Music of the Swamp

by Lewis Nordan

  Bob Steele takes out his six-shooter and fires off several shots, first one way and then the other. The gun is smoking. And then Bob Steele speaks the first words of the movie.

  He does not say, Stop in the name of the law. He is no lawman, no Texas Ranger. He does not say, Hold your fire, or I’ve got you covered. Here’s what Bob Steele says. He says, “What’s going on here?”

  My father looked at me.

  He said, “Do you see what I mean?”

  I said, “I’m not sure. You mean, shoot first and ask questions later?”

  My father said, “No, I mean ask the right question. Ask the same question over and over. Ask the only question there is.”

  I said, “Ask, ‘What’s going on here’?”

  My father said, “Maybe, maybe that’s the right question.”

  Creatures with Shining Scales

  THERE WAS rain all morning and the sky was as green as apples. It was only noon, and yet so dark the streetlights came on, right in the middle of the day.

  My father had just died in the bedroom.

  It was no surprise, he had been sick for a long time. My mother and I were sad, but also a little relieved.

  The tornado was not one of those slender, graceful beauties that snake down from heaven to Kansas on the television news. This was a thick, black, squat barrel jutting down from a gunpowder-colored canopy above the swamp. An ugly Mississippi bullfrog of a tornado.

  I had an excellent view of the storm from my father’s room.

  The rain was horizontal by now. I felt no fear of the window caving in and cutting me in two. I only stood there looking across our back yard, across the road.

  My mother said, “Honestly, some days it does not pay to get out of bed.”

  I looked at my father’s pale thin corpse in the bed and thought of covering his face with a sheet, but then decided not to. His eyes were closed, he looked all right, what was the point.

  I looked out the window at the strange tablelike slab of rain in the air, gray as slate. A red coloring in the funnel—bricks, I finally realized—meant the county school was down. Or, actually, up—if you want to get technical about it. The bricks floated like weightless things. Great sheets of plywood sailed around the outside of the funnel and disappeared and then sailed back around again, like painted horses on the carousel. So houses were down as well, the new subdivision just beyond the swamp, I supposed.

  A great noise issued from the sky. It was like a freight train, somebody was quoted as saying. A jet plane, somebody else said. To me it was a string of firecrackers going off, very fast but one at a time, sure enough, pop pop pop pop, a hundred reports one right after the other. A stand of one hundred loblolly pines snapped off, tree by tree.

  My mother said, “Do you think we should take shelter?”

  That was the first it occurred to me that our house would surely be hit. We were directly in the path of the storm.

  I said, “Well, maybe so. Maybe that’s a good idea.”

  My mother said, “I heard somewhere you could hide in the bathroom. The bathroom is supposed to be a safe place, for some unknown reason.”

  I said, “Well, all right. It sounds good to me. Let’s get in the bathroom, maybe we’d better get moving.”

  We started to go into the bathroom, and then my mother stopped. She said, “What about your daddy?” His body, she meant, of course.

  I said, “He’s light as a twig. I could carry him into the bathroom with us.”

  The house was rocking now. Shingles were flying like pigeons.

  She said, “You carried him to the bathroom often enough when he had to sit on the pot. You’re a good boy, Sugar. You were always awfully good to your daddy and me. And not even your real daddy at that.”

  All the window screens blew off the house at once and flew away like large transparent birds.

  I said, “Not my real daddy?”

  She said, “You’d better get him. You’d better take him to the bathroom with us.”

  The house was cracking like a bullwhip. It felt like we were riding a snake.

  The picture window was breathing in and out like a big-chested athlete.

  I was already scooping the body up in my arms.

  My mother changed her mind again. She said, “Put him down, Sugar. Come get in the bathroom. Don’t do anything foolish, after you’ve been such a good son.”

  I said, “Are you sure?” I was holding my father’s body in my arms like a sleeping child.

  Water was pouring under the doors and heavy things were hitting the outside of the house. I put my father back down on his bed and went into the little interior bathroom with my mother and closed the door behind us.

  Ten seconds later the storm was gone and so was the roof. Rain fell as if it were any other summer day, except that it fell into the house on us. Wet beards of Spanish moss draped from my mother’s hair, sucked up out of the swamp and dropped here. There were pine cones in my lap. There were also heavy things, rafters with bright nails and roofing with dull-colored nails. There was a small cut above my right eye.

  I said, “We don’t know what we’ll see when we dig ourselves out of here.” Despite the wreckage of the house, and the wreckage of our lives, we could talk in more or less normal voices.

  My mother said, “Maybe he blew away.”

  I said, “It’s possible. In fact, he probably did blow away.”

  She said, “He was light as he could be. He didn’t weigh any more than dandelion fluff.”

  I said, “I’ll look. You stay here. I’ll go out and look for him.”

  She said, “You have been such a good son to me. You have always been a good boy. Your daddy loved you so much, even if he wasn’t your real daddy.”

  I said, “Uh, Mama . . .”

  The bathtub was half filled with rainwater, and the rain continued to fall. We were stuck beneath debris, two-by-fours and shingles mostly, and many small fish that the storm had sucked up from the swamp and left behind in our bathroom and across the rugs and floors of our demolished house. Some were minnows, a million of them, small silvery creatures with shining scales. And there were larger fish as well, a small catfish or two, a gar with a snout.

  My mother, there in the rain-filled bathtub, covered with debris, said, “I loved your daddy. For all his faults, I did love him.”

  I said, “Mother, do you remember the time Dad took me fishing and it made me so sad to see the fish die?”

  She said, “Your daddy never took you fishing, Sugar. I begged him a hundred times to take you, but he never did.”

  I said, “No, I’m sure he took me once. He caught silvery-looking fish and I finally caught one, well, catfish I suppose, an ugly monstrous old creature of a fish. It looked nothing like the fish he was catching.”

  She said, “You must have dreamed it, Sugar-man. It never happened. Your daddy never took you fishing.”

  I dropped the subject and pushed away the last of the debris. I tested my legs and found that I could stand easily. I opened the bathroom door and went out into the house, though I might as easily have walked around the door frame.

  The rain had slacked up now, in fact had almost stopped. The sky had lightened a great deal and, though I could see nothing but destruction everywhere, the day suddenly seemed to re-dawn, as if with some promise of good things rather than bad.

  I could see through my walls. Neighbors wandered about in their yards, looking at the felled trees, the frames and shells of houses. I heard someone say something about a chainsaw.

  My father had not blown away after all. He was still in his bed, as if asleep. There were many small fish in the bed with him. The sheets were silver and shimmering with fish going flippety-flip.

  I said, “Mama, he’s all right! He’s still in bed. Daddy is just fine.”

  My mother said, “Well, I wouldn’t go so far as to say that.”

  I said, “Mama, did you say—a while ago, did you say . . .?”

  I looked directly
into my mother’s face, and for the first time in my life I understood that she was a very beautiful woman, that many men had loved her, that her choices had been more varied and strange than I had ever imagined.

  She said, “Did I say what, Sugar?”

  EPILOGUE

  Owls

  ONCE WHEN I was a small boy of ten or eleven I was traveling late at night with my father on a narrow country road. I had been counting the number of beers he drank that night, nine or ten of them, and I was anxious about his driving.

  Neither of us had spoken for a long time. What was there to say?—the beers, the narrow road, the stubble fields, a bare bulb shining out in the darkness from a porch far back from the road, the yellow headlights? What was there to talk about? The car held the road on the curves, the heater was making its familiar sound.

  Then I saw a road sign, bright yellow and diamond-shaped, and on it I read the word SLOW. My father kept on driving at the same speed and did not slow down, though I knew he had seen the sign. So I was bold. I said, “Did you see that sign?”

  Immediately my father let up on the gas and the car began to slow down. He said, “You’re right. We should go back.”

  He pulled his car onto the berm and stopped and looked back over his left shoulder for safety and then pulled out onto the road again and made a U-turn.

  I was frightened. I said, “Why are we going back?”

  My father shifted the gears and we began driving back in the direction we had come. “The sign,” he said. “I’m going back to see the sign.”

  I said, “Why? Why are we doing that?”

  He said, “Isn’t that what you meant? Didn’t you want to go back?”

  I said, “I wanted you to slow down. I was afraid.”

  We drove on in the darkness for a minute. My father said, “The sign didn’t say SLOW.”

  I said, “It didn’t? I thought it said SLOW.”

  My father said, “It said OWLS.”

  So we kept driving and I didn’t argue. I listened to the quiet sound of the heater fan. I saw the red eyes of a rabbit on the roadside. I saw the stubble fields. For one second I believed I had lived a very long hard life and that I was all alone in the world.

  Then the sign came into view again, the back of the sign, of course. My father slowed the car and pulled over to the right and when he had come to a complete stop he checked over his shoulder for safety and made another U-turn so that we might face the sign again and read its message. The headlights made the sign huge and bright.

  My father had been right. The sign said OWLS.

  We kept sitting there for a long time. The engine was running, there was a small vibration.

  Then my father turned off the engine. The early-spring night air was cold, but he rolled down the windows.

  I knew my father wanted me to be quiet. I’m not sure how I knew this. I knew he wanted us to listen. I scarcely breathed I was listening so hard. I did not move at all.

  Then I heard the owls overhead. I heard the soft centrifugal buffeting of their feathers on the night air. I heard a sound from their owl-throats so soft that I believed it was their breathing. In my mind I counted them and thought that they were many. The owls were circling and circling and circling in the air above us.

  I don’t know what I believed would happen. I think I believed I would feel the fingers of my father’s hand touch my arm, the sleeve of my shirt. I believed I would turn to him and for the first time in my life I would know what to say. I would tell him all my secrets. I believed my father would say, “I love you.” This was what it meant to sit in a car with your father in the middle of the night and listen to a flock of owls while looking at a diamond-shaped sign that said OWLS.

  Then he rolled up his window, and so I rolled up mine. In the darkness he said, “You know, your mother is a terrible housekeeper.”

  We only sat there looking at the OWLS sign. I knew things would not go well after this.

  And so then he started up the car and we drove away, back along the dark road, and we did not say anything else to each other that night, and he drank a few more beers.

  All I mean to say is this: Many years later I fell in love with a woman, and she was beautiful and strange. One afternoon, after we had made our love, we lay in a band of sunlight that fell across our bed and I told her the story of my father and the dark road and the sign that said OWLS.

  I said, “You don’t believe me, do you?”

  The woman said, “Have you ever told this story to anyone before?”

  I said, “I told my mother. That same night, after my father and I got home and my mother came upstairs to tuck me in.”

  The woman said, “Tell me again about your room, then, with the fake stars on the ceiling.”

  I told her what she already knew. I said, “It was an attic room, with a slanted ceiling. A desk, and even my clothes drawers were built into the wall to save space. There was a crawlspace in the back of my closet, where I sat sometimes, in the rafters. On the ceiling above my bed were pasted luminous decals of stars and the planets and the moon. Saturn had rings. A comet had a funny tail.

  She said, “Tell me again about the real moon.”

  I said, “The moon outside my window.”

  She said, “How large was it?”

  I said what I had told her many times. I said, “It was a peach-basket-size moon.”

  She said, “And you were lying in your bed, with the fake stars shining down on you and the peach-basket moon outside your window, and then . . .”

  I said, “I heard my mother coming up the stairs to tuck me in.”

  She said, “Your mother had been worried about you, out in the car with your father when he had been drinking.”

  I said, “Yes, she had been worried. She would never say this.”

  She said, “What did she say?”

  I said, “She said, ‘Did you have a nice time with Daddy tonight?’”

  She said, “What did you say?”

  I said, “I told her the story about seeing the sign. About stopping and listening to the owls in the air.”

  She said, “What did your mother say then?”

  I said, “She said, ‘That’s about like your daddy.’”

  She said, “Your mother didn’t believe you?”

  I said, “She was right. There was no OWLS sign. It’s ridiculous. There is no way to hear owls in the air. And, anyway, think about the coincidence of a drunk man and his oversensitive kid stopping at just the moment the owls happen to be flying above a sign.”

  She said, “Hm.”

  I said, “And you know that thing my father said. That thing about ‘Your mother is a terrible housekeeper’?”

  She said, “Mm-hm.”

  I said, “That’s a part of an old joke we used to hear in the South when I was a boy. The punchline is, ‘My wife is a terrible housekeeper, every time I go to piss in the sink it’s full of dirty dishes.’” I said, “I think I made the whole thing up.”

  She said, “Where did the owls come from?”

  I said, “I’m not sure. Do you remember in Winnie-the-Pooh, the character named Owl?”

  She said, “Yes.”

  I said, “Remember, somewhere, in one of those books, we learn that Owl’s name is misspelled on a sign as WOL. Maybe that’s where I got the idea. I just happened to think of that book. Jeeziz. It’s possible I made this whole thing up.”

  She said, “Are rabbits’ eyes really red?”

  I said, “I don’t know. I saw a blind dog in my headlights one time, and its eyes looked red. Christ.”

  The way the sunlight fell across the bed was . . . Well, I was so much in love.

  She said, “Was your father magic?”

  I said, “I wanted him to be.”

  She said, “He might have been.”

  Now she looked at me, and it was the night of the owls all over again. The car’s heater, the vibration of the engine, the red eyes of the rabbit, the stubble fields, the music of the
odd birds in flight, the OWLS sign before me. And also the feeling that there was someone beside me to whom I could tell my most terrible secret and that the secret would be heard and received as a gift. I believed my clumsy drunken inexpert father, or my invention of him, had prepared me for this magic. The woman beside me said, “I love you.”

  In that moment every good thing that I had expected, longed to feel with my father, I felt with her. And I also felt it with my father, and I heard his voice speak those words of love, though he was already a long time dead. He was with me in a way he could not be in life.

  For one second the woman and I seemed to become twins, or closer than twins, the same person together. Maybe we said nothing. Maybe we only lay in the band of sunlight that fell across our bed. Or maybe together we said, “There is great pain in all love, but we don’t care, it’s worth it.”

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Grateful acknowledgement is made to The Southern Review, the PEN Fiction Awards, National Public Radio, Story, The Chattahoochee Review, and The Southern Humanities Review, where some of these stories first appeared. And thanks also to the Pennsylvania Council for Arts for two summer grants.

  Published by

  Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill

  Post Office Box 2225

  Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27515-2225

  a division of

  Workman Publishing Company, Inc.

  225 Varick Street

  New York, New York 10014

  © 1991 by Lewis Nordan

  “Muddy Water,” words by Jo Trent, music by Peter De Rose & Harry Richman, copyright © 1926 (Renewed) by Music Sales Corporation & Fred Fisher Music. International copyright secured. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

  “Honeycomb,” written by Bob Merrill, copyright © 1953, 1982 by Golden Bell Songs. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

  E-book ISBN 978-1-56512-783-8