Music of the Swamp (5 page)

He said, “I saw it. It couldn't hardly walk, it was so crippled up with the disease.”

I said, “Tell the truth.”

He said, “There was ropes of spit stringing out of its mouth. Its eyes looked like busted marbles.”

I said, “Oh, man.”

He said, “A man with a rifle killed it. It was a shepherd dog. I saw a bright red bullet gash in its side. Mock it down: I watched that dog breathe its last breath.”

We lay in the night silence and watched the stars. I wished I knew the names of all the stars and all the constellations. Or even just one of them.

I said, “Jeeziz.”

Roy Dale still smelled like fish, but it was a good smell. The earth and its waters.

John Wesley spoke then. Soft little faraway ape-boy voice. He said, “The man who killed the dog was my daddy.”

For a while there was only silence. For a while neither Roy Dale nor I even looked in his direction.

John Wesley was not lying. His father had been the man who killed the maddog and saved lives.

In a while Roy Dale was still, maybe he was asleep. I pretended to sleep as well, and then maybe I did fall asleep, and not long afterwards I woke up again and John Wesley was crawling out of the tent. John Wesley was barefoot, and wearing only his underwear.

He was headed towards the house.

I shook Roy Dale. I said, “Look.”

John Wesley went inside the house through the back screened door, and we saw him through the window, in the kitchen with his sad mother beneath a lightbulb hanging from a cord. They sat together at the kitchen table amidst the birthday wreckage, and though we could not have heard them in any case, I think they did not speak.

And so we lay back in the tent, on our sleeping bags, and did not speak either. We pretended to be asleep, though I was not, and I am sure Roy Dale was not. After a while John Wesley came back to the tent and crawled in between the two of us and cried quietly until he slept, and so then sleep did finally come to me, and then to Roy Dale, as well. The birthday party was over.

I
SUPPOSE
there is one more thing to tell. For many years, after I was grown and no longer lived in Mississippi, I told this story to my friends. And when I told it, I always added one detail that was not true.

I always said that after we had settled down and had drifted off to sleep beneath the canvas roof of the tent, I was awakened in the middle of the night by the sound of Dixie Dawn's sweet pure angelic voice in song. I said that beneath the bright stars her voice was a crisp spirit, a lyrical hopeful pause in the terrible drama of our narrow lives. I said—and even as I invented this I believed it—I said that in the foreign-language
music of her song my ears and my heart opened up to a world larger and more generous than the world of my parents and our geography.

Now as I tell this story again, I forget why I ever made up such a thing. It is not true, of course. Dixie Dawn did not wake up that night, so far as I knew. As far as I know, she lay in her bed in a hard deliberate sleep, where song had put her and from which song could never draw her out.

T
HE SUMMER
I turned eleven years old, I had a secret—it was a small collapsible military shovel, an entrenching tool, it was called.

I saw it in a junk store in Arrow Catcher, my little hometown in Mississippi, and something about the fold-up-and-tuck-away nature of the implement made it attractive to me. At the same time, I almost bought a metal canteen with a canvas cover—the metal dented and scratched, the canvas sun-faded and water-stained, ripe with authenticity. I envisioned filling it with Coca-Cola and, at night, secretly removing the cap and drinking lustily and privately in the dark. But when I unscrewed the lid and smelled inside, there was a hint of something that may have been urine, and so I passed on the canteen and paid my dollar for what was the real treasure anyway, the secret shovel.

There was no reason to hide the shovel; no one would have cared that I had it. And yet it was an instrument that begged to be hidden.

My bedroom was in the upstairs of my parents' home. It was small and interesting, with drawers and bookcases built into the walls to conserve space. In one wall there was also a desk,
with pigeonholes and an inkwell, that could be revealed by unhooking a metal hook and dropping the desktop into place. There was a nice privacy in the hidden quality of the furniture in the walls.

And as long as I'm describing the room, I might as well tell that on the ceiling above my bed my mother had pasted luminous decals of stars and a moon and the planets—Saturn was prominent with its rings—and a comet with a tail. For a while after I turned off the lights at night, the little lunar system above me glowed with whatever sweet magic there is in such novelties. Outside my window the vastness of the Delta sky and its bright million stars and peach-basket-size moon could not compete with the galaxies inside my tiny bedroom and all its hidden geographies.

What I'm really getting at, though, is that in the back of my clothes closet—behind the hangers with trousers and shirts, behind the winter coats in plastic bags—there was a panel that could be removed to allow entrance into an even more secret spot, a crawlspace in the rafters.

On the day I bought the shovel, I removed the panel in the back of the closet and slipped inside the crawlspace to sit.

I had a stash of kitchen matches, from which I chose one and struck it and lighted a stub of a candle and then, careful not to set a fire, extinguished the match and spat on the tip. I sat cross-legged and sweaty in my hideout, inhaling the bad air of
insulation and candle smoke, and thrilled at the invisibility of things.

And that was how I lived with my shovel for a while, I'm not sure how long, a couple of weeks I think.

Every day, when there was time, I crept into the crawlspace and found the wooden matches and lighted the candle stub and extended the collapsed handle of the shovel and heard the extension snap into place. And then, in the broiling Mississippi afternoon, or mornings if I woke up early enough, or sometimes at night when I should have been in my bed beneath the fake stars, my life was filled with the joy of secret things in secret places.

Soldier, miner, escaping prisoner—these were the games I played with the entrenching tool.

I had not yet used the shovel out-of-doors.

T
HE SUMMER
inched through its humid hours. The figs on the trees along the chickenyard fence swelled up (“swole up,” we said) and ripened and turned purple and fat. I played barefoot and barebacked in the shade of the broad fig leaves and sometimes picked the fruit from the limbs and watched the ooze of fig-milk from the stem as it covered my fingers. The figs were like soft wood on my tongue, and a sweet residue of poison hung in the Delta air, where the ditches had been sprayed for mosquitoes.

Some days my father brought home a watermelon, green-striped and big as a washtub, and the three of us, mother, father, and myself, cut it beneath the walnut tree and ate big seedy red wedges of melon in the metal lawnchairs.

Evenings my father fed the chickens—the Plymouth Rocks, the Rhode Island Reds, slow and fat and powdered with dust—and my mother made fig preserves and sealed the syrupy fruit in Mason jars with hot paraffin lids.

It is tempting to look back at this time and to remember only those images of ripeness and joy.

Many evenings my father was drinking whiskey. He never drank before he was bathed and clean at the end of a day's work—he smelled of Lifebuoy soap and Fitch's shampoo and Wildroot Cream Oil, and of course of the Four Roses bourbon, masculine and sweet as wooden barrels.

Sometimes my parents fought their strange fight. The day I am remembering was a Friday.

The three of us were in the kitchen. My mother said to my father, “I wish you wouldn't do that, Gilbert.”

I was standing in front of the refrigerator with the door open, looking for nothing in particular.

My father was at the sink with the water running. He held a tall water glass beneath the spigot and allowed it to fill up, and then he poured the glass of water into the sink. He filled the glass again, and then poured it into the sink again. And as the water ran from the tap, he filled the glass and poured out its
contents, over and over, glass after glass, maybe twenty times without speaking.

My mother could only say, “I wish you wouldn't do that, Gilbert,” as she watched him, silent and withdrawn, filling and pouring, filling and pouring at the sink.

I closed the refrigerator door and watched my father pour out one final glass of water. Then he stopped. This was a thing he did every day, and it gave my mother distress. When he was finished, he did as always—he placed the glass on the sink and stood for a while longer and watched the water run from the pipe into the drain. Then slowly, deliberately, he turned the handle and shut off the flow.

That was the end of it. After the water-pouring episode, my father went to his room and closed the door and my mother went into her own room—she called it a guest bedroom, but it was her own, with her underwear in the drawers, her bobby pins on the dresser—and lay across her bed and cried.

I could hear her from the kitchen, and I could hear music from my father's phonograph, and I knew that he was drinking from a bottle hidden in his chest-of-drawers and that he would not come out until morning.

I wanted to comfort my mother, but there was nothing to say. I stood by the kitchen sink and looked at the glass my father had been filling and emptying, and I believed for the one-millionth time that if I looked at it long enough, tried
hard enough, I could understand what my parents' strange fighting meant.

Tonight I went to my father's room, a thing I ordinarily never did after they fought, or after he closed the door and started to drink in earnest.

I knocked at his door and waited. I knew he would not answer and he did not. I knocked again and said, “Daddy,” and waited again.

I heard movement inside his room, his chair, I supposed—a green-painted metal lawnchair, which he used as an easy chair—scraping against the hardwood floor. The chair sat on a rounded frame, which allowed it to rock back and forth.

After a silence the door opened and I could tell that my father was already very drunk. He looked at me and finally moved aside to let me in. He sat in his strange lawnchair and his record kept playing softly on the phonograph, a slow ballad sung by Elvis. The whiskey bottle was not in sight.

He said, “What is it, Sugar?”

My father was not a tall man, no more than five feet six inches, and his childlike shoes, with crepe soles and shiny uppers, were covered with tiny speckles of paint. His feet did not reach the floor except as the chair rocked forward. He was wearing Big Smith khakis and an open-necked shirt, and I noticed that the face of his watch was flecked with paint.

I said, “I bought a shovel.” I had not known I was going to say this.

My father let a few seconds pass and then he said, “Is that right.”

I said, “I've got it in my room.”

He said, “Do you want a peppermint puff?” My father reached across the top of the phonograph to a cellophane bag filled with peppermint candy and brought out a small handful and put one piece of candy into his mouth. I held out my hand and received a piece.

I said, “I haven't dug anything with it yet.” I put the candy in my mouth, the peppermint puff, and it was light and airy as magic. It seemed almost to float instead of melt inside my mouth.

And then, as unexpectedly as I had announced the existence of the shovel, my father said, “The Delta is filled up with death.”

Now that I look back on this moment I think that he meant nothing at all by this remark. Probably the mention of a shovel made him think of graves and that made him think of death, which was his favorite drunken subject anyway. Self-pity, self-dramatization—the boring death-haunted thoughts of an alcoholic, nothing more.

And yet, at the time, the words he spoke seemed directly related to my accidental, unintentional mention of the shovel, the way advice is related to a problem that needs to be solved.

I said, “It is?”

He said, “Yep. To the brim.”

The conversation was over. I stayed a little longer, but already my father was growing irritable and restless, and I knew he wished I would leave so that he could drink from the bottle in the chest-of-drawers.

T
HE DELTA
was filled with death. The information came like a summons, a moral imperative to search.

And so that day, and for many days afterwards, I took the shovel outside and started to dig. In the front yard the shovel blade cut through the grass and scarred the lawn. I replaced the squares of sod before my mother could see the damage, but already I knew I was doing the right thing. Earthworms retreated to cooler, safer depths. Roly-polies curled up into little balls. The blade of the shovel shone at the edges, the dirt was fragrant and cool to my touch.

My first serious digging was a trench alongside the back of the chickenyard, near the fence. The earth there was loamy and soft and worm-rich and easy to dig. I threw spadefuls of loose dirt at the busy old hens and watched them scatter and puff out their feathers as large as beach balls.

What was I digging for? Indians had lived on this land, Chickasaws and Choctaws. Slaves had died here. There might be bones. A well-digger once dug up a Confederate mortar shell near the dog pen and it was still on display in the Plantation Museum in Leflore. Sometimes a kid would find an arrowhead
or spear point. My father was right—the remains of other civilizations did still occasionally poke through into our own.

So there was a sense in which I was only following my father's advice—I was digging for evidence of other worlds. And for a while the hard work of digging, and the work of hiding its consequences, were enough.

The trench by the fence was a mistake. A neighborhood dog crawled under and killed my father's blue Andalusian rooster, and I had to fill the trench and get the dog out before anyone could figure out that I was responsible. I threw the dead rooster into some tall weeds near the trailer where the midgets lived, and so my father thought it had flown the coop and been killed as a result of its own restlessness and vanity. So that was good.