Sweet and Low

by Nick White

  Dr. Lane Douglas, failed scholar, jilted lover, had a new plan. She would write the book about the Author’s wife anyway. What she didn’t know, she would improvise, using her imagination, fabricating the sources here and there when called for. It took her a couple of months to finish it, and a small university press, lax in fact-checking, published it. At first, academia flocked to her book, dazzled by the wonderfully tragic story Dr. Douglas had crafted about the woman. The librarian and the Author were childhood sweethearts—in secret, of course, since the Cartwrights would never approve of his dating a mechanic’s daughter. After his return from France, they married and tried to start a family. Several miscarriages later, the childless couple began, heartbreakingly, to turn on each other until the Author turned away and took to the bottle. Yes, it was high drama—and most of it completely untrue. A couple of weeks after the book’s release, the first article was written to decry the falsehoods. In it, her book was spliced apart page by page for its “numerous and deliberate fallacies.” A firestorm erupted, and the university press felt compelled to pulp the book. Academics denounced her; professors around the country took to calling her Dr. Lie. In an interview with Charlie Rose, she appeared intoxicated—which she was—and admitted to everything. Back in Mississippi, the town, wanting some of the publicity for themselves, called a press conference and banned her from ever stepping foot inside their city limits.

  “Wait a minute,” I ask, raising my head. “Is that even possible?”

  “No matter—they put on a good show regardless, the damage was done.”

  Gilly’s mother never recovered emotionally from the vicious haranguing. Her drinking—Four Roses bourbon only, large bottles of it—increased. One night in December, she blacked out in a school playground, and by morning, she had caught a severe case of pneumonia, which eventually spread to both of her lungs. She died a few weeks later.

  “Histories sound so much more depressing when you lay them out like this, end to end.” Gilly nudges me from falling asleep, and I lift my head to kiss one of her hairy nipples. It’s lighter outside my bedroom window, almost morning. Very soon, she will start putting on her clothes: first her underwear and her bra, then her pants and her dingy top. She will brush her hair, tie it into a loose knot. Finally, she’ll tell me something that means, no matter what she says otherwise, goodbye. Goodbye and no more. But for now, she finishes her story. “Bradley came to her funeral. You should have seen him! All tears and blubber. You know how dramatic some Southerners can be. He practically proposed to me right there at her grave.”

  * * *

  —

  AFTER GILLY LEAVES ME that morning, there’s silence in my life. Silence filled with repetition.

  I go to work at the Author’s house. Give guided tours of his beautiful home. I bike to my apartment in the evenings. I eat frozen Hot Pockets. I watch reality TV. I read. I write. Maybe a sentence or two—nothing more. A month passes. Then two. Maggie finally calls me one morning.

  “I need you,” she says, “to come to the bookstore.”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “What do you think?”

  * * *

  —

  DO YOU WONDER WHY we ever took to calling it making love?

  I do. The term implies that with repeated and rhythmic penetrations we can somehow bring forth from ourselves the abstraction of what we mean to one another—call it infatuation or lust or, if you must, even love—and make this abstraction, transform it, into something tangible and concrete, some knot of magic that we can hold in our hands and show to one another, and say, “Look! This is it. We caught it.” I guess some want, in the end, what we do to be special and different from what the malodorous hippos do, rutting themselves silly in a jungle river. Maybe for a few of us it is different. Maybe the lucky and the beautiful experience this love-made-solid thing I’m talking about every goddamn day of their lives. In my experience, however, people always leave the love that cannot hold them; they just slip right on through the abstractness of it all. The steeplejack left the debutante. The librarian left the Author. The writer left the scholar. And now the married couple leaves the single misfits to fend for themselves.

  Critics called Holcomb’s new novel a masterwork. It was short-listed for every major literary award soon after the night of the reading. Then a private college in New England contacted him, offered Holcomb a lighter teaching load with a substantial salary increase. Gilly and he went to visit the campus and never came back.

  Maggie says, “For days I thought about flying up there and finding them.”

  “And doing what?”

  But she doesn’t say, so we sit quietly on the back steps of the bookstore and drink Diet Coke and vodka, and listen to an old Nina Simone record. We are tired. We’ve spent all morning outside, stacking Holcomb’s books into a great pile. Then we dosed them in kerosene. Maggie lit a match and tossed it on top of the books. Presently, we are watching them burn. Holcomb’s books pop and sizzle, their gluey insides unfolding before us like bloated marshmallows. Smoke pillows around us, and Maggie raises her glass to the rising flames. “One day,” she says, “you’ll write about this summer.” She’s drunk—has been drunk ever since I came over. I gulp down my drink and tell her I may never write again. “Oh, you will,” she says bitterly. “You’re like him that way.”

  When the fire burns out, she leads me upstairs to her room above the bookstore. It’s the afternoon, and light pools in from the windows, making strange patterns on the hardwood floor. We decide to close the blinds and shut the curtains. Still, the light ekes through and troubles us. We strip the comforter from her bed and duct-tape it over the windows. Now I can’t see a thing. “Much better,” I hear her say, and somehow in the darkness, she finds me, and we help each other undress. Then, all of a sudden, I hear sobbing. When she places a hand on my naked chest, I tremble and realize that it’s me: I’m the one who’s crying.

  “This is what you want?” she says. “Isn’t it?”

  “Of course, of course.”

  In the long, bright afternoon, we cleave to each other, our sad, wet bodies, and I blurt out everything I can think to tell her—all my feelings, all my regrets. “Yes,” she says, over and over. “Tell me, tell me.” And once I start, I can’t stop. I tell her how talented of a writer I am. I tell her how I want to be just like Holcomb only better, more successful. I tell her, my breath quickening, how I want to fuck his smell off of her. And Maggie—her thin body—can take it, every last bit, because she’s not there, not really. She’s eight hundred miles away, imagining the person in New England her body’s pretending I am in the dark.

  * * *

  —

  WHEN I GIVE TOURS of the Author’s house, I always explain to the guests that many theories abound for why his wife left him, but this is what I believe to be true: She was second to his work. The whole trouble between them stemmed from that simple fact. After he won the big prize in Europe, she thought their relationship would change, deepen, mature; he would, at the very least, throw some attention her way. He didn’t. Instead, he became more feverish in his desire to write—we know that he was working on three different projects at the time of his death. Like any talent, his was his greatest strength and his greatest weakness.

  But what do I know? I’m just the curator.

  I now stay late at his house, hours after the last guest signs the register and leaves. Maggie drives over in the evening. Our late nights have become ritual. We traipse over the velvet rope cording off the entrance to his bedroom. The twin mattress can barely hold the two of us. Around us, on the walls, his indelible charcoal etchings plot out the various lives of his characters, the words gleaming fiercely in the buttery light of the old-fashioned bulbs.

  “It’s all a lie,” Maggie says once, running a finger along the dark marks. “I’m not really related to him.”

  “You’re not?”

&nbs
p; “Does it matter so much to you if I am?”

  I pull her close, and the bed squeaks. “No, no—of course not.”

  She always leaves first after we finish—she never stays—and later, I kill the lights to the old house and bike back to my apartment alone. On the way, I sometimes ride down the Death Trace. The trail’s well-worn and easy to negotiate even at night. I pause at the bottom, where the Death Trace ends, and bellow out an old verse or two, something ornate, something I’m sure the Author would like to hear if he could. And the night swallows up my voice and spits back another, one that’s all haggard from years of pipe smoke and hard living, so like how I imagine the Author’s sounded. But, of course, this isn’t really him. It’s nothing more than a distorted echo, a trick of sound bouncing back to me through the trees—my desperate voice pleading to be heard by someone other than my own fool self.

  THE LAST OF HIS KIND

  It starts early one morning before sunrise. Someone hammering away at a rusty typewriter. Or perhaps hail: god-heavy, insistent. The three of them wake up nearly at the same instant and stumble from their rooms, half-asleep, blinking. At first, they act bewildered by the sound: Papa and his mother, MeMaw, and his son, Henry, believe someone’s knocking at the front door. They shuffle downstairs, open said door to no one, and discover, instead, a woodpecker about the size of a softball needling at the house’s awning at a breakneck pace. A miniature drill with feathers. Using a mop handle, Papa shoos the creature away. They almost laugh about it. Some kind of joke, they agree, before they climb up the stairs to their rooms—Henry wide-eyed, MeMaw complaining about her knees—and settle back into their beds.

  Not an hour later the bird returns. The thwacking drives Papa from his bed first: He explodes out of his room this time, a firecracker, and stomps through the old farmhouse, shaking the floorboards. “Where’s Dad’s rifle?” he asks the walls. “What have y’all done with it?”

  To Henry, his father’s carrying-on reminds him of a thunderstorm, only closer and more personal. His room rattles with the sound of the man’s anger. The chest of drawers facing his bed leaps toward him, as if alive, and tilts, almost turning over, before falling back into place. The door to MeMaw’s room slams open. Henry rushes to his, which is closed, and listens for what may happen next. MeMaw hollers at Papa. She calls him a “shitass” and a “psychofuck” and a “sot drunk.” She says he is acting a fool. His anger, she claims, has nothing to do with that pissy little bird and all to do with his wife who left him. “Delayed heartache,” she tells him, grunting. “You may as well face it like a man. If you can.”

  Henry cracks open his door to find Papa looming over the old woman, his jaw tight. She doesn’t move an inch under his glare, standing firm in her cottony nightshirt and her bare feet. She and her son have rowed many times before, Henry knows; each was used to the meanness of the other. Above them, the woodpecker keeps the racket going—a single pellet thrown at the same spot over and over.

  “Gun,” Papa says, in that fake calm voice Henry recognizes. “Where?”

  MeMaw points in the direction of the boy. Henry shuts his door and sprints to his bed, hoping to bury himself in a pile of covers before the drama hurtling toward him now makes it to his room. Seconds later his father slaps open the door and flashes on the lights. Henry covers his eyes, keeps very still.

  “Where? Where? Where?” Each time Papa shouts, his voice rises.

  MeMaw trails behind him, breathing hard. She’s become husky in her old age and isn’t accustomed to moving so fast this early in the morning. She says, “The closet, you idiot.”

  Until then, Henry didn’t know the rifle was in his room. MeMaw must have hidden it in his closet. His father’s a poor shot, and his aim only worsens when he drinks. Which has been a fair amount nowadays. Henry also knows MeMaw makes it a hobby to hide things belonging to Papa and bide her time until he notices they are missing. She likes the power of knowing certain things, Henry figures, that her son does not—his papa, who thinks he understands the world better than the rest of them, she says, all because he’s a writer.

  “I’ll be goddamned.”

  Henry opens his eyes in time to see Papa shoving out of the closet, rifle in hand. His face has become hard, something recently chiseled, and he looks as if he’s about to point the barrel at MeMaw. Perhaps the thought crosses his mind, but he moves on, pushing past her. He carries the gun outside and fires some rounds into the darkness. A few sharp kapows punctuated by silence.

  MeMaw has stayed behind in the boy’s room, leaned over his chest of drawers, catching her breath. There’s been enough excitement for one night. No need to follow him downstairs only to stir him up even more. Instead, she decides to wait until he has gone back to his room before she ventures back to hers. Henry’s eyeballing her from his bed—that freckled face, that rowdy bush of red hair. Just like his mother. On her, at least, such traits were handsome. On the boy, bless him, they rendered him homely. Oh, he was some kind of ugly. And there is something else about him too. A differentness she can’t as of yet place but knows that when it comes to a head it will endear him to few, if any, in this life. Life has a way of crushing the special ones, she often thinks. Just look at what it did to me.

  “Go on back to sleep,” she says. “It’s over now.”

  They both know she’s lying.

  * * *

  —

  THE BIRD’S SCIENTIFIC NAME is Campephilus principalis. Also called the American ivory-billed woodpecker. Not to be confused with his Cuban cousin, which is much larger. Ornithologists have classified the ivory-billed as critically endangered, and many believe the species to be extinct since there hasn’t been a sighting of one in nearly twenty years. Most of the time, these birds fly in pairs, mating for life. Like wolves and, occasionally, humans. This woodpecker hasn’t found its mate, however—and won’t because he is, in fact, the last of his kind.

  Territorial and antisocial, the woodpecker once lived amid a network of decayed water oaks infested with black beetles and slugs, delicacies to the bird, but bulldozers destroyed his habitat the week before to make way for a new outlet mall. The bird traveled for two whole weeks throughout the Alabama clay fields and Mississippi floodplains before finding himself here, at this farmhouse, desperate for food. His wingspan of nearly thirty inches and the red-tipped crown atop his head make him an easy target for the man with the gun. But the woodpecker, nervy and suspicious by nature, is too quick for him. He easily disappears into the night when the shooting begins, unharmed. And he will be back, of course. Dense forest such as this is hard to find. Not to mention the roof of the farmhouse, alive with so many delicious termites.

  * * *

  —

  HENRY’S EYES OPEN AT DAWN. Again to the sound.

  Peck-peck-peck-peck during breakfast (a modest bowl of Frosted Flakes) and peck-peck-peck-peck as he zips himself into a pair of coveralls and loads some paperbacks into his L.L. Bean book bag. The pecking’s softer now, less frantic. Almost melodic, which probably explains why MeMaw and Papa are still asleep.

  He leaves the house that morning to seek solace in a tree stand out in the woods. It’s November, and most of the trail grass has turned gray and brittle, and cracks underneath his booted feet as he hikes to the stand, a small covered plywood box nailed securely into a thick pine. He often escapes there to do homework (he’s homeschooled), but another urge sends him today. There’s no danger of hunters lurking around; Papa’s property has been posted for years, and many think he’s too crazy and his land not worth the trouble to poach.

  After he climbs into the stand, Henry sets down his book bag and retrieves a metal box from the far left corner of the squat room. Inside, he finds a scrap of paper he once tore from his father’s senior annual: a black-and-white photograph of the varsity swimming team. They stand in a row—eight boys in all, not much older than he is. By the looks of it, the picture had been taken from a l
ocation slightly above the swimmers’ heads. Someone must have perched on a ladder to get such an angle. Each of them gazes up with bristling confidence, their jawlines acutely defined. Wearing black Speedos. The gray-scaled pool behind them glistening. An illusion of undulation.

  Henry props the picture against the box, then leans against the back wall of the tree stand. Positions himself. Unzips his coveralls and places a hand inside. He imagines them, the swimmers, battling the icy water with their lean muscly limbs. He stares at the photograph until his eyes are dry and he must, at last, blink. The swimmers look back at him all the while, smirking. As if they know the power their broad chests and smooth feet hold over him.

  * * *

  —

  WHEN HENRY RETURNS HOME for lunch, Papa’s outside in the backyard taking shots at empty bottles of Knob Creek and Four Roses set up along the creosote fence. He finds MeMaw prone on the couch in the living room, a damp cloth pressed over her eyes. “He’s target practicing,” she says. “Every two hours or so the bird starts up and your daddy goes nuts. He shoots and shoots. Hitting only air, the poor bastard.” Between the bird and her son, MeMaw’s not had a good morning, and she’s come to an epiphany about her life. She has decided that all their troubles, the woodpecker included, can be traced back to her husband, dead and gone these forty years.

  She leans up from the couch and takes the boy’s hands into her own. “Now hear me out.” She tries to keep her voice steady so the boy will take her seriously. More seriously than anyone in her life ever has. But she must hurry before they start up again outside. That pounding! That shooting! Her mind’s liable to turn to scrambled eggs before it’s all over with. “Founceroy Barfoot,” she says, as if she were summoning him from across the room. “He’s the one who done it to us.”