Music of the Swamp

by Lewis Nordan

  I followed my father through the front door of the drug store and breathed in the strange chemical fragrance that hung forever in its unholy air.

  There was no one in the drug store.

  My father called out, “Shank!”

  There was no answer. Mr. Shanker was rarely conscious.

  Again, he said, “Shank, where are you, boy?” He said this in his ironic voice, and then looked at me and gave me a sharp wink.

  I felt loaded down with clothing and the shotgun and the gun-cleaning kit. There was a long soda fountain with a marble top, and a long mirror behind the counter.

  In the reflection I could see clearly the shelves of things behind me, the tonics and patent medicines and mustard plasters and bunion pads and suppositories and boxes of Kotex, all the bright primary colors of their bottles and boxes and packaging. I could see a glass counter where Mr. Shanker had placed costume jewelry for sale, large gold-looking earrings and necklaces, impressive large bottles of perfume with French words in the name and glass stoppers as big as the bottles themselves, bud vases and ceramic masks and even chocolates in gold foil, stale for a decade.

  But I could not see myself. I could not bear to look. I could not permit reality to swamp the invention and romance of Field and Stream. I looked in the mirror and saw the drug store, but I could not, would not see myself.

  Mr. Shanker was in the back room, my father told me.

  Still carrying the .410 and the gun-cleaning kit and with a loose box of shells click-clacking in my jacket pocket, I followed my father through the large silent old barn of a pharmacy, with its perpetual chemistry and perpetual twilight and antique soda bar.

  Mr. Shanker was in the back room all right. He was not dead yet, but he soon would be. He was filthy and soaked in his own urine and lying on an army cot beneath a wool army blanket. He was shivering so hard I thought he would fall right off the cot and onto the floor. The room was narrow and high-ceilinged and cramped and black-dark, and everything I needed to know of it I could smell or hear, the piss and the rattling of the cot against the floor, the rattling of something else, something inside Mr. Shanker, some clatter in his chest.

  My father groped around above his head in the darkness and finally laid a hand on a string hanging from the ceiling. An enormous light bulb flashed on and filled the cavelike room with harsh light.

  Mr. Shanker’s eyes looked like a busted-out windshield. His face was an incredible orange color in the glare of the electric bulb. He was literally bouncing on the cot, his shivering was so extreme. The smell of his urine was strong.

  Even so, Mr. Shanker made the last joke of his life. He said, “Gilbert, they wont no need for the boy to shoot me. Those yaller shoes of yours’ll do the trick by theyself.” When he finished saying this, he opened his mouth and his enormous blue tongue rolled out like a snake. There was no sound, but I understood this to be laughter.

  My father said, “Look like you bout to need a pick-me-up.”

  Mr. Shanker finished his weird tongue-laughter and motioned with his eyes to the syringe and morphine in a small black leather case on a low table nearby. The tongue sucked back into Mr. Shanker’s mouth like a blue runner into a hole.

  I said, “Daddy, he’s dying.”

  My father said, “Lemme see that kit.” He meant the gun-cleaning kit I was holding in my arms like a baby.

  Mr. Shanker had swallowed his tongue and was choking to death.

  I was rigid with fear.

  My father said, “Gimme that goddamn kit, Sugar, you want to kill Mr. Shanker or what!”

  I shoved the metal box toward my father and he took it in his hands. He set it on the low table and snapped open the latches. He said, “Now ain’t that just the way the Lord his mighty works doth perform?” He was saying what a fortunate thing we had this gun-cleaning kit along with us, just at a time when Mr. Shanker was swallowing his tongue. My father was in a spiritual mood.

  My father stripped the shortest section of the ramrod loose from the velvet-lined box and jammed it between the choking man’s teeth and pried open Mr. Shanker’s mouth. He said, “Hand me that box of swipes.” He meant the package of cleaning swabs that normally fit at the end of the ramrod to clean gunpowder residue from a barrel.

  Now he had Mr. Shanker’s mouth open, with one section of the ramrod cracking the enamel off Mr. Shanker’s teeth and his fingers down Mr. Shanker’s gullet groping around for his tongue. The cleaning swab between my father’s fingers gave him a good grip on the slick tongue, and so it was not long before he had grabbed hold of it and pulled it up to the surface like a fish. Mr. Shanker was actually breathing again.

  My father was competent and calm and in control of the situation. For a moment I felt almost good about my life, I felt less lonely and more hopeful than I had for a long time. Mr. Shanker’s tongue was as big as a bullfrog, and while it was no longer hopping, it did seem to have a life of its own, and to breathe in a healthy, regular rhythm, unlike Mr. Shanker’s own real breathing.

  My father said, “Hole on to this thang for a minute, Sugar.”

  He meant the tongue. He meant Mr. Shanker’s unbelievable reptilian tongue.

  I said, “I cain’t do it, Daddy.”

  He said, “Shore now. Jess put down your mighty weapon there and grab holt of it.”

  Mr. Shanker’s eyes were popped out and throbbing with blood and jaundice.

  I leaned the .410 against the wretched army cot and moved into position behind my father. He set the gun-cleaning kit carefully on the cot beside the shotgun.

  He said, “Use that-air swipe. You can get a better grip.”

  I said, “I don’t think I can do it, Daddy.” I took a cleaning swab between my fingers and reached around for Mr. Shanker’s tongue.

  My father said, “Have you got it?”

  I was holding the tongue on one side and my father still had a grip on the end of it.

  He said, “Okay, I’m letting go.”

  I said, “You’re letting it go? You’re letting it go right now?”

  He said, “Have you got a-holt of it? Are you ready?”

  I said, “I got it. I think I’ve got it.”

  He said, “All right then, I’m doing it, I’m letting go.”

  My father let go, and I held on like a bulldog. I had Mr. Shanker’s tongue by the balls. This tongue was going nowhere. We had passed the baton.

  My father said, “Good, good. Good work, Sugar-man.”

  I stood there holding the tongue while my father prepared the shot of morphine. Mr. Shanker’s tongue was as passive as a fed cat.

  It was almost like hunting. It was almost like Field and Stream. The great strange electrical bulb swinging from a cord above us was the blazing Mississippi sun, it was corn fields and sorghum and sugar cane, it was a campfire in the woodlands, it was a lantern to skin squirrels by, it was the harvest moon to sleep beneath, it was the Milky Way and all the stars above, it was electrical socks and a brier pipe and chocolatey tobacco, it was father and son together in a place so primitive that age and old hatred and all of history made no difference, it was love and bright water and dark wood.

  My father filled the syringe and found an uncollapsed vein in Mr. Shanker’s skeletal arm, and swabbed the vein with cleaning solvent, and tied a tourniquet from the small coil of soft cotton rope.

  He said, “Keep a hold on that tongue,” and I tightened my grip so hard that I pinched a blood blister into it with my fingers.

  THERE IS not much way to tell the next part except just to go on and tell it.

  My father inserted the needle in the vein of Mr. Shanker’s bruised and filthy arm, and pumped the little handle of the syringe, and filled Mr. Shanker’s blood with morphine, and killed him dead.

  There was a brief seizure and a few seconds of jerkiness, and maybe even a little vomit, but not much. It was a sudden death, if you look at it the right way. Mr. Shanker was dead of an overdose of morphine that my father administered thirty seconds after saving
his life from suffocation by tongue.

  My father said, “Some days I swear to God it don’t pay to get out of the damn bed.”

  WHAT HAPPENED next is a strange and marvelous thing.

  There was nothing to be done for Mr. Shanker. He was dead. I don’t know what I expected my father to do, or say. I had never seen a dead person before, though I suppose my father had.

  My father sat down slowly on the edge of the cot beside Mr. Shanker. The electric light bulb overhead still cast its odd harsh light over everything, the filthy cot, the army blanket, the table, the drugs and crumpled clothing on the floor.

  My father said, “I’ll have to call Big Boy.” He meant Mr. Chisholm, the town marshall.

  I said, “Are we in trouble?”

  He said, “No, Sugar. We’re not in any trouble. Shank wouldn’t want me to say I killed him.”

  I said, “We just found Mr. Shanker here like this?”

  He said, “I’ll work this all out with Big Boy. Don’t you worry, Sugar-man.”

  My father kept on sitting there. He patted Mr. Shanker once on the knee, and then sat a little longer.

  At first I didn’t move, and then I started to pick up the bits and pieces of my gun-cleaning kit and put them away, the tip section of the ramrod, with Mr. Shanker’s spit and tooth enamel still on it, the solvent my father had used to sterilize Mr. Shanker’s arm, the used swabs, the cotton rope. All of it I fitted carefully back into the velvet-lined box, and then I snapped shut the latches.

  For a little while neither of us spoke.

  My father said, “I look like a fucking fool in these shoes.”

  It is hard to say why, but I am certain that this was the closest moment my father and I had ever shared. I was very much in love with my father, though I might have known even in this moment that something inside me had frozen solid and would be a long time in thawing.

  I said, “Is the hunting trip, you know, is it off again?”

  My father rubbed his unshaven face with both his hands.

  He said, “Do you still want to go hunting?”

  I said, “Well, I wouldn’t mind. Sure. Okay.”

  He said, “You’re not just saying this? You really want to?”

  I said, “Well, you know—if you want to.”

  He shook his head. He said, “Tell you the truth, if I was a fine boy like you I wouldn’t much want to go hunting with a man like me.”

  He put his hands in his lap and studied the backs of them.

  I said, “You mean a murderer?”

  He looked up. He said, “Oh, well yeah, that too. I was more thinking about, you know, these damn shoes. Going hunting with somebody wearing yellow plastic shoes.”

  I sat down on the cot beside my father and the late Mr. Shanker. I could feel the warmth of my father’s arm against my arm, and the warmth of Mr. Shanker’s dead body against my butt and lower back. I leaned comfortably into the corpse.

  My father said, “Do you really think I’m a murderer?”

  I said, “I don’t know.” I said, “But you could throw the shoes away. That’s something you could do.”

  My father said, “You’re right there. I could do that. I could get rid of these damn shoes.”

  My father slipped off one shoe, very slow, and held it a moment and then dropped it into Mr. Shanker’s paraphernalia-cluttered wastebasket. Then with the other shoe he did the same. He crossed his legs and rubbed his foot with his hands.

  He said, “They wont even comfortable.”

  Mr. Shanker was very warm. I wondered how long it took for a body to grow cold.

  I said, “You could cry like a baby.”

  My father said, “I couldn’t do that, Sugar-man. Oh-no, I don’t think I could do that.”

  I said, “I guess not.”

  I thought of my father’s father, the bitter old man back at the house. What did he have to do with this strange moment in my family’s history? I could smell cigars and oranges.

  I said, “I’ve never fired a gun.”

  My father said, “Well, you’re right. You’re right about that. And that’s another thing we can do something about.”

  He stood up and took the gun and the gun-cleaning kit out of my hands.

  He said, “Here you go, let me carry these for a while.”

  I handed everything over to him.

  He said, “I think we’d better find me some decent shoes and call Big Boy Chisholm and figure out some way for me and you to burn some gunpowder before this day turns out to be a total loss.”

  PART III

  How Bob Steele Broke My Father’s Heart

  NAUGHTY DEMONS accompanied my father wherever he went. All misery did not seem to be of his own making. In his home, the telephone often rang with no one on the line. Hoses broke on the Maytag. Pipes froze in the spring. Pets came down with diseases they had been inoculated against. Wrestling and “The Love Boat” appeared on television at unscheduled times. Lightning struck our house and sent a fireball across the floor. He was the only man in Mississippi to buy a bottle of Tylenol that actually had a cyanide capsule in it. He went to only two high school baseball games in his life and was beaned by a foul ball at each of them. A homeless person died on his back stoop. When he walked down the street bluejays chased after him and pecked at his face. He was allergic to the dye in his underwear. He mistakenly accepted a collect obscene phone call.

  This sounds like a joke or an exaggeration, but I swear it is not. There was something magical about the amount of benign bad luck that, on a daily basis, swept through my father’s life like weather and judgment.

  After the separation my mother was suspicious of the outcome of any reunion with my father. He had quit drinking, it was true. And I was home on furlough from the army to lend her moral support, that was true as well. But even if she could have forgiven the incident with the knife, there was some chance, at least, that a reconciliation could lead to busted plumbing or bad wiring.

  I should say more about the incident with the knife.

  A year earlier, just before I went into the army, my parents had one of their usual fights.

  My mother: “You, you, you!”

  My father: “But, but, but . . .”

  My mother: “You never, you always!”

  My father: “But, but, but . . .”

  My father was drunk, of course. I went upstairs to hide, as I always did.

  I turned on my father’s small black-and-white television and watched part of a “National Geographic Special” about whales. Japanese whalers shot harpoons into whales and the whales dragged boatloads of people in raingear through bloody water. A cartoon special was scheduled, but the whales came on instead. My father’s portable television set.

  Later wrestling came on, though “The Cowboy Bob Steele Film Festival” was scheduled.

  The fight was over, so that was good.

  I got out of bed and started downstairs to take a leak.

  I walked past the kitchen just in time to see my father take a butcher knife from the sink and stab himself in the stomach. He was wearing only a light cotton robe, which was open in front. My mother had already gone to bed.

  Then he stabbed himself again, and this time the knife sank two or three inches into his stomach.

  For a second I was stone, and then I said, “Daddy!” and rushed to hold him in case he should fall. I said, “Oh my God! Oh Jesus, Daddy!” I had my hands on his shoulders, and I tried to lead him to the sofa.

  He drew the knife out of his stomach and dropped it on the kitchen table. Blood spilled down out of him, down his belly, down into the hair between his legs, down his thighs, onto the floor.

  All I could say was, “Oh Jesus, oh Jesus.”

  My father said, “Hand me one of those cup towels from the rack. Watch that rack don’t fall off the wall.”

  He took a clean dish towel and held it against the wound.

  I said, “I’ll wake Mama.”

  He said, “Don’t do that, S
ugar. She’s had a rough night. Let the pore woman get some sleep.”

  I said, “I’ll drive you, then.” To the hospital, I meant.

  He said, “Well, but somebody’s going to have to clean up this mess.”

  So that was that. I stayed behind to wipe up the blood with a sponge and wash it down the kitchen sink.

  I heard the car start up in the driveway—it was a Pinto he had bought from Runt Conroy, my friend Roy Dale Conroy’s daddy, the car that later would actually explode, but tonight it started on the first try and there was no fire. I saw the lights come on, and then I watched out the window as my father backed the car out and drove up the street towards the highway and on to the hospital in Leflore, ten miles across the Delta.

  After this incident my mother had had enough. She told him he would have to leave.

  He said, “I’m going to make this up to you. I’m going to become a new man, you wait and see. I’m going to change my luck.”

  It was when I was on leave from the army, sometime in the spring of the following year, that my father came back to our house to beg to be taken back. That’s what I thought he had come to do, anyway.

  It was hard to deny that he was different. He had stopped drinking, for one thing. He went to meetings that he called his Don’t Drink meetings, and to tell the truth, I had never seen him more in the flush of good health. It had been almost a whole year since he had a drink.

  I had a brand new stripe on my dress greens and a spit shine on my shoes, and my mother seemed more at ease with herself than I had ever known her to be. Now here was my father going to his meetings and saying he might have his teeth fixed.

  So when my father told me in confidence that he was planning to ask my mother’s forgiveness for all his years of drunkenness, well, it didn’t seem impossible to me that something very good might come of it.

  My mother was not completely unaware of what might be in the offing. My father had called her and had asked, in his gentlest way, to be allowed to speak with her about matters of a personal nature. He said he was working a “step” of some kind for his D.D. meetings and would appreciate my mother’s cooperation. This was the way he phrased his request, and so in my mother’s mind it could mean nothing else except that he wanted to be taken back.