by Rick Bass
The slow summer. The time when nothing moves forward, when everything pauses, and then stops. It’s a good idea.
In August men come from all over this part of the state to pick cotton. The men pick by hand. They do not leave much behind. It’s like a circus. Old white horses appear—perhaps they belong to the pickers, though perhaps they come from somewhere deep in the woods—and they stand out in the cotton and watch. Behind them, red tractor-trailers rise against blue sky, and behind them, the trees. Behind is the river, which we cannot see but have been told is there.
Then the men are gone, almost all of the cotton is gone, and there are leaves on the roofs of the houses, leaves in our yards. They’re brown and dried up and curled, and the street is covered with them like a carpet. The sweet olive tree doesn’t lose its leaves, but the other trees do. You can hear the pigs rustling in the leaves at night, snuffling for acorns. In the daytime you can hear Daisy moving through them, her slow, heavy steps and the crunching of those leaves. Daisy and Maggie burn their leaves in wire baskets by the side of the old road.
Something about the fall makes us want to go to Daisy’s church services. They last about thirty minutes, and mostly she recites Bible verses, sometimes making a few up, but they sound right. Then she sings for a while. She’s got a good voice.
We sing too. In the early fall when everything is changing, the air takes on a stillness, and we feel like singing to liven things up.
They’re old slave songs that Daisy sings, and you just hum and sway. You can close your eyes and forget about leaving the town of Rodney.
The owl calls at night. He’s big and lives in our attic. There’s a hole in the bedroom ceiling, and we can hear him scrabbling around at ten or eleven o’clock each night. “When the moon gets full, he emerges from the trees, flies through one of our open windows, and lights the rooms. We hear him claw-scratch out to the banister, and with a grunt he launches himself. We hear the flapping of wings and then silence. He makes no sound as he flies.
He zooms through the house—third floor, second floor, first—looking for mice. He shrieks when he spots one. He nearly always catches them.
We have watched him from the corner in the big kitchen. Elizabeth was frightened at first, but she isn’t now. The longer we live down here, the less frightened she is of anything. She is growing braver with age, as if bravery is a thing she will be needing more of.
Elizabeth and I want to build something that won’t go away. Were not sure how to go about it, but some nights we run naked in the moonlight. We catch the old white plugs, the horses, as they wander loose in the cotton fields. We ride them across the fields toward where we think the river is, riding through the fog amid the tracings, the language, of the fireflies. But when we get down into the swamp, we get turned around, lost, and we have to turn back.
Daisy’s standing out on her porch sometimes when we come galloping back. “You can’t go to it,” she says, laughing in the night. “It’s got to come to you!”
Afternoons, in the fall, we pick up pecans in front of the old church. We fix grilled cheese sandwiches for supper and share a bottle of wine. We sit on the porch in the frayed wicker swing and watch the moon crest the trees, watch it slide across and over the sky, and we can hear Maggie down the street, humming, weeding in her garden.
One night I awaken from sleep and Elizabeth isn’t in bed with me. I look all over the house for her, and a slight, illogical panic grows as I move through each empty room.
The moon is up and everything is bathed in hard silver. She is sitting on the back porch in her white dress, which is still damp from the wash. She’s barefoot, with her feet hanging over the edge. She’s swinging them back and forth. In the yard the pigs are feeding, the huge mother and the little ones, small dirigibles now, all around her. There’s a warm wind blowing from the south. I can taste the salt in it from the coast. Elizabeth has a book in her lap; she’s reading by the light of the moon.
A dog barks a long way off, and I feel that I should not be watching. So I climb back up the stairs and get into the big bed and try to sleep.
But I want to hold on to something.
Luther, an old blind man who lived down the street, and whom we hardly ever saw, has passed on. Elizabeth and I are the only ones with backs strong enough to dig the grave; we bury him in the cemetery on the bluff. There are toppled gravestones from the 1850s, gravestones from the war with C.S.A. cut in the stone. Some of the people buried there were named Emancipation—it was a common name then.
We dig the hole without much trouble. It’s soft, rich earth. Daisy says words as we fill the hole back up. That rain of earth, shovels of it, covering the box with him in it. I had to build the coffin out of old lumber. Sometimes in the spring, and in the fall too, rattlesnakes come out of the cane and lie on the flat gravestones for warmth. Because of the snakes, hardly anyone goes to the cemetery now.
A few years ago one of Daisy and Maggie’s half-sisters died and they buried her up here. Her grave has since grown over with brambles and vines. Now there is the skeleton of a deer impaled high on the iron spikes of the fence that surrounds the graveyard. Dogs, maybe, had been chasing it, and the deer had tried to leap over the high fence. The skull seems to be opening its mouth in a scream.
I remember that we piled stones over the mound of fresh earth to keep the pigs from rooting.
Daisy has a salve, made from some sort of root, that she smears over her eyelids at night. It’s supposed to help her fading vision, maybe even bring it back, I don’t know. Whenever she comes over to read our mail, she just holds the letters and runs her hand over them, doesn’t really look at the words. I think she imagines what each letter is saying, what history lies behind it, what chain of circumstances.
Daisy and Preacher used to go up onto the bluffs overlooking Rodney and walk among the trees. Then they would climb one of the tallest trees so they could see the river. They’d sit on a branch, Daisy says, and have a picnic. They’d feel the river breezes and the tree swaying beneath them. They would watch the faraway river for the longest time.
Afterward they would climb down and move through the woods some more, looking for old battle things—rusted rifles, bayonets, canteens. They would sell these relics to the museum in Jackson for a dollar apiece, boxing them up for the mailman, tying the boxes shut with twine, and sending them COD. There was always enough money to get by on.
Those nights that they came down off the bluff, they might go out onto their tilted ship, out in the deep river grass, or they might go to the river itself and swim. Or sometimes they would sit on a sandbar and look up, listening to the sounds of the water. Once in a while a barge would go by. In the night, in the dark, its silhouette would look like a huge gunboat.
Wild grapes grew along the riverbank, tart purple grapes, cool in the night, and they would pick and eat those as they watched the river.
“It can go just like that,” Daisy says, snapping her fingers. “It can go that fast.”
The pigs are growing fat. They’re not piglets anymore; they are pigs. One morning a shot awakens us, and we sit up and look out the window.
Daisy is straddling one of the pigs and gutting it with a huge knife. She pulls out the pig’s entrails and feeds them to her beagles. The other pigs have run off into the woods, but they will be back. It’s a cool morning, almost cold, and steam is rising from the pig’s open chest. Later, in the afternoon, there’s the good smell of fresh meat cooking.
Maggie shoots a pig at dusk, for herself, and two of the old men from the other side of town get theirs the next day.
“I don’t want any,” Elizabeth says after she’s slid down the banister. Her eyes are magic, she’s shivering and holding herself, dancing up and down, goose-pimply. She’s happy to be so young. “I feel as if I’ll be jinxed,” she says. “I mean, those pigs lived under our house.”
The smell of pork, of frying bacon, hangs heavy over the town, like the blue haze from cannon fire.
Coyotes at night, and the peafowl screaming. Pecans underfoot. A full moon and the gleam of night cotton. We mount an old white plug and ride in the cotton field. It’s mostly stripped, ragged and picked over, forgotten-looking. Only a few stray white bolls remain, perfect snowy blossoms, untouched by the pickers. The scraggly bushes scrape against the bottoms of our bare feet as we ride. It has been four years we’ve been down here in the town of Rodney.
“I’m happy,” Elizabeth says, squeezing my arm from behind on the horse. She taps the horse’s ribs with her heels. The smell of woodsmoke, and overhead the nasal, far-off cries of geese going south. The horse plods along in the dust.
Daisy will be starting her church services again, and once more we’ll be going. I’m glad Elizabeth’s happy living in such a little one-horse shell of an ex-town. We’ll hold hands, carry our Bible, and walk slowly down the road to Daisy’s church. There will be a few lazy fireflies at dusk. We’ll go in and sit on the bench and listen to Daisy rant and howl.
Then the moaning songs will start, the ones about being slaves. I’ll shut my eyes and sway, and try not to think of other places and moving on.
And then this is what Elizabeth might say: “You’d better love me”—an order, an ultimatum. But she’ll be teasing, playful, as she knows that’s near all we can do here.
The air will be stuffy and warm in the little church, and for a moment we might feel dizzy, lightheaded, but the songs are what’s important, what matters. The songs about being slaves.
There aren’t any words. You just close your eyes and sway.
Maybe Preacher isn’t coming, and maybe the river isn’t coming back either. But I do not say these things to Daisy when she sits on the porch and waits for him. She remembers being our age and in love with him. She remembers all the things they did, so much time they had, all that time.
She throws bread crumbs in the middle of the road and stakes the white chickens inside the yard for him. We try to learn from her every day. We still have some time left.
The days go by. I think that we will have just exactly enough time to build what Elizabeth and I want to build—to make a thing that will last, and will not leave.
Swamp Boy
THERE WAS A KID we used to beat up in elementary school. We called him Swamp Boy. I say we, though I never threw any punches myself. And I never kicked him either, or broke his glasses, but stood around and watched, so it amounted to the same thing. A brown-haired fat boy who wore bright striped shirts. He had no friends.
I was lucky enough to have friends. I was unexceptional. I did not stand out.
We’d spy on Swamp Boy. We’d trail him home from school. Those times we jumped him—or rather, when those other boys jumped him—the first thing they struck was always his horn-rim glasses. I don’t know why the thick, foggy-lensed glasses infuriated them so much. Maybe they believed he could see things with them, invisible things that they could not. This possibility, along with some odd chemistry, seemed to drive the boys into a frenzy. We would go after him into the old woods along the bayou that he loved. He went there every day.
We followed him out of school and down the winding clay road. The road led past big pines and oaks, past puddles of red water and Christ-crown brambles of dewberries, their white blossoms floating above thorns. He’d look back, sensing us I think, but we stayed hidden amid the bushes and trees. His eyesight was poor.
Now and then he stopped to search out blackberries and the red berries that had not yet ripened. His face scrunched up like an owl’s when he tasted their tart juices. Like a little bear, he moved on then, singing to himself, taking all the time in the world, plucking the berries gingerly to avoid scratching his plump hands and wrists in the awful tangle of daggers and claws in which the berries rested. Sometimes his hand and arm got caught on the curved hooks of the thorns, and he’d be stuck as though in a trap. He’d wince as he pulled his hand free of the daggers, and as he pulled, other thorns would catch him more firmly; he’d pull harder. Once free, he sucked the blood from his pinprick wounds.
And when he’d had his fill of berries and was nearing the end of the road, he began to pick blossoms, stuffing them like coins into the pockets of his shirt and the baggy shorts he always wore—camper-style shorts with zip-up compartments and all sorts of rings and hooks for hanging compasses and flashlights.
Then he walked down to the big pond we called Hidden Lake, deep in the woods, and sprinkled the white blossoms onto the surface of the muddy water. Frogs would cry out in alarm, leaping from shore’s edge with frightened chirps. A breeze would catch the floating petals and carry them across the lake like tiny boats. Swamp Boy would walk up and down the shore, trying to catch those leaping frogs.
Leopard frogs: Rana utricularia.
We followed him like jackals, like soul scavengers. We made the charge about once a week: we’d shout and whoop and chase him down like lions on a gazelle, pull that sweet boy down and truss him up with rope and hoist him into a tree. I never touched him. I always held back, only pretending to be in on it. I thought that if I touched him, he would burn my fingers. We knew he was alien, and it terrified us.
With our hearts full of hate, a terrible, frantic, weak, rotting-through-the-planks hate, we—they, the other boys—would leave him hanging there, red-faced and congested, thick-tongued with his upside-down blood, until the sheer wet weight of the sack of blood that was his body allowed him to slip free of the ropes and fall to the ground like a dead animal, like something dripped from a wet limb. But before his weight let him fall free, the remaining flowers he’d gathered fluttered from his pockets like snow.
Some of the boys would pick up a rock or a branch and throw it at him as we retreated, and I was sickened by both the sound of the thuds as the rocks struck his thick body and by the hoots of pleasure, the howls of the boys whenever one of their throws found its target. Once they split his skull open, which instantly drenched his hair, and we ran like fiends, believing we had killed him. But he lived, fumbling free of the ropes to make his way home, bloody-faced and red-crusted. Two days after he got stitched up at the hospital, he was back in the woods again, picking berries and blossoms, and even the dumbest of us could see that something within him was getting strong, and that something in us was being torn down.
Berry blossoms lined the road along which we walked each afternoon—clumps and piles of flowers, each mound of them indicating where we’d strung him up earlier. I started to feel bad about what I was doing, even though I was never an attacker. I merely ran with the other boys for the spectacle, to observe the dreamy phenomenon of Swamp Boy.
One night in bed I woke up with a pain in my ribs, as if the rocks had been striking me rather than him, and my mouth tasted of berries, and I was frightened. There was a salty, stinging feeling of thorn scratches across the backs of my hands and forearms. I have neglected to say that we all wore masks as we stalked and chased him, so he was probably never quite sure who we were—he with those thick glasses.
I lay in the darkness and imagined that in my fright my heart would begin beating faster, wildly, but instead it slowed down. I waited what seemed like a full minute for the next beat. It was stronger than my heart had ever beaten before. Not faster, just stronger. It kicked once, as if turning over on itself. The one beat—I could feel this distinctly—sent the pulse of blood all through my body, to the ends of my hands and feet. Then, after what seemed again like a full minute, another beat, one more round of blood, just as strong or stronger. It was as if I had stopped living and breathing, and it was the beat of the earths heart in my hurt chest. I lay very still, as if pinned to the bed by a magnet.
The next day we only spied on him, and I was glad for that. But even so, I awakened during the night with that pain in my chest again. This time, though, I was able to roll free of the bed. I went to the kitchen for a glass of water, which burned all the way down as I drank it.
I got dressed and went out into the night. Stars shone through the trees as I walk
ed toward the woods that lay between our subdivision and the school, the woods through which Swamp Boy passed each day. Rabbits sat hunched on peoples front lawns like concrete ornaments, motionless in the starlight, their eyes glistening. The rabbits seemed convinced that I presented no danger to them, that I was neither owl nor cat. The lawns were wet with dew. Crickets called with a kind of madness, or a kind of peace.
I headed for the woods where we had been so cruel, along the lazy curves of the bayou. The names of the streets in our subdivision were Pine Forest, Cedar Creek, Bayou Glen, and Shady River, and for once, with regard to that kind of thing, the names were accurate. I work in advertising now, at the top of a steel-and-glass skyscraper from which I stare out at the flat gulf coast, listening to the rain, when it comes, slash and beat against the office windows. When the rain gives way to sun, I’m so high up that I can see to the curve of the earth and beyond. When the sun burns the steam off the skin of the earth, it looks as if the whole city is smoldering.
Those woods are long gone now, buried by so many tons of houses and roads and other sheer masses of concrete that what happened there when I was a child might as well have occurred four or five centuries ago, might just as well have been played out by Vikings in horn helmets or red natives in loincloths.
There was a broad band of tallgrass prairie—waist high, bending gently—that I would have to cross to get to the woods. I had seen deer leap from their beds there and sprint away. I could smell the faraway, slightly sweet odor of a skunk that had perhaps been caught by an owl at the edge of the meadow, for there were so many skunks in the meadow, and so many owls back in the woods. I moved across the silver field of grass in starlight and moonlight, like a ship moving across the sea, a small ship with no others out, only night.
