The Problem with Murmur Lee

by Connie May Fowler

  On land, I am once more at the mercy of the wind, but this time it ferries me to amazing places, setting me among the keeled scales of an indigo snake, the deep twilight pads of a bobcat’s paw, the gossamer curve of a dragonfly wing, the sky white feathers of a restless gull. I am sand, fine grains that whip through your fingers and disappear into unknown worlds. Rock, shell, crystal. Blossom, leaf, bark. Earth, fire, water. When the wind blows, I fly, all swirl and dust and chaos. When the sky rains, I become an ocean tippling in the cupped petals of a morning glory. I am the smooth, silent movement of a hungry snake. I am the eyes of eagles and meerkats. I am the pant—the hot grassy breath—of a fox at rest. I am a clutch of skink eggs and the gopher who eats them. I am metamorphosis. Maggot and butterfly. Birth and death. Pain and glory. Bone and water.

  Coquina. Yes, today I am coquina, and I am learning that all of this—the wind, the surf, the moon’s faint glow, the sighs of fading stars—is plainsong.

  I can hear it now.

  Charleston Rowena Mudd

  The fog had lifted and my resolve was strong. I pulled into the oyster-shell drive at the trailer camp, feeling somewhat like an avenging angel. The midmorning light glinted, laserlike, off Speare’s little abode, momentarily blinding me. I killed the motor, shaded my eyes, hunched down in my seat, and scoped out the place. His curtains were drawn tight. His red pickup truck faced the road. A rusting boat trailer was hitched to it. A metal drum that looked like it was used for burning trash sat in the center of the sticker-burr lawn. Half a dozen empty beer cans littered the yard. A picnic table that had seen better days appeared lonely under the shade of moss-gnarled oaks. I counted: twelve other trailers, all of them nicer than Speare’s. Dear God, for being an allegedly famous author, he surely lived in a dump. You’d think pride alone would have forced him into a double-wide.

  I angled the rearview mirror and took a look. I was a tad shiny. I rummaged through my purse, found my compact, and powdered. Confidence arises from the damnedest places. Then I took a deep breath—I was both dreading and hungry for this little encounter with Speare. I told myself, Remember Murmur Lee. Do this for Murmur Lee. I stuffed my purse beneath my seat, got out of the truck, and softly closed the door, well aware that the element of surprise is always handy in manners of war, love, and settling scores.

  Just in case he was peeking out the curtains, I walked with large strides, keeping my face steady, stern. He had to know from the outset that I was not a trifle. I knocked firmly, three ominous raps. In no time, the door swung open, and there stood an absolutely darling, edgy girl—she couldn’t have been a day over twenty—who looked at me with curious disgust.

  “Who are you?” she asked.

  I admit that her stance, attitude, and mere presence threatened to knock me off my game. But I couldn’t allow her to best me. And since I didn’t know if she was friend or foe, I had to play it tough. Otherwise, she’d have me for lunch, dinner, and a midnight snack. I looked at her, unsmiling. “I’m here to see Billy Speare.”

  “He doesn’t live here.” She looked me up and down, a smirk marring her pretty face.

  “Well then, who’s that?” I pointed over her shoulder.

  She rolled her eyes. “Come on in.”

  I stepped inside. There he sat, at his dirty kitchen table, looking battered and drunk, a ridiculous white bandage on his nose. I offered him my hand. “I’m Charlee Mudd. Murmur Lee probably mentioned me to you.”

  He shrugged. Obviously, he couldn’t have given a rat’s ass. “Yeah, I think she may have said something.”

  Cretin. What on God’s green earth had Murmur ever seen in him? I remembered getting a letter from her, saying that he was a “really nice man.” Lord, I thought as I stood in his humble liquor-reeking anchovy tin, this couldn’t possibly be the same guy. But I knew it was. Yes, I did. As smart as Murmur had been, she was always a Class A idiot when it came to men.

  And what about this young girl? She bounced on one foot and said something about her “famous dad.” So, she was Speare’s daughter. Murmur had never mentioned him having kids. She began hopping from one foot to the other. Poor child.

  “May I speak to you in private?” I asked Speare.

  “No!” the two of them blurted in unison. And then, plainly using the girl as a shield, betraying the fact that he knew mine wasn’t a friendly visit, he said, “Ariela, you stick by me. Okay?”

  “Sure, Pops. How’s the nose? Feeling any better?”

  They were quite the duo. I tossed back my hair and calmly clasped my hands in case they wanted to do something stupid on their own, like tremble or slap the bastard.

  Poise. I needed quiet, abundant, black-and-blue poise. I needed to know when to say, “Hey, tell me what happened.” Did I need to make him my friend? Did I need to speak so softly that he’d think I was weak-minded, thus forcing him into a mistake? Did I need to pretend to be a ditsy belle to keep him off-kilter until I pulled the metaphorical trigger? I didn’t know. Despite my resolve to get the job done, I was clueless as to the methodology.

  He shot me a cocky, insincere smile. He was a sad sack, sitting there with his busted nose, an ice pack, and a bottle of tequila. And all of it in front of his daughter. He told me to sit down and get to the point, that he didn’t have much time. I tried shooting Murmur a message. Sister, what in the hell do I do now?

  Call me crazy, but the stale air in the trailer brightened. I looked at Speare and his daughter to see if they had noticed. They seemed oblivious. Could it be? Could Murmur’s spirit be watching all this? Why the hell not? Maybe she was the shadow over there, by that hideous kerosene heater. Or was that her, the ring of light streaming in the front window? And who had opened that curtain? It had been closed when I walked in. Maybe she was settling amid the cobwebs in the corners of the low, dank ceiling. Or maybe I was unstable. But then I heard her voice in my head. This is what she said: Posture.

  Oh! Right. Of course. Posture. It’s what her mother had always preached. “Girls, you will get most anything you want out of life if you carry yourselves well. Next to performing your duties to the church, good posture is the key to happiness.” Back went the shoulders. Tummy in. Spine straight. Head high. “Actually, it’s turning out to be a beautiful day. Why don’t we step outside?” I heard these words come out of my mouth and wondered who in the hell was pulling my string. How engaged in all of this was Murmur?

  Billy Speare leaned forward, ready to speak, I could feel a smart-ass comment coming on, but his daughter said, “Oh, yes! Let’s! Come on, Dad. It’ll be good for you!”

  He shrugged and held the bottle up to the dusky light.

  “Do you need to lean on my arm? To steady you?” I asked, summoning the manners of the queen of England.

  He waved me away and stood on crow legs. He wore shorts and a robe and he hung on to that tequila bottle as if it contained the essence of everlasting life. Poor child, to have a father like this, I thought as the daughter swept past both of us, tumbled into the day, and yelled, “It’s gorgeous out here!”

  So that’s what we did. Speare and I sat at the picnic table under the oaks, facing the river. His daughter, who claimed to be in college but behaved as if she were barely out of junior high, danced to imaginary music near the river’s edge. I shouted to her, “I have a boom box in my trunk; it’s got batteries in it—in case you’d like some music.”

  She stopped dead still, her left hip frozen in mid-mambo. Her eyes widened and a delighted grin threatened to break out. But Speare snarled, “No! No music!” The girl stuck out her tongue at her father. “Dad won’t let me listen to music. Will you, Father?” And then she did a cartwheel. And then another. I had to stop watching because she was making me motion-sick. She was a very strange child. But this music thing: Sure as Judas’s tongue, she gave me my entry.

  Billy drank right out of the bottle.

  “Do you miss her?”

  “Who?”

  “Murmur.” You stupid son of a bitch.


  He wiped his mouth on the sleeve of his filthy cotton robe. “Of course I do. I’m heartbroken.”

  “Daddy’s heartbroken, heartbroken, truly, truly heartbroken.” She cupped her mouth with her hands and hollered to the river, “Daddy is heartbroken!”

  “Fuck it, Ariela, go inside. Forget what I said about sticking by me. You’re driving me nuts.”

  “Well, yes, sir!” Ariela said, and she pranced past us like a wounded, slightly dangerous waif. “Wait until I tell Mommy!”

  I watched her disappear into the trailer. Speare said, “Listen, Ms. Charlee Mudd, I’m in pain, I haven’t had any sleep, and my out-of-control daughter is visiting. If you’ve got something to say, say it. Or else I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”

  And right then, as if on cue from Murmur, a gust of wind rattled the trees. Brown and lifeless oak leaves rained down upon us. A seagull—all white and angel-like except for those shining black eyes, which revealed an über soul—swooped out of the arms of the sudden breeze and landed but a few feet away. It pecked the oyster-shell dirt before cocking its head and studying us. A wild blast of music—Gregorian chant—issued forth from the trailer. Dear Jesus! I jumped and Speare jumped, but the bird just kept staring. My sense of place and time and urgency became liquid. The bird lifted its head skyward and screeched. The awful sound seemed to last minutes, but surely not. I heard myself whisper, “Please, no,” because it was the cry animals make when they spy death, when they see it right there in the reeds.

  Speare leapt to his feet and screamed, “Goddamn you! I told you no music!”

  The daughter’s laughter swirled amid the falling leaves even as she taunted her father, yelling, “God, these tunes suck.”

  Speare collapsed back onto the bench. “Goddamn it!” With each syllable, he pounded the table. His hair fell into his bloodshot eyes and the top left edge of his bandage curled. I felt I knew what the expression “end times” really meant.

  Then it got worse. Speare began to weep. His body heaved. The swollen strains of chant swallowed the wind. And as the white gull, still screeching, rose on unsullied wings into the oak, the man, the mortal, the fuckhead confessed.

  I wondered if God and all his angels were listening. Did they bend their heads closer to earth? Did their celestial eyes open wider in pain or compassion as one of their sons, a child of God, spilled his sins into the light and shadow of that awesome day? Did Murmur hear it? Did his words splatter onto her invisible skin like acid rain?

  There I sat, grim but my posture good, thanks to Murmur’s directive, hoping the entire population of heaven could hear the pitiful son of a bitch say, “I didn’t mean to kill her. I really, really fucking didn’t mean to kill her. Oh Goddamn me. Fuck me. I really didn’t mean it.”

  “Turn off the boom box!” I screamed.

  But the little girl did not oblige. In fact, she turned up the volume, and the ancient chant grew fuller in the swift wind. Weeping, Billy Speare dropped to his knees and repeated over and over, as if stricken with autism, “I didn’t mean to kill her! I didn’t mean to kill her.”

  And still the music raged.

  Billy Speare had no idea that Murmur had suffered from the rarest form of epilepsy—musicogenic. That is, until I told him that day under the oaks while the white bird squawked and the sacred chants pounded and as his confessions pooled all about like wet ash.

  Before that, I was the only one who knew. Anybody else who’d had a clue was dead.

  I don’t know why Murmur had kept it a secret. Secrets kill. Look at what this one had done. Maybe that had been her problem: Pride.

  Hell, no, forget that. If we didn’t have pride, we’d all go around scratching our asses in public.

  Men, that had been her problem. Just like all the rest of us womb-bearers. Men, even when they aren’t trying, fuck us up.

  No, no, no! They only fuck us up because we are prone to being fucked-up. Men aren’t the problem. We’re the problem. We’re all our own individual humongous problem.

  I mean, look at Speare. There he sat, sniveling and scared, not truly listening to me when I said, “Understand something. Musicogenic epileptics almost always have above-average musical aesthetic appreciation. You were never going to stump her. And how could you know that Murmur responded to plainsong the way other epileptics respond to strobe lights?”

  “But I didn’t mean to kill her! She started jerking and shit. I tried to calm her down. Nothing worked.”

  I set my hands flat on the table. I didn’t want to let anger ruin my chances of knowing everything, of hearing very, very clearly. “Billy Speare, tell me the truth: Did she trip or did you help her? Did you do something that made her fall?”

  His face crinkled up like a squalling child’s. He pawed at his tears and wailed, “No, no. I didn’t push her. I would have never done that. Never. She fell. The woman fell. There was nothing I could do.”

  “Why didn’t you go in the water after her?”

  That was the question. I nailed him. In a flat second, he quit crying. His face steadied. He gingerly touched the no-longer-very-clean bandage. His quiet delivery ran counterpoint to the chaotic air. “The water was dark. The current was swift. I looked and looked. I called her name. I was a little drunk. I was also confused. The woman had just had some sort of fit. If I had gone in after her, I’d be dead, too. Hypothermia kills in seconds.”

  I sat on my hands so I wouldn’t hit him. Seconds, my ass. Motherfucker. I wanted to scratch out his eyes. I wanted to smash what was left of his nose. I wanted, as they say, to shit down his throat. I leaned in real close and almost whispered, “You disgust me,” but the music suddenly ended, and in that unexpected vacuum of sound, I lost my voice.

  Speare hugged the tequila bottle and said, as if this truly made sense, “I knew she was dead. There was nothing I could do.”

  In the leaf shade, the white bird watched, and I wondered what was moral. What was vengeful? What was just? Where did compassion and forgiveness and settling the score fall? Was this the real Speare? Was the demon truly revealed? I thought about Murmur and what she had brought to this earth—her generosity, her chestnut laugh, her humor, her desire to see the best in people, her insistence on making green things grow—and the old age she’d never see. I thought about Z and Lucinda and Edith and the crew down at Salty’s, how her passing had torn through them with the effectiveness of shrapnel. And then I thought about the asshole demon sitting in front of me. Arrogant, brilliant, narcissistic, cowardly.

  “Ms. Mudd,” he said, “this has been really nice. But I’m going inside now. Our conversation is over.”

  “No. Not yet.”

  To my surprise, the fool stayed put.

  And me, I stared into the day and mulled things over. What should happen to Billy Speare? What would be a just punishment for an unintentional murderer whose selfishness was so bloated, it smelled evil?

  A trial would be an exercise in public humiliation. A conviction might end his career. But more than likely, legal proceedings would make him famous. And what would he be charged with? Involuntary manslaughter? What good would that do? A few years behind bars, with him being interviewed by TV and print tabloids every week, even as he penned his next book?

  Did the people who loved Murmur need that brand of retribution? What effect would a trial and all the dirt and all the maneuvering have on Z, Lucinda, Edith, me, and all the rest? Would we love Murmur any more? Would we hurt any less? If her loved ones knew the truth—that her death had been a cruel and careless accident, that God hadn’t called her home for any special reason, that he hadn’t called her at all, that it had been one gigantic fuckup—would that make us feel better? And what about Z? Poor Z. If he knew that what he had seen through the gauze of fog was a medical emergency, not a lovers’ quarrel, he would not be able to go on.

  I reached over and took the bottle from Speare. I drew my own healthy swig. “Okay. Let’s talk. Let’s finish this.”

  He shot me a squint-eyed
glance. “What are you gonna do?”

  “I don’t know, Speare. I’m still thinking on it.”

  He was snotty, red-patched. He looked out at the river.

  “What’s your real name?”

  He jerked around, glaring. I didn’t flinch. I wanted an answer.

  “Joe.”

  “Joe what?”

  “Waddlesberg.”

  Now that was amusing. William Speare—what an egomaniac! “Well, Joe Waddlesberg, Murmur was sweet on you. That’s unfortunate, but it’s the truth.” I looked up at that bird—the Murmur bird—and wondered what the hell I should do.

  The wind gusted and the bird didn’t budge. After two more draws on the bottle, after slipping over the pulse points of my own life—one in which I’d sabotaged my own success at every turn; what a dumb ass to leave Harvard because some pretty man I fell in love with had lied to me about the very foundation of our relationship—I started toward something. An idea. I had to think really hard about it. But the spark felt right. This was it, the flash that started me thinking: I’m tried of hating.

  Oh my God. The breeze lifted my hair off my shoulders and I thought it again: I’m tired of hating. I’m tired of hating. I looked at Billy Joe Waddlesberg Speare, that sad sack excuse of a human, and said, “Give me your hand.”

  “What?” He looked at me as if I’d just said, Take off your pants.

  I hit each word hard and slow: “Give me your hand.”

  “Christ,” he grumbled, but he did it.

  “Listen to me. I’m tired of hating. I’m tired of hating me. I’m tired of hating you. I’m tired of hating God. I’m tired of hating that son of a bitch asshole I was engaged to. And I’m tired of being scared.” It was those last six words that almost pushed me to sudden tears, but I was saved from that embarrassment, because another blast of music from the trailer sobered me up: “You’re . . . the kinda girl who looks better naked.” Speare squeezed my hand. He stared at me as if I were the one who’d just confessed. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, I was losing my bearings. Again. I looked up at the tree. The Murmur bird remained quiet. It preened amid a fluttering of Spanish moss. I thought I might run to the truck and blaze away. Forget about a reckoning, I needed out of here. And right then, a single white feather curled its way from the bird to me.