Music of the Swamp

by Lewis Nordan

  I need not go into the details of why she might oppose a complete reunion. Her life was moving along well enough, she had adapted to the small town gossip about the separation and the suicide attempt and my father’s embarrassing Don’t Drink meetings. She must still have harbored some grudge about the final scene at the house, the stabbing.

  But in fact there was an irresistible quality about my father’s particular doom. It did not seem entirely related to alcoholism. It seemed more cosmic, as if there were demons other than rum that did not care for my father at all.

  The appointed day and hour arrived. I was home on leave, as I said. “You’ll want to talk privately,” I said to my mother, in an effort to get away from the house.

  My mother insisted that I stay. “I need you here,” she said. “If he asks to come back I’ll need you here beside me.”

  I said, “What will you say?”

  She said, “I’ll say no. If he says, ‘I’m sorry,’ I’ll say, ‘I forgive you.’ If he says, ‘Take me back,’ I’ll say, ‘No, I can’t, it’s too dangerous.’ But you have to be here. If you are not here I might say yes.”

  So we waited for him.

  My mother said, “I’ll straighten up the kitchen.”

  She straightened it up, she more than straightened it up. She mopped the floor, she unloaded the dishwasher, she put new dishtowels on the rack, she scrubbed the sink, she put Drano in the pipes, she scoured the range and sprayed the oven with Oven Off, she cleaned the Venetian blinds and swept a cloth-covered broom over the cobwebs in the ceiling corners.

  She said, “Do you know how to put up wallpaper?”

  I said, “Mama, he’ll be here soon.”

  She said, “I didn’t mean I’d hang the paper right this minute!”

  I said, “Why on earth would you say yes?” I wanted her to say yes.

  She took off her rubber gloves and sat in a kitchen chair. She mopped sweat off her forehead with the back of her forearm.

  She said, “He’s just so helpless, Sugar. When all those bad things happen to him, I just can’t keep from wanting to help him.”

  I said, “But do you love him?”

  She said, “I don’t even ask myself that question any more. It doesn’t even matter any more.”

  At last my father’s car appeared in front of the house. It was the Pinto. The car was just out of the shop for electrical and fuel pump problems, as usual. My father did not seem to mind paying large sums to have the car repaired. He expected mechanical failure.

  Here is what I know now. When he came to the house on this day, my father had no intention of talking my mother into taking him back. His only purpose in coming was to say to my mother, “I have treated you badly. I am so very sorry.”

  My mother and I watched him out the front window. He sat for a few moments in his car. I thought his doors might have become accidentally locked, but I looked more closely and saw that his eyes were closed and his lips were moving. I think my father might have been saying a prayer. I think he might have been praying, “Keep the demons away from me while I do this thing.” Who knows what he might have been doing. The key was probably stuck in the ignition, or the seat belt would not come unbuckled.

  My mother said, “Jesus!” as if he had just done something awkward or unusual.

  I said, “Poor Dad.”

  She said, “Oh, poor Dad, my foot! I am so sick and tired of hearing Poor Dad!”

  The door opened and my father stepped out of the car. For a moment he stood beside the car and mopped his forehead with his handkerchief. He also seemed to be sniffing the air. Testing the air, maybe. For a fragrance of spring flowers? For a fragrance of fresh paint from a back-yard fence nearby? For the ripeness of possibilities, or something to do with his car, maybe, a flooded carburetor? It was impossible to tell.

  My mother said, “What is that fool doing now?”

  I said, “Mama, it hurts me for you to talk like that. He’s not doing anything.”

  She said, “He’s bringing his bad luck with him. He’s going to infect me with his bad luck again.”

  I said, “You are in love with him. That’s why you’re so scared of him.”

  She said, “I’m not letting him move back into this house. He can have a minute to talk, but that’s all. That’s all he’s going to get from me.”

  My mother opened the door and allowed my father to come into the living room.

  She said, “You might as well sit down.”

  My father eased himself down onto the sofa, where he had once accidentally sat on the cat and broken its neck. He was careful to sit on nothing but cushions.

  My mother said, “Sugar, you sit down too.”

  I sat on the other end of the sofa and made myself otherwise invisible. I looked steadfastly out the window and except for polite greetings said nothing.

  My father was not an articulate man. He scarcely noticed my presence. His face was pinched with concern for what he was about to say. I’m sorry. That’s all he meant. I was beginning to understand that now. All he would have to do was say this and be gone.

  Now my mother sat down as well. She was in the bentwood rocker. Not rocking but perched there, fragile as a bird on a twig.

  This was it. My father was here to make amends.

  Nothing happened. My father sat for a very long time and did not speak. His face was moving, his eyes, his jaw muscles, his ears and nose. There was even a wormy movement of his lips. He may have been speaking in there somewhere, he may have been carrying on conversations far back there in the silence. We didn’t know. All my mother or I could know was that he was not speaking in the world in which we lived. He seemed to be carrying on a conversation in some other realm, where only he and the demons resided.

  My mother kept waiting. Nothing happened.

  My father put his hands on his knees. This may have been a gesture of decisiveness, it was hard to tell.

  Some of my mother’s anger had faded, or been stuffed out of sight somewhere. She was trying to help my father speak. “Can I come back, will you have me?” she believed he was trying to say from his weird silence.

  She leaned forward in the rocker, as if to encourage him.

  Still he said nothing.

  My mother looked at me for help in jarring loose the words. I offered nothing. I fixed my eyes on the tree outside our front window.

  My mother looked back at him. Truly demons inhabited whatever space he occupied.

  I wanted to say it for him. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt you.

  My mother wanted to say it for him. Take me back. I can’t live without you.

  Nothing.

  My mother said, “Was there something you came to tell me, Gilbert?”

  My father was sweating now. He wiped sweat from his face with the back of his arm. Then, immediately, he wiped his face with the other arm. His underarms were big full moons of sweat stains.

  I thought, If he could have a drink of whiskey he could do this. Sobriety has killed this moment, this marriage.

  My mother said, “Gilbert?”

  He said, “Yes, please, thank you. I wonder if you could, if you might—I wonder if you would please give me a drink.”

  My mother said, “A drink?”

  He said, “Tap water is fine, yes.”

  She said, “Water?”

  I was already out of my seat. I filled a glass with ice cubes and ran water into it from the tap.

  He drank the water and crunched up all the ice cubes.

  He said, “There were eight of us.”

  My mother sat back in her chair, and allowed it to rock slightly for the first time since my father arrived in the house.

  My father was talking about his own poor family in Canada. His brothers and sisters, his parents. He told about his father, who was blinded in the mines by coal dust.

  My mother was very irritated now. She said, “Your father was not blinded by coal dust. Your father had cancer of the eyes.”

  He said,
“Six children. Guided through life by a blind man and a crazy woman. Dishes were forever piled up in the blackened sink. My mother was odd. Now you would say she was depressed. Then she was only odd. Some days she couldn’t move out of her chair. The table was never cleared. The oilcloth was stained with congealed foods. My father couldn’t see it anyway, he was blind, but I could see it.”

  My mother said, “Gilbert, will you please get to the point?”

  He said, “There was no telling what you might find on the breakfast table.”

  My mother had had enough. She said, “Gilbert, thank you for coming over.”

  He did not stop. He said, “A shoe, dirty clothing . . .”

  Mother said to me, “Sugar, will you please . . .”

  Father said, “A dead cat, once. Can you imagine that? A dead cat on the breakfast table.”

  Mother said, “I can imagine it all too well.”

  He said, “It was frozen, for some reason. Honestly, I can’t think why.”

  She said, “I don’t know what to say.”

  He said, “All I mean is . . .”

  It was then that I heard the first sound. It was a sound like wump.

  My father did not seem to hear the sound, but he did not finish his sentence either.

  It was odd that he could not tell my mother he was sorry for their sadness together. He had apologized a million times in his life. On this occasion, though, when I suppose his words were genuinely important for the first time ever, he could say not a word that made sense.

  Then the second time, this sound: wump. Small, distant, unreal. A cozy sound, I would say.

  I continued to look out the window at the magnolia tree, as my father sat mute before my mother and me. My mother, in her anger, seemed to soften to the hope of hearing something sensible come out of my father’s mouth. If he could have said, “I am sorry,” she would have said, “I forgive you,” and she would have meant it. If he had said, “I love you,” she would have said, “I have always loved you,” and this would have been true as well.

  Out the window I saw the trees coming into leaf. Pecan and chinaberry and black walnut. I thought that those leaf-buds were almost voices. I thought that those new leaves, gold-green, were almost words, almost something being said. I believed, in this family silence, that I could hear the voices of the leaf-buds as a sound of their new growth. They were not just poised there, I watched them relax and spread. I believed that their greenness was a kind of grief.

  My father said, “We ate cold canned spaghetti, dates, Post Toasties, Ovaltine, candy bars, soda water with cocaine in it, condensed milk by the teaspoonful. The contents of overstuffed drawers hung down to the floor like sad cold animals.”

  My mother moved from her chair and sat on the floor by my father’s feet and held his hand as he talked.

  I was embarrassed. I stood and walked to the window and looked out.

  He said, “I hated my pap for going blind. He beat me and my sisters. He tore us up as fine as cat hair.”

  Mother said, “I know, baby, I know.”

  Now that I was at the window and could see the street I knew what the sound outside had been. Hearthlike, had been one of my thoughts when I first heard this cozy sound. My father’s car had exploded and was burning in full flame. There was a third sound of wump, and now a crackling and a sound of air rushing and being sucked somewhere.

  I said, “Dad, your car is on fire.”

  He said, “I’m not trying to make excuses.”

  She said, “I know, I know.”

  He said, “It might sound self-pitying.”

  She said, “No, baby, no it doesn’t.”

  I said, “Uh, excuse me. Dad, your car is, you know, on fire.”

  He said, “My house gets robbed, my TV picks up programs that are no longer aired, people I don’t know call me up on the telephone.”

  Mother said, “We never should have let that white cat sleep on a white couch in the first place.”

  I said, “I’ll just call the fire department.”

  He said, “I’m just so sorry for everything. For the way things turned out.”

  She said, “Learn to love yourself, Gilbert. For once in your life, learn to love yourself.”

  We could hear the sirens now. The Arrow Catcher Volunteer Fire Department was on the move.

  The Pinto looked like a forest fire. It would not be long before the gas tank blew and rocked the neighborhood. The black smoke from the tires looked like a tornado.

  Now the three of us stood at the window together and watched the flames rise, and we were happy together when the Arrow Catcher pumper truck turned the corner at the Methodist church and banged to a halt in front of our house.

  I wish this story ended more happily than it actually does. All this happened a long time ago, and now I’m middle-aged and have been going to Don’t Drink meetings for a good long while myself. There is a good deal of wreckage in my own past, a family I hurt in the same way my father hurt me, and the same way his father hurt him. I tore my children up as fine as cat hair, you might say.

  And I wish I could tell you that my father died a happy man, or at least a sober man. But the truth is he died a dozen years later underneath a blanket of fish. That, however, is another story. His skin was as yellow as a traffic light. These were hard times for all of us, especially for my mother.

  But the night my father came over to the house and made amends to my mother and blew up his car, none of this sadness seemed possible. And for that blindness to the future I will always be grateful.

  That night my father and my mother slept together in their bed in their house, for the first time since he stabbed himself. I imagine that she looked at the scar on his stomach for the first time ever. I imagine that she ran her fingers over it and maybe kissed it as a part of their love-making that night.

  I heard nothing, not even their quiet voices, and not the sound of their touching. But I know this fantasy must be true, this dream of romance. There was such hope in all of us then.

  Let me tell you what did happen that night. I was lying in the same bed, in the same room with the slanted ceiling and luminous decals of stars and planets above me, where I had lain on the night of the stabbing. The same magnolia tree scratched at my window. The same peach-basket-size moon celebrated the width of the Mississippi sky. I watched the same black-and-white television set that I had watched that night.

  This night I did not follow a light in the kitchen and find my father there with a knife. This night my father left my mother asleep in their bed and eased inside the door of my room and stood without speaking with his back leaned against the door frame.

  I said, “Hey, Daddy.”

  I was waiting through a commercial for the beginning of “Petticoat Junction.” I met a boy in the army who had been to Hollywood and had walked through Petticoat Junction and Mayberry and two islands, Gilligan’s and Fantasy. Because of him I tried to watch these re-runs whenever they were listed in TV Guide.

  But when the commercial was over “Petticoat Junction” didn’t come on. An old Western movie came on instead. It was a movie called The Rider from Laredo, with an actor named Bob Steele.

  My father said, “Bob Steele.” He was standing there, just inside my door.

  I said, “TV Guide says ‘Petticoat Junction’ is supposed to come on now.”

  He said, “Bob Steele don’t understand Western symbolism.”

  I said, “This television set is crazy. It never picks up what is supposed to be on.”

  He said, “He can’t sing, either. Don’t even try.”

  I said, “Bob Steele?”

  We looked at the TV screen and watched a distant horseback rider come into view. There was a dust cloud behind his horse.

  My father said, “No wife, no white hat, no good-looking horse, no Indian sidekick, nothing.”

  The rider was close enough to see now. My father was right. There was nothing to distinguish this rider from a messenger, or a bad guy,
or a minor character. There was no way to tell this was the star, the hero of the movie.

  My father said, “And no comical sidekick either. Andy Clyde, Smiley Burnett—those guys wouldn’t give Bob Steele the time of day.”

  We watched the movie. Bob Steele was not a good horseback rider. The horse was a small brown nondescript beast that was jerking its head this way and that. Bob Steele was tired and hassled-looking from struggling with it. This was not part of the script.

  There is a gunfight going on in town. Bob Steele finally cracks his horse over the head with his fist to make it settle down. He reins the creature to a halt and the horse’s eyes are wild from fear of being punched out, blind-sided.

  My father said, “Bob Steele don’t take no shit from a horse.”

  It’s a gunfight sure enough. On one side of the street are all the solid citizens, the ranchers and farmers and the parson and the church ladies in bonnets. On the other side of the street are the gamblers and the floozies and the real estate swindlers and the saloon guys in black hats.

  My father said, “Watch this.”

  Bob Steele is not tall, is not handsome, has no bullwhip, or sidekick, no distinguishing features. He can’t ride a horse, he can’t sing. He is new in town, and what I begin to understand is that without any help at all, without even a white hat or an interesting horse, Bob Steele is pure gold. He is the believable de-symbolized, unromanticized version of what every man on earth wants to be. He is the magic that can be touched. He is what my father drank to become, and what I later drank to become. He is alone, he is pure hope, and complete.

  Bob Steele jumps off his horse.

  The two sides of the street are blazing away at each other. Men and women in violent conflict. Confined and victimized by their wardrobes, their unchangeable, unalterable representations of themselves and beyond themselves.