In the Loyal Mountains

by Rick Bass

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Acknowledgments

  Dedication

  The History of Rodney

  Swamp Boy

  Fires

  The Valley

  Antlers

  Wejumpka

  The Legend of Pig-Eye

  The Wait

  Days of Heaven

  In the Loyal Mountains

  Coming Soon from Rick Bass

  Read More from Rick Bass

  About the Author

  Copyright © 1995 by Rick Bass

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

  www.hmhbooks.com

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

  Bass, Rick, date.

  In the Loyal Mountains / Rick Bass,

  p. cm.

  Contents: The history of Rodney—Swamp boy—Fires—The valley

  —Antlers—Wejumpka—The legend of Pig-eye—The wait—Days of

  heaven—In the Loyal Mountains.

  ISBN 0-395-71687-X ISBN 0-395-87747-4 (pbk.)

  I. Title.

  PS3552.A821315 1995

  813'.54—dc20 94-49609

  eISBN 978-0-547-61733-6

  v2.0513

  Acknowledgments

  These stories first appeared, in different versions, in the following publications: “The History of Rodney” in Ploughshares; “Swamp Boy” in Beloit Fiction Journal; “Fires” in The Quarterly and Big Sky Journal; “The Valley” in American Short Fiction; “Antlers” in Special Report; “Wejumpka” in The Chariton Review; “The Legend of Pig-Eye” in The Paris Review; “The Wait” in Story; “Days of Heaven” in Ploughshares; “In the Loyal Mountains” in Southwest Review. These stories were also published in the following anthologies: “The History of Rodney” in New Stories from the South: The Year’s Best 1990 and Other Sides of Silence: New Fiction from Ploughshares; “Fires” in Pocketful of Prose; “The Valley” in Listening to Ourselves; “Antlers” in Texas Bound, In the Company of Animals, and Best of the West 4; “Wejumpka” in Pushcart Prize XV and New American Short Stories 2; “The Legend of Pig-Eye” in The Best American Short Stories 1991; “The Wait” in Boats; “Days of Heaven” in Pushcart Prize XVIII and The Best American Short Stories 1992; “In the Loyal Mountains” in New Stories from the South: The Year’s Best 1991. Grateful acknowledgment is made to these publications and their editors.

  Deepest thanks to Russell Chatham for the painting on the jacket, to Hilary Liftin for production assistance, to Melodie Wettelet for the book’s design, and most especially to my editors, Camille Hykes and Larry Cooper. My publisher Sam Lawrence, who passed away last year, was many things to many people, but for everyone he was a steadfast lover of books. He is missed.

  These stories are products of the imagination. The characters in them are not intended to represent any real persons.

  for

  JOHN GRAVES

  JIM HARRISON

  TOM McGUANE

  The History of Rodney

  IT RAINS in Rodney in the winter. But we have history; even for Mississippi, we have that. Out front there’s a sweet olive tree that grows all the way up to the third story where Elizabeth’s sun porch is. Through the summer butterflies swarm in the front yard, drunk on the smell of the tree. But in the winter it rains.

  The other people in the town of Rodney are the daughters, sons, and granddaughters of slaves. Sixteen thousand people lived in Rodney before and during the Civil War. Now there are a dozen of us.

  This old house I rent costs fifty dollars a month. Electricity sizzles and arcs from the fuse box on the back porch and tumbles to the ground in bouncing blue sparks. The house has thirty-five rooms, some of which are rotting—one has a tree growing through the floor—and the ceilings are all high, though not as high as the trees outside.

  Here in the ghost town of Rodney there is a pig, a murderer, that lives under my house, and she has killed several dogs. The pig had twenty piglets this winter, and like the bad toughs in a western, they own the town. When we hear or see them coming, we run. We could shoot them down in the middle of the dusty lane that used to be a street, but we don’t: we’re waiting for them to fatten up on their mothers milk.

  We’re also waiting for Preacher to come back. He’s Daisy’s boyfriend, and he’s been gone for forty years.

  Back in the trees, loose peafowl scream in the night. It is like the jungle out there. The river that used to run past Rodney—the Mississippi, almost a mile wide—shifted course exactly one hundred years ago.

  It happened overnight. The earthen bulge of an oxbow, a bend upstream, was torn by the force of the water. Instead of making its taken-for-granted way through the swamp—the slow wind of northern water down from Minnesota—the river pressed, like sex, and broke through.

  I’ve been reading about this in the old newspapers. And Daisy, who lives across the street, has been telling me about it. She says that the first day after it happened, the townspeople could do nothing but blink and gape at the wide sea of mud. Rodney then was the second-largest port in the South, second only to New Orleans.

  Boats full of cotton were stranded in the flats. Alligators and snakes wriggled in the deep brown as the townspeople waited for a rain to come and fill the big river back up. Giant turtles crept through the mud and moved on, but the great fish could do nothing but die. Anchors and massive logs lay strewn on the river bottom. Birds gathered overhead and circled the dying fish cautiously, now and then landing in the fetid mud. When the fish began to smell bad, the people in Rodney packed what belongings they could and hiked into the bluffs and jungle above the river to escape the rot and disease.

  When the mud had dried and grown over with lush tall grass, the townspeople moved back. Some of the men tracked the river, hunting it as if it were a wounded animal, and they found it seven miles away, running big and strong, as wide as it had ever been. It was flowing like a persons heart. It had only shifted.

  Daisy didn’t see the river leave, but her mother did. Daisy says that the pigs in Rodney are descended from Union soldiers. The townspeople marched the soldiers into the Presbyterian church one Sunday, boarded up the doors and windows, and then Daisy’s mother turned them all into pigs.

  The mother pig is the size of a small Volkswagen; her babies are the color and shape of footballs. They grunt and snort at night beneath Elizabeth’s and my house.

  Daisy has a TV antenna rising a hundred and fifty feet into the air, above the trees. Daisy can cure thrash, tuberculosis, snakebite, ulcers, anything as long as it does not affect someone she loves. She’s powerless then; she told me so. She cooks sometimes for Elizabeth and me. We buy the food and give her some money and she cooks: fried eggs, chicken, okra. Sometimes Elizabeth isn’t hungry—she’ll be lying on the bed up in the sun room, wearing just her underpants and sunglasses, reading a book—so I’ll go over to Daisy’s by myself.

  We live so far from civilization. The mail comes only once a week, from Natchez. The mailman is frightened of the pigs. Sometimes they chase his jeep up the steep hill, up the gravel road that leads out of town. Their squeals of rage are a high, mad sound, and they run out of breath easily.

  Daisy never gets mail. We let her come over and read ours.

  “This used to be a big town,” she said when she came over to introduce herself. She gestured out to the cotton field behind her house. “A port town. The river used to lay right out there.”

  “Why did it leave?” Elizabeth asked
.

  Daisy shook her head and wouldn’t answer.

  “Will you take us to the river?” I asked. “Will you show it to us?”

  Daisy shook her head again. “Nope,” she said, drawing circles in the dust with her toe. “You got to be in love to see the river,” she said, looking at me and then at Elizabeth.

  “Oh, but we are,” Elizabeth cried, taking my arm. “That’s why we’re here!”

  “Well,” Daisy said. “Maybe.”

  Daisy likes to tell us about Preacher; she talks about him all the time. He was twenty, she was nineteen. Once there was a Confederate gunboat in the cotton field. The boat has since rusted away to nothing, but it was still in fair shape when Preacher and Daisy lived on it, out in the middle of the field, still rich and growing green with cotton, the color of which is heat-hazy in the fall. They slept in the captains quarters on a striped mattress with no sheets. They rubbed vanilla on their bodies to keep the bugs from biting.

  There were skeletons in the boat and in the field, skeletons of sailors who had drowned when the ship burned and sank from cannon fire to the bow. But these were old bones and no more harmful than, say, a cow’s skull, or a horse’s.

  She and Preacher made love on the tilted deck, Daisy said, through the blazing afternoons. Small breezes cooled them. They made love at night, too, with coal-oil lamps burning around the gunwales. Their cries were so loud, she said, that birds roosting in the swamp took flight into the darkness and circled overhead.

  “All we were going to do was live out on that boat and make love mostly all day,” she said. “Preacher wasn’t hurtin’ anybody. We had a garden, and we went fishing. We skimmed the river in our wood canoe. One day he caught a porpoise. It had come all the way up from the gulf after a rainstorm and was confused by the fresh water. It pulled us all over the river for a whole afternoon.”

  A whole afternoon. I could see the porpoise leaping, and I could see Daisy as she was then, with a straw hat low around her brow. I could see Preacher leaning forward, battling the big fish.

  “It got away,” Daisy said. “It broke the line.” She was sitting on the porch, shelling peas from her garden, remembering. “Oh, we both cried,” she said. “Oh, we wanted that fish.”

  Elizabeth and I live here quietly, smoothing things over, making the country tame again; but it is like walking on ice. Sometimes I imagine I can hear echoes, noises and sounds from a long, long time ago.

  “This place isn’t on the map, right?” Elizabeth will ask. Its a game we play. We’re frightened of cities, of other people.

  “It might as well not even exist,” I’ll tell her.

  She seems reassured.

  The seasons mix and swirl. Except for the winter rains and the hard, stifling brutality of August, it’s easy to confuse one season with the next. Sometimes wild turkeys gobble and fen in the dust of the road, courting. Their lusty gobbles awaken us at daylight—a watery, rushing sound. That means it is April, and the floodwaters will not be coming back. Every sight, every small scent and sound, lies still, its own thing, as if there are no seasons. As if there is only one season.

  I’m glad Elizabeth and I have found this place. We have not done well in other places. Cities—we can’t understand them. In a city everything seems as though it is over so fast: minutes, hours, days, lives.

  Daisy keeps her yard very neat; she cuts it with the push mower weekly. Tulips and roses line the edges of it. She’s got two little beagle pups, and they roll and wrestle in the front yard and on her porch. Daisy conducts church services in the abandoned Mount Zion Baptist Church, and sometimes we go. Daisy’s a good preacher. The church used to be on the river bank, but now it looks out on a cotton field.

  Daisy’s sister, Maggie, lives in Rodney too. She used to have a crush on Preacher when he was a little boy. She says he used to sleep, curled up in a blanket, in a big empty cardboard box at the top of a long playground slide in front of the church. The slide is still there, beneath some pecan trees. Its a magnificent slide, the kind you find in big city parks. Mostly wood, it’s tall and steep, rubbed shiny and smooth. It’s got a little cabin or booth at the top, and that’s where Preacher used to sleep, Maggie says. He didn’t have any parents.

  The cabin kept the rain off. Sometimes the two girls sat up there with him and played cards. They’d take turns sliding down in the cardboard box, and they’d watch as white chickens walked past, pecking at the dust and clucking.

  “Maybe he always wanted one for a pet,” Maggie says, trying to figure it out.

  Daisy says they can put you away in Whitfield for forty years for being a chicken chaser. That was what the social workers saw when they happened to pass through Rodney once: Preacher chasing chickens down the street like a crazy man. He was just doing it for fun—well, he might have been a little hungry, Daisy owns up—but they took him away.

  Daisy says she’s been keeping track on her calendars. There are old ones tacked to every wall in her house, beginning with the year they hauled Preacher away. The forty years will be up this fall. She expects he’ll be back after that; he’ll be coming back any day.

  Forty years—all for maybe what was just a mistake. Maybe he only wanted one for a pet.

  Toward dark the mother pig lures dogs into the swamp. She runs down the middle of what used to be Main Street in a funny high-backed hobble, as if she’s wounded, with all the little runt piglets running ahead of her, protected. A foolish dog follows, slavering at the thought of fresh and easy meat.

  When the pig reaches the woods, she disappears into the heavy leafiness and undergrowth, and the dog goes in after her. Then we hear the squawls and yelps of the dog being killed.

  The sow sometimes kills dogs in the middle of the day. She simply tramples them, the way a horse would. I’d say she weighs about six or seven hundred pounds, maybe more. Elizabeth carries a rifle when we go for our walks, an old seven-millimeter Mauser, slung over her shoulder on a sling, a relic from the First World War, which never affected Rodney. If that pig charged us, it would rue the day. Elizabeth is a crack shot.

  “Are the pigs really cursed people?” Elizabeth asks one evening. We’re over on Daisy’s porch. Maggie is there too, shelling peas. Fireflies are blinking, floating out in the field as if searching with lanterns for something.

  “Oh my, yes,” Maggie says. “That big one is a general.”

  “I want to see the river,” Elizabeth says for the one hundredth time, and Daisy and Maggie laugh.

  Daisy leans forward and jabs Elizabeth’s leg. “How you know there even is a river?” she asks. “How you know we’re not foolin’ you?”

  “I can smell it,” Elizabeth says. She places her hand over her heart and closes her eyes. “I can feel it.”

  Elizabeth and I put fireflies in empty mayonnaise jars, screw the lids on tight, and punch holes in the tops. We decorate our porch with them at night, or we line the bed with them, and then laugh as we love, with their blinking green bellies going on and off like soft, harmless firecrackers, as if they are applauding. It’s as though we have become Preacher and Daisy. The firefly bottle-lights seem like the coal-oil lamps that lined the sides of their boat in the field. Sometimes we, too, shout out into the night.

  The bed: buying it for this old house is one of the best things we’ve ever done. It’s huge, a four-poster, and looks as if it came straight off the set of The Bride of Frankenstein. It has a lace canopy and is sturdy enough to weather our shaking. We have to climb three wooden steps to get into it, and sleeping in it is like going off on some final voyage, so deep is our slumber, so quiet are the woods around us and what is left of the town. The birds will not scream until further into the night, so they are part of our dreams, but comforting. Nothing troubles our sleep, nothing.

  Before falling into that exhausted, peaceful sleep, I slip over to the window and unscrew the lids of the jars, releasing the groggy, oxygen-deprived fireflies into the fresh night air. I shake each bottle to make sure I get them all out. T
hey float feebly down into the bushes, blinking wanly. Wounded paratroopers, they return to their world, looking for something, searching for the world they own and know. If you keep them in a bottle too long, they won’t blink anymore.

  Elizabeth loves to read. She has books stacked on all the shelves in her sun room, and in all corners, books rise stacked to the ceiling. Sometimes I take iced tea up to her in a pitcher, with lemons and sugar. I don’t go in with it; I just peek through the keyhole. When she’s not near naked from the heat, she sometimes puts on a white dress with lace as she reads. Her hair’s dark, but there by the window it looks washed with light, and she becomes someone entirely different. She disappears when she goes into those books. She disappears and that strange, solitary light seals and bathes her escape. I knock on the door to let her know the iced tea is ready whenever she feels like getting it. Then I go back down the stairs.

  After a while I hear the click of the door and the scrape of the tray as she picks it up and carries it to her table. She shuts the door with the back of her foot, or so I imagine, before she goes back to reading, holding the book in one hand while fanning herself with a little cardboard fan in the other hand. I’ll go out and sit on the front steps and picture her drinking the tea, and think that I can taste its coolness and freshness.

  In summer, even beneath the sweet olive tree, I sweat, but not the way she does in the oven of her upstairs room. There’s no air conditioner, no ceiling fan, and late in the afternoon each day, when she takes off the white lacy dress, it is soaking wet. She rinses it out in the sink and hangs it on the porch to dry in the night breezes. The dress smells of sweet olive the next morning.

  “We were going to have a baby,” Daisy says. “We were just about ready to start when they took him away. We were going to start that week so the baby would be born in the summer.”