Swamplandia! (43 page)

“Look, he loves it!”

“Ha-ha,” Kiwi heard himself say. “Thanks, guys.”

Next followed innuendo of the conventionally scatalogical variety and Saturday insults, “cocksuckers” and “pussylickers” raining down on him like blows, and each time Kiwi spoke a word it felt like raising an arm to cover his face: “Fuck you, fuck you, shut
up.
”

Kiwi elbowed past them and tried to shut the closet door with a growl of laughter. Then he saw what they had done to the poster of his mother.

“Oh, sorry, bro.” Leo let out a buzzy laugh but then changed tone when he saw Kiwi’s face, pinching at his earlobe. The mood in the room became cinder-flecked. “That was like an accident? We were trying to get that ugly one off the wall, that’s some seventies shit right there …”

They had split her down her middle.
SWA
and
MP CENTAUR
read two halves of it. Half her face regarded him with its dusk intelligence, and he pushed the scraps of her into his fists. Kiwi wanted to scream at everyone to get out of his room, to die slow and go right to
hell;
out loud he could hear his dull, persistent chuckle.

What he could hear as clearly as if it were still happening was the blare of the Chief’s banter through the Pit’s loudspeakers:

“Hilola Bigtree has more talent in her pinkie finger than any other wrestler on the planet!

“Hilola Bigtree can tape up a twelve-foot gator in the time it takes you mainlanders to haul your lard asses up to the fridge!”

All day long the Chief’s good publicity funneled into the blue sky inside Kiwi, scattering birds.

Patched together the poster would have read
HILOLA BIGTREE, SWAMP CENTAUR
. Kiwi had always been embarrassed by this particular epithet for her—more of the Chief’s lame publicity—but it was a name that his mother was growing into, apparently. Because here she was: a real centaur on the door. The closet wood showed through half a dozen rips in the poster and blanked out one cheek. You could touch the grain
of the wood through her torn forehead. A crescent of her smile hung on a little fang of green paper. Death was speeding her evolution into this monster: half woman and half invention. Kiwi couldn’t remember the real color of his mother’s hair anymore, her nascent wrinkles like the first cracks in an eggshell, her voice, her beautiful scowl, because the poster had papered over her third dimension and now even it was ruined.

“Kiwi? Learn to take a fucking joke, bro …”

“No, it’s fine.”

He touched the paper of her face and shut the door.

O
ssie’s ribbon was still on my wrist. All it did was remind me that I had a sister somewhere, the way you’d strap a watch to your wrist to keep you in time. If the Bird Man had showed up and tried to take this cloth protection from me then, I really think I might have killed him.

This part of the swamp grew very noisy at night, growls and squelches and the infinitesimal roaring of each mosquito piling into waves. Sticks snapped and once I heard a large animal go crashing through the water; all I saw, though, were the tall gumbo-limbo trees that were like pepper shakers of moths. Probably the Bird Man was miles and miles away from me, I told myself. On his way home, back through the Eye and this phony underworld. In a way, he’d made good on his promise to me, our bargain, because I couldn’t imagine a hell that would be worse than this place where he’d left me. Overhead the sky was a fast and swallowing blue.

“Ossie?” I gulped. “Mom?”

I fixed my eyes on two palm trees at the edge of the saw-grass prairie; I was going to use them as goalposts. I started to walk. I could see little oases of thatch-palm and cabbage trees, carpets of gray sea oxeye, of red sea bight, and between these the stalks weaving, endlessly, acres and acres of this.

* * *

I walked steadily all morning. By noon I was getting really mixed up. I drank more of the silty groundwater and then threw it back up an hour later.

If I don’t find water
, I thought,
freshwater, rainwater, potable water, and soon …

Now I didn’t always recognize the cries of the animals; whatever adhesion in my brain connected sounds and light to the names of species was breaking down. The leaves that I had easily identified as bay or gumbo-limbo or pop ash gave way to a muted palette of foliage, a glowing russet and gray, much of it alien to me. Fewer and fewer of the plants that I tripped over or pushed through in curling curtains of vines uprooted a name in my mind. I was seeing new geometries of petals and trees, white saplings that pushed through the peat like fantailing spires of coral, big oaky trunks that went wide-arming into the woods (no melaleucas anywhere). A large egretlike bird with true fuchsia eyes and cirrusy plumage went screeching through the canopy. For some reason all the life gurgling in the anonymous hammock made me want to cry.
Some underworld this turned out to be, Ossie
.

I started to think it might not be a terrible thing if the Bird Man found me. A little later I began drafting my apologies to him for leaving. If he had water, I wanted him to find me now. I didn’t care at all what happened afterward …

Then I pushed through a stand of palms and saw the house. It was a one-room bungalow, the sort of dilapidated structure that swamp rats like Grandpa Sawtooth used for a fish camp or a hunting cabin. A tripod of sticks held a resin pot over a stack of pinewood; a stiller pump stood pondside. My heart leapt—my first thought was that we must have rowed to the Gulf coast, where you could find a few actual towns on the elevated pinelands. I got it in my head that I was walking toward a town. It didn’t matter that nothing else I had seen or smelled or heard in the last few hours bore this theory out: I was on the outskirts of some island community, I decided, a place with televisions, telephones, refrigerators filled with sodas and cold cuts and cans of whipped cream, paper towels, pet dogs, telephone wires—I was on a roll now, I was close to blinking back tears—generators! electric light! hot showers! toilet paper! I walked behind the first house.

“Hello?”

This first house appeared to be the only house. A live alligator was sunk into the mud behind the southernmost wall, watching me as I scouted the perimeter. Switchgrass sprayed like a little beard beneath the blue-black apples of its cheeks. Its grin upset me in a way our Seths’ musculature never did back home.

“It’s not funny,” I hissed. “You’re the clown, you stupid monster, you don’t know anything, you don’t love anyone, you can’t even imagine …”

I looked inside a begrimed window and I thought:
abandoned
. For sure nobody lived here. There was a straw pallet on the needle-covered floor and no furniture that I could see. Dishes on shelves, little cups. Outside its wooden walls had been completely overtaken by weeds and strangler fig, thick vines doing their weird tethered ballet when the wind blew. Water thinned to a brothlike cup between the mangroves.
Oh, yes
, I thought. I was going to drink all of it.

Thirst dragged me by my neck to the bottom creek and I was halfway to water before I noticed the clothesline. Clotheslines, I realized—there were half a dozen of them strung like a winking web in the high branches. Clothes were snapping all along both banks of the canal. The blouses nearest to me hung like cutouts against the sun, pinned and flapping. Sunshine turned them mild shades of gold or ghostly whites. The vaguest beiges made me think of photographs waiting to develop.

Some of the clothes looked antique. I found a woman’s glove with a star-shaped wine stain over the palm. Each finger was bent against the wire by a clothespin. Many of the items looked burned and stained, moth-eaten. A gingham sundress had holes that I could have put my fist through. I thought again of photographs in the developing solution of the blue-violet air. Only the sky out here seemed like a deteriorating solution—it was erasing them.

A black hat brim—just the brim—hung from two pins like a shocked O.

Oh
. I took a step toward the tree line, and for a second the maze of clotheslines looked as if they went on forever and ever. A line of billowing dresses that stretched to infinity, missing their women. All the silhouettes were wrinkling. Then I blinked and the image of an eternally twining line was gone. The clothes just looked like dirty old clothes
strung from one branch to another again, mosquitoes shimmering vacantly around them. But where had all this clothing come from, in the middle of the swamp?
Mama
. The name came to me without warning out of the aching blue sky.
Mama Weeds
.

There is a legend in our swamp about a lady, a laundress—or a ghost, or a female monster—named Mama Weeds. She was like an island bogeyman. Her story predated us. The Chief liked to tell it to tourists: he’d ham it up and do all the different drawling voices like a radio play.

Mama Weeds started life as a real woman, Midnight Drouet, a light-skinned black seamstress descended from freed slaves who lived in the Ten Thousand Islands. A beautiful woman, so quiet that strangers assumed she was mute, with no real interest in rearing children or marrying a man. She moved to the deep interior of the swamp and worked there as a seamstress and a laundress; the pioneers could leave their clothing with her and she’d sew up holes and sew on faux gold buttons, a bottomless bucket of which she’d brought with her from the factory that once employed her in Troy, New York. People swore that she could get any stain out in the river by her house. Her few neighbors, moonshiners and gator skinners among them, were incensed by her presence.

“You won’t make it,” they told her. “You won’t last the wet season. You’ll howl at all the mosquitoes, the snakes, the scalybacks that dig their holes beneath your floorboards.”

But Midnight Drouet didn’t howl and she didn’t go mad—the way my dad told the story, her composure was like a gun she kept cocked and pointed at her door. Five years later the gator skinners were infuriated to discover that she had, in fact, made it and lasted. Midnight built her own buttonwood shack and never asked for anybody’s help. She refused to let her neighbors hunt on her property. One day she mentioned to the bird warden that she’d shot a ten-foot alligator with her .22—he had been going for her dog, she said, a huge smoky mongrel named Luke. No: she had not bothered to skin the alligator for the tanneries. No: she hadn’t tried to sell or cure its meat. Word of this failure to profit from slaughter got around and the glade crackers were appalled—the Depression was on and here she’d killed an alligator with a huge dollar value and refused to skin the damn thing? Unforgivable. Selfish. Evil. Any one of them would have been glad to turn the carcass into coins for their own families. Apparently the bull gator’s
head had languished in the water behind her house until the scales slipped, its hide moon-permeated and worthless.

And then it’s said that a man out there, or several men, rowed over to her island at night. “He” or “they” killed Miss Drouet, in cold blood. The decision was cold cognition, explained my brother, who liked to add a pinch of forensics to our gory swamp legends. Most people believe it was the work of several men, owing to the kind of damage that they reputedly did to her. For no other reason than that she’d killed that alligator and let it rot! A cardinal sin in those days, according to the Chief, back when people were killing the last snowy egrets for a buck five …

This part always made me dart under the covers, because I couldn’t stop seeing poor Miss Drouet in my mind’s eye, gagged and dragged down to the water by her murderers, dead already and now drowning, too, her cloth dress opening like a flower on the swamp water in a mixed-up and evil chronology. Her dead body floating. Her dead face, the mask of it, rising and falling on the sea’s uneasy breath.

Panthers found and finished her in the cattails. Wind unstitched her skeleton. Weeds sprayed outward from the heart-shaped wreck of her pelvis; a sinkhole opened beneath her and gave way with the suddenness of caved ice, swallowing her bones. Children who had never heard about Luke or Midnight Drouet began to report seeing a shadowy figure along rivers, beneath the dry fingers of palms. “Mama Weeds!” a little glade cracker boy called her: the woman he saw was standing in the Caloosahatchee with a quiet dog by her side, covered in pigweed. The first child who saw her hadn’t been frightened: she was doing laundry, he said, beating clothes against rocks, beating the dyes and patterns right out of them until colored oils ran downstream in twining browns and indigos and reds. The name stuck. If ever you saw a woman alone at the edge of the swamp at dusk, that lady was her, that was Mama.

I touched my throat. Personally, I had always considered the story of Mama Weeds a little silly. I had rambled all over the islands and I never once saw a ghost dog or a weedy lady in a lake. Kiwi was always telling me that Chief Bigtree’s swamp lore was uniquely stupid and that I didn’t have to believe it—if the swamp boomers had killed Midnight, he said, assuming a woman named Midnight Drouet had indeed existed, then she was dead and that was that.

But what if I was looking at an aerial cemetery? What if these
clothes were Mama Weeds’s collection? In the vacant spots where no clothes were hanging, the line seemed to disappear against the blue sky. Your eyes could pick it up again further down the trees as tines of light. Far down in the west I could see five or six buzzards, spaced out on the clothesline like mainland pigeons on a telephone wire. Below them, some family’s checkered tablecloth made half a bubble on the wind.

I nearly jumped out of my skin; I saw a jacket that I recognized. It was one of the articles closest to me, pinned a few feet from where I was standing. A jacket that was so old and sun-faded that it had gone cuticle white—a WPA jacket, Bigtree museum quality, the Chief would have gone berserk for it. The shirt beside it had checks running in a canary net over the fabric; the last time I saw this garment, Osceola had been wearing it in our kitchen. Initials were sewn in cursive on the pocket—L.T.—in fat raspberry thread. Then a brighter purple caught my eye, an amethyst, the same shade as the ribbon around my wrist, and I saw that Ossie’s favorite skirt was hanging one line over. It was the clothing she’d been wearing when she left to marry Louis T.