by Bill Cheng
I ASKED UNCLE REB WHAT happened to Nan Peoria and Uncle Reb said she died.
And I said how come she died.
And he said because the pneumonia got her.
And I said well, where the pneumonia getting her to?
And Uncle Reb laughed and said, Down the Gulf of Mexico.
But that ain’t what Nan told me.
SOMETIMES WHEN I GET MY dreams, Nan Peoria is putting her hands on my shoulder. They’re warm and I can smell that sweet oil she wears before she goes to bed. And I try to turn over and get a look but only she don’t let me. She says to me, You can’t wake up yet.
IT WAS EVENING THE SECOND time I heard the boat. We’d both of us heard it, moving across the water, a man’s voice humming. Uncle Reb was already up. A mist rolled thickly across the water plain. He stared out toward the neighbor’s house, his rifle against his leg, his fingers kind of loose in his grip, like it was a hand he was holding. Flies buzzed all around his ears and his eyes, but he didn’t swat them. He was just watching.
There were rings in the water widening out toward us, and I could hear the spilling coming off a pair of oars. It slapped soft, and bumped the boat and spilled again, moving closer and closer. Uncle Reb put the rifle up against his shoulder.
Ho there, he called out.
His shoulder jumped and there was smoke.
Ho, he said again.
Whoa, a voice answered.
Who’s that?
The man drifted out from the mist, his hands up so his long coat came down almost like a pair of wings.
Easy, brother. I bring peace.
The man turned a little sideways, and there were little canvas bundles on the other end of the boat.
You come on easy there, Captain, Uncle Reb said with his rifle still up. That your salvage?
It’s salvation, brother.
Uncle Reb let the rifle down an inch so he could look over the man’s goods.
Bring it over here, Uncle Reb said.
The man paddled over till the boat bumped up against our roof. Uncle Reb put one foot down on the boat floor, anchoring it.
All right now, I’m the one with this here rifle. Just you remember that.
From your mouth to God’s ear, the man said.
Now get on over to that far end there.
The man moved to the back of the boat, his arms still raised. Uncle Reb went on board, aiming his rifle to the man’s chest. Balancing the gun with one arm, Uncle Reb started untying the bundles with one hand and emptying them on the boat floor. There were cans mostly, but also some bread and what was maybe jugs of clean water. The man looked at me and winked.
When Uncle Reb was bent down low, reaching one arm deep into a gunnysack, the man kicked the side of the hull, rocking it. Uncle Reb near fell over excepting that he put one hand down on the boat edge. And quick as anything, there was a pistol in Uncle Reb’s face.
The man said, Easy, brother, easy.
The rifle passed out of Uncle Reb’s hand and lay flat on the boat floor. Uncle Reb righted himself.
The man said, Now let say you invite me aboard your lovely home.
HE MOORED TO OUR ROOF with a length of rope, and when he crossed, he bowed deep and said his name was Pat Stuckey. He went through our things, but there wasn’t much to begin with. Uncle Reb’s box of shells and a tin of rolling tobacco. He flipped through Nan Peoria’s Bible, holding the cover open and rattling the pages. Uncle Reb sat down beside me, his arms crossed over his knees, not looking at neither Stuckey nor me.
Roll it, he said to Uncle Reb, handing him the tobacco.
Paper?
Use the book.
Uncle Reb tore a page cleanly from Nan’s Bible and started to roll. I bit my tongue.
Stuckey took a match from his breast pocket and lit the hand-rolled. He drew on it, then passed it over to Uncle Reb.
What’re you going to do with us?, Uncle Reb said.
They sat together cross-legged on the quilt.
Haven’t puzzled that out yet.
COME SUNDOWN, IT DIDN’T LOOK like Stuckey was going to quit us. He took a coffee can from inside his jacket and set it down on our quilt. He matted the bottom with a fist of dry peat. Then he took Nan Peoria’s Bible and started tearing up pages, crushing them down into the can bottom.
You can’t do that, I said.
Uncle Reb hushed me.
Now how do you figure on that, miss?
You can’t use those. Those are the Good Words.
Uncle Reb ripped up a few more pages, then took a match to them. Stuckey took a small gunnysack from his boat and drew up two skinned rabbits. He cut a slice with his knife, then laid a strip out on the flat of the blade.
He held the flat over the can.
Meat commendeth us not to God. For neither, if we eat, are we the better; neither are we the worse.
The can smoked and a tongue of flame licked up and out toward the blade. The fat started dripping down the edge. We hadn’t eaten in days except maybe the heel of some stale bread. I couldn’t remember the last time I had meat. It sizzled on the knife blade, sweetening the air. Something pinched at my stomach. Uncle Reb stared at it, his eyes wide, his mouth pooling up with his spit.
When it was all cooked up, Stuckey held the knife out to me.
Careful, it’s hot, he said.
No, thank you, I said.
Stuckey smiled. He held the blade to Uncle Reb. Uncle Reb didn’t waste no time; he plucked up the meat and put it in his mouth. It steamed out of his mouth, it was so hot. He sucked his fingers and his eyes watered and Stuckey laughed. Stuckey cut up another strip and started cooking, and Uncle Reb and Stuckey went on like that all night, feeding my uncle on little bits of rabbit, so’s that my stomach was fussing me all night and come morning, there wasn’t nothing left but a pile of bones and two little rabbit heads.
NAN SAID, WAKE UP, AND I did.
Then Uncle Reb said, How much?
And Stuckey said, How much for what?
You take a man’s livelihood, you’re taking the whole man.
I pretended I was still asleep. There was a long quiet, just the water babbling all around, and there was a hawk screaming about something. The dew was cold on my skin.
Then Uncle Reb said, The girl. How much you give for the girl?
And that’s how Uncle Reb got his rifle back.
STUCKEY ROWED I DON’T KNOW for how long, over places he told me what used to be Hollandale and Rolling Fork and Silver City. There wasn’t nothing left but a sheet of water. Little crosses stuck out where the churches were, and little roof islands, empty except for maybe a blanket here or bits of straw there. There was something under the water by the penny cinema in Silver City, all cloudy and covered in what looked like little yellow hairs, I couldn’t make out what.
Where are we going? I asked.
Your new home.
We went on and on, till there wasn’t no town at all, no houses or building or nothing—just bits of treetop sticking out with the leaves all stripped. By dusk, we were drifting toward a forest of blackgum. Weeds and roots scraped the boat bottom as we came into the shallows. We found ourselves in a great swamp. The gums came up like bars over the mossy water. Stuckey brought the oars in and steered us through by hand, managing us forward through the marsh grass.
There were bits of mirror nailed to the trees.
What’re those for?
Keeps away the ghosts, he said. Ghosts don’t like mirrors. Can’t stand the sight of them.
And I didn’t say anything more after that.
WE STOPPED WHERE THE GROUND was soft and flooded. Up above, branches blocked out the sky. The air was hot and still. Nothing moved. Stuckey dragged the boat up a mud bank and tied it off.
Rest of the way we go by foot, he said.
The water came up to my ankles. Stuckey made me carry one of the smaller satchels and he shouldered up the rest.
Don’t dawdle, he said. We don’t want to get stuck here come nightfall.
He marched ahead. The long tail of his coat floated behind him as he pushed across the swamp, a cloud of mud rising around his boots.
We’d gone some time before it began to darken. My toes were numb in the water. There was screaming coming from the trees. We looked up and saw a line of crows flying away from where we were heading. Stuckey started singing: Old black crow, old black crow, did the farmer pluck where your feathers don’t grow.
The cabin was set out on a small clearing, the earth pocked from where the trees used to be. The boards looked blue-black and rotted. Stuckey took me around back where I could make water. He turned his back as I crouched out in the grass, next to a small pump, staring out into the woods. There was a small path that led out behind the scrub to what looked like a henhouse. He waited for me to finish, then he took me into the cabin.
Inside, the junk had come together into piles with only a narrow strip of floor to move around on. There were chairs stacked on top of chairs. An old bureau had been stripped of its doors and heaped up with brass pots, sketches, bundles of old newspapers.
Stuckey set his bag down by the door and made his way to the stove. He lit it, then he picked up an old steel poker with a little hooked head and pushed around the coals, sending up a breath of sparks.
Come here, he said.
I didn’t move.
Don’t make me come to you.
When I wouldn’t move, he grabbed me and yanked me toward him.
He thrashed the poker into the embers and little sparks licked out of the stove. When he took the poker out, the head was all red. He took my leg with his hand and twisted it toward him.
I shut my eyes.
There was the smell of something burning. After a minute, he let go of my leg.
When I opened my eyes, little fat leeches were squirming on the floor.
He put the poker back in its place. He stamped on their fat bodies.
We’re going to have to get you some proper boots, he said.
STUCKEY PUT ME UP IN a cramped room with a mattress and a little bureau pushed against the wall. He changed me out of my clothes and gave me a cotton dress that itched all over and didn’t fit right in parts. He looked me up and down, made me turn for him, and he clicked his teeth and pinched the scrub of hair on his chin.
Pretty as the morning, he said.
He looked me up and down a little bit, then without a word, he left room.
The window was boarded up, but there was space enough between the boards to see through to the outside. On top of the bureau, there were cane poles and little fishhooks. After a while, Stuckey came in again with a plate of biscuits and some cold beans.
Eat and then go to bed, he said. We’ll talk tomorrow.
When he closed the door, I heard it lock behind him.
I ate up the beans and scooped up all the juice with the biscuits. I filled up my mouth faster than I could chew, pushing the food through with my fingers. When I was through, I had licked the plate clean and my stomach was starting to feel a little funny. I left the plate on the floor and tried to sleep.
Before the flood, there was only one bed and it was Uncle Reb’s—a beat-up old thing he traded a Guernsey heifer for. It was all cut up and the stuffing was coming out but Uncle Reb got in a terrible fit if anyone went near it. Me and Nan Peoria had to sleep down on a pallet of crushed hay and dry grass. At night, I could hear it crackle softly under me, and come morning, there’d be little bites all up and down my arm.
Here, there was a mattress and it was strange the way the bed went up against my shoulders and my back. It pressed at you the way nothing else did, rising up to fill the spaces you couldn’t fill yourself. I turned and beat on it for a while, but there wasn’t any way I could get any sleep. Instead, I pulled the sheets down into a pile at the foot of the bureau and curled up against it.
I slept I don’t know how long. The room was all dark and I couldn’t see nothing. There was somebody in there with me.
Nan Peoria put her hand across my mouth.
Don’t breathe, she said.
It took a while for my eyes to get used to the dark. There was a man standing at the foot of the bed. His head was rolled back toward the ceiling.
Don’t wake up, she said.
She said, Do you believe in God?
My mouth was stuffed up with cotton.
Do you believe in the Devil?
COME MORNING, THE LIGHT WASN’T more than a trickle through the boards. There were little motes of dust casting through the air. I rubbed the stiff out of my sides and looked around before I remembered where I was. The door was open and someone had taken out my tray, swapping it for a pair of cotton slippers.
Out in the kitchen, Stuckey was at the stove, turning over a pot of oatmeal. He looked at me and pointed over to the table with his chin.
You slept on the floor last night, he said.
I’m not used to beds, I said.
You’ll learn.
He served up the oats in two bowls. They weren’t boiled up all the way, and there were little mealworms floating in the milk. I picked them off and ate around it.
After this, all the meals, you cook. You know how to cook, don’t you?
I told him I did.
Finish eating and I’ll show you what needs doing.
After breakfast, he took me around to the back and showed me how to pump for water, how to split the firewood. He showed me the chicken coop all twisted up with wire and straw, not far from the cabin. Then he took me inside, showed what needed wiping down. The stove had to be swept out and the floors needed scrubbing. There was the laundry and the dusting and the mending. He showed me his socks that needed darning and the holes in his oilskin coat worn through at the elbows. He talked me through the piles and piles of junk. What to touch. What not to touch.
When he was done, he stooped down and put his face into mine. His eyes were lowered till there was barely any white showing. His face hung there, waiting on something. When nothing happened, he stood up and took his long coat off the hook.
Swamps are full of gators, he said.
He pulled on the sleeves, then checked the chamber of his pistol.
I’ll be back by nightfall, he said.
IT WAS LITTLE THINGS. THINGS I found cleaning. A cut of cloth from the bedspread. A piece of shell out in front of the porch, who knows from where. I took little bits of hay and I tied them together with horsehair. There was a big black button I swept up from under the dresser. It had two little holes in it and was shaped like a little fish.
One time I found a bird skull, sweeping out the stove. It wasn’t no bigger than a lump of coal, eyes filled up with soot. I dusted it off, then ran it out under the pump. The bone was gray and scorched, and the water made the ash muddy. It took a while to clean with me scrubbing it with just my fingers, blowing into the eyes and hearing my breath whistle back through its shell of a head. I kept that too, all tied up and neat, under the bureau.
They were mine. They were no one else’s.
I WAS BEHIND THE HOUSE, chopping wood. A chill had come down on the swamp and tinted the grass blue. I had a hard time working the ax. The weight threw me instead of me throwing it. The swing would always come down crooked, and I didn’t know how to score so that the cut’d go even and clean.
My hand was chafing so I rested awhile on the chopping block.
Then someone said, Black the mirrors.
I turned and there wasn’t no one there.
Nan said, You have to black the mirrors and I will keep you safe.
HE NEVER SAID MUCH ABOUT where he went or what he was doing. Come evening time, just before the dark
got settled, he’d come up through the marsh, gunnysack over his shoulder, the fringe of his coat all draggled and muddy. The wood seemed to close behind him, what was left of the daylight shunted out by dogwood and blackgum and cypress. He’d pass beneath their branches, stooping just enough to clear his head.
He’d have me meet him at the porch, where he’d upturn his sack and the day’s find would come clattering onto the floor. Most days there wouldn’t be much in the haul—brass pots, teakettles, maybe a spoon or a knife. They’d be caked over with mud, and I’d have to take them out to the pump and scrub them clean. One time, he brought back a pair of boots.
The leather was worn and cracked, and a hole had been worn through the toe.
I looked at them like they were the first boots I’d ever seen. I held them up by their laces and let them hang in the air.
Try them on, he said.
The boots were a little big and the insides were damp and cold. He had me lace up and walk them around the yard. If I wasn’t careful, the boots would ride low about to my ankles and slip off.
How do they wear? he asked.
I looked down and wiggled my toes. They’d do just fine.
Do you like them?
I said I did.
He stared at me. His bottom lip shook a little.
How much do you like them?
He took my face in his hand, like an apple, and bit my lip. Then there was a thing in my mouth that was his tongue except it tasted all like brass. He stood up and put on his hat. His eyes were all wet and he wouldn’t look at anything except straight ahead.
Filthy, he said.
YOU LEARN WHERE TO STAND and how. Ten paces from this bush, an arm’s length from that tree. You learn how to walk—swinging your legs saddle wide, then easing your weight across a width of earth. It goes up the calves, the fat of the leg, then across. All your weight is in your belly. Then the other leg. The ball of your foot. Back into the earth. The first time, I near sunk clean through. The ground was too soft, and the mud rose up into my boots. It drew in my feet, my ankles, up above the knee. I had to dig my way out with my hands, pressing into the cold yolky soil, pulling it back in clumps.
