Music of the Swamp
Read Music of the Swamp Online
Authors: Lewis Nordan
A NOVEL BY LEWIS NORDAN
Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill
For Alicia
Take away the arrogance, the battery, and the alcohol, and down comes innocence.
â
Judy Grahn
A Hank of Hair, A Piece of Bone
Train, Train, Coming round the Bend
How Bob Steele Broke My Father's Heart
T
HE INSTANT
Sugar Mecklin opened his eyes on that Sunday morning, he believed that this was a special day and that something new and completely different from anything he had ever known before was about to jump out at him from somewhere unexpected, a willow shade, a beehive, a bird's nest, the bream beds in Roebuck Lake, a watermelon patch, the bray of the iceman's mule, the cry of herons in the swamp, he did not know from where, but wherever it came from he believed it would be transforming, it would open up worlds to him that before today had been closed. In fact, worlds seemed already to be opening to him.
When he later came into the kitchen and sat down to his Sunday breakfast of chocolate milk and homemade bread, toasted and smeared with sweet butter and fresh cinnamon, his mother noticed a difference in Sugar and placed her hand against his forehead and said, “Are you running a fever?”
And then when Sugar's father came into the room, Sugar leaped up out of his chair and did what he had never done before, he grabbed his father suddenly around the neck and hugged him and said, “I love you, Daddy.”
This is the kind of day it was. This is the way Sugar Mecklin's summer morning started out.
First there were the mice. Sugar was still asleep when he heard them singing. Sugar was dreaming that he was standing alone in the shade of tupelo gums and cypress and chinaberry and weeping willow and mimosa and that the water of Roebuck Lake was exactly as it was in real life, slick and opaque as a black mirror, with the trees and high clouds reflected perfectly in the surface. He dreamed that he walked out to the end of a short pier, the one that in real life he had built, and saw a beautiful creature of some kind, a mermaid maybe, rise up from the water. Her breasts were bare, and she was singing directly to him as she combed her long hair with a comb the color of bone, and in the other hand held a mirror as dark and fathomless as the mirror-surface of Roebuck Lake.
He believed that this creature could foretell his future, or endow him with power and knowledge. There seemed little wonder to Sugar Mecklin, waking up to such thoughts, that this day should turn out to be special.
And then once he was awake, there was Elvis. Until this very morning Sugar Mecklin had never before heard the name of Elvis Presley. And now here he was, this Elvis person, in full uh-huh complaint on Sugar's Philco radio, and he seemed truly to be singing about the dream that Sugar Mecklin had just dreamed. Elvis told Sugar
you'll be so lonely you could die
.
It was as if the mermaid's song had come to him first
through the sweet voices of the mice in his mattress and then from WMC in Memphis.
These were the reasons Sugar Mecklin astonished his father at the breakfast table by grabbing him suddenly and holding onto him for all he was worth and almost actually saying, pleading, Don't ever leave me, Daddy, I'll be so lonely I will die.
He did not actually say these words, he said only, “I love you, Daddy!” in a bright voice, and his father struggled and finally muttered, “Good luck on your travels through life,” and then went out to the garage to get paint buckets and brushes and dropcloths and a stepladder to paint the bathroom, which had needed painting for a long time, probably.
And then after breakfast, while Sugar Mecklin's father spread paint and Sugar Mecklin's mother ran cold water through a colander full of figs to be put up in paraffin-sealed Mason jars as purpley preserves, Sugar Mecklin thought it might not be a bad idea at all to comb his hair with Wildroot Cream Oil and put on his hightop tennies and take a walk right down the middle of Lonely Street and stand along the shore of dark, wooded Roebuck Lake and look across its waters in search of barebreasted women. It was a day in which such a thing might happen, he believed.
His mother said, “Are you going to Sunday school this morning, Sugar?”
Sugar Mecklin said, “Haven't decided.”
His mother said, “I wish you would put on a clean shirt and go to Sunday school once in a while.”
Not today. Today was a Sunday, this was a whole summer, in fact, in which magic might prove once and for all to be true. It was a summer in which Sugar Mecklin noticed many things, as if they had not been there before, like the mice in his mattress, like Elvis Presley on the Philco. This summer Sugar Mecklin heard the high soothing music of the swamp, the irrigation pumps in the rice paddies, the long whine and complaint, he heard the wheezy, breathy asthma of the compress, the suck and bump and clatter like great lungs as the air was squashed out and the cotton was wrapped in burlap and bound with steel bands into six-hundred-pound bales, he heard the operatic voice of the cotton gin separating fibers from seeds, he heard a rat bark, he heard a child singing arias in a cabbage patch, he heard a parrot make a sound like a cash register, he heard the jungle rains fill up the Delta outside his window, he heard the wump-wump-wump-wump-wump of biplanes strafing the fields with poison and defoliants, he read a road sign that said
WALNUT GROVE IS RADAR PATROLLED
and heard poetry in the language, he heard mourning doves in the walnut trees.
And for a moment, when he arrived at the edge of the water, Sugar Mecklin almost believed that he had found whatever magical thing he had come looking for.
When he looked across the water to the spot where in his dream he had seen the woman admiring her own reflection in a black mirror, he heard clear sweet tuneful voices raised in plaintive anthems to God in heaven.
There was a cow, a brown-and-white heifer with horns, standing chest-deep in the water directly across the lake. The cow was not supposed to be there, it had only wandered there and could not be coaxed out of the water in time, and so it only stood and once or twice flicked its tail against invisible insects that may have been flying in the morning air.
All about the cow were men and women in white robesâblack persons, colored people, Negroes, whatever they were calledâand they too, like the cow, were standing chest-deep in the water, and it was their voices that Sugar Mecklin heard in song.
It was a baptizing.
I come to the garden alone
the voices said, in complaint as profound as Elvis Presley's uh-huh
and the voice I hear falling on my ear
the singers sang, speaking of Jesus, who would take away loneliness.
The song went on, and then when it finished there were other songs, questionsâ
shall we gather at the river
, the singers wanted to know
the beautiful, the beautiful river
âand in a way all of the songs were about loneliness, and the defeat of loneliness, and the heartbreak if it could not be defeated, as probably it never could
you'll be so lonely you could die
And so this was the happiest moment Sugar Mecklin had
ever felt in his life. He was almost delirious with strong feeling. His face was flushed and even in the Mississippi heat he was almost cold, almost shivering with emotion. The sweat beads on his arms were like a thin film of ice.
And then another child showed up.
Sugar Mecklin was startled. It was Sweet Austin. Where had Sweet Austin come from, so unexpectedly? Sugar Mecklin thought Sweet Austin looked a little like he had seen a ghost.
Sweet said, “Hey, Sugar Mecklin.”
Sugar said, “Hey, Sweet Austin.”
Sweet Austin walked out onto the narrow pier and stood behind Sugar, and for a minute or two neither of them said anything. Sugar and Sweet were the only two completely white-haired, blue-eyed, freckle-faced, skinny-assed boys in their whole class. People thought it was funny that they looked so much alike and their names were almost the same, Sugar and Sweet.
They only stood and watched the baptizing,
oh what needless pain we bear
sang the choir on the other side of the lake.
Sugar Mecklin said, “You know about a singer name of Elvis Presley?”
Sweet Austin said, “Hey, Sugar . . .”
Sugar Mecklin said, “He sings this song about Heartbreak Hotel.”
Sweet Austin said, “Hey, Sugar, listen . . .”
Sugar Mecklin said, “His voice, this guy Elvis Presley's
voice . . .” Sugar didn't know exactly what he was going to say about Elvis Presley's voice. That it made you visible to yourself and invisible to others.
Sweet Austin said, “I've got to show you something. Something bad.”
Something was definitely wrong with Sweet Austin. Sweet Austin had definitely seen a ghost.
Across the lake the choir had a friend in Jesus. God's grace was amazing, they said, and sweet. There was a church in the wildwood, they said, and their voices floated across the lake to the pier where Sugar and Sweet were standing and the voices reached them like angels' voices and invited them to come to the church in the wildwood, come to the church in the dell, whatever a dell was,
it
might be like a swamp, mightn't it, or a bog, or a quicksand pit, what the hell was a dell, anyway?
Just then the brown-and-white cow decided it was time to leave the water and, as the choir sang a final songâ
oh I'm tired and so weary but I must travel on
âthe cow, as if
it
had been waiting for just this moment in the music, opened its amazing and sweet old cow-mouth and hollered one long heartbreaking bellow and moan, one incredible tenor note in perfect tune and time with the rest of the choir, as if to impart some message about hope, or maybe hopelessness and loneliness, who could tell the difference, or maybe just to say goodbye I've had enough of this, these horseflies and this sentimental music are driving me crazy, and then turned and slogged its way past the
robed communicants and out of the water and up the muddy bank and into the pasture towards a barn.
there'll be no sadness
, the choir sang,
no sorrow, no trouble
. . . and Sugar knew that when you say these things what you really mean is that sadness and sorrow are all there is and all there ever will be. And then somebody, a young woman in a white robe, waded forth, chest-deep in the black water, and allowed herself to be dunked backwards, out of sight, by a white-haired Negro woman, who held her hand over the young woman's face in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost and held that young woman beneath the water for a long time while catfish and cottonmouths and snapping turtles joined with Christ Our Lord to wash away all her sins in the dear sweet magical blood of the Lamb while the choir sang songs.