it. And yet she could not stop. In her mind swamp-elves bolted from cover and crossed a glen and into the trees and cane.

  “Gallop the horses! Hook and ladders!” called Jeff Davis from his room.

  Fortunata did not hold back on account of me. This open fighting told me that she was white trash to the core. A family of higher quality would have died before allowing me, an outsider, to witness their anger and pain. She said to Runt, “You worthless failure. You stinking drunk. You impotent pig.”

  I heard a voice say, “I like the way it smells.”

  It was Roy Dale. We were standing together in the room, practically clinging to each other. There were framed pictures of the entire white-trash family on the mantel above the living room space heater. Generations of rednecks in black and white and sepia and even in color. Aunts and uncles and cousins, nephews and nieces, foundlings and mulattoes, Ku Kluxers and gentle parsons. There were rednecks behind the traces of a mule, rednecks beneath false bowers at the senior prom, rednecks at weddings, rednecks in academic regalia at Ole Miss, rednecks in flannel shirts and fake pearls and with stethoscopes around their necks. There was enough money in professional photography of rednecks to fill in the miserable cellar with dirt and bury Runt and the cat in the bargain.

  When Roy Dale said, “I like the way it smells,” all the rest of the people in the room, including myself, looked at him as if he were a man from Mars.

  Nothing could stop Fortunata Conroy, or so I believed. She said, “I’ll tell you why this house stinks.”

  Runt said, “Shut your ugly mouth.”

  Fortunata was momentarily stopped. She said,
“What did . . .”

  Runt said, “Your voice is like eating ground glass.”

  Fortunata said, “Don’t you dare . . .”

  Runt said, “Your breath is like Gary, Indiana.”

  Fortunata said, “If you ever . . .”

  Runt said, “Your tongue is a snake that swallowed a frog.”

  Then Roy Dale’s voice again: he said, “It smells like pine trees to me.”

  Runt said, “Your gums are raw liver.”

  Roy Dale said, “I sincerely like the smell of pine trees.”

  Jeff Davis was silent.

  Fortunata said, “You low-life drunk.”

  Runt said, “You stooge.”

  Fortunata said, “You sexless lump, you eunuch.”

  Runt said, “You bitch.”

  Fortunata said, “Hit me! That’s what you want to do! Hit me! It would be a relief!”

  Runt said, “You sick slut.”

  Fortunata was screaming now. She said, “Get out! Go away! I don’t want you near these children! Go to a mental hospital!”

  Runt said, “Then I would be near your entire family.”

  Jeff Davis remained quiet. Even Jeff Davis could not be in a good mood all the time.

  RUNT WENT away from the house then. We heard the front screen door slap shut and then the Pinto started up. There was no explosion. Roy Dale led me out of the living room and down a dark hall to the room where he usually slept. Douglas, the child who wanted to be an apple, was sitting on an army cot, crying.

  Roy Dale said, “What’s your problem?”

  Douglas said, “I don’t know.”

  Roy Dale said, “Me and Sugar want to be alone.”

  Douglas said, “Ask me what I want to be when I grow up.”

  Roy Dale said, “I’ll ask you tomorrow.”