by Bill Cheng
There’s room enough for us both, he said.
Stuckey’s waiting for me, I said. He’s wondering where I gone to.
G.D. sighed and wriggled out. He stood up and dusted the front of his coat. He lifted the strip of fencing over his head and pulled it over the other side.
That’s all it takes, he said. Then he took off toward the woods.
EVERY DAY FOR TWO WEEKS, I saw G.D. Stuckey had stopped leaving his room except at night to leave his plate or a pile of his clothes in the hall. I spent longer and longer out in the chicken coop, an hour sometimes without anyone being the wiser. Sometimes I’d go out early and wait for the trapdoor to lift, G.D.’s round head pushing through on the other side. We’d get underneath the floorboards and stretch out on the grass—with those hens pecking around and pushing seed above us, the yellow dust coming down through the boards, on our hair and backs and clothes. We stayed down there, the two of us, like a couple of secrets.
G.D. talked on and on about Anguilla, and I showed him my little bird skull.
And he said there were all manner of birds in Anguilla.
Then in his pockets I found a little black rock and I said, What’s this?
It’s a piece of lodestone.
What’s it for?
He put his arms behind his head and shut his eyes.
Reckon it can be for you.
He told me how him and Stuckey had started to partnering a week after the rains. Stuckey had stacked hay on G.D.’s cousin’s farm, and on weekends, he’d take G.D. and his little cousins out hunting, the lot of them trekking back by sundown with a belt of squirrel skins or gopher or rabbit. They’d circled around to each other after the flood over in a camp out at Sunflower County. It was Stuckey’s plan that they work salvage, with Stuckey working the waters and G.D. going by foot along the countryside, in the camps and flood towns. They’d go off on their own for weeks at a time and meet once a month to trade on news and supplies.
He told me how he’d go around with his trousers rolled and his boots tied around his shoulders. Buzzards set down along the roofs, tracking him as he pushed through the shin-deep water. G.D. picked carefully around the deadwood, feeling through the mud with his toes to keep from stepping on a nail or a piece of glass. He learned to figure by eye which houses would hold and which were about to give at any moment. There were jewelry boxes, silverware. Tins of money stuffed under mattresses. Things left behind in the rush.
People only take what they can carry, he said. What they leave, it must not mean that much to them in the first place.
And then there was a pain in my stomach and maybe some dust got into my eyes, but he turned over on his side and put his hand over mine. Then he looked at me for a long time and he said, I’d carry you with me. Then he put his hand on my face and set it there gentle like, his thumb moving along the ridge of my eyes. And he was looking and he was looking and he took so long that I just went ahead and kissed him.
THE NEXT DAY, HE WAS waiting for me inside the chicken coop. He stood, stooping a little to keep from hitting the ceiling.
I started to go to him, but he put his hand up.
I know what you’ve been doing, he said.
What?
What were you thinking?
He reached into his coat and showed me. The little bits of mirror with the mud still on it.
You took them!
You don’t think Stuckey is going to notice? For Christ’s sake!
Then I cuffed him across his mouth.
Don’t say that! You better put those back, I told him. Or else Nan is going to—and he—he—
What?
Put them back! Put them back, please please please . . .
Dora, you have to leave with me. He’s going to notice what you done. Stuckey’s going to notice. You don’t know him. You don’t know what he’s like. I cleaned them near as I could, but—
He had cleaned them! I flew at him, beating at his chest with my fists. The chickens got all fussed up and started going every which way—flapping around, air full of feathers.
What did you do! What did you do!
Dora, calm down. Calm down.
No no no no no. You’re supposed to black the mirrors. I need to black the mirrors. What did you do!
I started crying and I kept beating on him with my fists.
What! What’s wrong?
You ruined it! You ruined it! Get out! Get out!
Dora, please. You have to come with me. It’s not safe.
Get out! I started screaming.
He tried to quiet me down, but it wouldn’t do no good so finally he left. He crawled out and went under the fence, then he was gone. There were little bits of mirror on the floor and I gathered it up and I kept crying and crying, and the chickens were all fussing around me and I had to knock them away and I didn’t feel bad about it or nothing, I could’ve knocked every last one of them.
By the time I went back into the house, Stuckey was in the living room. His shirt was off and the sweat ran down in streaks. There were gashes all on his side and his back and his stomach, some of it already skinned over, but some of it pink and oozing a little. He looked at me sleepy eyed and I tried not to show anything.
You were feeding the chickens for a long time, he said.
Then he looked hard at me, turned around, then went back into his room. And I wasn’t sure if I saw what I saw, with his eyes all droopy the way it was and me not really wanting to look into them anyway, but maybe his eyes flicked and maybe it was down and to the left, at the one wool gray glove still holding my hand.
THAT NIGHT HE CAME INTO my room and said that he was hungry. It was full dark, and there was only his voice—Dora, I’m hungry, he said. I need to eat. I need to be fed.
And I told him that I’d make him something.
And he said, I’m hungry. I am starved body and soul.
And then he was on me and I could taste the bitter in his mouth. And Nan said, No, and I said, Don’t, but then there was me and the sharp and the hot and he tore me. And I said, Please, and then it was, but then it was, and I said, Please please please, and my jaw would not make the no no and Nan would not say no no and then the mattress was gone and there was the wall and the slats through the boards, and out beyond it, the full dark, trees and swamp and river, and then Nan said, Look, and I would not Look, and Nan said, Look, but I could not would not, and it went through me, and there was not skin enough to hide my eyes and air enough to heavy my scream but there she was standing out in the blackgum, holding under the bits of mirrors that I did not black. Nan Peoria in the moonglow. And she would not could not look at me. And in my head I saw the trees and I saw the glass looking back at the not-looking, and she would not speak and I said I tried and please and please but she would not, held there in the blackgum, held under bits of glass, not speaking.
After that night, Stuckey put the Spirit in me. He knelt naked out in the open air, his breath steaming through his clapped hands. And he said Lord Lord, and the clouds doughed over in a purple roll, no moon no stars, only the Spirit spooling in my gut, the brass of it in my mouth. It hummed and cut. He pulled me down to my knees. He said, Pray for your forgiveness. But there was only my choking and the warm wet down my leg and the cold binding in my throat. And after his praying, he’d go back into his room, and I would wash under the pump, my jaw cinching and my stomach bucking under the cold water.
He came at me night after night. I closed my eyes and the hurt was in the meat of me. It slid and chafed and burned. And in the leavings there’d be blood and in the water there’d be blood, and the hurt would tight and slack and tight and slack; I thought it would snap and I would go with it, like chalk, in two: this a Dora and this a Dora. And times I would wake up in the night and feel the Spirit stitching through me, knitting up my guts so that it hurt to breathe and there was no honey on the
bread, and no Good Words and Nan Peoria is down down down the Gulf of Mexico.
WINTER HAD COME AND THE winds howled and smashed against the walls. Leaves and twigs and sand blew in from the swamp, gathering along the side of the house. Stuckey had me run the stove through the night and come morning, the air was gray with ash. It stuck to the floors and chairs and table. It was in the salvage, rimming old pans and flowerpots, setting like a skin over stacks and stacks of books. It was in my mouth and my nose and it stung my eyes, and the only air was outside. I cleared the cull, chopped firewood. When I went to the chicken coop, there was G.D., waiting.
I had not seen him for weeks, not since we’d fought, and he was looking clean and good.
Dora, he said, and I knew that it was me, and he said it, my name, me, the sound dor-a and he held out his hand, reaching for Dora, but Dora did not move. The hens puffed into themselves, clucking, their eyes wet and clear and black in the light. He stood a long time looking at her. The winter light spangled at his shoulders, his breath going white and low.
Where’s your glove?, he asked.
And my face came apart.
And when he tried to comfort me, his arms open like a cave, I shrunk. He looked at me, not speaking, the words all clumped in his mouth, pushing on his cheeks. He stepped past me and did not leave out the trapdoor, but out the front, in full view of the cabin.
THAT NIGHT, IT WAS HAILING. Ice came down in a scatter, on the windows, the walls, the roof. It beat against the crossbeams, through the ceiling slats, pebbling and pebbling. They were like pearls slanting in the wind, crashing in the dark. Stuckey sat slumped in his chair, the stacks of salvage towering up behind him. He’d been smoking his pipe, and his mouth hung a little open, with his small breath rustling inside his chest. His eyes glassed looking out the window.
What’s that?, he asked. What’s out there?
There was flash and powder and the glass collapsed into nothing.
That was his finish. Poor Stuckey. I sat there and watched the life go out of him. G.D. came in through the door and he let the pistol go out of his hand. Bits of hail twinkled against his cheek. He went about the room and stuffed the pieces of salvage into his satchel bags. When it was time to go, G.D. picked me up by my arms and kissed me. We stepped out into the night and G.D. held an oilskin sheet over me to protect me from the stones. We moved very slowly together through the swamp, the sheet rippling around me, the air full of pearls and us, ghosts.
PART FOUR
A SHINING NEW SOUTH
(1941)
In Yazoo County sits Panther Swamp: thirty-eight thousand square acres of floodplain, bog grass, nuttail, water oak, black falaya loam. The Yazoo River courses down from an upridge of gray marl. At 32˚47N 90˚35W, the D.C. men chalk a line, 307.65 meters east, then south 683.03 meters, a square of map equaling to fifty-two acres of burrow pits, concrete walls, and a roadway running flank to the railroad line, wide enough to drive in the mixers, the CATs, the drill trucks. The men do math. Surface area by water volume. The wattage of the primary inflow into a catchment area of fifty-two thousand square kilometers. Rate of drainage against mean declivity downstream rejoining the Yazoo.
In a room, a projector clicks.
There are six million operating farms in the United States today. Less than 8 percent have electric lights. Less than 10 percent, running water. Runoff from outdoor toilet systems in conjunction with inadequate food storage has led to spoilage, typhoid, dysentery, undulant fever, ulcerative colitis, and a staggering rise in hookworm.
A projector clicks again. On the wall is a plan for a lock and dam reservoir system 115 feet wide and 580 feet long, with a vertical lift gate and a concrete spillway capable of generating over 162,000 kilowatts of power and transmitting nearly 6,900 volts to previously unelectrified districts.
Think. All the modern comforts of New York and Chicago. Lightbulbs. Frigidaires. Electric irons. Radios. Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s voice in every hick son of a bitch living room from Podunk to Jerkwater. Imagine, at every dinner table an ice cold Coca-Cola, the Lone Ranger on the wireless, rich chocolaty Ovaltine chilling in a brand-new General Electric. Money changes hands. Businesses grow. There is solvency. Jobs. A shining new South.
Let’s break for lunch.
In the cafeteria, they unwrap sheets of butcher paper from sandwiches of corned beef, salami, sardines—grease on their fingers and lips and shirt cuffs. On a napkin, they write: cost of wages for engineers, surveyors, construction crews, dam tenders, local labor, housing; equipment by tonnage, cost of transport, upkeep, materials; permits, filing fees—against five years projected, start to finish. They talk out the numbers, checking them again and again, passing the frail napkin down the table.
Someone takes a dill pickle from between two slices of bread. He lays it on the napkin, brine and all, and the numbers start to bleed.
Say this pickle is the national budget.
He cuts it into eighths.
This is the Agricultural Adjustment Act. The WPA.
He portions it out. Eats a slice.
TVA. The REA.
He eats another. Then another and another until it’s just a nub. Then he eats that too.
God bless this mess.
THEY WENT IN, EIGHT TEAMS of five, through clay sinks, peat pools, chokevine—the low suck of their waders pulling from the mud bed. The swamp was airless, holding the sweat down against their skin, gnats ambering on their foreheads. They read from altimeters and leveling rods. They moved through gullies and berms, mapping a long silt wall along the gravel bar. They took plant samples, soil samples, water samples. At the perimeter line they tied yellow ribbons to low branches, marking the trees for demolition.
With their hatchets and their towlines, they went out—their bodies locked under the conifers, oilskin hoods drawn tight around their heads. They arced their axes into the base, snapping the wood away in clean white wounds. The trees gave and the towlines snapped taut. With each fall a column of rain would open in the forest ceiling.
There were signs of prior human encroachment. Symbols cut into bark, ash pits from old fires, the label off a can of Van Camp’s Pork and Beans. One team found a set of jaw traps hidden in the weeds. A slab of meat sat spoiled on the weight plate. They photographed it, tripped it with a rock, and moved on.
In May they broke ground, and by June there were seventeen dig crews out in the back swamps. It was hurricane season and the Yazoo roiled and crunched. Under hard rain, the crews dug relief basins along the tributaries. The ground was too soft for the crane trucks so they worked by hand—shovels and spades and pickaxes—breaking the earth and carrying it off in thick slippery slabs.
It was George Burke’s team off the main stem who put in the requisition for the slurry pump. Mr. Catkill held the yellow form up to his third-floor window, squinting through his bifocals. It’d been their third requisition since April, having destroyed their first and lost the other. The Panther Swamp project was already over budget, and the signs of incompetence made it harder to secure federal funding. He set the form down on his desk and folded his fingers together, knotting his hands into a praying shape.
At night, in his slippers, he would stir out of his bed, and he’d feel the thing in the room. It was vague, uncertain, and he would catch it only in glimpses. He’d shut his eyes and become still. It would pass above him, stretching like a sheet. Then one morning at the breakfast table, he sat buttering his toast. He watched the metal move against the stiff bread, the band of light that caught on the blade. Then all at once, there it was. Steel and glass and light. The beating pulse of a future.
Mr. Catkill looked out his third-story window and he sensed it just beyond the horizon—driving inexorably toward him. He had read the papers. He had seen the photographs. The crumpled suits. The sod caravans edging toward the coast, and in the cities, bread lines that stretched for blocks upon blocks. What
he understood, better than his colleagues, was that this was a darkening world and he would have his place among the torchbearers.
He decided. He would sign the requisition form. He would meet with George Burke.
THE MORNING TRAIN PULLED INTO Yazoo and the city was slate gray with deep veins of light marbled into the sky. A porter wheeled the crate into the hired car and Mr. Catkill pressed a coin into the porter’s glove.
The car carried him under the soft patter of rain toward the swamp. On the drive in, he sat stone-faced in the backseat, his pale hands folded across his lap, watching the mute and desolate country. The road was choked with stones and softening ground. Entering Panther Swamp, it was as if he were passing through a large organism. There were no clear roads, just lanes of stone and red mud, obscured by curtains of overhanging vine. They pressed through into forests of blackgum, dogwood, spruce, tracing a fence of cattails to a river crossing.
Burke’s work site sat on a mud plain twenty yards from the tributary. Safety flags were posted along the perimeter of the dig, and behind it a network of craters and trenches five feet deep and over a hundred yards across. The crew was at work in the trenches, shoveling up the loose mud and reinforcing the walls with sandbags.
The driver pumped his horn and the crew turned toward the car. A man climbed up from the trenches. His body was slick and brown, and he wiped the mud from his goggles. Mr. Catkill recognized him from his file.
He rolled down his window.
You George Burke?, he asked.
Who are you?
Arthur Catkill, vice president of operations from the home office.
The foreman straightened and looked back at the site. His men had stopped work and were watching the exchange.
Let’s go into my office, the foreman said.
They went inside a construction trailer where Burke kept a set of cabinets and an old oak-top desk. A kerosene lamp burned from a cross pipe as the rain sounded across the corrugated ceiling. The foreman stripped off his shirt and toweled down his large hairy body. His skin was pale and bloodless underneath the layers of mud. He motioned to a folding stool and Mr. Catkill sat down.
